Will the housing crisis ever be solved?

[ByJustScroller]

Do you think there is any hope for young people wanting to buy in? I have friends and family where I live but now I am priced out. I am not just competing with locals but people who live in London and the ever increasing new arrivals. Housing supply has not kept up with demand for years and this government has no plans. I will be renting for ever.

@Badbadbunny

The holiday home thing is not just for the Lake District it’s a national planning policy for the countryside . I can’t convert a barn into a home but I can apply for a holiday let or business . It’s all ludicrous. We need growth in this country and the planning system is preventing it . It’s not just about big house builders there are plenty of ways small development can assist local growth using local trades but no , Planning says not .

To an extent, yes, but people on minimum wage simply can't afford to buy a house or pay rent in lots of places, so NEED universal credit/subsidised rent, otherwise they'd be living in tents. You need to be earning "average" wages or above in lots of places to be able to afford to rent a flat when you also factor in utilities, food, commuting costs, etc, leaving very little left for actual enjoyment of life to pay for hobbies/socialising etc. Long gone are the days where you can rent a flat for less than £500 per month - these days more likely at least double that, and then another few hundred per month for the utilities etc.

A very good start would be to ban residential homes in blocks of flats and housing estates from being used as Air BNBs and holiday rentals. Huge numbers of properties are lost to being occupied residentially because the owners/investors can make more money by renting them out on short term holiday let basis. It's not just removing homes from the housing market, it also causes problems for neighbours, i.e. noise, rowdiness, parking issues etc. Holiday lets should be far more heavily restricted, and, yes, taxed heavily too.

it will require a total change to UK society.
The acceptance that home ownership is not about personal success in life and a sign of ever increasing wealth. It is simply somewhere to live, not somewhere to climb up the housing ladder.

Your own post is symptomatic of that, you seem to regard a life of renting as a "failure".
Approx 53% of Germans live in rented accommodation, over there that is not seen as a fail, it is seen as the norm.

Germany rents are generally a lot lower than in the UK, both in absolute terms pound for pound (Euro) and also as a percentage of average wages.

I disagree. When I started out earning just over minimum wage I was able to afford to life. It’s just about cutting your cloth accordingly. Yes it was a house share, yes I didn’t have overseas or expensive UK holidays, yes I couldn’t do expensive hobbies (so ended up enjoying running as it’s essentially free!). The issue is societal lifestyle creep constantly driving up “costs of living” then costs to businesses resulting in fewer jobs, so higher costs to the state so on and so forth.

We need to return to a place whereby we all live within our means without expecting “the government” = other people to pay for us.

Housing costs have increased massively as a proportion of wages over the past few decades. People being unable to afford to rent a flat today is because housing costs have increased far higher than wages, not because they "can't cut their cloth".

I could afford a one bedroom flat aged 20 upon the low wages from my trainee/entry level job, and still had a decent enough amount left over for clothes, socialising, etc. That one bed flat sold for £18.5k whereas checking on Rightmove today, it last sold for £245k a couple of years ago. Wages havn't risen by anywhere near that much over the same period.

House prices were roughly 4 times average wages in the 1980s and they're now 8 times average wages. So twice as much in proportion.

Cost of raw materials and construction is irrelevant. Prices are pitched at the max the market will take calculated by the developers. Their job is to max out their profit - they won’t pass on any savings to the customers.

Truth be told people don’t want social housing to be built. Not in my back yard. Whilst I’m at it social housing rents aren’t subsidised. It’s just that they’re not bloated like the rents charged by private landlords. If you’re looking for anything that’s been subsidised it’s mortgages which have been kept artificially low by interest rates. This was done so that those that had overstretched themselves weren’t repossessed by the lenders. That’s a fact so people need to get off their high horses and have a look at how savers have been affected by the low rates just so they could keep their homes. I suspect they’re the same people that would gleefully see council tenants kicked out to fuck knows where just so they can see themselves as some sort of superior citizens.

"If you’re looking for anything that’s been subsidised it’s mortgages which have been kept artificially low by interest rates. This was done so that those that had overstretched themselves weren’t repossessed by the lenders."

Exactly my take too - but I would add that it was also done to create a false sense of wealth that fed into economic activity and created some desperately needed "growth".

It has only stopped because it had to.

Exactly. If ppl all moved into better paid work who does @ExpectMore think will do the care/supermarket work. It would still need to be done and they would still need somewhere to live. Ditto the people who delivered her orders during the lockdowns.

Imagine if everybody refused to do those jobs because it wouldnt buy a house. In fact i remember an interesting conversation with a till operator at a well known supermarket. A colleugue hadnt turned up to work. Apparently he had phoned in and said he wouldnt be coming in as he was facing eviction as he couldnt afford to pay his private rent due to sporadic shifts and it wouldnt make any difference coming in so he decided to stay home with his feet up instead. This is why we need social housing. Because if you take everything away from ppl till they have nothing left to lose you end up with situations like this There are a few threads on here from MNers moaning when their supermarket delivery hasnt turned up. So we already know what the reaction would be.

My oldest DD was recently paying £1000 a month for a room in a not-that-nice HMO in a crappy bit of London 25 mins walk from a tube or train station.

That's over half her take home pay as a barista - even though her employer pays the London Living Wage rather than NMW. She was also saving to self fund a second degree. She only ate one proper meal a day most days - the free lunch she gets in the coffee shop she works in.

I'm not sure how much better you want people to cut their fucking cloth. If the cloth isn't big enough, it's not making a dress however you cut it!

You’re missing the point. My point is that not all jobs provide the financial means to buy a house, or even rent a house, and individuals need to be mindful of that and cut their cloth accordingly (by, for example, house sharing) rather than allowing continued lifestyle creep.

so those jobs will always be needed, people will always want to do them, but when doing them, they can’t (or at least shouldn’t) expect to have a lifestyle that matches the income of a much higher paid role.

if they want that higher level of living standard, then they crack on and secure the commensurate higher level of income. Creating opportunity for those earlier in their career or with lower lifestyle aspirations to backfill them.

I don’t see what’s hard to understand: clothes need cut accordingly and we need to stop expecting silk cloth on a hessian budget.

Why didn’t she live somewhere cheaper like Manchester whilst saving? Spending £1000 to live in London whilst doing a job that can be done anywhere whilst saving seems silly.

leave that London barista job to someone else who is for example living at home with parents and thus has reduced living costs.

It’s not hard to think these things through.

I do feel that social housing should have limits or checks to ensure need is still being met and if not then there should be support to move. The emotional side is hard to ignore but those in private rentals don’t have the luxury - at any point the landlord can sell up and yet it’s ok for one adult to stay in a four bed house forever after children have left while young families are in cramped housing? It’s not ok

@JenniferBooth They do refuse to do that work! That’s why there are jobs with many vacancies! A good employer will attract staff but some jobs are unskilled and pay accordingly. Some are underpaid of course. However it’s long been the case that there should be two people buying a property with two salaries! This means £50,000 a year and you can buy for .£200,000 easily in some areas. Buying alone has always been problematic.

£200,000? I don’t know where you live but that wouldn’t get you a one bed flat round here. Try £400,000

A friend of mine lived in a shared house share while managing a jewellery shop in Surrey. Management.

And im not missing the point. Once the social contract is broken all bets are off

Social housing tenancies are for life. I can see where you’re coming from, of course I can, but that’s the policy.

Germany is an outlier when it comes to home ownership vs renting. What about the other countries in Europe with higher home ownership that the UK?

And homeownership is not about personal success in life for most people its about housing stability.

If you want to own nothing and be happy nobody is stopping you.

I know, my point is that they shouldn’t be

bet you wouldnt bother to decorate if you knew your house would eventually be repossessed Hope you arent expecting SH tenants to do so.

Why would anyone decorate a rented house? Most tenancy agreements would prevent you from changing wall colours or wallpapering anyway. You'd have to put it back to how it was originally so a waste of time and money.

The answer is less subsidies and let rents drop, the immigration slowdown is already dropping rents and many recent BTL mortgaged landlords will probably be in trouble.

Mortgage approvals are at their lowest on record I believe? That 400k flat will soon be a 300k flat, most areas are seeing demand/sales drop significntly.