Why have people tolerated the housing catastrophe of the last 30 years

[nomemono]

I know it has been good for those geared up or alt the top of the ladder in the mid 90s, and to a declining degree, most years since then, but really, how has this been allowed to happen. Just as one illustration, houses in the frankly crime ridden North London estate I grew up now cost 4 times their real, inflation adjusted, 1997 price. £420,000 to live in one of the worst areas of London, in an old, poorly insulated house. Oxford, affordable when I was a student, now almost worse than London. Cambridge, Brighton, anywhere well linked and with good transport links or local jobs, the same. People casually posting on this website about having £900k to spend on a house. Single people shafted, ditto those without inheritances. How has it come to this?

Because older people are more likely to vote than younger and they’re the ones benefitting from house price inflation and shortages of homes to buy or rent.

Plus their dc

Don't forget wage stagnation

How has it come to this?

If I'm not mistaken it happened in 1996 with the creation of buy to let mortgages. The whole concept that a house was no longer a home but part of a property portfolio is what ruined the housing market, imo. That is what pushed prices up and up and up. Then foreign investors arrived... the rest is the mess we have today.

The problem of wages not rising belongs to tax credits. The generation x and millenials all became addicted to tax credits and preferred to work the minimum amount of hours they could possibly get away with because the rest of it would be topped up with tax credits anyway so why bother working. Of course, t his means that you can only ever have £6k in savings which means that you can't afford a house deposit.

Yep, it's definitely because everyone is on benefits & can't haggle FML 😆

We've tolerated desperate wage erosion for years because enough people feel rich as their homes have rocketed in value due to a strategic lack of social and private housing.

yep

housing ladder doesn't really work now, cost of stamp duty for one.

Easy lending. Low interest rates.
Too much population (single parent umbers and immigrants legal and otherwise)

This is the issue. If the mortgage companies hadn't let people borrow so much more compared to income then housing prices wouldn't have risen so fast

Now we have house prices that are based on 1.0% mortgage rates, but the rates are much much higher than that now - but prices havent come down to match - everything in every part of the country is way overpriced even by 2014 standards.

London prices are definitely stagnating & even falling in parts. Even if people can afford expensive property the interest you have to pay back these days is a big turn off.

Why don't you lead the way and sell your house at 50% market value tomorrow? Or is it only other home owners that should take the hit, as is the socialist way?

Plus holiday lettings, air bnb and student accommodation which have taken homes out of the residential market.

Thing is- and it’s an inconvenient truth- what really needs to happen is a massive housing crash. And mass building of council houses. Ban buy to let and AirBNB. Anything else is tinkering around the edges.

But most people don’t want that. It’s easy to complain about it - and it is an insane issue that’s eating the country alive - but people still like to talk about how much their house is worth.

There has to be a huge culture shift. Houses solely as homes. And acknowledge that being a landlord should never be a valid career choice.

Nail on the head, meanwhile the oldies think it’s all down to mobile phone contracts!

When the older generation that live in the £800k+ houses pass on, who will be able to afford them?
Some economists think it will suppress prices because due to a glitch in of supply. Plus younger people are having fewer dc or none & utilities will stay £££ so bigger houses are less attractive. .

wtf?

Im a very late boomer. I couldn’t ’haggle hard’ Someone would have just outbid me.

My Millennial dc have never been on tax credits.

Your post is like Truss’s budget. Crazy

Tax credits didn't have a maximum savings restriction.

This is the issue. If the mortgage companies hadn't let people borrow so much more compared to income then housing prices wouldn't have risen so fast

lending tightened up post 08. I know people who bought 95% interest only mortgages on low salaries, you can't do that now.

In Wales, making empty holiday homes a real issue has started to reverse the second home problem. The second home owners don’t like it but frankly f*ck them- locals have been raising their kids in caravans while holiday homes in their villages sit empty, schools close and communities are destroyed. It’s insanity and the entitlement from holiday home owners is terrible. It’s systematic of a broader problem that has to change. Nobody needs more than one house when there are hundreds of thousands of homeless kids.

Quite simply slap a hefty tax on second properties and multiples there after. Tax the shit out of them... that should cool the property market.

Of course that's never going to happen as MPs own multiple properties...

Why don't the government cap new house prices for people not already on the ladder?
For example 2 bedroom £120000, 3 bedroom £140000 etc.... And cap resale of these homes at the same prices.
There must be something radical which would help youngsters

Maybe it’s got something to do with the population in 1995 being 57 million compared to 70 million now. Demand outstripping housing stock. Another reason to review immigration. Housing cannot sustain the people already here, yet still we encourage more people to come. It’s not rocket science……

Exactly. Plus as some have mentioned, families are much smaller now. You can stay in your 2-bed starter home if you’re child-free or have only one child. No need to upgrade. You can spend the money on holidays and days out instead.

Its outrageous. And growing inequality just makes all of it worse. Need onto introduce rent caps like france and Germany

Quite right and then we get asked why people aren’t having kids.

I WONDER WHY 😂😂😂

The housing is one of the worst things about the U.K., along with the weather. Mass immigration has played a big part in this crisis. It was New Labour who opened the floodgates, though the Tories have also ignored people’s concerns. Someone who attended a cabinet meeting under Blair said they “planned to rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” But the immigrants have to live somewhere. And because there are so many people jammed into this little island (including illegal immigrants), developers take advantage. They build ridiculous little rabbit hutches, squeeze them on top of one another, and then charge a fortune.

The Tories don’t care, because they represent the business people who make a fortune out of the high demand (the builders, estate agents, surveyors, suppliers). These people make their money and then bugger off to Spain or France with the profits. I know a guy who set up a business supplying building materials, made a fortune, and then moved to Spain. He wasn’t going to live in one of the ghastly ratholes he’d helped build, that’s for sure. But the left don’t care either, since their priority is the immigrants. No one cares about the ordinary person stuck in the middle, who works hard, saves, and ends up suffocating in some new build hobbit home surrounded by a sea of other ghastly hobbit homes.