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’re correct it’s a contributing factor and something that needs to be openly discussed.

so let’s discuss how we cater for the immigrants we need. Where should the houses go? How do we ensure we adequately support the required infrastructure? How should we pay for the new doctors, schools etc?

it’s a valid debate, but not the one I think the op wants to have. Unless I’m mistaken they just don’t want houses in their village, and the solution is stop immigration…

Don't build on green fields or at least anymore. When they built my house it was different, that was fine.

There is a demographic problem, the country , and most of western Europe is getting older it needs younger workers to pay for triple lock. The only way to do that is bring people from other countries , they naturally want to bring family. Reform don't want to acknowledge this , it's busy banging on about boats. The alternative is they say stopping people coming in will push taxes up. Hardly a vote winner.

The vast majority of newbuilds are not on green belt. There is a major building project happening in my area which is on a bit of wasteland which used to be a provincial airfield. There was little nature and whatever was there was inaccessible to the public. They are now building a development which includes a sizeable park with a pond. We have no parks of that size in the area. In fact, we have almost no greenery as the area is devoted to shopping mall and giant manufacturer's warehouses. The way I see it, the new development is a massive improvement to the area.

Oh please cut the generalising, patronising crap.

You can shut your eyes to the problem, but the country clearly can't cope with the way the population is increasing. If you want to say it's racist to say that, go ahead, but you're just a useful idiot and not providing any solutions.

Immigration is just one factor. However we don't have a large enough working age population to sustain the country's needs and THAT is something that a large section of the demographic seems to be sticking their head in the sand about. Who do you think is wiping bums in nursing homes and cleaning floors right now? It's not British people. We physically don't have enough people in the UK for whole industries from facilities management to nursing to construction. That's one reason why the British economy isn't growing (thanks in part to Brexit for that). The drop in the birthrate, coupled with the fact we all live longer, means that's unlikely to change any day soon (other than that people will be expected, and will have to work for longer). And yes those people do need homes. Slamming the doors to the UK is a) impossible anyway and b) creates more problems than it solves.

Many people don't want to buy flats because they are leasehold (you only own the flat for x number of years) and there's no control on service charge increases.
Many blocks of flats are blighted due to cladding issues or other faults in the building. Eg wooden balconies, lack of fire proofing.
It's not known as 'fleecehold' for nothing.

I am going to take a wild guess that what you mean is we can't accommodate such a large number of immigrants, and you are not talking about children born to British parents in the UK.

The fact is that without migration, the population would be falling at an alarming rate with a lot more old people than young people and children.

We need working age migrants to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, our housing system has been set up based on families with children taking up one fairly large house, rather than single, working people having one small home each.

Brexit seems to have led to increased immigration figures, so that was an own goal.

See my comment below.

The ones with their eyes closed are the people who think that ending immigration is the answer to all the country's problems.

It was always bound to increase immigration - when we were part of the EU people came here to work then went back to their own countries. Now they come from further away and stay here.

Thank you. It is quite shocking.

Our main issue is the emergency medical provision. I don’t think anyone could call that a first world problem.

Sadly a family lost their son a few years ago due to cardiac arrest and no Cat 1 response and they have worked tirelessly to fund raise to have the whole town kitted with defibrillators. We now have an extensive network (one every 3 or so minutes if you were to run) but that’s still not good enough. It’s completely ridiculous for a population of over 100,000 rapidly expanding.

I nearly lost my own son at 2 weeks old with blocked airways from vomiting retained mucus and thankfully didn’t call an ambulance but jumped straight in the car with a not breathing blue baby in my arms as we are one minute from a cottage adult minor injuries. They saved his life only because a diligent nurse had been stashing various items in a cupboard. And she had a probably pennies worth piece of plastic tube which was small enough for suctioning a newborn.

When the ambulance finally did turn up (white as a ghost as weren’t sure they weren’t turning up to a dead or brain damaged baby) to transfer us to the large hospital; they asked if they could take the tube. She said no that’s my only one! The paramedics said oh ‘we use that as a throw away disposable’.

It’s just completely unacceptable.

We have monthly marches through the town to campaign for increased emergency services.

Part of me wants the extra houses because then we have more reason to demand a proper A&E or ambulance hub back. But the other part doubts they will do this because we aren’t recognised as our own CCG/ Area. Despite now being equal and shortly will be far larger than neighbouring areas who manage their own provision.

We are just a side thought. Our funding taken to prop up other areas with no provision given.

So quite the rant. My apologies 🙏

You imply that there is a definitive absolute number of immigrants that we 'need' and the only discussion to be had is around the logistics of making this happen. This isn't a universally held opinion and there are many different schools of thought about what the future population trends mean, especially with the introduction of AI and more automation on the horizon. Even if technology doesn't have a huge impact, countries have vastly different approaches to immigration with similar demographic models to us. There isn't one way of doing things and there are trade offs no matter what you decide.

For some, the disadvantages of mass immigration outweigh the positives. This is a valid opinion and one that they can act on in elections. Other people believe the opposite which is also valid and their voting can reflect this.

Whatever way you look at this, immigration impacts the housing crisis and is a key way that it can be tackled alongside other measures. You may not agree with this but it isn't as a radical or ridiculous of an idea as you seem to insist that it is.

Not all immigration is bad immigration. It’s a lot more complex than saying we are bringing a lot more people in, and that’s leading to the collapse of our housing system, healthcare system etc

We have a huge rise in aging population and not enough births in the last couple of generations to offset that for the foreseeable. You’ll have a lot of folk that now don’t work (rightfully so, they’ve worked their whole lives) Who will not be contributing to the economy enough to sustain it long term. Because of the decline in fertility rates over a significant period of time, you don’t have enough young people born and bred in the UK to keep things going so naturally the government will be welcoming migrants from other countries to fill those gaps. This could be in highly skilled professions, or otherwise.

Writing an essay that says “I’m Aright Jack” without saying “I’m Aright Jack”! Nice one!

Hope your kids are super clever or hands on and creative as they’ll need to get a bludy well paid job in order to afford a house for themselves. You might not give two shits now but wait until your kids or grandkids are living such a difficult life.

I’m sick of it too. And according to Shelter there are 354,016 homeless people in Britain, which includes children. So why do we need 1.5 million brand new houses 🤨 Big Ange is up to no good and it shows.

You can’t claim to care about the environment while also concreting over beautiful green fields, make it make sense 🤣

So is there a bigger GP surgery, a new dental surgery, new schools, etc? If not, then it's not a massive improvement!

A lot of these houses are leasehold and the leases are owned by companies who can increase ground rents and service charges as they see fit. In some estates houses are not available for UK nationals to buy but are being sold to foreign nationals ( particularly Sri Lankans) to rent out to pay for children's college fees etc. Even those houses that have been built with UK taxpayer subsidies. Brown field sites are eschewed by developers as they are not profitable enough and empty buildings in town centres are ignored as not profitable either. Nothing is done about second home ownership in tourist areas that make house prices too high for local people and builders like to put high price executive homes in pretty rural areas which younger people can't afford. This government wants to reduce the land being farmed by 10 % so building all over the countryside suits it fine. I think a government that actively takes steps to reduce the nation's food supply is as sinister as f*CK personally. More and more homeless people in the city where I live but none of these home are for them and the younger generation can't afford them. I'm not a NIMBY. I live in a fairly grotty polluted urban area and that's partly why having access to the countryside is important to me.

The housing is likely unsold because the developer is only releasing 2-3 houses at a time for sale - a commonly used ploy to keep demand and prices high.
Developers should not be allowed to do this the whole point of building 300 houses should be that increased supply stops prices rising so much but they are all determined to max profits so even if Angela Rayners millions of houses get built the developers will dribble them onto the market so slowly it won't help prices reduce at all 🙄

So no discussion on the how, just reiterating that you object to immigration.

Selling off a public asset- council housing - to massively benefit one generation then leaving a desperate situation for those coming afterwards.

This is basically what's happened, isn't it

Interest rates bumping along at less than 1% have been a disaster. They should have been increased incrementally until they were around 4% which is still historically low. When you could borrow ££££ for .25% for more than a decade, it was like being a pig in shit for a lot of people who jumped on the wagon.

There are tons of things this government could do to bring the housing market back into affordability but the main issue is that if the housing market goes pop, then we really will be bankrupt. Right now, we're still pretending we're not but if housing tanks, all bets on Great Britain plc will be off. Not a single government is going to play around with the balloon that must keep rising, hence 1.5 million new homes to be built.

Everyone that says ‘what about schools/drs’ etc, developers often have to pay section 106 contributions to the local council to counteract this. They’ll pay into the millions for this. However, councils aren’t spending the money. There was an interesting article that I’ll try to find that showed councils have millions sat there not spent.

Ultimately it’s cheaper to build on green field (not to be confused with Greenbelt) than having to develop a brownfield site, developers are businesses at the end of the day.

There is another interesting debate regarding housing associations having their funding cut which means less social housing.

Ahh. "I want to live in a large house in an unspoilt village, they can live in a flat above a takeway"

I live in a deprived inner city area, we have people sleeping on the streets, and this has now spread to the more affluent parts too which ironically means it is now getting attention in the local media. To rent even round where I live is horrendously expensive which means that tiny houses are overcrowded to cover the costs. When a property goes up for sale in my area aside from the fact that it is so horrible round here that no first time buyer would want to live here even these little houses are out of the price range of a younger person on an average income. What happens is that BTL landlords buy the homes and the cycle of exploitation continues. This is one of the reasons that we have a housing crisis.

There is a difference between being functionally "homeless", and literally living in a cardboard box on the street, and that 354,000 figure does not include those who are in temp accommodation, sofa-surfing and so on.

Herein lies the problem. When people hear the term "homeless", far too many still assume you are talking about down-and-outs, vagrants, tramps, rough-sleepers, whatever you choose to call them.

There are 1.5 million empty homes that could be done up to a liveable standard again; it also helps reduce crime and anti-social behaviour to not leave them empty.

You could not allow people to buy/own residential homes through any kind of company (cut out the tax dodges).

And not allow non-British citizens (or people who haven't lived permanently in the UK for at least 5 years) to buy houses (cut out the oligarchs buying property and leaving it empty).

And implement extra taxes for homes not occupied for XX% of the year (use the second homes and half arsed Airbnbs to fund more services/restore the empty homes).