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?

Totally agree. No need to build on the green belt when the population is set to decline anyway and plenty of properties will become available as the baby boomer generation passes on.

I think this could happen anyway - the return to office just isn't happening as expected (and is largely driven by landlords and commercial property companies wanting to see a return on the investments they made pre-covid) and eventually commercial landlords are going to have to look at other uses for those buildings or they'll just sit empty.

Yes this is true, but will building all over green spaces solve this? The families in this situation still won't be able to afford the kind of houses the developers are building. To be brutally honest, many people can't afford anything. So what's to be done?

And will the projected numbers of immigrants entering the country be able to afford these houses too? I suspect not, in almost all cases.

Because people don't get paid enough. But we need more and more housing as our population grows by a million people every year due to migration and the globalists do it to keep wages down, which in turn means people can't afford the housing costs.

But yeah, like a lot of things the issue with housing/social housing goes back to the short-sightedness of Thatcherism.

We currently live in a flat with 2 children (in the middle of selling and buying a house) and honestly the pressure I have had from family and friends over the past few years to move is astounding, no-one thinks it is acceptable to raise children in a flat. I have to disagree - we spend more time out in nature taking the kids for walks etc than most people I know, and most importantly they are happy. My main reason for moving is the children are older and different sexes so cant really share, and there are no 3 bed flats in my area. From an investment side, the flat was a poor choice though, it has not increased in value at all in the past 10 years. A cultural change in which people who lived in flats are not judged I think would make a big difference.

I know at least 6 couples in their 50/60s who live in 4 bed houses with no children at home anymore, they think about downsizing but still want the entertaining space so don't bother. There is probably a big gap in the market for 2 bed houses, with larger kitchens, dining etc.

What I just can not understand about the so called housing crisis is why the village I have lived in all my life has doubled in the last 5 years (and so too have all the surrounding villages) and yet only 10% of these new builds are set aside for social housing. The rest are 4-5 bed houses all started around £400-500k, we've had 9 luxury homes build right opposite our house, all selling for £700k.

Is there only a housing 'crisis' amongst the rich, and have they all been sofa surfing up till now?

I agree with you op, they keep building yet none of the infrastructure or public services are matching the influx of new residents. In our area there are plans to build a garden city, with approx 9k new houses. Only a fraction of those houses will be cheap/affordable.

There will still be a continued housing crisis if our government keeps agreeing to this madness.

It isn't a few single room ex shops. In my local town there are loads of substantial buildings that are vacant that are ex department stores and office blocks. If you repurposed all of them then there would be thousands of new flats available. Look at places like Homebase shutting down leaving huge plots of land that could be redeveloped into housing. There are so many opportunities to regenerate but it is more expensive than just building on a green space so the incentives to need to be there for developers to do this.

Yup, I agree with the BTL crowd buying up everything in sight. My son has struggled to rent anyway when he first moved cities for his first graduate job. Couldn't even get viewings as demand was so high and estate agents would only "allocate" a handful of viewings to each property coming up to rent. He eventually got one by offering to pay a years' rent up front and pay 10% more than asking rental price! Time came last year to move, and he's spent the last six months trying to find somewhere else to rent - it's impossible, he's only managed to get one viewing and that was a flea pit hell hole of a flat no one else would want.

He's now looking at buying instead, has mortgage in place, but everything he looks at (1 or 2 bed flats) is being snapped up within days of listing - he's only managed to view one as other booked viewings have been cancelled due to offers being made. A couple of the ones he wanted to view a few months ago have already come back onto the market as rental properties so clearly bought by BTL-ers. The estate agents regularly confirm that these properties are being bought by "serial" buy to let'ers.

If that's not bad enough, they're snapping up furniture from charity shops too. We have a really good charity shop near us, we've donated sofas, a bed, etc., and they've been very open that the good stuff is snapped up by local landlords for student flats or their buy to lets - often not even making it to the shop floor as these landlords are known to the shop staff, so things are "put aside" for them if the staff think they're suitable!

So it's the third most densely populated then? 🙄

Do you live in a block of flats? Just curious

We don't need to keep importing millions of people.

Limited numbers in specific areas and then you don't need to pave over the countryside.

Cost is another issue. As is wages which have been undercut for decades.

You can't keep blaming Thatcher - she's not been in office for 35 years or so! There's been plenty of time to reverse any policies of hers that subsequent governments (of both colours) believed to be wrong. That neither party have changed it in those 35 years tends to suggest that they agree with the policy!!

I live in a holiday area; really high house prices. Developers are supposed to build a proportion of affordable homes when they are given planning permission. Overwhelmingly they get partway into the build and start pleading poverty "costs have risen" or "we will go bust" unless they can cut out some or all of the affordable homes. So they don't get built. Neither does the landscaping they promise, or the playground for the estate.
The new houses go up - and they are snapped up by holiday home buyers. One lady was boasting she'd bought 4 houses on a recent development to let out as airbnbs.
The only solution is social housing under the control of the council.

@Isthatarealname Snobbery over home ownership has got so rife that people are making stupid comments like you’ve got to move from a flat to a house makes my blood boil. Butt the fuck out and worry about your own life x

Where I used to live in Yorkshire a good portion of the town was taken over by disused factories, looming over and becoming increasingly unsafe. Rumour is that the owners want to keep the land for speculation, and knocking over the factories is too pricy.

Meanwhile housing in the village is in extreme demand, there is not much space to expand anymore.

Our shopping town off the high street the flats above little shops that were once homes are empty and decaying. The cost to bring them up to building code is onerous. So they remain empty.

Our council are offering to take over empty homes, lease, refurbish and let. But not at crazy market rent. The owners want the highest rental but don't have the money to refurbish.

This is not really a fair comment on the OP. The situation where I live is exactly as the OP described, with hundreds of expensive new houses being built on previously green sites around just one town, with nothing done for the infrastructure except one new school. And the affordable homes which locals actually wanted built have been reduced in number from those agreed initially.

Housing consultant here. The housing crisis is a huge issue and deserves attention, but I agree with you in some ways.

What we are really seeing is an affordability crisis.

The solution is not simply to develop more housing. A range of interventions are needed to support access to genuinely affordable housing. These include building more social housing, reforms to the private rented sector and improved regulation to reduce demand on social housing supply, and reforms to the welfare system (including raising LHA rates). There is also a big issue with speculative investment and property/asset hoarding by the rich driving up house prices.

Those are only a few of the issues and ways to address the crisis - in reality the landscape is extremely complex and it's not simply fixed by building more homes in general.

Totally agree. We need proper rentable council homes. These huge ugly ticky tacky developments with no proper infrastructure are ruining the countryside and still not meeting the needs of local people.

Also it should be much easier to force owners of suitable building land to actually build on it or sell it to someone who will.

For example next to my block of flats in London is a large derelict site. There was a run down old house on it that was run as an illegal HMO (incredibly dangerous) for years till the council took the owner to court. House sat empty for years then eventually demolished it but for the past 6 years the owner has just left the site to rot, full of rubble, weeds and vermin and our fences are falling in to the huge hole it's left. It's been an absolute eyesore and yet could easily provide housing for several families.

Its 1000% this. Its the loss of affordable social housing that is a massive contributor to the problem. The loss of that pushed people into the private sector, which sent rents soaring there because of lack of supply, which has incentivised people to hold onto homes they no longer live in, and rent them out, rather than sell them on.

LIke OP I live in a semi rural area with extraordinary levels of house building over farmland and green belt. All of the houses are expensive homes for higher earner and yes, the infrastructure is not following - these are massive housing deserts.

We need sensible planning of housing development and the country really, really needs a massive expansion of affordable social rented housing. We can't achieve affordable and secure housing for the country without it.

That's why I said Thatcherism. Thatcherism has continued since she left with Labour and Conservatives.

I don't mean to be harsh but you can't really have it both ways and blame BTL landlords for an undersupply of rental properties being available and also not enough affordable housing for your son to buy.

The fact that there is so much competition for rental properties in the area implies that they actually need more BTL landlords in order to improve the supply of rental properties to meet demand and ultimately start to reduce prices.

When landlords buy the housing stock to improve supply in the rental market then it will reduce the stock available for buyers. That's just basic economics!

The reality is that your son is clearly trying to live in a popular and desirable area. This will inevitably be expensive and demand will probably always outstrip supply when it comes to housing. It's certainly not BTL landlords fault though as they are performing an important function in a difficult market and many people would be much worse off without them

Wales reformed the private rental sector. A lot of landlords sold up reducing the rental sector further.

I’m sick of it too. What we need is rent controls, quadrupling council tax on holiday/second homes, and making it easier and cost effective for people to share homes/have lodgers. And incentives and actual physical help for older people to downsize to smaller units out of their family homes.

Our council has constructed more houses than the government required them too. All very expensive- we thought about moving to one but the new build premium is so huge we didn’t bother.

A friend of mine bought a modest family house in our town in the 90s for £75k, it is now value at £675k. The price of housing in ludicrous.

Every where I go I see more and more boxy overpriced new builds. My town has been destroyed by it. The council is broke, even with the extra council tax - I’m sure that’s the incentive to build more…more homes=more revenue for our LA.

The focus needs to be taken off the South East. Why is Government policy so London centric at the expense of the rest of the country? Look at house price differences between the South East and say Carlisle. It's huge, and Carlisle is (imo) a much nicer place to live. If there was work people would move, in fact people who can work from home already are.

Rather than building over every scrap of the best farming land we have in the country we should start looking at food security, and invest in employment and housing in areas that have suffered from the loss of the industries that were their main employers.

It's a really bizarre that the Government is pushing to turn Kent farm land into housing and solar farms. It is not known as the Garden of England for nothing. These farms feed us.

Government has to start investing in the North.