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.

Please want better for the human race xx

So if some people had their way, people would not be allowed to spend their money on:
Private renting
Private healthcare
Private education
What will people be allowed to spend their money on? Longhaul holidays? Flash cars? Booze and fags?

The state would have to buy up a lot of houses at market rate, or build new ones. So how does that pay for itself?

Sounds like fun!! :-)

I own one house which I rent out. I moved in with my partner. I don’t put the rent up every year. I make about £100 a month. I pay tax on it.
MN always tells women to protect themselves. If I split with my husband I would have somewhere to go in about 4-5 months.
It may be sold in the future to pay for my care.

To have more choice over where they live and the size of their property.

This was what I came here to say.

Expecting housing associations to buy every private rented property would force the country into a sovereign default. Basically, the country would go bankrupt.

Where do you think the housing association would get all of this money from?

Private rent means I can pick my house
If it was up to the housing association I would get allocated a1 bed flat.

We don't have enough of the right houses in the right locations for the right people.

Stop frothing and read the OP again. All of that information is there if you want to see it.

And yes I agree @honeyrosesandwich

We do, many of them are owned and empty

They can kick you out but it takes a while and there's a whole process (#Germany). Same as with a mortgage seems to me. I have never been late/through that process though.

There's is nowhere near as much money in it as in the UK! (Or "as there used to be in the UK" is maybe better?)

You can still invest in it. Some people like investing in brick over stock market. Some inherit. In a sense though it's a purer investment than in the UK: you get revenue, but not other rights like many of the traditional housing rights or what comes with that. Landlord cannot decide if I have a cat, if I paint my wall, if I move out - I am always aghast what a landlord in UK controls/has to do.

This. It would cause a massive shock to the system, probably on the scale of the financial crisis if not worse.

It would inevitably devalue property. Landlords can’t pay off their mortgages. There isn’t enough equity to repay the mortgage on sale of the property. Banks are at risk of collapse.

Pension funds are huge property owners and tend to hold property long term to let. If they had to sell it all off at below its current value, they would likely collapse.

It’s fundamental to our economy that the government respects property rights. If you interfere too much with that, trust is lost and people stop spending and investing in the UK. It’s why the government offers full compensation for compulsory purchase etc. rather than just confiscating privately owned assets.

I work with families who can’t live by the rules of social housing. They struggle to keep noise down, behave appropriately with neighbours, pay the rent, maintain the interior and exterior of their property (often due to mental health needs, traumatic childhoods, addiction etc.). Social housing won’t take them only private landlords. Where will they be housed?

So no private renting but you’d still be able to book a hotel room, a multi bedroomed suite?

Hotel chains will be able to buy up all this cheap housing stock in cities - create lots of those long stay apartment hotel rooms, stick a bit of hotel branding on the front of the building, and basically ‘rent’ the flats out.

So Jane who inherited her parent’s house, sells it and decides to buy the apartment next door as an investment and a small income isn’t allowed to.

But big commercial chains will be able to effectively rent out long stay places under the banner of hotels?

Just for starters - explain Bristol's housing issue.

I'll wait.

I don't think you can actually ban it as there are some limited circumstances where a person may legitimately want to keep their house but not live in it, for example trialling living with a partner or while temporarily working away, and it would be a pity to have homes standing empty.
What you could do was prevent landlords charging any more than the social housing rent for a comparable property. That would take the incentive away from people seeing it as a business opportunity, while allowing for temporary accidental landlords.

These are people our society failed. We probably owe them castles.

A lot of people rent because they don’t want to buy. In the village where I grew up there’s a couple of 6-bedroom houses with huge gardens and multiple reception rooms for rent and they’re usually taken by folk doing short-term work for just a couple of years in the nearby city, who don’t want to buy somewhere if they’re not going to be there long. It happens all over. I don’t see that banning ALL private renting and thus forcing people to buy houses they don’t want to own is helping anyone.

When I lived somewhere effectively without private rental it was an absolute nightmare - very little opportunity to find somewhere to live, zero flexibility, lots of stress. Prices were fine but doesn't help if you don't actually have anywhere to rent and can't afford to buy/not staying long enough to make buying sensible

I just did the maths. There are roughly 5 million private rentals in the UK. At 250k each, the total value is 1.25 TRILLION pounds.

Just where is this money going to magically appear from?

exactly - many professionals need to move around for work purposes and can’t wait for months to be allocated a house. This sounds lovely if you want to be given a house in the neighbourhood you grew up in and never want to move/never need a bigger house because you decide to have children. Leaving out the significant question of how to pay to purchase all these houses.

The answer would be have much more social housing.
But there'd never be enough.

We didn’t have the safety regulations in the 70s that are in place now. The extra maintenance fees would cripple the HAs if they increased their stock (and were prohibited from making too much profit). The HAs would need to pay for additional staff to deal with the assessments and lettings. I can’t think of a business model to make this work at all.

And if owned by local authorities? They can still end up at risk of insolvency due to deficits….

Housing Associations are not run for profit, unlike private renting landlords, that’s why HA rents are cheaper so there would be no need for rent subsidies. Not all social housing is government owned, there are plenty of housing associations that are not council run.

https://www.housing.org.uk/about-housing-associations/what-housing-associations-do/