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?

We're not talking about "a couple of single room ex shops". In lots of towns and smaller cities, there streets were up to half the shops are empty/derelict - including large ex-department stores like closed down Debenhams, M&S, etc. We have a long established shopping street in one end of our town - a street full of small "single" width shops - over 80% of them are empty, including the flats above. These used to be newsagents, grocers, butchers, bakers, chemist, shoe shop, clothes, car accessories, etc. All shut down forever. The few "shops" remaining are an off licence, tattoo studio, betting shop and a couple of charity shops. Ideally the entire street needs demolishing and new houses/flats built as the properties themselves are poor quality with no architectural merit.

Our town's M&S store is still empty despite them closing down years ago. It's been empty ever since - a large plot. The old Boots store is also derelict and they moved out about 20 years ago - it's only use since then has been a cannabis farm! Same with the High Street bank branches - Nat West, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds all closed down leaving pretty substantial premises lying empty.

In my local council there are over 10k people on the housing register. Over 2k families in homeless/temporary accommodation. For years . Share bathrooms/kitchens with strangers . Cold and damp. Often rats, mice, bed bugs . Families are living for years in that situation.

On top of that there's the effect it has on mental health. Children's education. Poverty. Having to move from one temporary to a bitter on several occasions with 24hrs notice.

It's so easy when your looking from the outside in . When you don't truly know the bigger picture.

What I don't agree with is building unaffordable homes.

I am deeply invested in supporting social landlords to find solutions to end homelessness. Especially around issues such as children in b&b which is absolutely unsuitable, and over 6 weeks illegal. But what those families need is not more unaffordable homes. They need affordable social housing, and an accessible private rented sector so fewer households become homeless in the first place.

@taxguru has done a really good and helpful response to my post on this above (thank you!). I think we are all frustrated that the gov solution is to build more so people can make more money rather than doing the hard work to unpick the bigger problems to free up existing property and make it fit for purpose.

@justasking111 because their funds could be ploughed into property elsewhere in the Uk that wasn’t hampered by the constraints on wales? Because the policy didn’t mesh into a wider programme of well thought out reform?

Nail on the head. Look at Kendal. Used to have big offices for both Provincial and Prudential insurance. Really good quality professional employment. Now no jobs at all for people living in that wider areas as no "insurance" jobs at all - anyone wanting to work in insurance has to relocate to Manchester, Leeds or York being the closest. That just causes "brain drain" as youngsters don't return to their home towns after graduating due to there being no jobs for them.

Whatever you say about Boris, and whether anyone believed him, he hit the nail on the head with his "levelling up" agenda as it's desperately needed to stop and reverse the London centricity of the country at the moment.

The shortage of rental properties I think is because the Conservative Government put in legislation that has led to this very issue.

Left to its own devices the number of rental properties would have gone up as more and more people became landlords and more houses became rental properties
Rents would have levelled downwards and the landlords who couldn’t offer descent places at a competitive rent would have sold up because it wouldn’t be profitable for them to continue.

Instead government got involved and decided to control what would have controlled itself and landlords left the rental sector and either sold up or turned their place to short term/holiday lets which made them the same amount with less risk.

It is a huge crisis, but needs a multi-strand approach:

1. Invest in developing brownfields sites - yes, there is often a cleanup cost, but is worth it.

2. Look at putting up steel framed houses - they are quicker to build, are more environmentally friendly than traditional bricks and mortar (they have amazing U-Value) and investing in local manufacturing could help support bases like Port Talbot.

3. Where new houses are built, a higher proportion need to genuinely affordable / shared ownership. I also think on any new estate of 20 houses or more, somewhere between 10% and 20% should be built and handed over to the council for social housing.

4. Continue to allow Right to Buy, but ensure that there is a covenant on the house that if it is sold, it cannot be used as a Buy to Let - ever - and that the council must be given first refusal on re-purchasing at market value

5. Ring fence monies from Right to Buy so that they can only be used for building / purchasing / renovating social housing.

6. Tax the hell out of multi-property landlords (a lot of people have one property that they rent out - because they've had to move but don't want to sell, or an old family home so I wouldn't want them caught up - but something like, you get 1 or 2 properties to rent out at current tax rates, but anything over that tax payable should rise in line with the number of dwellings held)

The last one may very well cause a lot of properties to be sold and mean house prices take a bit of a tumble, but it is a correction that is desperately needed (and I say that as someone who has benefitted from rising house prices, so I would be affected by it).

It doesn't solve the problem of more doctors and schools being needed. I would like to see minimum ratios when planning applications are being considered and putting an end to new facilities being promised and the developers not following through - although the staffing of them would remain an issue - but that needs to be looked at no matter what as it is an issue everywhere!

This is the problem. the loss of social rented housing created demand for private renting. But there was no market there to supply it,. So instead what has built up is a haphazard market of landlords with one or small number of properties. Absolutely tenants need more rights but when you are a landlord with one property you do not have the funds to absorb loss of rent from one bad tenant - you are very vulnerable and some landlords will leave the market if they feel too financially vulnerable. Now governments are looking at private landlords to improve the eco efficiency of housing but these small landlords do not have the funds or benefits of scale to be able to do this. So they sell up. Which reduces the supply further. This is a problem of governments never building up a professional private rented sector.

The government need a proper, well thought through strategy to address the problems successive governments have created in the housing market. It really didn't need to be like this. Its been created by poor decision making and lack of long-term thinking. I'm bloody furious with all the governments from Thatcher onwards for getting us in this state. I see nothing from our current government to make me believe that actually have a handle on what the problems are, let alone how to fix them.

Landlords snapping up properties makes it worse not better, as there are loads of people who want to buy and able to buy but being priced out by competition of landlords snapping up everything small/cheap that comes onto the market.

If the people who wanted to buy were allowed to, then they'd no longer be renting and their previous homes would be available for people wanting to rent.

Completely agree with this - when landlords sell, the houses don't disappear into the ether!

I think this is quite unfair tbh.

I don’t think OP is saying we shouldn’t build any houses.

You have no idea of the reality of what it’s like in these rapidly expanding places.

Where we are based we have had 5000 new homes over the past 10 years. 15% population increase. No new services of schools, nurseries, GPs or dentists. No new road infrastructure. It now takes 45 minutes to get across town in what used to be a 5 minute journey.

As we are the only area locally to meet our targets they have now increased our next 10 year goal to an additional 12.5k homes. That’s another 25% population increase.

We have no A&E and no capability for Cat 1 emergency response as nearest hospital is 30 minutes on a quiet run in the dead of night/ 20 mins on blue light. It’s would be nearer an hour in rush hour even with blue light. People are dying here.

It will have turned from a medium sized town to something nearing the population of Oxford with absolutely no space for the required road infrastructure and none of the services!

So no I don’t this is about cutesy villages and NIMBYs

I think there is one big difference between the North and the South and I say this as a northerner who came south

It is the weather

I come from an area that growing up , even in summer months always had a chill in the air, it was always damp
I came down to London for a weekend and I loved that it was warm and dry

I left only to work my notice and pack up my life up north.

I find this baffling too. The vast majority of the houses being built round here start at £500K for a three bed (at least) - so who is buying them? It's 'luxury' housing that's being built, for the most part. So how is this addressing the housing crisis, because surely the people who are buying them already have homes? And yes some people will buy bigger when they have a family, but unless they're all moving out from London where all property is twice the price of anywhere else, how are they all affording it?

@ghostboxsters I disagree- not everywhere 'down south' is London - when the north was getting huge investment into places like Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle etc - plenty of places in the southern half of UK were told to fend for themselves and hence places like Southampton, Bristol , Swindon to me look in a worse state in many parts than many places 'up north' and many of the small towns here are just as shitty as anything you find up north- go to Medway or areas in Somerset not far from where we live - shepton Mallett as an example or Bridgewater - equally as bad as places you mention- in fact Carlisle is better.the whole UK has issues - not just 'up north' - with regards to London centric work wise- I don't think it is from the gvt angle- many big departments are not in London- what is more London centric is a lot of private sector work - but that's because there are more people /clients prepared to pay for what the businesses are servicing or selling in the south east-

I think the crises isn’t just that there’s not enough houses
theres not enough homes available at an affordable price

yes a doctor married to a lawyer might afford one
but a teacher married to a policeman probably wouldn’t be able to buy one

I am seeing that a lot of development on green field sites is for larger homes for wealthier people not those in housing need.

Round here in our not very lovely city large family homes are being demolished and flats built on the sites. Exactly what people might think is a good idea but we still have the issues of infrastructure. The family home might have had maybe four or six people living in it. The site now has 8 or maybe more flats with probably two people per flat so increased numbers who need doctors, hospitals etc.

Even avoiding building on green belt is leading to too many people chasing too few services.

I don't know what the answer is although I am very supportive of higher, maybe much higher council tax, on second homes or properties left empty for investment purposes.

Funnily enough we also have quite a few sites which are derelict because they are owned by the likes of Lidl or Aldi. They say they will build a new supermarket when they knock down what was there before but they have been empty and overgrown for years and in the case of one of them decades.

You are very lucky op to have this as a worry. There are loads of empty houses that were bought to rent out by people as an investment/ extra pension that now sit empty and in disrepair, this pushed prices up forcing more people to rent. There is a housing crisis in that there is a lack of affordable and social housing alongside private landlords charging far above what a mortgage would cost on the same property while not maintaining it.

There is a lack of affordable housing and social housing OP.

Indeed - it seems that this is all the building companies want to do and so the 'nicer' villages and small towns are being overwhelmed whilst bigger towns and cities, many of which have suitable urban land which could be developed, don't get new housing because it won't fetch the premium prices.

This is incredibly naive and based on some pretty massive (incorrect) assumptions.

We have a housing crisis with regards to renting properties and buying properties. Not everyone can or indeed wants to buy. BTL landlords are performing an important function and aren't the cause of the housing crisis.

The houses that are bought by BTL landlords wouldn't all be bought by people currently living locally in the rental sector. You have FTBs living with their parents, people from outside the area or people that are downsizing that could all buy the house and not leave a rented house to be 'backfilled'. The impact of this would be a house removed from the rental sector and rents spiralling further.

NRTFT because I think OP is me.
The thousands (true figure) of houses recently built/planned building near me have little affordable housing and even that is going to HA’s as it’s beyond the budget of ftb’s
First homes are mostly buy to let properties so ftb’s are stuffed.

The stark reality, as OP mentions, is that we are indeed concreting over more and more countryside.
We are all living longer, so as the population grows (and will continue to grow) we need more houses.
And not just that. Everyone in those houses will want cars, gadgets and access to an already strained power supply.
Along with that, more concrete is needed for more schools, doctors surgeries, hospitals, roads, etc, etc..
At some point, someone brave in authority is going to have to say, "This problem is only ever going to get worse- perhaps we need to stop breeding for a bit."

Of course this thread has turned into a debate about immigration. Classic 11am MN.

There are currently not enough births to sustain population size overtime, which means that the UK will rely on immigration to do so.

Yes true, and the urban heat island effect makes it only warmer. This same better weather coupled with enormous population density and utter mismanagement of resources will create a new problem which can only get worse - water shortages.