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 homeowners had a vested interest in rising property prices, they didn’t want the brakes put on. Because homeowners formed the greater part of the population pyramid for so long (think of it as an upside down pyramid with older homeowners forming the broader top layer). Politicians of the day work for the broadest population base with policies favouring them in order to stay in power. So, no political party without a death wish was going to put the brakes on property prices. That’s only going to occur when the broadest base of the pyramid are the group that needs/wants this, then it will occur. So, it will happen but not until the bulk of the voting population represents this need.

So, in essence, extremely simple on ‘how it came to this’.

ETA - while not easy, it’s still possible. Some of my kids have just purchased a small run down flat together. It meant they had to stay at home and not leave the nest, which they would have preferred. It meant saving the bulk of their earnings, living frugally, not pissing it away ever Fri/Sat night. However, once on the ladder and with a bit of elbow grease and some further progression in the ladder at work, and increased equity they should be able to add another in a few years and then another so they will be financially independent of each other (although at this stage their preference is joint for all properties at the end of the day, but maybe the future will change minds?).

They have friends who are serious about getting into the property market, who are banding together as 3 couples to rent 3 bedroom flat together, eat dirt together for a few years to enable deposits/affordable repayments. So, it’s possible, this generation just has to make larger sacrifices, that’s the difference.

Those worst affected by it were, for quite a long time, ignored politically in favour of those who held greater political sway. That's basically it. It's now got so bad that it affects a larger proportion of the voting public, hence why it's finally being talked about and attempts to address it by those in power are being made.

Selfishness and greed by those whose homes rocketed in value, essentially, is the issue.

@nomemono I agree with most of that and also posted about the FPTP system - I don’t think Starmer is an idiot stall though - I think he’s been dealt a very difficult hand where he’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t mainly because as you say if the FPTP system - also some things are kind of undoable without significant cost and a mainly right wing dominance in media these days that is against anything progressive or not focussed on late middle aged to elderly people- as that’s their core market in the main - my honest belief is the Tory’s threw the last election mainly because they knew they had created a ticking time bomb and left the country in a perilous situation post Brexit and Covid - they were bang out of solutions that fitted a Tory agenda.

No but a hell of a lot of people are , or very close to it. Do these people not need homes then? I don't think that minimum wage is any higher in London than it is elsewhere.

Just seen the median wage is £18.64 and hour so that means that 50% earn less than that

Just out of curiosity what are they doing instead? Shared ownership is actually better than renting because it's cheaper and you can't be evicted on a landlords whim

Absolutely - people have been predicting that the whole thing is about to crash, and that only a fool would buy now, for absolutely ages. I remember absolutely terrifying myself just before we bought our first house in 2015 by reading some forum full of people saying that anyone who bought at that point - so self-evidently the very top of the market - was clearly an idiot. As it was we sold that house 5 years later for £60k more than we paid for it (which, of course, benefited us not a whit because the bigger house we then bought had gone up by even more in those years).

I know someone who lived in a houseboat and it is not nearly as much cheaper as you'd think/hope!

2009? I'm amazed you've lost money , prices had plunged ny then.

Most NW houses have doubled in value in the last 10-11 years (which is bad bad thing)

So if there was still RTB would you turn your nose up at it or bite the hand off.
Opportunity was knocking for council house renters by Thatcher don't tell me if you were in that situation you wouldn't have brought your house . So much jealousy towards older people it's disgusting.

I always suspected as much but I guess we include Park home / nomadic lifestyle / camp on the beach etc.. to the list of possible options!

Park home is also an absolutely terrible investment and would work out really badly financially - camp on the beach is cheap but has some clear downsides...!

This is what I'd suggest people do:

1. Join political pressure groups and parties that support decreasing housing costs a quickly and by as much as possible.
2. Create and sign petitions on the subject demanding it be raised in Parliament
3. Mass demonstrations & civil disobedience. Target the supposedly critical 10% of the population on the streets at the same time in different parts of the country. So 7 million people marching.
4. Bombard sitting and prospective MPs demanding action

On an individual level, young non inheritors on <£100k p.a. might be advised to look for work that is remote, take language classes then relocate to parts of Europe with reliable broadband and affordable housing. Unless there is radical change within a reasonable time frame, much of the UK will be for the older property owners, their inheritees, and people who have migrated from countries with a worse quality of life. Nursing and teaching posts will go unfilled, including in fee paying schools. Worse health and education outcomes over a generation, possibly feeding into a declining economy and eventually declining house prices in 30or 40 years time.

At the start of the 90s women stayed at home with the children and mortgages were based on one wage. By the end of the 90s childcare centres were opening, so women went back to work, therefore there was 2 wages to base a mortgage on. If a house was up for sale at £79k a working couple could offer more than "traditional" couple where one stayed at home. also when a house was valued at £79k but was bought for £83 by a working couple the neighbours then believed (as did estate agents) they could get £88k for theirs and on and on it went. Valuations weren't and still aren't based on the actual worth but on what you can expect someone to pay for it. Add into the mix of high numbers of migration in the last 20 years and it is a nightmare.

I remember reading probably at least 10 years ago, that the housing benefit bill was something like 20 billion annually. And a good deal of that would have been going straight into landlords’ pockets. Scandalous.

This is me now. I’m 42 and still in my starter home, with no chance of moving up the ladder due to higher rates and low wages.

Don't forget that land is a decreasing asset and because it's finite, the cost of the land also keeps going up and up.

I think a lot of attitudes have changed.

My dad was over 50 before he first bought. My early years were spent in a HMO. Nowadays people would be horrified at a family spending years living like that. When my parents eventually bought the place was a wreck, not quite in a nice part of London. I remember my mum stuffing newspaper into the cracks in the wall to stop the draughts.

I didn't buy until I was in my 30s. Before that I lived in various house-shares in varying degrees of squalor. For several years I worked three jobs: my main one, evenings in a pub, and three 12-hour shifts per fortnight at weekends. I didn't go out much - didn't have much time.

Nowadays no one seems to want to share for over a decade, or miss out on takeaways, or delay having a family until they are established. Yet all my friends were in shares in our 20s and have lots of good friends made that way.

My first buy was a tiny one-bed on the fourth floor in a rather run down building in an area of London no one had heard off. No tube close by. But at least one post says that s/he doesn't want to work up the housing ladder.

Added to the immigration numbers, numbers of people living in single-adult households, complicated planning/building regulations, difficulty and expense of finding builders and materials, so constraints on building, and housing becomes scarce. And like any scarce commodity, expensive.

Oh and not everyone could afford RTB. I couldn't my parents couldn't. A lot of people could not get a mortgage. Also a single woman could not get a mortgage or she had to be married or have thier dad sign for them.
Most people I know have got a mortgage in the last 20 years because thier parents have helped them out. So the boomers are not that selfish.

It's the international buyers who buy off plan that provide the initial capital (through the initial deposits) for any building in the first place. It's not an ideal situation but that's what you get when vast majority of building is private. Lots of singaporeans buy apartments off plan in uk but in singapore vast majority of building is done by the state and for citizens.

There are fewer foreign buyers now and most brits don't want to buy new build leasehold hence there is far less building in London now.

What is this fuckery?

Dh and I bought our 2 bed flat in London in our 20s for 400k (period 1930s flat) in 2019. Cobbled together deposit after 3 years of work.

We weren't any different from his parents; his father lived at home until his early 30s before buying a 1 bed flat in London as a newly wed and they had 3 children there in 7 years. We lived with his mum for 3 years so we had a quicker timeline probably cos our wages were higher..They only bought their terraced with family help. We wouldn't be getting that so would be staying in our flat and investing in education instead. Dh got a vasectomy after I got pregnant to prevent the 3 kid situation.

Of course dh's grandpa (also in London) had a better time housing wise with his mortgage on a 3 bed semi from the council on a single garment worker's salary but that was in the 50s and they paid their mortgage with savings from a tin can. So I find it difficult to relate to that time.

I'm not sure that people have tolerated it, but as individuals it is hard to know what they could do, other than live in a yurt in wild camping areas of Scotland!

Property prices have risen faster than wages in Dublin, Sydney, Vancouver, New York huge swathes of the UK and many more places and countries. It was a big issue in the Canadian elections just gone.

Here in the UK we have a desperate shortage of housing, which keeps prices high. We also have wages that haven't risen at the same pace, meaning that young people can't afford to buy anything. In addition, we have a shortage of skilled labourers. The Construction Industry Training Board estimates that over quarter of a million extra labourers will be required by 2028 to meet demand. The shortage spans all specialisms and layers of the construction industry, from senior project managers to the steel fixers, welders and labourers needed on site.

We also had Sarah Beeney and similar back in the noughties telling us all what a good wheeze it was to buy properties cheap, do them up and rent them for income, which loads of people did. In 2004 there were 2,894,000 privately rented dwellings by 2019 that had gone up to 5,363,000 privately rented dwellings. I imagine in the last 5 years it has only increased further. Maybe the new Renters Rights Bill will prove so punitive for landlords that they start to sell some of their income properties, which may release some more properties to buy.

Labour seems to have good ambitions to get more houses built but without training, investment and probably tax breaks I'm not sure how those ambitions will be realised.

Exactly. Why blame people for grabbing the opportunities available to them.

Maybe the new Renters Rights Bill will prove so punitive for landlords that they start to sell some of their income properties, which may release some more properties to buy.

Won't that reduce the properties to rent - thus driving up demand and prices for people not yet in a position to buy - and thus put renters at more of a disadvantage to ever be in a position to buy?

I'm not a landlord but took us 10 years to save our first deposit - no bank of mum and dad for us - to buy and for our careers to settle to one area for a bit. So those 10 years we needed to rent various places - and they were all private landlords.

My kids near or at first steps of adulthood won't be in positions to buy for years yet - and were not in a position to give them any significant money to help. They are just starting out and while they at least of option of living with us their careers and work they want may not have jobs in this area for them to do so.

It is really odd though as everywhere my family is in UK there is signifacnt building works - massive new estates - all of which have had to overcome huge opposition yet we still aren't building enough housing year on year.