To think we should ban private renting?

[honeyrosesandwich]

AIBU to think this is a great idea?

Imagine if private renting was banned. All rented houses were done under social housing / housing association. There are already over 4.5 million houses rented under social housing, so it's on a huge scale already.

It would mean rent would be affordable for everyone and effectively help the cost of living prices. I live in a housing association house and my 2 bed is £520 a month. My brother, who private rents, pays £1100 for a 2 bed in the same area.

Repairs for my house are done by the HA's own company. I just put in a request online for it.

People that want to stay in their privately rented home will be free to do so but they put a ban on any new tenancies. The owners will have the opportuntiy to sell the house to social housing or keep it for themselves, but not rent it out further. If sold, the tenant will be allowed to stay.

I've been thinking about this randomly today and haven't come up with any negatives so far. Is it bad to monopolise housing? Well, there are already certain housing associations which own hundreds of thousands of houses.

There are countries that have tried this.

usually as part of a communist or socialist system.

china is the one I’m most familiar with so I’ll talk about that.

so in China all property was state owned. Housing went with your job, pretty much. Each unit of production (company in western terms) would have a factory or area of land of agricultural and would have some housing alongside that - flats in cities or urban areas, houses in villages or rural areas.

at birth and growing up you’d live with your parents in “company” housing. Think like army housing today in the uk. You’d go to the local school. You could apply to go away for university and if you got accepted you’d be given a place in a dorm a bit like student halls in the uk.

on graduation, you’d apply for jobs with various units that you wanted to work with. Everyone would be given a job so you would get one. It would come with housing, but when I say housing for new grads and single people it would be a bed in a dormitory and the dorm would have maybe 10 or 20 people in It.

singapore’s social housing runs on a very similar model - only families get flats, single people uny recently were not even allowed to apply, now they can apply but they’ll get a bed in a shared room with 12 people. Singapore’s biggest housing complexes sleep over sixteen thousand people and you aren’t allowed to cook or do laundry yourself because there just isn’t space.

going back to China,
if you applied to get married and it was accepted you’d get better housing in the sense that you’d get a private room for the two of you.

but in all the systems where this has been done, the sons and daughters of the people running the system get much much better housing and jobs than anyone else. There’s one system for the masses and another for the elites.

How on earth do you actually believe this?
What about those people who don’t want to be reliant on the state?
How is the government going to buy all these properties (I assume you’d put taxes up?)?
What about those between properties that just need short term let’s?
What about encouraging aspiration rather than just ‘let’s rely on the State’!

They aren't. They are "not for profits" and many of them are charities.

Your whole argument is based around the fact that you think your affordable rent covers all the costs of your housing.

It doesn't.

I agree with you, we need a massive increase in social housing.

No need to get so animated. My view is we need more affordable housing. That there should be a choice. Might not be for everyone. No more, no less and I’m assuming your own housing situation is secure otherwise you’d be more understanding how difficult it is for those with high rents and no security of tenure. They can’t achieve aspirations if they’re crippled every month paying high costs. That’s a catch 22.

Why would I need to know them intricacies of Bristol to know there are thousands if not millions of empty properties in the UK?

I’m not animated particularly - but I’m delighted you think that!
Since you ask my housing situation is secure thanks to years of hard work and saving.
My daughter however is 23. Has recently graduated (degree apprentice). Works in London - £29k a year - she rents a room in a house share. In order to afford to do that, pay rent, buy her Oyster card etc and try save towards a deposit she works in a bar at weekends. She saves every spare penny she has to try and secure her own future rather than rely on others.

I am a private landlord
tenants have just left owing me over 30 k and trashed the place

its cost me 9 k to fix it up and fallow months

its now in the hands of a local authority thanks to a great company called elliotleigh who take flats iff you and do all the admin legal and repairs

Why should anyone bother to own property then? If I can sell my house to the state and then be housed myself at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining a home why would I not do that? Then I can quit my stressful job and do 16 hours a week somewhere and claim benefits to top me up. Why not? I mean I wouldn’t because it’s not in my nature but if there is no personal benefit to work and sacrifice why bother? Some magical person will pay for it after all

perhaps they’re the very small numbers the producers could find to appear on the show.

Lots of people profit from need for housing - the architects, builders, mortgage lenders, investors amongst many more. It’s how society works - people do things to make a profit.

This is where everything has gone a bit bonkers. Houses which owner occupiers live in quite happily are not good enough by council criteria. I’m all for improving standards but when you have an EPC system that classifies large swathes of the uk housing stock as not good enough, something is very wrong.

We're all caught in a vicious circle. LA don't have money so can't cope with the demand for social housing. The answer from the gov: make it very hard for private landlords to evict so any problem become the problem of the landlord. Landlords either sell up because there is no more benefit to be a landlord or hack the price up to cope with the additional costs that come with the regular new legislations that always penalises them. When they sell, the gov gets less tax revenue. When the landlords increase rent, it cost the gov more in benefits. Either way, it's more pressure on the budget, less allocation to LA, and rinse and repeat....

No government wants to truly tackle the problem because it requires a long term solution...and as we know, governments never last long enough to have and implement any sort of medium term, let alone long term plans.

Private landlords need to be valued in our society so that they can value their tenants. Legislations should focus on punishment for bad landlords and bad tenants, no punish everyone indistinctly.

PS my own Victorian terrace “mansion” would come into the not good enough category.

Many work extremely hard but don’t have the luxury of being able to save or get on. Meritocracy is no longer correlated. If you were to lose everything tomorrow, would you, completely on your own, no help from anyone else be able to rent and replicate your current situation over time? Starting back in an entry level job. Chances are absolutely not so maybe don’t look down on others who also work extremely hard but are in a catch 22 situation.

What happens if someone needs to rent short term? Like waiting for a house to be built or renovated, a delay in the sale/purchase of a new house, moving to a new city and not wanting to buy before getting a sense of the place? Will the HA be happy to have a 2
month rolling lease agreement?
I don’t believe that putting all rentals in the hands of local government will be the best option, look at all the threads here about the local council failing to make repairs, fucking them up etc etc.

Sigh
Just because I have a different view to you - doesn’t mean I’m looking down on anyone!

How will the system work regarding the size of property you are allocated? Will same sex children be required to share? What if you need a home office or space for stepchildren or guests? Would there be an option to pay more for add ons or will it strictly be a case of you get what you are given?

Personally I think the government should build high rise flats that are big 3/4 bedrooms like in Dubai to house people, with a GP at the base.

Certainly that would reduce the amount of farmland having houses built on it. However in UK high rise flats seem to be less popular than houses or low rise flats.

I can think of a "what about" case.
What about people who need to live elsewhere for a short period and so rent their property out in the mean time?

Our neighbours did this. Their employers wanted them to work in a location overseas for about a year. Obviously they did not want to sell it when they knew they were coming back. Rather than leave it empty they rented for the short term they were away. I have known others do this in the past when on work placement of a year or two so it can't be that rare.

If you banned private rental then these perfectly good family houses would stand empty until their owners came back.

Pension providers/funds buy entire blocks of flats off plan to rent out as do overseas investors. I know of two blocks in Manchester bought by a Chinese consortium. It's not the nest egg people with one home that live locally, but the untouchable owners on another continent.

This is widespread and shocking. I’m surprised successive governments have allowed it to happen.
@honeyrosesandwich what do you think of this practice?

Housing associations and social landlords would never be able to afford to buy them all at market prices. They likely wouldn't have the capital or the means to get a mortgage to buy them. When they build new homes they get all sorts of grants to be able to afford it.

I think there are several things that could be done
1 totally stop right to buy ( although I think that is in the pipeline)
2 dramatically increase supply of HA and at least 50% of new tenancies go to people who have paid at least 5 years tax and NI within last 10 years - - buy back in bits and bobs off open market- not just small new builds - proper established family houses in areas where people want to live
3 no foreign property buyers or shell companies used by foreign buyers ( when we lived in Denmark this was quite strictly regulated)

1. Rent caps relative to area and size of property . Not at social housing levels, but maybe half as much again and more like the levels that UC actually take into account - Yes some landlords would get out of it but on the plus side these could then be bought back by private big companies and HA etc who do it for long term investment, not quick buck and can work with the rent caps.

5 bring back DIYSO - on a large scale - ( do it yourself shared ownership) both for houses and flats - this was in under Blair and was so successful they stopped it as it was pissing if house builders - we bought our flat on this when I was pregnant with my son back in -98 - nice big one bedder in Crouch End - off open market - straight forward 50/50 deals- share of freehold necessary . Works fantastically well in expensive areas and for those who are working but can’t get sufficient mortgages or big deposits- basically 50% on mortgage- 50% owned by HA - any gains are split 50/50 . Rent paid on non owned share at 2.5% .
7 bring back self declaration mortgages if you have 15% deposit - it’s ludicrous that plenty like us that are self employed but highish earners couldn’t buy without jumping through multiple hoops and having to actually not declare and offset any business costs to get your profits to look high enough on paper - the fact is if you work for yourself and it’s consistent you actually know far more about how your business is doing than any young thing on £40k who can be made redundant tommorrow - people like ourselves have been hogging nice private rented houses whereas in reality we could easily have bought 8 yearsago but can’t get the mortgages

Totally disagree! I've had health issues for decades and whilst I do work part time I also rent out my old house (I struggled to sell it) and it's the only way I can afford to live as it tops up my part time salary to full time. It's saved me from poverty. It also stops me from claiming any sort of benefits (I've never claimed). I could easily say, how about you work harder and buy your own home rather than relying on the state to provide you with cheap housing? That's not nice is it!?! Not everyone who is a landlord is rolling in it, believe me

When they show the auctions its young people or construction/handy men in the audience in great numbers. The phone in/Internet bids could be older individuals. Estate agency or overseas.

I know two estate agent firms the first a married couple she handles the sales he buys run down properties, then lets them.

The second estate agents the owner has a loose consortium of wealthy people who share in buying residential properties and commercial ones. They're not involved physically in renovation, lettings. Just divvy up the income from the portfolio.

I have rented at various points in my life, including now, because I need(ed) the flexibility. I have plenty of money. Not enough to waste on a property I am going to leave in 6 months. The world is a lot more mobile now. You may be poor, lots of people are not and need/want to rent. And what about students, young professionals?

You also assume the government will do a great job maintaining these properties. I very highly doubt it.