To feel slightly grumpy at people who have moved to my hometown and made the house prices shoot up

[Pollysoftheworld]

I’m not talking about immigrants.
I was born here. My grandparents grandparents met in the Victorian days in a theatre two miles from my house. Now I have to move out. I don’t recognise my local high street and I can’t afford to shop there. I don’t see how £6 sourdough is a social enterprise. I imagine it’s lovely if you’re used to much higher prices. But I miss my town the way it was.
I wonder if those moving here experienced similar in Brixton, Oxford, Cheltenham etc

Cornwall is very cheap compared to where I live?

This is the bit I sympathise with. Sometimes in the past, whole families would move together, to somewhere where there was more work and cheaper housing. At least, you see it when you do genealogy: a whole branch ending up in another part of the county or country.

Not suggesting you do that, of course, nothing is that easy.

@theresnolimits @Y2ker my parents bought their house for about £70,000 in the 1990s and it's worth over £2 million now (they sold before the crazy boom but still made a bit of profit). I don't think people who weren't born in London really understand what it's like to live through these enormous property price changes in your home town. And whilst I guess you have a foot on the ladder being born there, you can't really expect your parents to sell and move up out of their home town and give you all the profit from the move necessarily! Thank goodness my parents will have many more decades of life before I'll see any inheritance, but in the meantime it doesn't help much.

The alternative though would be terrible for those that aren't born and bred in lovely areas. I was born in an undesirable town and have worked really hard to move to a much nicer area that my children now get to enjoy growing up. They are objectively very lucky, as are all the children growing up here.

Should I have been condemned to staying in my hometown because OP was blessed to be raised in a lovely part of the country already and she doesn't want to be 'pushed out' by people like me? Surely this is just entrenching inequality in that she would enjoy an upbringing in a great area and get to stay here all her life too whereas people like me would be trapped in our hometowns? Also, it would create intergenerational inequality as once OP has kids then her children could also 'claim' the area and essentially block other people from moving there. Where would it all end?

@BumpitybumperI don’t think my area is a lovely area though. It’s a city. Some people you couldn’t pay to live in my part of the city, it’s got crime, guns, drugs, antisocial behaviour. But it’s my home. My children will grow up being able to commute to university, to thousands of jobs, and I’m aware that’s a privilege. But the irony is the amount we pay to live here means that we have no money for the nice bits of living in a city, I’ve probably eaten in the many, many restaurants in our city twice in five years. I can’t afford to use the many cafes, bars, sustainable zero waste shops, bakeries. So what use is it to us, having this on our doorstep?

Or London.

If there are lots of people that want to live there then it is obviously viewed as desirable, probably for the practical factors you mention. Should people less lucky than you be stuck in areas without these amenities and advantages because they happen to have not been born in your city?

@Bumpitybumperno but there should be some sort of house price cap. This would ensure houses don’t become commodities. It would also promote less affluent areas and possibly prevent ‘brain drain’ to other areas.

Bought a £6 sourdough in a Cornish town 1 hour ago

If there was a house price cap then how would this resolve the problem that there is more demand for housing in desirable areas than there is supply? You can cap the price but this simply means that even more people would technically be able to afford a house but there simply isn't enough housing for everyone in the desirable areas.Equally the less affluent areas will still be drained as people will always try to improve their situation. Realistically if people can afford to buy or rent in a nicer area because the prices are capped then that's what they will try to do.

I think what you're actually suggesting is that 'locals' are prioritised in some ways and offered lower house prices and rents than those who through sheer luck were born in less desirable areas.

I've not said anything about what people 'should do'. I'm just pointing out the futility of railing against something that is part of something much bigger, and unless that something changes, we have a system where the more wealth you have the more of the best things you will take, and the less wealthy will lose because they cant match your budget. This is something the less wealthy have to live with, across every area of life, and your hometown is as much for sale as anything else.
The alternative I'd like to see is greater equality in standards between areas so there weren't rubbish areas that people felt they needed to flee as soon as they 'bettered themselves'. Because however hard we work, we can't all be in great jobs making money, there's not enough of them, and we will always need carers, retail workers, manual workers, and there will always be people impoverished by illness or disability or care commitments. These people deserve not to be stuck in rubbish areas as much as those privileged enough to be able to escape them.

I agree with much of what you have written but realistically there will always be areas that are a lot more desirable than others. This is often due to natural advantages (like Cornwall with it's beautiful beaches) or manmade advantages like London with it's excellent facilities and access to jobs. It would be impossible to even all of this out.

In this context then I think the fairest way to allocate housing in desirable areas is through a mix of capitalism and some housing allocated for people working in essential services. There isn't really any other superior method to do this. Prioritising locals is extremely unfair, especially for areas like Cornwall that take a huge amount of financial subsidy from other regions in the UK. It would be ridiculous if they then essentially barred people from outside the region from moving there. We are one country and freedom of movement is an intrinsic part of that. Nobody is more entitled to live anywhere than anyone else if you have means you afford housing. There are also questions around nepotism (rich people already dominate a lot of the nicer areas) and racism/xenophobia when we will essentially be blocking certain cultures and races from ever getting a foothold in a place because it is dominated by white locals that have priority.

Husband and I couldn't afford the town we grew up in, so we moved an hour down the road and bought a house for half the price it would have cost in our original town. We love it here. It's a very poor area, very scruffy, but it's got loads of parks and local amenities and isn't in the least bit pretentious. AND our mortgage is half the cost of our peers'.

@Bumpitybumperbut social housing isn’t really for keyworkers is it? Even when my ex and I both worked in shops we would have never been considered for social housing as we could (just) afford to rent privately.
Thats why there’s such a shortage of nurses, social workers, HCAs even in London and Cornwall. If they don’t have social housing, they can’t afford to live there.

So you’ll move elsewhere and become a newcomer there. Should those people then blame you for moving to their town and putting up prices there?

This is very true. I grew up in zone 6 and have been forced to move an hour away. Everyone here complains about people moving in from London. You can't win.

That's why I specifically stated that the housing existed outside the capitalist model should be made available to key workers, not just general SH. I think this is the fairest model in our society. Other models where SH in super desirable areas is used to simply house the most needy will build resentment amongst people that can't access the SH and can't afford you live in the desirable areas and it also isn't a good use of public money. Some council houses are worth over £1 million and this money could be used to buy lots of SH in less desirable areas that could house many more families in desperate need of accommodation.

When DH and I bought our first house, we were priced out of our city. Now we live in a town 100km away and our kids are almost completely unfamiliar with where we grew up. It's sad and I miss it, but I really don't see an alternative. How would you regulate house buying if there was a cap on prices? There would still be the same demand, which is what's increasing prices.

I did. It was ghastly!

As from someone From London I understand your frustration and the feeling of powerlessness.

I hope that gentrification has at least brought cleanliness and nice people. Rather than curtain twitching losers who aren’t interested in local community and expect rural silence in the city and an area that is know for “vibrant creative scene and nightlife”

So has Gail’s now taken over Waitrose on the posh-o-meter? Apparently there are now 170 branches. Is that what you mean by expensive sourdough?

We got lucky in London and will move out and the kids can hopefully convert the house and live there somehow. Families are smaller now, living space required is smaller too (less clutter/all on the iPad). I think people are also getting used to living differently.
Parts of Central London have stagnated or gone down in price due to very high stamp duty. There are still areas that are up and coming, but generally speaking since Covid people are moving out to places that still have potential. It is nicer for young people to go somewhere with lots of other young people. London is ageing, hardly any young families left now. They have to close primary schools quite frequently.
10 years ago a lot of coastal towns were “dying”, the fact people are moving there and to new areas is a good thing. The centralisation of most lucrative jobs in London or the South East is not a good thing. It creates division politically.

So OP if you are priced out of your hometown, it is really sad, but if you research it properly there will always be another vibrant up and coming place. Follow the artists and techies now, that usually works. In fact you need these types of people to move in to invigorate an area. The gentrification and what used to be craft beer/now sourdough/milk alternatives/kimchi tends to follow after that.

A while ago I was listening to the radio where a guy was complaining bitterly that he couldn't afford to buy where he grew up as 'incomers' had pushed up prices.

I realised that he was talking about the very street in which I grew up, from which I had had to move as I couldn't afford to buy (or even rent) there. 'Incomers' had pushed up the prices and one of those incomers had been his family who had done to me what a new group were doing to him.

I moved elsewhere, I had to. And presumably that meant someone else had to move elsewhere from where I had gone.

Sourdough is usually stale anyway from these shops. Lidl do a delicious one for £1.90 on the bakery counter

hardly surprising that you feel grumpy OP, It’s complex, OP, and you are not alone.

So many causes:
WFH / remote working
‘locals’ cashing in
Astronomical house and land prices elsewhere
In part driven by foreign investors, who leave London flats empty (for example)
’Levelling up’ - be careful what you wish for. More well paid jobs may well lead to sourdough and higher mortgages

Be thankful that the influx in your area is not second- homers and foreign investors creating ghost towns with no facilities.

Welcome to my world, I grew up in east London before it was gentrified, haven't a hope of being able to afford to live there and I am in a professional job. Also it's full of hipsters now