To buy a house next to housing association properties?

[Brightskiesahead]

I need some advice/opinions please.

Soon to be divorced and left with some equity to buy a small house for me and 2 primary age DC.

One has come up on a new build development which is great on paper. Detached, 3 bed, garage, 2 parking spaces and west facing garden. It's in budget. I can't stretch to the next house type up. But the house types I'm looking at are next to housing association properties. The immediate neighbour is a disabled property then its 5 terraced houses of HA.

Would you buy it?

I can't investigate the area as it's not complete yet. The general neighbour hood is lovely (I live close by currently).

We moved to a 'better' area, leaving behind lovely neighbours, our new neighbours consisted of a bloke who abused his wife loudly, and I had to explain to my 5 year old son, why the lady next door was crying like a child every day. On the other side, adult children, loud television, and various relatives with large barky dogs, made sleeping before 2am difficult.
Every thing is fine now, time moves on and so have the neighbours, but at the time I thought we had made a terrible mistake.
You just can't tell what your neighbours will be like until you live there.

I live in a HA house which has a handful of owned houses and there’s been more problems with the owners than the tenants!!

I missed a bit out of that sentence - I live in a HA house on a small estate which has a handful of owned houses!

It really is the luck of the draw. My MIL lived in an amazing HA property for about 35 years and moved about 5 years ago into independent living for daughters and widows of armed forces members. Anyway, I loved her HA flat and her neighbours were just brilliant. When DS1 was a baby, we lived with her for a short spell while we waited to move into our own place. There wasn't one issue... not ever. Then she moved out and who moved in was a nightmare (I'm still in touch sporadically with a couple of the neighbours and MIL still meets up with them... well, not now during Covid times). Anyway, the people who moved in have been total PITAs, noise at all hours, disruptive, dirty, disrespectful. It's been years of torment. All it takes is one asshole to ruin a perfectly nice place.

Around the corner from me is a row of really nice HA terraces. And 4 out of the 5 residents are really lovely people. You can have a lovely chat, the cats are roaming about, lovely gardens. Nice neighbours. But the problem is, there is that one weed-smoking, Grime blasting a-hole who just ruins it for everyone else. All it takes is one deadbeat to kill the peace for everyone else. I feel so sorry for anyone whose lives get ruined by these dickheads. And you're stuck with them. And unfortunately, this is the risk you take. This isn't snobbery. It's just a matter of life.

I really really wouldn’t buy an off plan new build next to HA. New builds tend to go down in value anyway and many people don’t want to buy homes next to council/HA houses. If your circumstances change over next few years you are more likely than average to end up in a property no longer worth what you paid for it.
We live in a Victorian terrace where bulk of houses are privately owned but the odd one is housing association. Everyone is very nice and most have lived there many years. Some of the gardens and back yards are a bit of a mess but there is no link between that and who rents vs who bought. The housing association house next door to is horrendously badly maintained as the HA have put off having the external window ledges and other stonework painted for years so it’s crumbling in places. I wouldn’t be confident some of their other maintenance is great either. I really don’t care overly if next door looks scruffy & that’s not the one we share supporting walls with (our street is on a hill so while it’s a terrace it’s really lots of semis built right next to each other on slightly different levels) and we have every intention this will be a forever house so not that worried about resale. In case we did need to sell there are a finite number of big old Victorian terrace houses with gardens in walking distance to the sea so it’s much less likely a house or two on the street being a bit run down will put off buyers. New build estates are common and there are always newer ones so it’s going to be harder to shift a house next to a row that look rundown there

Your concern should be about how the properties will be managed, not who is living there, because that will tell you more about how any problems that could arise will be handled.

Find out which Housing Association owns the properties and start by checking them out on the regulator page: www.gov.uk/guidance/regulatory-judgements-and-regulatory-notices-a-to-z-list plus have a google to see if any news stories about complaints come up.

We live near a few housing association properties. We wouldn't choose it again. We have a lovely couple over the road who look after their house better than we do. An old man who mostly keeps to himself but has druggie relatives round. Then the houses and flats at the end of our road are full of druggies and arseholes. I'm glad we dont live on that end of the street and only have to deal with them passing by and letting their dogs shit everywhere.

It's always a lottery who your neighbours are. But I think its perfectly logical that someone who has had to work for something and owns a house is more likely to look after the house and neighbourhood than someone who hasn't had to pay for it and isn't financially invested. Not guaranteed, just more likely.

I wouldn't buy a new build though if I were you. We viewed a few and they just fall apart. And builds are always delayed. You can get lovely middle aged properties with big gardens for half the price of them and were built to last.

I live on an estate that is a mixture of owners, private tenants and HA tenants. Any issues on our street (not many mind) have been the private renters (next doors landlord found a cannabis farm in the attic when they moved out )

I lived in a flat (I was renting from a HA as were all the other tenants) and it was sheer hell. Man downstairs had parties and drug dealers in and out 24/7. Girl upstairs was constantly banging on people's doors drunk. People have every right to be wary of where they are moving to and you just never know who you're going to be loving next to in a council/ha flat I've rented all my life btw before some idiot embarrasses themselves by accusing me of looking down on renters.

*living.

I can think of nothing worse than living next to the absolute snobs on this thread.

Again, my advice would be to ignore anyone who hasn’t been in this situation

Tenyearsgone I can imagine something much worse. In fact I dont need to imagine it we lived it

Our first house was in a row of nice semis in a cul de sac that then connected by footpath into a housing estate. I ended up preferring to walk my dog there in the dark as there was always people about and it felt safer than the empty dark roads of the posher bit that I was on the edge of.

That said, when I went to sell, the main negative feedback was that we were too close to the estate, and we got that a lot.

I've lived in SH properties and on a snotty road full of MC snobs. I know which one I preferred. It wasn't the look down their noses Mrs Bucket types that seem to be on this thread.

OP, do those HA tenants a favour, don't buy that house.

So many posters here are being completely ridiculous. Obviously you can get a problem neighbour anywhere but you are more likely to have problem neighbours in council estates or HA houses. Op asked for opinions and there have been a large number of negative experiences including my own very negative experience meaning I wouldn’t have bought my house where it is if I knew they were going to put HA houses here. So I shared that opinion with the OP.

Those of you who are living in HA houses - it’s not a direct slight on you it’s just reality. And to be honest you’re also not displaying yourselves in the best light being verbally abusive to other posters, name calling and cursing and casting aspersions on OP children.... all the OP did was ask people for opinions on whether it’s a good idea to buy near HA houses in a new estate and you’re all slagging her and her children off.

@FitzsimmonsMarvel

So many posters here are being completely ridiculous. Obviously you can get a problem neighbour anywhere but you are more likely to have problem neighbours in council estates or HA houses. Op asked for opinions and there have been a large number of negative experiences including my own very negative experience meaning I wouldn’t have bought my house where it is if I knew they were going to put HA houses here. So I shared that opinion with the OP.

Those of you who are living in HA houses - it’s not a direct slight on you it’s just reality. And to be honest you’re also not displaying yourselves in the best light being verbally abusive to other posters, name calling and cursing and casting aspersions on OP children.... all the OP did was ask people for opinions on whether it’s a good idea to buy near HA houses in a new estate and you’re all slagging her and her children off.

Oh so it's ok to cast aspersions on HA tenants then? Just not the other way around.

Erm have I insulted the op or other posters.

It entirely depends on the individual area. I've had some fucking nightmarish experiences next to HA, but those were in very rough areas and the trouble was already well and truly established. If I had choices I wouldn't have lived there.

I know other people who have had positive experiences.

The problem for you is that you don't know how it's going to be because nobody lives there yet. I think this coupled with the fact that it's a new build would put me off buying it.

@Tenyearsgone it’s not casting aspersions. It’s sharing your own experience of HA houses as neighbours of which mine has been:

• massive increase in dog poo everywhere and actually seeing many times those from the HA houses walking on when their dog poos.
• massive increase in teenagers and kids hanging around being disruptive at all hours. Kids who only look around 7 years old out in the dark walking up to the shop before it closes at 11. Never a parent in sight
• gangs of teenagers verbally abusing me when I walk to the shop minding my own business
• dirt unkempt gardens
• calling the police when one of my HA neighbours was screaming banging on my door at 6am shouting ‘they were after me, they’re going to kill me’ while drugged out of his mind.

I’m sorry if you don’t like to hear this but that is my direct experience of living beside HA houses. Prior to these houses being built the village I live in was lovely and quiet and zero bad experiences.

My own experience:
As a newly single parent in a new build HA estate, a few neighbours were fine. Others were druggies, gangs of male cousins, bullies and incredibly noisy.
I never complained about noise as it was only rock music, tho in the small hours, but I was accused of being the one who had called the police. They wouldn’t believe me.
The drug dealers terrorised my disabled neighbour and destroyed her lovely flower beds with weed killer. They also said they would disrupt her funeral and not allow the hearse access. This was the only time the Police intervened.
The rest of the time the gangs fought each other and anyone else. One woman’s neck was broken and she was left paralysed.
A newly installed playground was vandalised the first day, in broad daylight. The mayor stood watching- she had come to ceremonially open it!
So, no, never ever again would I willingly live next door, and I would never buy.

[quote FitzsimmonsMarvel]@Tenyearsgone it’s not casting aspersions. It’s sharing your own experience of HA houses as neighbours of which mine has been:

• massive increase in dog poo everywhere and actually seeing many times those from the HA houses walking on when their dog poos.
• massive increase in teenagers and kids hanging around being disruptive at all hours. Kids who only look around 7 years old out in the dark walking up to the shop before it closes at 11. Never a parent in sight
• gangs of teenagers verbally abusing me when I walk to the shop minding my own business
• dirt unkempt gardens
• calling the police when one of my HA neighbours was screaming banging on my door at 6am shouting ‘they were after me, they’re going to kill me’ while drugged out of his mind.

I’m sorry if you don’t like to hear this but that is my direct experience of living beside HA houses. Prior to these houses being built the village I live in was lovely and quiet and zero bad experiences.[/quote]
Oh deary me. The unwashed WC moved into your village. Did you write to your Tory MP?

I really think some posters are being unfair to the op. It's a reasonable question imo. Like I said previously, I live near a ha estate...it's lovely, nice families, no anti social behaviour at all. However, a few roads away is an estate that is really notorious and awful. Very menacing atmosphere, lots of fly tipping, anti social behaviour...I wouldn't live there unless I had no other choice. I also know a woman who lived upstairs a ha tenant who was a drug addict and made her life hell.

And I lived next door to a drug dealer who got 8 years inside for drug and fire arms offences. No wonder he could afford to buy such a fancy house on a nice leafy street.