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?

@nomemonowell said!
Right to buy was the single worst decision for working classes. Helped a few at the time and screwed over the rest.

….just watch Homes under the Hammer. People with money, going to poorer areas, hoovering up houses, creating “portfolios”, renting them out for more than the cost of a mortgage on those properties, preventing local people from buying them.

Councils need the ability, and desire, to buy houses like this, and start charging affordable rents, or going into part-ownership with people.

I’m hopeful that the new Affordable Homes programme can make a difference … but every housing scheme seems to bring protests. The council round here had a small scheme, including 3 special bungalows for Adults with a physical disability, and you should have seen the protests.

Brighton has the highest foreign investment outside of London and it has totally changed the tone of the place. That said, a seafront leisure centre is not going to be luxury apartments anymore and will be a new leisure centre for locals to benefit from. Equally, the council are thinking of taking steps to limit Air BNBs as the place is swamped with them so one of the proposals is a zone where they are permitted and outside of that they won't!

Can you elaborate on why you think this might make a difference? Older people might not be welcoming of over-development and loss of green spaces, for example.
Madly rising house prices only profit people if they are selling up to cruise around the world or pay for care. Mostly houses are just places where people live.
Personally, I'd like all the empty properties brought into use before we build any more.

Of course. Always our fault.🙄

Councils need the ability, and desire, to buy houses like this, and start charging affordable rents, or going into part-ownership with people

Exactly this. The private rental market, propped up by housing benefit, is killing us.

We also need major changes to the rights of tenants. I always find it funny seeing threads on here of long standing home owners having to temporarily rent (e.g. because of a house move) and complaining about having a "nightmare landlord". No guys, this is renting in 2025. Pay eye watering prices and get treated like a massive inconvenience in your own home.

The price of land is the problem, to build those new builds on, unfortunately.

You'd need something even more radical. Companies hoarding unused land to speculate should have it taken from them.

Yes they can. My DS and GF bought at 24. 1930s semi, cost £230k. They put down £23k. They saved for over a year out of uni because they both lived at home and paid £200 per month board and saved hard. They had both saved since 17 working Saturday type jobs/holiday jobs in uni so had a few thousand each when they graduated. They could not have bought that house for that price where we are, but they’re in a cheaper part of Merseyside, but safe and pleasant. It has room to extend in the future.

We, GF’s parents, and DH’s very handy DF, helped them patch up the old kitchen units, scrub the place clean, paint and decorate, tidy up the garden. They bought second hand furniture on eBay etc, only a few things new.

Yes, they’re lucky that they have family to help, but they’ve done it in terms of the basic finances. And yes, we’re in the North. But it is possible.

They have friends who claim not to understand how they’ve done it. But those friends have expensive cars, have spent £££ on travel, have new everything. One said she would have had to rip out the kitchen as it’s too old and grim. No, FIL replaced rotted cupboard backs and replaced the sink and taps; the cupboard shelves, doors, tiles and extractor scrubbed up well ( my job), DH prepped and painted - and DS&GF both think it’s great.

It’s the other way round. Prices have risen (fewer houses more people) so mortgages have had to change to allow people to buy. Multiples go up and terms increase.

I'm a late boomer. My flat I bought in outer London in 1988 for £65k had dropped to £38.5k by the time I sold it in 1995. A number of my friends ended up getting their houses repossessed. My mortgage rate went up from 12.5% to 17.5% overnight.
The problem today as I see it primarily has three main causes.

1. The Thatcher council house sell off (with a concomitant failure of successive governments to replace stock)
2. The market at the bottom end being driven more recently by BTL and holiday lets. I might add that I did not participate in BTLs or a holiday home because neither sit comfortably with my political beliefs, and
3. an extended period of stupidly low interest rates.

I strongly believe that there is a need for a large correction (price crash) in the market - I would welcome it. I'd definitely be in favour of a combination of returning to rent controls and having much more severe taxation on second properties.

True. I live in a seaside town in NE and we’ve seen similar since Covid. Houses on our street have close to doubled their selling prices since we bought (less than 8 years ago) though in fairness they’d been rising above average rate for a while before that too. We’d have struggled to move here now as in our old area prices have risen a lot slower.

I have a well paid job but the 3 times the salary lending rate wouldn’t buy me a lock up!

Stamp duty isn't the main issue in moving up the ladder, it's the ridiculous house prices that are the barrier to moving up!

It isn't national though.

Where I live you can buy your standard recently renovated bed terraced house for under £200k. This isn't in the middle of nowhere. Central England. It is possible to commute into London albeit it's a long commute so better suited to hybrid roles. Otherwise there are plenty of employment opportunities more locally.

I live in a strange pocket of affordable housing.

The thing is I dont think it was ever unusual that buying property was out if reach of lots of modest earners.

It was only during the 80's and 90's with the council house sell off, that buying property was in easy reach for most people. People talk of their parents on low/modest incomes able to buy a house nonetheless? It was often because they bought their council house!

I think people need to readjust their mindset about renting and we need more social housing and a better regulated rental market. There will always be those on lower incomes and in insecure lines of work for whom buying is unrealistic, better that the market is regulated so that people can achieve security in renting, rather than thinking everyone should be entitled to buy property. If you went back a couple of hundred years people didn't all assume they'd be able to buy their own home.

I remember back in the early 2000s I had a job where I had to find a particular number once a month and the easiest place to find it at the time was a website called ‘housepricecrash.co.uk’ or some such. It was packed with people declaring an imminent house price crash, they were holding off buying until it came etc. It reminded me of people in cults thinking the world was going to end next Tuesday at 12:15.

Yes you don’t want to lose money but you have to have a home somewhere. Having said that I do think house prices will fall in the next 20 years (Britain is in decline economically, population is in decline, no one can afford to pay it unless they inherit) and there are much better places to put your money.

Flat prices are always more volatile than house prices

I completely agree with this assessment.

If younger people joined together to say we will vote for the party which will embark on truly massive house building scheme which will mean a fall in house prices as well as sufficient supply so rent would fall too, and actually voted - then parties would fall over themselves to do it. They just want to be voted in, so they will (largely) do what will bring them votes.

I think holiday homes are an issue in pockets of the country, but many holiday homes are in areas where they isn't much work. For examples in the Yorkshire Dales, there are hundreds of holiday homes up for sale at the moment. They're being reduced and still getting stuck on the market. There's little work, so many younger people will move away naturally.

The reality is that the government know that people feel well off if their home is increasing in value. It suits successive governments to allow a rampant market.

£200k is 6 times the median wage in this country - the fact that you would consider that "affordable" says everything about how entrenched this crisis is!

That doesn't really make any sense - you're saying property in the North is cheaper, but you've experienced 'crazy' house price increases.

Wages are lower in the North.
There are expensive places to buy in the North too.

I have heard and see the point that lots of single income families moving to double income families has also played a part as people could afford larger mortgages?

A couple of hundred years ago poor people were forced into workhouses, many lived in slums, and hardly anyone could vote. We may well be returning to that but it's hardly a reasonable comparison.

The biggest difference now is that lots of "modest earners" are saddled with student loans, having been lied to throughout their education that working hard at school/university would give them a better life than their parents. If someone has a normal student loan and a postgraduate loan they're paying 50 per cent tax on their earnings ( 20 tax + 11 NI + 10 undergrad + 10 post-grad) Say what you like about graduates being entitled or deluded, but why should someone who is going to spend their whole life paying for their education settle for a worse housing than their parents who didn't have that burden?

As an Irish person living in London til 2018 I had such werid examples from both sides. One friend in Ireland stretched hard with family support and bought a house in 2000. On what became a ghost estate and they are still in negative equity despite rampant house price growth here. Another in the UK bought an ex council non traditional build on a 100% mortgage the same year for 130k, it's worth 4 times that now. But still a v difficult to mortgage non traditional build way past the end of it's expected life.
Dh and I almost bought a small off plan Docklands flat for 120k on a 100% mortgage on 2003 but it felt too scary a commitment at 23. We regret that now as that was the last time we were in a position to buy for another 20 years.

Of course it's a national problem.

Nationally we've had the same overlending, BTL's, emergency interest rates and all the rest that have driven prices way out of kilter with wages.

Prove that you've not had huge price increase in your area in the last 25 years...
I'd wager those houses were 20-25k in 2001.