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?

So you think that legislation to prevent people having to live in dangerous mouldy flats or in a flat with dangerous electrics is a bad thing! Jesus!

Hundreds of houses built on farmland in the last few years here and just been informed of 100s more on the way again on prime farm land. Hospital is in crisis mode, schools rammed and a tiny incident and the roads are gridlocked. Building more houses is not going to solve anything, except a few people will become extremely rich.

There was a scheme I heard of in Ireland where by banks would lend you the money to buy a property that needed work and also lend you the cost of doing it up so that you could pay tradesmen, etc. I thought this was a great idea - why don’t we do this in the UK? All those small terraces that need upgrading are perfect starter homes.

i guess there is more profit in management fees and selling off book to foreign buyers

The thing that worries me about this isn't so much the houses (and I say this as someone living near a planned massive development). It's that we're doing it now when there's a shrinking birth rate globally and massive issues around immigration. At some point our population will start to shrink and we will be left with a load of poorly built housing on the farmland that we really could have done with to supply food.

"they should live above shops" - says the OP from the comfort of her nice semi-rural 1800s home which was allowed to be built because it was the 1800s and, well, because its hers.

Let them eat cake I say OP, are you with me?

Spot the dodgy landlord.

You really think protections that require landlords to have safe electrics and no damp are the issue? What a load of crap.

It is worth noting that all new housing has been agreed by local authority planning departments in line with government policy. All new housing is in a local plan that has been agreed. There is an expectation that a local plan or area plan includes areas for housing and some locations will get more than others. Therefore large villages which already have facilities and towns will grow. Some by thousands of houses but it saves very small villages and AONB for example. It’s totally ignorant to say development is all led by property developers - it is not.

We have artificially controlled building areas by the green belt and some of that isn’t great. Therefore better quality farmland has been used which is wring. We also now have a presumption of building on Brown field sites. As long as we can afford it as some are pretty contaminated. Companies like John Lewis have earmarked stores for housing use. They could be demolished but the sites could be used and they might well be decent sites near transport links and jobs.

We do seem to prefer box sized houses with tiny gardens. We do need to understand we will get a lot more housing by accepting we need to go a bit higher and keep space around the developments.

Often holiday homes are actually in highly priced areas. Nearby are much cheaper towns but locals don’t want them! There’s plenty of cheap housing in Cornwall but the Cornish don’t want it either. It’s all very well suggesting the state takes houses away from people but what about separated parents who maintain 2 family houses? There are huge numbers of them. We cannot afford to build bungalows as they take up too much land so the elderly get stuck in family homes. We cannot make everything right.

Angela Rayner may find there’s nowhere wanting these houses so she will have to play hardball . My local area is being told to take thousands more on top of thousands already built. East-West rail and the varsity line will build on farmland. So local plans will be ripped up. Most of us know there’s a need for more housing but where and what sort will cause endless rows with Reform saying immigrants are the problem. We will continue to be a divided nation.

We also need to consider water supply and flooding. Transport links and local facilities but if we don’t have GPs, surgeries won’t be staffed! Developers are required to contribute towards schools and these are planned by LAs. However birth rates are not an exact science.

Because no one is going to want to buy a flat now with all the rules and regulations that go with it.
And flat dwellers are always moaned at by the middle class eco warriors on here for not having room to recycle or grow their own food.

I live with my dad in his privately owned home, and have done since i was born. Because of quite severe health issues i cannot work, so have a set income through disability payments that i have no way of increasing.
Because i do not have an income via wages, i will never qualify for a mortgage, so i will never be able to buy or own my own home.
I could not afford private rental prices in my area. The house next door ( 2 bed and a box room terraces so nothing big or fancy) is a rental, that is let out for £1200 a month. All local properties i've looked at on various sites like rightmove, zoopla etc, show absolutely nothing at all local enough for me to move out but be near enough to my dad who is my carer, for anything less than £1000 a month, which i absolutely cannot afford, and which my LHA would only cover a maximum of £170 a week. There is absolutely nothing available social housing or council, the wait list is years long, and as my dad would never kick me out and make me homeless, i'll never be a priority on that list, as they know they can fob me off on my dad.

The problem isn't (just) that there aren't enough houses, but that housing of all types is too expensive, and people in various situations are excluded from buying, or priced out completely of either buying or private renting.

Yip, that's one of the biggest piles of nonsense I've read in ages. So all these "benign" landlords disappeared, and presumably all the formerly barely-habitable rentals were legislated into luxurious des-res, and they are all just sitting empty now, or something....

Convert the shop to housing as well so it isn't empty? Yesterday we went out for lunch with my adult DD in a neighbourhood in London that we used to live in before we were married. We took her to see the old sights including where my best friend used to live - in a large two storey maisonette above a shop. She lived there with two flat mates for at least 5 years, perfectly happily. It is absolutely normal to live in flats above shops in London, loads of people I know did this in their 20s and 30s. It's a scandal that residential accommodation like this is standing empty when young Londoners are spending at least half of their salary on rent in shared houses.

There is a housing crisis but the solution is not to build ever-more houses, it's to reduce the population. Net migration was what, a million people last year? And they want to build 1.5 million homes over 5 years? Well that means you have to fit 5 million new arrivals into those 1.5 million homes, so over 3 people in each new home. That's just to keep up with immigration, not allowing for natural population increase in those already here, and more importantly doing nothing to solve the present crisis.

There's more than an empty flat above a dodgy kebab shop (which is probably used to house the illegal workers/slaves for the shop anyway).

What about the empty department stores in town centres? What about the 2/3/4 story flats above High St shops, not to mention the empty shop itself. If the shop is also converted, then the flats above aren;t "above a shop" anymore.

What about the empty High Street banks which are usually pretty substantial buildings?

What about empty/derelict pubs and restaurants?

We have to face facts - such places aren't suddenly going to reopen as shops, pubs, banks etc., so they NEED repurposing and when there's a massive housing shortage, it makes sense to convert them to flats etc.

They are. But they also encourage people to downsize into something more manageable. They don’t have to have large gardens. Just bigger than the tiny fenced in ones allowed on new builds currently the same with driveways. Big enough for two cars. Make them attractive and people will downsize to them.

id also have planning permission for Astro turf in my redoing planning laws.

Yes, but the footprint of a bungalow is the same and sometimes larger than a large family house. As land is often the main constraint when building houses then I struggle to see how building loads of bungalows would help the situation. You could just build more family houses on similar sized plots like what they're doing now and the material impact would be the same.

Like I said, just look at the 1930’s towns built.
maisonettes, great for singles, small families or elderly. A garden to call your own.
a few bungalows, a few terraces, a few semis and a few detached. All mixed in. All desirable.
cramming as many in as possible all fenced in, isn’t good for biodiversity, it isn’t good for peaceful happy living.

it is good for profits though.
It built a happy community, with the ability to downsize and upsize within the same town as they travelled through life.

People with mobility issues need bungalows. Our most recent estate built there's a mix of 4 beds, 3 bed semis, three storey townhouse, bungalows, apartments and social housing. It's well laid out. We're in a cul de sac of 10. Four bungalows and six houses. All sell well.

I wonder if we should build more terraced houses with a quadrangle garden in the centre. Uses less land and can offer better security. My friend in sheltered housing has lived happily in hers for two decades.

We should build densely with plenty of green space but it needs strong regulations- excellent sound proofing between terraces or floors on flats

I live in the north east in the pit villages, we are FAMOUS for our abandoned houses.

I was homeless for 3 YEARS and walked past hundreds of empty houses daily. These houses where council houses where tenants where evicted for 'regeneration' except it NEVER came, the houses rotted quickly (leaks, fires, vandals) and became uninhabitable and now stand as empty husks though all the towns/villages. The houses where FINE before people where evicted, my friend lost her childhood home in the early 2000 (which was on a nice street) when they where forced to move (with promises of moving back once it was rebuilt better) and then watched it fall apart and then burn down with most the street, eventually to get demolished without ever being able to return to it, nothing was ever built on that land.

London then started shipping their drug user (crime spiked with the influx of them) and immigrant/migrants up here (no issue with the immigrant but they also deserve better than the uninhabitable housing too).

Now their are whole streets of unusable houses that would cost 3 times as much as their worth to fix.

What would be great is a £1 sell off of any salvageable houses + incentive grants to do them up for locals (NOT landlords/developers) but that has been blown off several times. It has worked in other areas though (although it still usually favors more privileged people with saving).

"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?"

Which is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn proposed to do (along with lots of other progressive stuff) but apparently he was the actual Antichrist and thankfully all the property investors were spared from his unadulterated evil!

I agree that it's the lack of infrastructure that is the problem, especially round here. People are buying houses in my local market town with a view to getting their children into local schools. They will be very disappointed that the schools have no room. The secondary school has already been extended and is over-subscribed.

Yes. Because let's be realistic. Nobody was dying of mould. There wasn't an epidemic of people being electrocuted in their showers.

If you had a choice of being homeless, or wiping some mould from the bathroom ceiling once a week in your affordable rented home, which would you choose?

Everyone over the age of 40 has lived in the type of places I'm talking about, it was perfectly safe, no deaths, nobody was maimed by outdated 1970s decor

🙄

It's a people crisis. 60 odd million people live in England which is only one part of a small island. The best part of 10 million live in one city within that.

It's simply not designed to house or hold that many people. That's why it's not just a housing problem but an infrastructure problem. The roads are too busy, public transport clogged, public services on their knees. Too many people live here.

But this year we'll still import the population of Leeds.

Yes. They are all literally empty. Nobody is able to rent out their Granny flat anymore because of the legislation required to do it "legally".

But 20 years ago they could, and rent was cheap.

Show me evidence of mass deaths caused by the condition of rented homes around 2005.