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?

I totally agree with the OP.
There is a population crisis foremost!
Poor quality housing is being thrown up and advertised as sustainable and affordable which is an absolute laugh. Affordable to whom? I have watched a beautiful green space being devasted with horrible new builds which are basically brick fronted sheds, while a local factory remains empty and could have been renovated to many decent flats/apartments.
There is so much city wide brown space that goes unused while nature is being devastated with concrete.
Follow the money. If you think "they" care one jot about normal people think again.

Yes I know. My point is that they should pay the SAME taxes! I.e. Same level of taxes from wages should result in the same level of taxes from pensions etc. It's grossly unfair to charge workers higher taxes on the same income, i.e. national insurance, which is just another tax.

No, it is a housing crisis, but family breakdown is a contributing factor, along with inflation, high rents and taxes meaning hard to save a deposit, wage stagnation due to limited economic growth and probably lots of other things

Ah so your issue is that pensioners don't pay national insurance . You accept that they pay the same rate of income tax.

I never said anything else. I didn't even mention income tax. NIC is just a tax, but unfairly only on workers.

Well I've just calculated my income as a working person and am still under the NI threshold. As I was when I job shared so worked half a week.

The government did look at this for the retired but decided not to alter the system

The issue is that council estates are no longer built as they’re believed to be ‘sink estates’.

It’s a catch 22, can’t build too many social housing without peppering them in new housing estates but then that means not enough social housing to go around.

Also means the criteria to get social housing doesn’t include the average working class family.

We don't have sink estates because so many are now privately owned which means our council tend to move on the worst to certain roads in town. There's always problems there.

A colleague bought a brand new house on a new estate in a cul de sac. She soon discovered the social housing one opposite was drug dealer central. Day and night characters rolled up to buy. She had a baby and was afraid to leave the house at times. As were the neighbours.

Eventually after many police Etc visits they were relocated. But there were no other issues on the estate with social housing occupants.

So I think mixed housing works better.

@taxguru I totally agree - I know it's a bit boring that I mention the differences when we lived in Denmark but they are indeed a very different way of looking at it - and there was no NI as such - although you do pay into a kind of insurance scheme for sickness/unemployment .

I totally agree about NI - why should my son at 26 be paying in whereas a retired person receiving just as much pays zero NI -?

But do you have 17 spare rooms? Some might be studies/ offices for those who wfh? Just because they don’t use the bedrooms as bedrooms it doesn’t mean it’s not used. I have 4 bedrooms. 3 are bedrooms, one is duel purpose as my office and spare bed if the in laws come to stay. We would struggle in a smaller property but potentially could be penalised for having a ‘spare’ room.

There's also offices. I counted our home as a three bedroom but we have a big office library too.

It is not about lack of housing units, Thatcher selling off made little or no difference, it is more about the banking de-regulation from that era that has led to the "financialisation of everything" world that we know live in.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-15855977/Thousands-new-build-London-homes-lie-service-charges-taxes-high-prices-buyers-investors.html

KeepPumping

Why have you resurrected this zombie??

Because they have paid it for 50 years and your son for maybe 4 years if he went to Uni?

The family who want a four bed but currently in a three bed move into the four bed. This frees up the three bed for the family squashed into a two bed and so on down the chain. You do also need to have a balance of types of home that matches the household composition, but building even bigger homes does help, compared to building no homes. Of course if you do need to think about density too, both to make local services viable and to give more people homes.

Yes, but as the poster said, if they are too expensive (people can"t afford the monthly mortgage debt payments any more) no one moves.

My view is that there isn't a housing crisis, there is a housing distribution crisis. As well as a climate crisis - so the presumption has to be for no green field development unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

There are, as the OP says, a LOT of empty homes. They need to be brought back into use. And we need sticks and carrots to get people to give up their second homes - ie sell or rent out for full time residential use. I think you'd get a million extra homes that way.

The system is wrong and Angela Rayner should be fixing it rather than expecting people to have massive "new villages" built in the countryside.

I'd also mind less if the houses were good quality but they are awful. Building standards are so poor in the UK. 1920s council houses were a lot better - bigger rooms, decent sized gardens, reasonably wide streets. And then you need solar panels, rainwater harvesting systems etc. They need cycle lanes, walkways that cars can't park on, amenities like playparks - if you are going to build new then build quality.

Good we need to keep it that way. We need less people not more houses. The more houses built the more roads, schools etc need to be built which has a knock on effect on wildlife.

The other problem is allowing people to turn two bed houses into four bed, or bungalows into houses. You need a really wide spread of housing.

Exactly, less people = less infrastructure = less disruption to the natural world.

The birth rate is already historically low and immigration is predicted to be net negative next year so what do you propose to achieve fewer people? Culling?

We already have the people! They’re just living in miserable overcrowded housing, or in the worst case emergency accommodation because they are homeless, with appalling outcomes for their children. Density is fine. We don’t need more roads - the roads are already there - just better public transport.

Ha ha ha

That's a very narrow minded view i could say that we dont have people we have empty houses we can't get rid of nothing is selling there are no jobs and no prospects because in my area thats entirely accurate forced to build housing that is stood empty until a housing association buys it it will then hang around as part buy houses and eventually be put out for (not affordable) rent because its a new build they charge almost double

It’s interesting -we are looking at moving back into the EU for our business reasons ( and having to jump through a fair old few hoops of course) - and it’s been interesting looking at house rentals in nice areas outside of Dusseldorf and Bonn in Germany - whilst not cheap the value and standard relative to decent areas here ( and we live in Bath) is just no comparison - most of them have got full useable basements with laundry rooms, storage room , often a hobby room/extra office etc -no council tax too in germany - they also build a lot ‘to rent’ and I don’t just mean 1 and 2 bed flats- 3-5 bed houses and extremely nice too that you can tailor to your requirements and rent until further notice - admittedly deposits are enormous in germany (3 months rent) but security is enormous too on tenants side and you can still give notice ok if your circumstances change- We had similar standards too when we rented in Copenhagen back in 2020 for 20 months - not one house we looked at was remotely grotty and most had very good storeage options and were quite a bit bigger than what you tend to get in the UK - Netherlands on the other hand seems to have rather a lot of crammed in estate style dinky houses - they seem to have copied the Brits - and at similar money -