The housing catastrophe has ruined lives

[Croydonishell]

The real terms rocketing in house prices since the mid 90s, particularly in desirable cities in the UK & elsewhere, have been a social catastrophe.
Young and many middle.aged people without rich and donarion inclined parents, people doing jobs they hate and working all hours just to afford basic accommodation, putting off life decisions.
Then on here you get this casual comnenting like "you won't get much in X for £800k".
People who were just born atbthe right time or inherited rich way beyond necessity. Probably caused Brexit and a lot of the hate towards immigrants too.

They are not building because there is already more than enough property! They have been talking about a "mass building program" for two and a half decades, at least! When will people wake up to this? If AB actually builds hundreds of thousands of council houses I will eat my computer screen.

"They are not building because there is already more than enough property!"

London home prices say otherwise. House price to income is at 10:1, well above affordable 4:1 levels. There isn't enough supply for the demand, so prices are high.

https://londondaily.com/london-new-build-home-sales-plunge-to-lowest-since-financial-crisis

Why the fuck are you resurrecting thread after thread about housing KeepPumping????

Why don't you start a nice new SINGLE thread instead of filling up the AIBU board with old threads on one subject?

Aren't people allowed to be interested in other subjects?

House prices are a simple matter of supply and demand.
More people choosing to live alone, and the huge increase in our population is what is keeping them so high.

You can’t have it all ways about.

I lived in Croydon until I was 36, when I managed to escape to a small town in Sussex.

I wouldn't move back there for any money, but rents and house prices are still high, considering what a shithole most of it is.

House prices are a simple matter of what people can afford to pay or borrow (mortgage approvals are at all time lows I believe) No one viewing a house to buy is homeless and there are plenty of houses, part of the problem was that people believed the house would always make money, so they thought if they got the mortgage debt they had bought an ATM, that sentiment has been swept away as people see what interest rate rises can do to their debt and house value.

You are talking about the ‘demand’ part of the equation.
There’s also a shortage of houses; ‘supply’.

https://northfoxproperty.co.uk/2026/03/23/collapse-in-demand-for-london-apartments/

https://noah-news.com/londons-rental-market-faces-collapse-amid-oversupply-and-policy-chaos/

"This crisis stems from an unchecked increase in rental stock combined with a dramatic drop in tenant demand"

No amount of saying "Not enough houses" over and over again makes it true, there are plenty of houses! NEH is a banker meme designed to suck people into mortgage debt!

London is a wholly different market to the rest of the country!

London is where the jobs are, people flock to where the jobs are, London is one of the largest cities in the world, London has an oversupply of houses. Can you name some areas with a lack of housing?

Cambridge, Oxford, much of the South East (outside London), Bristol, Liverpool, suburban Manchester, Birmingham, Milton Keynes (even though they’re building like mad!)
The list is endless. 🤷‍♀️

Where are all the people who need this housing living at the moment?

Absolutely agree with @Croydonishell

There are plenty of houses on the market, but they are unaffordable for most people. There are also plenty of houses that are now rented as Airbnbs, sitting empty half the year.

It is not a lack of housing, it is a mis-match between what is available and what is affordable. The market is distorted by stamp duty and the flats that were once the best option for many first-time buyers have crippling maintenance charges.

We are spending time in the west Midlands, getting to know the area, and there are huge developments being built by the major companies. Acres and acres of land are being covered with houses. Is there work? Perhaps or probably. There definitely isn't sufficient infrastructure, so probably not a good place once you need a school place or a GP or hope that your sewage is being properly treated.

London is a magnet city. And once you look closely at the figures, most of the people qualifying for social property are refugees. I agree that we need to help them out, but in areas where their agricultural competences would be useful. I'm sure goatherders can wrangle cows, and that plough men could be put to work, but they won't find jobs in London.

Ditto Edinburgh. The point is that they're not conversions- they were built in the 19th century as apartment blocks rather like similar ones in Paris or Berlin. I've lived in cheap flats with acanthus-leaf plasterwork and marble fireplaces. Off the point, but it is interesting.
Incidentally, right up to the late 70s it was almost impossible for single women to get a mortgage. Even a car loan or, say, hire purchase on a washing machine needed a husband or father to guarantee the loan (and in many cases, to give permission). It wasn't always that simple for the post-war generation.

The fact that there are loads of houses sitting unsold means that demand has dropped, this is good because eventually people who want to sell have to accept market reality, can"t see the cheap debt coming back to bail them out anymore?