To be sick of hearing about 'the housing crisis'?

[GoldfinchFeather]

This is related to the thread about Angela Rayner wanting to build 1.5 million new homes. Is anyone else sick to the back teeth of hearing about the supposed housing crisis in this country?

I live in a semi-rural area, and the amount of house building around here over the last few years has been crazy. Hundreds of houses appearing on pretty much any vacant piece of land, turning what was once a small village into something that feels closer to a town in size. Roads getting busier and busier, and and all the while nothing has been done to provide any new facilities like doctors or schools.

I understand people's frustration of not being able to buy a home. But surely just concreting over more and more of the countryside is completely unsustainable?

If the housing crisis is really so bad, why isn't the Government taking more of an innovative approach? How many town centres/high streets have empty shops that could be converted to residential use? Or properties that have stood empty for years and haven't been brought back to market? Surely just through that, there would be an enormous surplus of homes available, and less need to concrete over more and more of the countryside?

There may be disadvantages, but the issue is that a lot of British people won't do the jobs for the wages they pay, but also don't want to pay more for the product.

For example, fruit picking is hard, boring work and pays very little. Immigrants will do it. British citizens will not. British people also will not pay £6 for a punnet of raspberries, so raising the pay isn't going to work. It will just mean they rot on a supermarket shelf instead of in the field.

Half of Leicester is factories where immigrants are running up garments for £5ph, and the buyers are feeling good about not buying Chinese made goods, without asking how £7 could possible have covered the cost of making a dress under fair conditions.

None of these workers are what you'd call skilled labourers (although they can clearly use a sewing machine which is better than I can do) and some of them aren't even here legally, but they are keeping the economy going.

You are being unreasonable.
It's not a fake crisis, it's a real crisis.
NIMBY jumps to mind.

Actually I live in a grotty city and I don't begrudge those living in the nice houses in the surrounding villages but please don't build all over the local countryside as I like to go and walk in it. And please don't build all over the farmland as I would like to be able to eat, particularly in the event of some global crisis when we can't import food.

Many new developments don't build amenities, though.
And we need green lungs. They're vital for not just air quality but quality of life.

Yeah well that doesn't count. It's the NEW houses that are bad.

🙄

It definitely is. But if anyone tries to address this issue we are accused of being right wing racists

The majority of women and children who are homeless are invisible as they tend to 'sofa surf' and so the council does not prioritise them. Most people literally homeless on the streets are men.

I own a small 2 bed flat in the nw london suburbs and am pregnant with a baby boy. I could never justify moving out to the SE as it is as expensive as staying in a flat in london and I would have less access to private childcare options and would spend more money on commuting. Only having this one son and no family help so having access to childcare and being able to do nursery pick ups easily is very important to me perhaps just as important as having more space

Partially due to lack of building in many SE commuter towns like Amersham and Radlett, family homes in SE are really quite expensive and at top end of my budget. So it doesn't make sense given what I would be sacrificing. If it was cheaper it may make sense. And then that would free up my flat. There is a knock on effect down the housing chain. My flat would probably be rented out or occupied by young professionals who could move out of a HMO. HMO can be for minimum wage workers.

This is a very important point. If you shut down discussion, and label people, it's not productive. Have a look at Germany, Austria and Sweden and the move to the Far Right. They're only to ready to provide answers.

I accept the need for more housing. What I don't accept is the commercially driven approach to meeting that need.

Where I live tens of thousands of new builds have gone up. They're lovely estates in the main, too. Attractive properties and nicely laid out with green spaces. However, there are no corresponding GP surgeries, shops or schools, and all bar the tiny amount of social housing on them are mostly unaffordable for anyone wanting to live and work locally. So they've been bought up by people either prepared to commute to one of the surrounding cities or people who can't afford to buy on those cities but are prepared to move out to the countryside and travel back in for life/work.

The result is absolute carnage on the roads. Rush hour has gone from an hour commute to sometimes 2.5 hours. GP appointments now take 3 weeks or longer even if urgent. Meanwhile, our young people are still leaving because they can't afford to live here, vulnerable people on waiting lists are still on waiting lists, and our communities are fracturing because everyone is so busy working and commuting to have time to get to know their neighbours or contribute to their community.

We don't need more private developer housing estates. We need a massive investment in smaller properties at affordable purchase prices or sensible rental prices. Accompanied by job growth and additional GPs. And much more attention needs to be paid to transport networks. There is no point in telling a rural area with no rail network and meagre buses
To build 100,000 homes. Developments need to be planned, looking at rail links and arterial routes.

I can only imagine how much prosperity the government could unlock by having a massive council house building campaign, by the government giving new money to fund councils to do this. London is currently having a massive council house building boom under Sadiq Khan and it’s so important. Why can’t we do this more widely? Why it is left mostly to private developers to build the ‘profitable homes’ that they want to build not necessarily the homes that people actually need?

Housing crisis indeed.

However the approach is totally wrong.

Yes, people have to live somewhere and our population is growing.
We have limited land and space.

BUT. Building over good farmland in rural villages is destroying our countryside and it is shocking to see. We MUST retain space and farmland that can give us some independence in food production.

Housebuilders developing great big estates on the edge of villages with no additional infrastructure means that local area cannot support the population from a health, social care and education perpective. Add to that the lack of social housing and affordable homes on those developments - usually just a small portion of any estate is designated as that.

What is needed FIRST is a fast identification of brownfield sites and existing buildings for change of use where there is often infrastructure already in place, and local authorities forced to build into those sites first, with a minimum of 50% designated as at affordable rents.

Also, some sort of longer term legislation to control rents so that creates a range of more affordable housing for tenants.

I don't envy anyone trying to cope with buying a small property or find somewhere to securely and affordably rent.

In an ideal world, I do also think there is a mindset change needed in that the default should be to work hard and try to buy young. Start with a bedsit/ wreck/ buying in a rubbish area, and moving up the chain as jobs and salary allows. Its so hard to leave home comforts when you can't afford a tv or sofa and want to spend money on a shiny new car lease.

But also having to spend crazy money renting somewhere that means you can never afford to save is bonkers.

We need to go back to a time where this was possible to rent cheaply or buy affordably and set expectations of achievement to make this possible.

There’s an acute shortage of housing where I live because it’s a holiday area and there are a lot of second homes. Local people literally can’t find anywhere to rent, let alone afford anything that comes up.

@taxguru

New build flats are actually really good quality, especially the likes of retirement flats and Uni student flats. All compliant with modern rules and regulations.

Tell that to the thousands of flat leaseholders who have issues with cladding and other building faults. Eg wooden balconies and lack of fireproofing.
Some are paying £000's a month for 'waking watches' in case fire breaks out.
Some have had their service charges increase from £4k to £16k a year. Who can afford that. Some will have to declare themselves bankrupt and be homeless but still be paying their mortgage.
The government needs to sort out these and other leasehold problems and then push to build more flats.

There is a distinct lack of rental properties in my area, the few available are always overpriced, tiny shitty little boxes (I've even seen some bedsits with no windows at all, is that even fucking legal?). Most of the houses here have been chopped up into tiny HMOs to rent to students, any families or couples or indeed non-students just looking for a normal flat/home to rent are screwed, it's almost impossible to get anywhere. The social housing list is neverending and house prices are not affordable for most people.

It's easy to say move elsewhere but it's sad and frustrating for people who have lived in their home towns where they have support networks, family, friends, hobbies, careers etc to have to up sticks due to lack of housing.

There's also the consideration of how much of our country we need to keep green (both the countryside and inside cities) for the sake of the environment, our mental health (huge links between this and access to green spaces) and food security.

That's a good point. Cornwall and parts of Devon are now more or less glorified holiday camps for (rich) city dwellers now. Can't see how that will be sustainable in the long run either, if there are no locals left to actually work in the shops and bars, because the work is only seasonal now. The answer to that will be immigration, which nobody likes.

It's really expensive to move with stamp duty and all..most people in my generation are aiming to buy their forever home as FTBs because of that. I think I would be in my starter flat for at least 2 more years which would make it 7 years I have lived here. Very likely to be 10 years (son would be 4 by then). Thank goodness its a 2 bed.

It is a point as immigration is one of the contributing factors to rising population and the need for housing, but to put it down as the sole root cause as some posters are alluding to is also not healthy.

The elderly population in 2022 was estimated at 12.7m whereas log term migrants estimated at 1.2m. Don’t get me wrong, the elderly deserve to have housing and a dignified, leisurely period after all their hard work in the prior years, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that they are idle and no longer contributing, leaving no choice but to bring people in to replace that workforce. And yes, that does mean that more houses are needed. And yes it contributes to a crisis. But there is a bigger picture here.

We need more social housing, and where new housing of any type is built, we need the infrastructure to support it: schools, transport, surgeries, a sewage system that can cope, councils that can collect bins ...

At the moment what we're getting is vast new build estates built by greedy developers that put pressure on local services and are still unaffordable to the vast majority.

It's fucking shit.

@AestheticallyChallenged well yes, I actually live in a 2 bed flat in London. There are probably more people living in our four storey block than in the village I grew up in.

The issue is many people, including many on here, seem to think it is some sort of failure in life to be living in a flat past 30. Hence the market provides lots of semi detached suburban houses with parking for two cars.

I am just amused people who oppose development always suggest housing solutioms they would never ever consider for themselves. If it is such a good alternativd, why don't they want to live in a converted office block on tbe high street?

Try building masses of "council" housing where I am, and watch the wealthy, tory-voting, landlord types who are already having conniptions about rent controls and proposed restrictions on BTL immediately drag the council through the courts, protest in every way possible, and ultimately make council business practically impossible until the whole thing keels over and more "amenable" Councillors emerge, and you'll get some idea of why it's just not practicable to expect it to be more widespread, even in worst affected areas where it's most desperately needed. Sometimes extreme wealth and deprivation coexist, and its often the case the former is partially responsible for the latter, but predictably has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, or at least, they're happy enough with the problem being swept under the carpet so that it doesn't bring the area, and profits, down.

This thing with people requiring social housing being relocated outside of their own locale is still going on, and it isn't going to stop any time soon, because when it really comes down to it, ingrained snobbery and protection of personal wealth matters more to the people who could do the most to alleviate the problem than poor people having nowhere to live does.

@GoldfinchFeather absolutely agree- UK is full up, there are no open expanses like one sees in Europe or USA - it's grim.

At a friends recently, beautiful green rolling fields bought by bloody new build developers.
Even in urban areas, every patch of green space is being built upon.

Massive population expansion in last 40 years- it's unsustainable.

Maybe we should give out converted vans, tents, or build shanty towns...
Nobody in modern UK should be homeless, sofa surfing, living in sheds. It's a shame that every politician should be holding. Every MP/ councillor should have to prove they are actively trying to solve their constituency housing issues.

I never said it was the only cause.
I was reading about the rise of the Far Right in Europe and how they are using migration . They are also using the fact that people raising these concerns are frequently labelled as "racists".
You really do not need to tell me that there are many elderly. You do not need to tell me that there is a "bigger picture".
I am well read and well informed, thank you.