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.

The single biggest change for good that can happen to housing and community assets in this country would be a massive explosion in the number of true ‘community led’ projects.

Communities need to come together and take control of their own housing needs, not leave it up to volume developers to build thousands of homes that no-one can afford to buy.

www.futureoflondon.org.uk/news/londons-new-wave-of-community-led-housing/

The best thing would just be a price crash, the more things in the ME deteriorate the more that becomes likely, it would save a new generation of borrowers from massive debts for basic property.

I think a slow deflation is better than a crash. Basically what we are seeing now but in pockets. Flats, London. Leaseholds.
Am a homeowner but have three adult children so am watching with interest.
The confidence has gone. That’s the first ingredient for a downturn. House pricing is not logical but based on hopes and dreams and confidence. I love to see the rational choices people are making now and a return to at least some caution.

agreed
when I bought my house the solicitor said with the size of deposit I had "you could buy a nicer house"
30 years later it is the only property I have ever bought and I have been mortgage free for the last 25 years whereas my uni contemporaries are still working because they have massive houses with mortgages running until almost their retirement date

If rates get cranked it will be a crash, UK market has never done "slow deflation" as far as I am aware?

It will never be solved

On a more realistic tone, who is going to marry the single young guys coming on the boats? When they will start working, where and are they going to pay the tax needed for the locally born elderly? Why no one talks about the obvious problem

Because statistically the number of people who come here on boats illegally is tiny compared with the number who immigrate to the UK legally.

For example in 2025, approximately 813,000 people migrated to the UK, of which 41,472 arrived via the boats, so about 5%

Returning to the OP, the biggest impact on house prices has been the growth in population of 10 million in the last 20 years, of which 98% has been due to immigration, as our "net birth rate" has been falling and is now negative.

They’ll just slip into the illegal black economy, money laundering, illegal work, unregistered slum landlord accommodation, fake self employment van driving or just eat deliveries or hand car wash, modern slavery, fake identification, etc.

You miss their point. The goal is to get settled, and then once citizenship is obtained, import family and a suitable spouse.

Biggest impact on house prices has been cheap mortgage debt, doesn"t matter how many people are here, if they don"t get the affordable (on a monthly basis that is) debt they don"t buy houses.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyp1ekd584o

They still need houses,

Everyone viewing a property to buy or rent already lives somewhere, have you ever known of a homeless person walking into an EA and being allowed to view a property for sale or rent?

So many reasons why that argument simply doesn't stack up.

They may be living in university halls and needing their own flat/HMO/house upon leaving University.

They may be living in an HMO but need to change locations for work etc and need a place to live in the new city.

They may be living at home, but need a place to live in a new city if they get a job in a different city.

Children eventually leave home, one way or another, and need somewhere to live.

Couples split up so you need two homes instead of one.

Couple have children, so their one bedroom flat is no longer suitable and they need more bedrooms, either a larger flat or a small house.

But in all your examples they vacate a space that someone else can take, even leaving parents frees up space for a lodger, you are trying too hard to deny the obvious, there are more than enough housing units and the UK is awash with unsold housing units.

Don't be ridiculous. In reality, parents aren't going to let out their kids' rooms to lodgers. The kids will be coming back during Uni holidays, Christmas, etc and will expect their old room. Look at the sheer number of OAPs rattling around in houses far too big for them - they're not letting them out to lodgers.

Only Uni students can take Uni accommodation rooms. With the numbers attending Uni falling, especially overseas students, there are going to be lots of empty Uni flats/halls.

The reality is that the empty/under occupied housing is going to stay that way. People working in London aren't going to occupy some of the streets of empty run down homes in Liverpool or Newcastle.

There's a lot we could and should be doing to bring unused/underused homes back into use, but part of that is societal change, i.e. reverse the brain drain to London, revolutionise planning to bring empty flats about High Street shops back into use, give councils a kick up the bum to sell/redevelop homes where the occupier has gone into a care home and they're left empty for a decade or two before the council do anything, etc. But you're not going to get parents to let out their kids rooms to lodgers any time soon.

Yes, I agree, but that doesn"t change the fact that no one who is homeless is in the market for buying or renting property.

The housing crisis is about more than homeless people.

Yes, it is about houses being too expensive due to years of cheap mortgage debt and the public not really being able to understand how they were farmed by the money lenders for basic shelter.

What was the public supposed to do? Rent and be framed by Landlords?

Pretending that all private rents are excessive and ignoring that HA rents are cheaper and partly/fully covered by benefits to say that mortgage debt is the only way to go is just classic money lender meme, and now more and more young people are just staying at home, so that is another large chunk of the population that doesn"t need a mortgage, and this is definitely being reflected in the mortgage approval stats.

I never mentioned HA rents and kids living at home. Nor did I say that mortgage debt was “the only way to go”. It is a legitimate choice rather that paying higher rent for something that someone else owns. .

You claimed that the housing bubble required “very large numbers of people” to have “gorged on cheap debt”. I asked why you were not bothered about the banks, regulators, government policy, etc and housing supply which all played significant roles in what happened. You are remarkably tight lipped about those. Fringe actors were they? Bringing housing association tenants and young adults currently living with their parents into it... Yeah that's really relevant🙄

You don't get to bring sweeping generalisations to the table yourself and then dismiss someone else's argument for supposedly generalising. For many people, owning their own home is greatest form of housing stability. We live in a country where people are entitled to spend their already taxed money on homes, if they choose to. Surely HA homes should be left for people who need them not people who can afford to live elsewhere.

All we have established is that you will use any straw man argument to justify confiscating the money and assets of workers who have worked hard for them.

1. Unlikely that rent is higher than mortgage in many parts of the country now, and remember many of the agents publishing stats about "achievable rents" have a vested interest in getting landlords onto their books so tend to exaggerate or use samples that make rents look high across the board.

2. I have said that the banks, regulators, politicians and media cheerleading it all deliberately created the conditions for a massive housing/secured lending bubble so that the public didn"t notice lack of proper wage rises and the vested interests at the top of the Pyramid could cream off profit and bonus, the public gladly went along with this ridiculous scam based on basic shelter for many years. Hardly "tight lipped"!?

3. People were not "buying" with hard earned taxed income they were "buying" with cheap mortgage debt from the global wave of cheap credit created by the zero rate experiment and massive money printing! Stop making it sound like people worked and sweated so their ex-council house they bought for 150k could be worth 3 or 4 times that, it was cheap debt and dumb borrowers, nothing else!

1.There is a shortage of housing at affordable prices in many of the places people want or need to live for work. Unsurprisingly, that also means high rents.

2.So after acknowledging that banks, regulators, politicians and monetary policy deliberately created the conditions for the bubble, we've arrived back at blaming the people who needed somewhere to live for participating in the market that was created for them. Victim blaming, essentially.

3.And yes, people absolutely were paying for their homes with hard-earned, taxed income. A mortgage is used to finance the purchase. Where do you think the payments come from to pay the mortgage? There is no magic money tree. Hard earned income handed over monthly for the next 25, 30 or 40 years.

Nobody claimed homeowners personally worked hard to create all of the subsequent capital appreciation. But that is a different argument. If I purchase a fixer upper and do it up then an element of the appreciation is actually down to me. But broader HPI is not. That element is reasonable to discuss.

Saying that calling out people who took on BTL, holiday home, AirBnB debt as well as their personal home mortgage as responsible for their own debt decisions as "victim blaming" just shows that you are too emotionally involved, maybe you lost money, maybe you have too much debt, but you do not seem to have a clear point to make, my point is basically that it was a massive cheap debt Ponzi and the bubble is now bursting, individuals who participated at all the different levels from buying a small home to live in to buying up multiple properties so they could farm students/tourists whatever just have to deal with it.