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?

So you are proposing that all the people who bought their houses at higher prices and have debts against them (in plenty of cases for over 50% of the house value) should lose everything (because once their house is worth less than they owe they won’t even be able to remortgage). That feels so harsh given that many of those people are the ones who had to rent for an age and save over decades to manage to buy a home to start with.
I’d just like to see measures in place to slow/stop house prices rising further. If you could achieve that then over time, as wages rise, they become more affordable and maybe people start seeing them less as assets

immigrants are needed because we have an ageing population.

@treesfalling I think we have more than enough immigrants now.
We are over populated and we should have zero immigration and force companies to employ our university graduates instead of using cheaper labour from places like India

Right to buy
Some people bought houses and died, so (some of) the younger generation had more wealth than ever before, and weren't constrained by their salaries, so they had lots to spend on a house
Bank lending rules were changed so that people who didn't have an inheritance could borrow more to keep up
Foreign investors buying property as an asset rather than a house

What could any individual do to stop any of those things? And aside from Right to Buy, those things are happening around the world and pricing people out of housing.

Though it's worth remembering that years ago home ownership was fairly rare and renting was the norm.

<a class="break-all" href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20160107120359/www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/a-century-of-home-ownership-and-renting-in-england-and-wales/short-story-on-housing.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20160107120359/www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/a-century-of-home-ownership-and-renting-in-england-and-wales/short-story-on-housing.html

But the immigrants will also age eventually so it won't make any difference.

The aging population is a demographic blip. It'll be gone in 2 or 3 generations and things will even out -it's just unfortunate if you're one of the ones caught up in it now.

Yes, they are like vultures. At the top of the market, they are earning a LOT of money in commission, and for doing what, exactly? It's basically just chatting shit in the attempt to create an inflated selling price so they get the highest wad of barely-earned cash possible.

Chartered Tax Advisor here.

People aren’t moving up the ladder and getting loft extensions as stamp duty is ludicrously expensive. Just scrap it entirely.

There were a lot of taxes that went on BTL landlords to try to get them to sell up. They just passed the cost onto the renter, making it even harder for a renter to save to buy. The only people who this helped at all were the bank of mum and dad people or whose who can live with parents to save to buy.

Putting CGT on house price rises would be political suicide. People would just not move at all, vote someone else in at the next election in the hope that they reverse the policy.

A developer gets all the VAT back on a new build and limited VAT back on a conversion of eg disused offices to residential. This doesn’t help.

Tax credits have simply suppressed wages in this country. Employers have been able to pay low wages and get away with it as people are getting tax credits.

Massive council tax on second homes does encourage people to sell up and should be rolled out everywhere.

Part of the reason why so many old people object to inheritance tax is indeed because they feel they earned the large value of their estate, forgetting that often it is largely made up of untaxed house price inflation and so IHT is fair enough.

Rent controls have not been shown to work anywhere.

The cost of housing in this country causes so many issues. People not willing to move to take jobs due to stamp duty. People being unwilling to have large families or any kids at all due to the cost of housing. People waiting to buy before having kids and leaving it too late. People feeling that they can’t properly start their lives when they get a good job as they can’t afford to move out. Some valuable jobs (teacher, nurse) no longer pay enough for a basic standard of living. To buy a house usually needs two incomes. It’s not really fair on single people, or people where one partner is needed to care for disabled family members etc. not to mention the amount of money the government spends on emergency housing and housing benefit.

Then there’s the mental health toll of the stress of all of the above. It’s a total disaster.

Though it's worth remembering that years ago home ownership was fairly rare and renting was the norm.

My understanding is that you could get more secure long-term rentals then, though. Plus council housing was easier to get.

We need to ban overseas citizens and companies from owning uk residential property. Many countries do this already. Stop homes being bought by overseas citizens and left empty in the hope that money can be made on house price rises.

Unfortunately those who have gained from HPI don’t want it to change and have voted to continue it.

I’m 61

Its fuck all to do with mobile phone contracts. I’ve got one for a start.

Because people keep buying into it and expecting their house value to rise and rise. There needs to be a crash, and if you bought a house to live in, then you can't really complain. But no government would allow that to happen, even though it needs to.

Mass demonstrations, coordinated public sector strikes might be needed, I know of several who gave up on the UK because of this. The property classes voting in governments too timorous to even tackle this are to blame, To make the 2 bed places un N London affordable to a single earner they'd need to crash by 75%,

I hear you, but me and my first husband had to skrimp and save for our house purchase alongside working / studying (no band of mum and dad here). I understand that the deposit position is difficult in the current market, but banks are again offering 95% LTV (salaries aside). But absolutely we were not spending on "nails and avocados". What worries me is the mentality of "oh well I'll never be able to do that and so I spend my money on such things" - due to appearances and SM living in the "now"moment.

Mortgage lenders kept increasing the amount they would loan to borrowers, which enabled house prices to rise. If people can borrow 4 or 5
times their annual salary, estate agents will value properties accordingly.

I don’t think it’s to do with that. Estate agents don’t pull a price out of nowhere. They value according to market rate. They aren’t artificially inflating prices,

I think one reason is because a lot of MPs and top civil servants have a lot of their money invested in housing.

What nonsense is this? The only thing with a grain of sense here is that tax credits contributed to wage stagnation. Yes, if Amazon, Asda et al can keep their wages low and get the government to top it up to an amount where people can afford to eat, of course that will happen. But otherwise this comment is a load of bollocks, frankly, showing an ignorance of how tax credits worked (tax credits are now defunct; universal credit is a different thing and its taper causes real issues, the statement here massively misses a load of points, not least the savings penalty).

As for “baby boomers didn’t pay those prices so the prices aren’t their fault”- how about, baby boomers are the ones listing the houses they have sold at inflated prices, while the generations below them are forced to fight and offer ever more because of the shrinking pool of homes available?

But actually although as a generation baby boomers have benefited a lot from rising house prices, the problem is much more complex than this poster seems to suggest.

Which is why our flat has just been valued at £10k less than it was pre-covid.* *

You're optimistic.

@nomemono the same reason we tolerate everything in this country, we are a completely fractured country with no basis for the solidarity needed to mount any opposition to this. Look at the rates of migration. We've always said no or less, and the rates get higher and higher. We're held in utter contempt, a resource to be strip mined by those who can and a problem to be managed. Because they know our atomised society can do nothing about it because we're divided by perceived differences that amount to far less than our shared interests.

This. Although Thatcher selling the houses made no difference to demand. The same number of people still live in them.

It's basic supply and demand. More households competing for the same number of dwellings.

Housing hasn't kept up with immigration/population growth. And the profile of our society has changed. More divorces, more single adult households.

I'm in my 60s. A late boomer. I'm a single mum and have owned one flat and three houses in the last 40 years. I chose each of them because they were the cheapest/scruffiest in the area I wanted to live. One had water running down the dining room wall. A rotted floor which took me 4 months of weekends to strip out and replace.

I've repaired them all. Current house has taken 14 years and has a new roof, extension, windows & doors, kitchen, boiler, rewiring etc. I haven't finished yet. It's hard work, but it has doubled in value. All three of the houses have doubled in value.

Now I want to downsize and can't find what I want. Hell will freeze before I am forced into a 'retirement village'. So I'll finish my 4 bed house, wait for dc to leave and then look again. But I'm not selling until I can buy something I like.. I have worked too hard.

People don’t have any choice about the price of housing, which has risen for two reasons : two-income families, and uncontrolled immigration which has put housing at a premium. You can’t allow a million people to come and live here in a year (thanks, Boris) without making any provision by way of housing and infrastructure, and when there’s a shortage of something, the price rises. It’s supply and demand. When I was young, it was fairly normal for a mother to stay at home with her children at least until they went to school; nowadays, women have to return to work after maternity leave to make the sums add up. It’s not possible to build enough houses to keep up with demand, so prices will continue to rise. If there is competition to buy houses, the price will continue to rise, with ever-lengthening mortgage terms. We may not like it, but for as long as there are people prepared to pay the price demanded (and a government prepared to allow council houses to be occupied by all comers - almost 50% of social housing in London is occupied by those not born here) - nothing will change.

Because mortgages allow foolish (IMHO) levels of borrowing which has allowed prices to rise exponentially.