To think he’s choosing to be homeless and it’s right that he doesn’t get a housing association property?

[Casparr]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-68033982

Man works 50hrs a week. At minimum wage that’s 27k and about £1900 take-home each month. He sleeps at friends’ houses or his ex-partner’s, presumably for free. Why can’t he just get a room in a house share (under £600 a month in Glasgow) and save up a deposit for a flat?

There's really nothing controversial about that. The issue is that homelessness goes right back to the Thatcher years when social housing was sold for Tory votes. Since then no government has at all invested in social housing on any scale at all. We all hear the talk especially at election time.
But there is still a lack of affordable social housing and BTL landlords are sometimes bowing out.
The issue of Asylum seekers etc really does not impact on lack of affordable housing as such.
I live in Scotland and my town has had an influx of Asylum seekers and believe me they are not generally receiving social housing.
Rather as the government has failed to provide social housing we are seeing increasingly people being put in temporary accommodation sometimes for years.
These people Are Not Asylum seekers but people who may or may not with sometimes disabilities or down on their luck.
So your leap to Glasgow Asylum seekers is still WOW!!

I feel very sorry for him. It’s quite possible he moved out knowing his daughter needed to stay with her mum as her primary carer and have a roof over her head. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t pay support and doesn’t desperately want her to stay overnight, as a full time working man it must be very depressing that these things don’t even seem to be options.

Hear hear! Completely agree.

@JenniferBooth

Hopefully tomorrow the various agencies who have been passing my Step Mum round like a bloody hot potato will have sorted some respite for my Dad. She has complex issues encompassing long term mental health issues pre-cognitive impairment and probable vascular dementia. She developed hyper delirium shortly after New Years when she had some sort if seizures, was awake for up to 60 hours at a time ransacking the house and all sorts. Eventually her community nurse suggested possible UTI but it was impossible to get a sample so her GP advised 999 and A&E. I was there with her for 13 hours on Tuesday and then have been in every day except Friday with my Dad who is waiting for treatment for atrial fibrillation- he's 84 - and now he has a dreadful cold. He's immuno compromised as had his spleen removed due to splenic lymphoma which means he can't be treated until his GP has checked with his cancer specialist. Oh it's all fun and games....

Had to fight to prevent an unsafe discharge of SM on Thursday - they told her she was going home before us so she kicked off aggressively and the staff tried to imply it was a family issue at play not her condition. It's been a complete bloody nightmare and we're hoping she'll be transferred for respite somewhere so long term plans can be made.

Have had to put my life on hold in the meantime and am worried my Dad will deteriorate - he's exhausted.

Anyway that's potentially a whole other thread, and apologies to the OP for the de-rail.

Thank you for your kindness though x

There’s 2 issues at play here:

1. Austerity/terrible policies/crap economy
2. A needy public who require so much support to do the most basic things and feed into problem number 1 by not paying tax to replace the money spent on them

My point exactly

@MistressoftheDarkSide Oh God i hope things get better very soon Thats a LOT to go through

No one has yet responded to my point that women are increasingly choosing to live alone after divorce or separation even if their adult kids have left home.
If nearly half of all marriages end in divorce in the uk, imagine the pressure on the housing market to provide homes for these people. See the thread below for some thoughts about housing and homes.

Given a choice, I wonder whether a lot of women would prefer to live on their ‘own’ whilst remaining in a relationship? www.mumsnet.com/Talk/relationships/4986280-given-a-choice-i-wonder-whether-a-lot-of-women-would-prefer-to-live-on-their-own-whilst-remaining-in-a-relationship

The distinct lack of social housing is just a subset of the underlying problem - a distinct lack of housing, full stop.

Every problem is downstream of this. If we build lots and lots of housing:

Rent gets cheaper.
Private buying gets cheaper.
Councils can buy social stock more cheaply.
etc etc.

Build. More. Houses.

What you mention is a national issue. As I’ve said earlier in other parts of the UK (mine for instance) a man in the same scenario would be given the same response, and would have been for decades. Single young working man is at the bottom of the list for social housing is a obvious fact here, not a news story. I don’t expect anyone in his shoes in the south of England would even bother to try, to be honest.

As @unlimiteddilutingjuice points out, the man in the article has grown up in a place where, not so long ago, a man in his situation could expect to be housed. Now he can’t. That’s why it’s newsworthy to him (and probably other Glaswegians).

What seems to have changed is the main housing association demolishing properties, reducing stock, at the same time as there being a increase - into a very specific regional area - of refugees who are eligible to apply for that limited stock (@unlimiteddilutingjuice mentions two thousand incoming). I’m sure there are other factors which could be included too such as rising divorce rates or long Covid or major companies closing down or the death of the high street.

I’m not saying ‘refugees are stealing all our houses!!!!’ but you can’t deny it’s likely to be one factor that’s impacted the likelihood of the man in the article getting the property he wants.

I agree there's a lack of housing but who would build this amount of houses and flood the market? Labour, land and materials are expensive. Companies want the max return on investments. As a business modal it makes no sense.

I can't see the government deciding to build that amount of affordable homes because it wouldn't be popular with voters. So much personal wealth is tied up in property, people don't want to pay increased taxes etc.

That's without even considering the land issues, lack of trained tradesmen etc.

There are many countries in the world which don't have this problem. It is largely a planning issue in the U.K. which could be tackled by a determined government.

You are correct in that there are plenty losers in a world with more housing. But it still needs doing.

A price crash would be bad. A well engineered, long period of flat prices against rising incomes, on the other hand, is what’s needed. And that is very doable.

I'm not sure this is totally true.

What is true is that housing has not kept up. Whether council owned or otherwise, and there are various approaches that can work, clearly it is not working.

And it isn't just down to Thatcher, in the sense that this seems to be a problem across many countries, even places where in the past there wasn't the tradition of publicly owned housing that the UK has. Housing isn't keeping up even with domestic populations. Canada, NZ, the US, Australia, all have the same problem.

However, adding thousands more people, in a single city, besides the domestic population is of course going to necessitate even more housing and cause more of a pinch.

I am very skeptical of governments now saying this isn't so. Canada has had the same approach for years, accepting a very large number of migrants of different kinds (refugees, economic migrants, family members, students) and when people suggested it was contributing to housing problems, they were called racists. It now turns out that several years ago the PM received an official report warning that immigration levels were going to cause a housing crisis.

This is true but it's not completely straightforward either.

Materials and labour costs are high.

Some of the stuff people want to build fast is frankly quite shit, and will be poorly planned.

Circumventing planning process makes things quicker, but it means developers, who are almost always mainly out to make a lot of money, are the ones driving the decisions, which will turn out badly.

There are reasons we don't want people to build everywhere, in wetlands, on good agricultural land, etc.

My town has recently had a controversy because in the interest of building quickly, they decided to place a massive seniors center in a town center neighbourhood. Basically taking up their whole green space. The neighbourhood is complaining that they weren't consulted, rightly, and will likely prevail, but only because they are part of a historically marginalized community and the town doesn't want to look bad in that way. If they were a wc white community they'd not have the same leverage.

Of course the seniors still need a place to live, and in the main part of town makes sense for access to services. No one really wants it in their neighbourhood's green space though.

Thank you.
You are agreeing with what I said earlier.
That the issue is really about governments and the people we vote for??
It's not about Asylum seekers or refugees.
I am sorry that this poor man and others cannot get housing. But I was also homeless, couch surfing etc but I was very lucky that my family clubbed together to be my guarantor's and give me the deposit that I needed

To be fair upto that point I was completely in despair

But the point of the housing list is not to give a house to anyone who wants one, regardless of income. Or I’d be in a council house myself. It’s to house people who cannot house themselves, and he could easily house himself if he wanted to. Yes it used to be different in the 60s, but social housing hasn’t been an option for most working adults for decades.

“What immigrants get” or who has paid in most, is irrelevant. If it went on contributions, a wealthy city lawyer would be well above him on the list, and I’m sure he’d think that was unfair too.

I think the real issue is that someone who works 50 hours a week cannot comfortably afford a home of their own. What has the world come to. Just because he's earning the 'living wage" doesn't mean it equates to the true cost of living. The housing and rental market is absolutely disgraceful, that's the real issue here.

The housing stock in the uk is disgraceful. However, building new houses is expensive and bankrupt local authorities cannot afford to build unlimited new homes. There was a Panorama about a year ago that looked at the practice of taking a small townhouse and turning it into eight single room studios with a shower and loo in one corner and the most basic kitchen in the other.. They were cramped and substandard but shifted people off the housing list.
Allocation of homes is unfair and there is little effort to monitor whether changing circumstances of tenants would result in houses being taken away. I have a friend who has a beautiful two bedroom garden flat. She owns three houses. Her mother and her aunt have both died and left houses to her and her ex husband is living in the family home in Cyprus. She has sold two of the houses and given the proceeds to her grandchildren. The local authority is committed to housing her until she dies.There must be many many women like her abusing the system. Although to be fair she has done nothing illegal.

There are many threads on here from posters who want help in avoiding death duties on their parents wealth and homes. Cheating the situation is commonplace.
We need migrant workers and they need to be housed. Rising divorce rates puts pressure on local authorities to house single families.
I don't think anyone has a solution. I feel desperately sorry for those people waiting to be housed. The housing crisis is not going to be solved any time soon. If anything it will get much worse.

@MistressoftheDarkSide

I'm so sorry for your predicament.
Is moving in with your parents an option?

@JMSA

Well, as beggars can't be choosers, this may be my last resort. Whether my parents would want me to is the first issue. My SM owns the house outright. The only available room is the downstairs front room, which has been kept as a shrine to her late parents. The house has no central heating and they live on the first floor. One complication is that while they have been together approximately 42 years, and are now married, before he died her DF set things up to ensure my Dad wasn't a gold-digger, so her will stipulates that my Dad can live in the house until he dies if she goes first, then her Northern family will inherit (Cousins and their children who I have never met).

Part of my SMs condition is paranoia. She is convinced my poorly 84 year old Dad is having affairs left right and centre and regularly uses her position as a weapon, in fact she threw it at him in hospital on Thursday when it was clear it was a safeguarding issue for her to go home without a care package in place. Oh, and she is convinced he has three other children .... absolutely not possible.

As she is deemed as still having capacity (which may change today after a long needed assessment), it would be up to her as to whether i could move in, and while if I pander to her every whim, it might fly, however, she went for both me and my Dad physically on Thursday .... oh it's very complicated.

There is no POA in place, so my Dad is a bit insecure. And I would be too. I imagine her illness would make her very pleased to have two people under her control.

I mean as far as the authorities are concerned it would be a win - I would be a live in carer so less input required from them. I could claim Carers Allowance but if she wanted rent I don't think I could claim for that.

This isn't my first rodeo when it comes to dementia. My MIL lived with me and my DP for 18 months and I was her main carer.

This is my current reality in case anyone thinks I'm making it up. It sounds unbelievable to me too, but alot of my life has been quite left field, so I should be used to it by now.

Maybe it's because I was born on a Wednesday?

Anyhow, must crack on and get down to see my Dad, make sure he's made it through the night and his cold isn't heading towards pneumonia or anything, then brace for today's round of National Hell Service roulette..... dutiful daughter to the rescue....

What a busybody. You sound thoroughly unpleasant

For having an opinion on a news story?!

Unfortunately the property developers who fund the Tory party don’t want that, so it looks like Sunak is planning to over-heat the market again before he leaves, with Help to Buy on steroids.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/21/99-per-cent-mortgage-scheme-uk-housing-market-ministers