Younger people should be rewarded for lockdown via affordable housing

[Ordree]

As others have noted, young people (not just those in frontline roles) are making enormous sacrifices to protect others, mostly but not exclusively from much older age groups. They will be bequeathed a damaged planet, a ruined economy and they will have done further damage to their mental health by staying indoors for months on end. They are the ones paying older people's pensions when they won't have anything like the same financial security to look forward to themselves. Yes I know older people paid their elders pensions during their working lives, bit never has there been such an imbalance. As the economy is likely to be ruined short to medium term anyway, would it not be reasonable to start the biggest givernment-funded housebuilding programme ever, allow younger people who have just bought to write off negative equity losses against tax, and essentially redress some of the appalling imbalance between generations and classes?

www.itv.com/news/2020-04-04/lower-compliance-to-lockdown-among-young-warns-michael-gove/

@bubblesbuddy

Yours is a perfect example of how anecdote doesn't equal evidence. Here are some of my anecdotes...

Not all nurses work in state funded settings so your assumption that they all have pensions is incorrect (or certainly was until recent years). As a result, there are nurses working into their late 60s early 70s because they can't afford to retire.

Many people were massively screwed over by endowment mortgages because of the risks associated. After paying his mortgage for years my DH had paid of £150 of his actual mortgage (not even one months mortgage payment).

Glad you found 15% manageable, many didn't and lost homes, security and lives as a result of that. Likewise holidays and cars...

Limits... so reward selfish behaviour then.
Ffs Pack up the top trumps for who Is the most hard done by.

Young people do want everything though. They want the tech gadgets, the overseas holidays, the expensive weddings etc

I rarely see them content with hand me downs, 20yo appliances etc They want the newest and the best.

I work with someone who is older than me, heading towards retirement. Doesn't own their own house but takes regular overseas trips that would be equivalent to a deposit on a modest place to live. They continually say they can't afford to buy a place to live. As far as I can see, they can afford to buy a place to live it's just not a priority for them.

I live in a very modest flat. It costs me less than I was paying in rent. The upside is that by paying a mortgage I am investing in an asset that is growing in value. I haven't travelled overseas as my priority is my own financial security.

You can only spend money once, so to me it's about choices. If you choose to spend on things that don't last - holidays, tech - then don't complain that others have chosen to spend differently and buy assets instead of experiences.

@Bubblesbuddy yes I was an SRN and started my training at the age of 19 and as I am sure you know our training was mainly on the wards. So I was nursing.

I wouldn't worry to much about affordable housing, the recession will correct prices down to a more affordable level and out of this bubble that has been formed since cheap interest rates and government prop up schemes.

My 14 year old gives me the whole “your generation ruined the planet for us” line. Then he wants a lift to the park which is 5 minutes walk away, and he wants the central heating up high so he can wear a T-shirt in winter.

The relentless modern desire for “new stuff” has changed the country. Don’t get your washing machine repaired, just buy a new one. Don’t wear last season’s clothes, buy new ones. This has led to a need for cheap imports, travelling long distances in fuel burning transport. And the building of huge warehouses on fields to house it all. I’m sure many of us over 40 can think of a field we played on which is now built on.

And don’t get me started on mobile phones. The gadgets my kids have right now cost relatively more than was spent on me in my entire childhood.

I think, as a general rule, younger people prioritise the here and now more than older people did, rather than looking to the future.

Clothes, gadgets, techno, holidays, meals out - these are all seen as basic necessities in a way that they weren’t when I was younger. These things all cost money that could have been saved up.

would it not be reasonable to start the biggest givernment-funded housebuilding programme ever,

Who would pay for it? The government isn't a big pool of free money. If there was a big government-funded housebuilding programme, this would cost a lot of money which would need to be repaid. Your proposal would saddle the "younger generation" with masses of debt that they would then be re-paying for for years to come.

@ordree you are clearly unprepared to take in anyone else’s view. So continue to live in ignorance.

As others have noted, young people (not just those in frontline roles) are making enormous sacrifices to protect others, mostly but not exclusively from much older age groups.

Welcome to living in a healthy society. We all make sacrifices. Presumably these people have family and friends they dont want to die? And of course while the illness is killing more older adults, younger people are not immune.

This is a very odd thread. Why is home ownership suddenly essential? Affordable, secure homes to rent, free to access education and free to access healthcare are 3 markers of a civilised society.
Free houses, not so much.

If you’re concerned about damage to the planet, why on Earth are you advocating the mass concreting over green spaces for housing?

Surely the horrendous flooding earlier this year coupled with the current pandemic, suggests that reckless mass house building and reducing the ability of this country to feed itself (by building on farmland) are the last things we need!

This is an embarrassing representation of the poor me generation!
You have help to buy schemes for first-time buyers, your £400k now becomes £300k you can get a mortgage for 5 or 6 times your salary for 35 years with interest rates of 1.5%.
I'm 40 when i was a first time buyer you could get 3 times your salary for 25 years max with interest rates of 8%.
You say people have not earned their equity in their houses what a load of rubbish, most have bloody paid for it with the 15% interest rates in the 90s and 8% interest rates in the 00s. If you bought a house in 1984 chances are you would have to put central heating, double glazing, a proper kitchen, a shower they didn't come with all these things, people have spent on their houses. My first house i spend over £30k modernising it, i didn't get a penny of that back.
Across the country younger folk can buy houses, maybe think about leaving London the uk is a big place.

Lots and lots more wilful misinterpretation here. These things I see as facts; housing especially in the centre of employment is unaffordable. It is not right or necessary that in many many places in the country half a million pounds now only gets you on the bottom rung of the ladder. Just being born years before other human beings does not make you any more nor less virtuous than anyone else. Successive British governments since the 1980s have sold off and not replaced social housing. Those (admittedly fewer) who went to university up to the 90s had their education paid for by the taxpayer. Today's ( and the 15 to 20 preceding years) do not. The ratio of working to retired people means the taxpayer of the next 20 years has a greater burden than those of earlier times in respect of pensions and health. Older people voted in much larger numbers than the young for Brexit which is forecast to hit economic growth and makes it harder for future generations to emigrate should there be more opportunities in EU countries. Older people are also far more likely to have voted for the current Conservative government which is composed of mainly architects and cheerleaders of austerity in public services. If young people left the country en masse, who would pay the taxes and generate the economic growth of the future to fund pensions and a health service?

People both young and old have spent the past decade paying for the mistakes made by bankers. So you want them to now pay for a virus as well.
You are clearly an ageists but remember you will be old to one day.

OP you are still hung up on buying a house, and you seem to have some entrenched ideas about what happens when you hit 40, or how you vote when you are A Certain Age.

''Housing is unaffordable for women in every English region.
Rising house prices and the gender pay gap means that there is no English region where a single woman on median earnings can afford to rent or buy an averagely priced house according to a new report from the Women’s Budget Group and Women’s Housing Forum. ''
wbg.org.uk/media/press-releases/exclusive-data-housing-is-unaffordable-for-women-in-every-english-region/

I think you'll find that in other parts of the UK university education is free and in this country the older generation will definitely not vote conservative governments. Especially after the major shafting it got from the Thatcher years.

I qualify as the 'older generation'. Inherited nothing, worked full time all my life, have never voted Tory, never voted for Brexit. Parent fought in WW2, lived through rationing and their city being bombed. This impacted on the children of that generation. As a female I faced significant Discrimination at work but fought hard to reach the top of my profession than any man had to with the same qualification and work record as I had. Have been shafted by the pension age shift with insufficient warning to plan, having already been shafted by the Endowment Mortgage Scandal. Never was their the remotest chance of being a 'stay at home' parent if you wanted to buy a home and part time work was not an option in many professions. In the current crisis, and before, I (and many like me in my generation) volunteer endless free hours to support others.
No, I don't think my generation has had it easy, nor am I feeling supported by 'the younger' generation.

I’m a young person. I think that people stopped expecting things from others and provided for themselves. While I think that housing in general in Britain is really over priced I don’t really expect someone to give me a ‘cheap’ house/build huge amounts of housing supposedly for my benefit. Limiting the powers of NIMBYs and removing CGT breaks on homes would be beneficial in removing distortions from the housing industry/market and should be encouraged as a way of reversing decades of harmful policy that has encouraged huge amounts of money into housing rather than into investment. Just imagine how much wealthier we would all be if we were putting our money into growing business and innovation rather into houses and then conspiring to inflate house values.

Oh for pity's sake. I don't think I've ever heard such a daft statement in my time on AIBU. The generations you arecslating worked a lot bloody harder than we do now. Much less employment protection legislation, if any, and much less technology to make their jobs easier. They also paid, and still are paying, their tax and NI. Give it a rest and stop making it all a competition.

Umm...afffordable housing is a social good, no matter one's age.

Young people are not 'sacrificing' for older people; we are ALL sacrificing (though none of us as much as health care workers) for our COMMON GOOD in the face of a global pandemic.

Wel I’m in my mid 60s. Our endowment mortgage worked for us. We didn’t work that hard. My DD who is a barrister works a lot harder! The hours lots of younger people work is huge.

If people chose not to have a job with a pension, then so be it. Years ago most jobs had decent pensions. Nurses paying into private pension schemes is rare and not advisable.

I’m with Ordree. In the overall scheme of things, a lifetime of paying back government spending on this will greatly outweigh temporary indulgencies from parents. I was a SAHM and we were able to have a great life with our DDs. The recession in 08/09 did cause us problems but this is nothing like the ones we are facing now!

Younger people will sacrifice more because they will spend longer paying it back!!! Simples.

All the shops we don’t need should be demolished/converted to housing. That saves fields and most areas could find space using that criteria. All estates have affordable housing and social housing now. But we don’t build enough as the planning process takes years. The government wants to build but has to speed up the processes.

There is not going to be any money for ‘affordable housing’ after this crisis. People are getting huge payments, temporary hospitals are being built and endless other costs. Less tax will be paid because of all this, the country will have huge borrowings as it is.

So the sacrifice is staying indoors?

The OP thinks that staying indoors is a sacrifice which warrants special treatment (but only in a specific age range)?

Surely that's not right, but I can't see any other detail of said sacrifice.