Social consequences of house price boom

[Upwind]

comment at the guardian.co.uk [click]

One of my pet subjects but I have not seen this in the mainstream media before:

"If food or energy prices were rising at 8% per year, let alone at 20% there would be outrage. There would certainly be alarm that such price rises were not sustainable and that increasing numbers of people were unable to afford a basic commodity.
Academics at the university of Aberdeen are currently running a project on this, and other, changes in society and believe that "when the implications of these developments are taken together, they hold the potential to produce profound and, as yet, largely unanticipated social consequences for this age cohort, as well as for UK society as a whole".
Astronomical prices mean that couples who cannot afford to buy, or move to larger properties, or lose half a joint income, are having children later in life when their fertility rates are lower. You do not have to own a home before you have children but many people desire at least some stability before they do so. "

The British have an amazing desire to own their own homes but many other Europeans do not. (I don't know what the comparative percentages are). But then again who owns the homes that the Europeans rent?

I don't have an amazing desire to own my own home - far from it - but really we don't have much of a choice. We are renting atm and it is so insecure. Once our initial contract period is up, our landlord can give us two months' notice to leave. There is very little property in the area (to rent or buy) and the chances are we would have to leave our village and live somewhere else. We had to do this last October because we were given notice and our dds are now on their third primary school. We really can't face going through this again so our only other option is to buy. (We are on the council housing list but there are no properties available or likely to become available in the next 5 years).

But - because of the boom in second property purchase, the house prices have been pushed up so much that we cannot afford to buy. Catch 22.

I fell pregnant in 2002

both my partner and i had a full time job

Could we afford a mortgage? could we hell.

It's leaving double income households in the same position as part time single mothers - unable to buy so needing a rented place - therefore the private properties are given to the couple with 2 incomes, leaving everyone else to scrabble for the council houses - oh no wait, those would be the council houses that all got sold off 7 years ago.

Plus, when the new rules regarding deposits on privately rented properties come into force in April, a lot of properties will disappear from the rental market. So will some people be forced to buy, crippling themselves financially, merely to have a roof over their heads?

Yes I think it's interesting that no-one talks about the social consequences of high house prices. Maybe it's because the chattering classes are mostly home owners (or own several) and therefore the consequences are ok for them?

We will buy at some point but will still only get a fairly average house (a 3/4 bed) for a stupid price and we'll only be able to afford it because we have an above average income. House prices in most places are about £100k a bedroom, which is mad given salaries/salary increases. But maybe we won't do it - the cost of renting the house we live in now (we rent) is about half of the cost of buying it.

That's a real problem isn't it Miaou? The school I work in has a high turnover of children for just that reason. They have to move on because of problems with their housing. One family who've recently left can't get the children all in one school in the new area and currently the children aren't attending.

We own our own home, but have been in the market for 20-odd years now. I couldn't afford to buy it today. And when my children will be able to move out I have no idea. Even renting is becoming out of reach.

Most people haven't always owned their own home in the UK. Lots had employer provided houses. My grandfather (I recently looked at the 1901 census) then lived in a terraced house with 21 other young men from 16 - 27. Whole families in one room were often the norm. Today we have hugely better stsandards of housing but also perhaps far too high standards and expectiations. The rented French/German flat for a family is something most of the British wouldnt' countenance.

In 1983 we struggled to buy a tiny house in a very outer London borough on two salaries and certainly couldn't despite the new baby, afford for one of us to give up work or take much maternity leave. It was ever thus.

However you're certainly right that house prices have gone up a lot. I also remember the period of negative equity. I'm probably one of the few people in England who bought buy to let flats and had to sell them at 50% less than we bought them for so things do tend to go up and down.

Also may be it's good if people are having children later as we may have too many people anyway and we can always let more skilled workers in from abroad.

Over here in Germany, renting is the norm (think it's somewhere between 60 and 70% of the population who rent) and tenants have very extensive rights. A landlord needs a good reason to give notice to quit (whereas the tenant needs no reason) and the minimum notice period is 3 months on both sides. Several years of living here have made me a lot less understanding of the British obsession with property. I often get the feeling that Brits, hearing we live in a rented flat, think 'oh poor things'. But over here it's really fine. Of course I'd much rather have a house with a garden, but I'm not desperate to buy.

SecondhandRose - the properties are owned by anything from local councils to big, semi-private organisations (literally 'building societies') to private landlords.

So in a sense the British need some therapy or hypnotism along the lines of "An englishman's home is not his castle". "Owning your own home is capitalist and bad". "Renting is great, no upkeep or responsibility". "Buying is for the silly and reckless". We never get that message here. We just get people wanting to own their own place. My oldest had said she'd rent until she was 30 and thinking of settling down but even she last week was talking about when might be the best time to think about buying a flat once she was in work.

I think in Britain the culture is such that people often don't have much choice (cf. Miaou's post), whereas here there is a viable alternative (or rather buying has the status of the alternative). All sorts of policy and cultural matters would have to change in Britain for that to change.

That said, I live in an area of Germany where there is a particular obsession with, not buying, but building one's own house. The accepted (or highest-status) route is get married - buy your plot and get your house built - have children. Renting is still not stigmatised, though.

Huge issue in Wales at the moment.Similar implications as thereare in places like Cornwall combined with colonisation which renders Welsh speaking communities fragile,

Attended a rally with this group yesterday.

We used to have loads of people renting as most couldn't afford to buy and you couldn't even buy council houses. We also had large estates with tenants and farm workers living on them, some industrialists building properties they owned and rented to mill workers and miners and their families, army accommodation all rented stuff, a million live in servants in Victorian England who obviously didn't own either. Then in the 1930s at least in London we had a wave of house building and start of cheaper houses for sale and I suppose the upper middle class victorians tended to buy too. But we certainly haven't had thousands of years of home ownership for most ordinary people in the UK.

Some tenants were realy badly treated so we brought in the Rent Acts which meant it was virtually impossible to get anyone out ever which meant private landlords just didn't continue to exist and rented property became very hard to get hold of until we invented the "assured shorthold tenancy" which allowed you to grant tenancies not for life but for a year or more. Even then you coudln't then and can't now get people out without a court order. Then we had galloping house prices and people piling into buying buy to let properties and becoming a nation of landlords in a sense.

You can't compare the renting situation here to most of Europe. The set up is very different, with a much less secure situation for the tenant.

I think there are very depressing social consequences for people who didn't buy in time, and I find it mind-boggling that in this country we are unable to build enough homes to accomodate people at a reasonable cost.

But I have given over probably two years of my life thinking about it, and have come to the conclusion that our generation are just unlucky in that sense. We just have to get on with it, and that for us means living in a flat for our whole lives and bringing up our children in a very cramped space. It's not the end of the world, but it is unfortunate from our point of view.

md, interesting. I wonder what Wales traditionally had. Presumably like England large landed estates, miners mostly renting and not much history of the poor owning anything? Plus ca change.

Yes Xenia.
In this area slate quarries owned by people who also made a lot of money from sugar and slavery.

You need a revolution then of the poor I suppose to right the wrongs of capitalism and give land to everyone like in Zimababwe I suppose. Hard to get it right. I found it easier just to pick a high paying job and pay the ridiculously high prices.

Home ownership is not the cause of people not being able to afford decent homes.
People need to live somewhere, so if there are too few homes the cost will go up.
Mortgages are simply "renting money", and roughly equivalent to rent.
What we have is a housing shortage. If we had a larger rented sector, we'd see exactly the same bubble, indeed the buy to let sector is an expression of that.
You want cheaper houses ?
Let developers build them.

Not a popular statement I suspect.

well of course there are severe social consequences of this focus on houses and the house price boom

I for one would be happy to see prices drop by 50% but then again that's because my house has falsely doubled in price in the last 5 years .. its appalling and it is a fake rise although pleasant to consider momentarily the connotations of which are unpalatable

the concept of extended families is destroyed because which of our children would be able to afford to live with us

the concept of security is destroyed

I blame thatcher's drive for home ownership in the 80's and the right to buy scheme

an englishman's home cannot be his castle if we have so many homeless

but surely the difference between a mortgage and rent is ownership and security .. rent is dead money

the drive for buy to let investments by the chattering classes is much to blame in the housing shortage and the increase in cost of starter homes

there is a basis in greed

an it locks us all into the homes we're in now

and I say this as a family who has benefitted greatly from the housing market .. although I see that as luck rather than skill

It's a popular viewpoint with me DominiConner, but I have seen the anti-building 'green space' protectors seemingly have their way, despite a housing crisis. I just can't see any hope.

I think it blows a huge hole in the supposed success of democracy. Because the majority of people already own homes, and have seen huge windfalls because of that, the government of the day cannot commit political suicide and hint that ever higher prices are not good for society.

Yet there is an increasingly large minority for whom high house prices are directly affecting their quality of life to a huge extent. Their plight will never be heeded. The mainstream who were lucky enough to buy their homes before the boom (yes, lucky - not 'astute investors') just assume that that people who point this out to them are either stupid or poor. They think that housing has 'always been expensive' and that we are just a bunch of whingers.

Sorry Twiglett, X posted and you have rather nicely demonstrated that I am wrong about all existing homeowners.

Perhaps the tide is turning. I am biased by the number of lectures I have had by my 'elders and betters' telling me I have brought this on myself in some way by not 'buying at the right time'.

but of course it affects those of us who are already secure in our homes .. what about our children and their abilities to leave home / own their own place

its a short-term view not to consider the social implications

I would love my children to grow up and find somewhere decent to live, hopefully within half hour of me .. but the chances of that happening are nil .. destroying another potential extended family / network

I would like to see more rights for tenants - last week a friend of mine was evicted by bailiffs because his landlord had not kept up their mortgage payments. He had only moved into that flat a few months ago so the landlord was probably in arrears when he signed the lease agreement. My friend is suddenly homeless and has no prospect of getting his deposit back.

As far as I know it was the short assured tenancies that xenia mentioned that have made private renting so insecure. That, combined with the decline in the social housing stock means that there is no real alternative to buying a house.

This statistic is striking:

"Over 90% of towns in Britain are now unaffordable for first-time buyers."

I'd be interested to know how this figure is calculated.