Feminism and house prices

[Anniegetyourgun]

An issue I've seen before was raised again in this thread and I thought I'd talk it out here rather than derailing the thread or showing my ignorance .

Issue is that feminism is blamed for the rise in house prices during the 70s/80s. The argument would appear to be that because women were able to (a) work and (b) earn a fair wage for doing so, the laws of supply and demand meant that prices and loans were geared towards double-income households, thus pretty much forcing everyone to go out to work whether it suited them or not, and making it very difficult for single earners to afford to buy a house at all. The net result is to reduce options for women rather than increase them.

There's definitely something that does not stack up here, but I am not an economist (tried doing an economics course at the OU a few years ago, couldn't get my head round it). I mean, there's the obvious point that if the price of housing depends on half the population being either chained to the kitchen sink or paid a lot less for doing the same job, this is unfair - like a society based on slavery, but you see we just can't afford to pay them, it's better for the slaves too etc. Also there are far too many assumptions that all women can get married if they want to (let's not even start on the theory that they should want to!), that working age equates to child-bearing age, that all women can as well as want to give birth, oh, and that all men are able to earn enough money to keep a family. These are all fair points IMO. What I'm looking for, though, is hard economic arguments as to why feminism taking the blame for house price rises is horseshit, because I'm fairly sure it is, but I couldn't tell you why.

Could someone with brains that work and/or who has read Useful Texts on the subject help me out, please?

At least there is acknowledgement there that high house prices are a bad thing. They rose because supply is artificially restricted here, and because the banks, and property rich are so powerful. There was no effort to stop the boom, and sod all discussion of the negative impacts, and what would happen when the bubble inevitably burst.

House prices rose exponentially and the losers were the relatively young and relatively poor, so it seemed a given that the rises were a good thing.

However there is no reason why women having equal rights as men, should mean that households have to work ever longer hours. In my utopia, everyone would work part time hours, making childcare, volunteering, allotments etc easy.

And poor women have always been expected to work.

I'd be interested in this too - as it popped into my head when reading the thread about the MIL's comments about feminism being a factor in her having to work when she'd rather not.

House prices certainly did rise when the attitude to including second income in mortgage applications changed. The cost of housing depends on willingness/ability to pay across the buying public, and so the availability of higher loans within a market of fixed supply mean price rises were inevitable.

Before this, which I think was a factor in the 80s boom, it was quite possible to buy an average house on a manageable multiple of a single average salary. I don't think that's the case any more, and multiples of two incomes are the norm for such properties. Single income buyers can usually only dream of a house - smaller flats are the only prospect.

Well it could be said that house prices were artificially low because women weren't earning.

Personally, I think the argument that feminism is to blame is lazy and inaccurate. Lots of things lead to house price rises. There was a drive and enablement from the government for people to buy their own houses. Banks slackened their requirements for mortgages and yes, women could afford to buy/contribute to houses.

To suggest feminism is to blame is to suggest that women shouldn't really be able to buy houses. Which really shows where the people saying these things are coming from.

From an economist background - You're right - the increase in double-earning households in one of the factors that increased house prices in the past 3 decades, but the other critical factors are:

• Sustained low interest rates
• Huge increase in mortgages at close to, or even above, 100% of the value of the housen
• Development of buy to let mortages, leading to increase in private landlords
• Increasing number of households (from a mixture of birth rates, longer life-expectancy, migration to UK, and smaller average household size)

Against this there has been chronic under-supply of housing because of the planning system in the UK, and people's innate opposition to any housing being built anywhere near them.

SO, you have not enough housing, and increasing abilty to pay for housing, so house prices go up. Increasing double-income households is one factor amoungst many in causing this.

I think it's worth noting (maybe an economist can come along with the actual figures) that as far as I'm aware, house prices didn't track female income/household income in the neat way that this anti-feminist myth demands - the banks' decision to offer high mortgage-to-deposit and high multiples of income mortgages came about 10 to 15 years after the equal pay and female entry into the workforce in large numbers. Also, you have to factor in Thatcher's sell-off of council housing and her insistence that everyone should aspire to property ownership (presumably because all property owners vote Tory ), which left banks thinking there was a vast new marketplace of consumers to be tapped (and changed the way lenders thought about their customer base, ultimately opening the way to sub-prime mortgages and the ensuing financial crisis we're in the middle of now). So the primary driver was capatilism: commercial decisions made by lenders and political decisions made by right wing neo-con economists; not feminism!

purpleroses I'm always amused that those who blame feminism, are so reluctant to acknowledge the role played by longer life expectancy

Cross posted with purpleroses! :)

I think there's a tendency to dumb down any discussion on house prices to 'house prices in the South East of England'. Elsewhere in the country house prices are very different and much more affordable on one salary. The S.E angle is important because the price of houses just in one region can't be simplistically laid at the door of working women. (An argument that I also think is lazy and inaccurate) Women work nationwide, not just in the Home Counties.

Successful companies have congregated in the S.E because our transport links have been historically rubbish, government is Westminster-centric, and other regions of the country and the skill-base of the residents were traditionally geared around dying heavy industries rather than more modern forms of commerce. People like myself moved way out of their home region in search of jobs in the eighties. In 1986 when I bought my first home I could buy a three bed semi in the Yorkshire town I was leaving for £20,000 but only a 2-bed terrace in North Herts for £48,000

I would also add that the phenomenon of 'working women' is also dumbed-down to 'working middle-class women'. Growing up in a working-class area in the 1960's and 1970's, the vast majority of women I knew worked part or full-time to make the housekeeping stretch. The first truly 'SAHM' I met was the mother of my first serious boyfriend. They were a wealthy middle class family that had relocated from the South.

I think that's a good point cogito.

Women have always worked. Just most of them weren't upper-middle-class homeowners. Renting used to be much less stigmatized - there are houses that were built by factory owners for their workers to rent which were initially seen a really impressive bonus. I think that's part of the problem too.

I want to know how much it is about space. DH reckons there's a funny British resistance to living in flats or any kind of dense housing, whereas in lots of places living in skyscrapers or high-rise buildings is either normal, or even a bit chic. I think there's that aspiration to be in a 'naice' semi-detached house when you have children, and that doesn't help.

Where we are house prices are absurdly high (not London but nearly London prices) - and yet there are blocks of ex-council flats sitting unused and unrenovated because no-one wants to live there.

Thanks everyone. Some concepts I was struggling to pin down and some I hadn't thought of.

Re the "commercial decisions by lenders" point, I believe the usual argument to be that lenders will make those decisions on the basis of what the market will bear; thus, knowing that more households had two incomes, they were pretty much bound to exploit that fact. Some, of course, might say that is what regulation is for. But they didn't do financial regulation in the 80s.

... ooh look, the AIBU thread has come over to join us.

I think it's widely acknowledged to be true - when the double-income family became the norm, the price of a standard family house adjusted in line with a standard family income.

But what happened in my city, and presumably many others, was that houses that offered short commutes shot up relative to salaries far more than those that necessitated long commutes. You would need two incomes to buy a house in the belt that means you'd have a commute of less than 45 minutes each way, but if your family follows the old model where one person is available (ie domestically supported) to sit on a train for two hours a day and the other is available to do all the shopping, cooking, and picking up kids, you can still buy on one average income.

I think economics always comes down to swings and roundabouts, essentially.

Annie - I think the trouble is that commercial decision making is both more complicated and less rational than the phrase "what the market will bear". It's not as simple as "our customers can realistically pay X so we will charge them X".

Rather there's a sequence of decisions: "what we think we can get from our customers is Y" (which may or may not be affordable, depending on whether the customers' decisions are rational, fully informed ones - for instance, in the subprime crash, raises in interest rates a year or so into the term of the mortgage) were very carefully hidden in the small print) "The percentage we expect to default is Z" (where that assumption about the percentage may be incorrect). "We can use highly leveraged derivatives as insurance policies against default" (so highly leveraged and complicated that not even the banks themselves understood what they were buying and selling, by the time product within product within product had been packaged up like an absurd financial Russian doll). "The quants (quantitative economists) tell us that this time the market won't be subject to sudden, chaotic - in the technical, mathematical sense- and catatrophic crashes" (contrary to what any knowledge of economic history might have told them). Add to that outright fraud (the serious fraud office is looking into a number of cases of illegal consortia of developers, estate agents and solicitors using "cash back" schemes to deliberately misreport house purchase prices to the land registry in order to send house prices in an area spiralling upwards) and the fact that the commercial interests of the major players (banks, estate agents, developers) may pull in different directions, and you have a recipe for complete chaos - in the everyday sense. The actual income levels of the punters at the bottom end of this monstrous heap were only a tiny ingredient in the mix!

And also - you've got to live somewhere. So when we create a society where the housing stock isn't where the jobs are, social housing is in short supply and mortgages even on multiples of 5 or more times income still come in cheaper than rents in the private sector (propped up by artificially low interest rates, driven by political pressures to do with the budget deficit and trying to keep some sort of liquidity there for industry), it's hardly suprising that people "choose" to over-extend themselves, but it's Hobson's choice, not a real choice.

i think a lot of the problem arose when property became an "investment" and way to make money rather than just a home. Think of all those buy a dump/make a fortune programmes.....

I am sure a good portion of the rise in productivity that came with women not being marginalised (quite so much) at work did get captured into house prices.

That is what happens when you have a class of asset that is limited - in this case land, further limited by restrictive planning permission.

(it's the same thing with farming- as agricultural productivity goes up it isn't farmers who get richer it's landowners)

A good portion of the gains in productivity from computers and other technological advances also ended up in rising house prices. But no body is going to say that computers were to blame for rising house prices (...and therefore were a bad idea..?)

If you want house prices to come down you have to make it possible to build more houses (or for cheaper areas of the country to become attractive and take the heat off the overheated SE).

I do think what Ninedragons said is interesting though - basically there is split pricing for middle class family houses - short commutable require two incomes to support, long commutable require one income to support but you need a SAHP to make the lifestyle viable. One problem that this causes I think is that people move out to the suburbs when the wife is taking a career break, and then she finds that she can't ever get back to work because the commute makes having two working parents unviable.

Now that, you see, was why I had such a job getting my head round the economics course. The financial world is tremendously complicated, as you point out, but it seems economists pick and choose which factors they feel are significant, sometimes (in my view) cheating rather, in order to come to the result they wanted. Hence the old joke, "if all the economists in the world were placed end to end they still wouldn't reach a conclusion". And then yer actual lay person only picks up on the bit that reinforces their prejudice anyway. Hence, all the excellent contributions from posters here would still boil down to

"it's all the fault of them bloody feminists"

if that's what the reader wanted to believe.

To go back a bit, HoleyGhost's utopia sounds pretty good to me, but that would be kind of like Socialism, so we can't do that. Obviously. Just because.

"DH reckons there's a funny British resistance to living in flats or any kind of dense housing"

He's got a point actually. One of the biggest pressures on the amount of available housing is the increasing number of single person households and the number of under-occupied houses. The population has not risen very fast but the number of individual households has ballooned. Again, where I grew up, a lot of people had various elderly relatives living in the house with them - now they're shipped off to care homes. Young people didn't leave home 'until they got married'... and often lived with parents after they got married until they'd saved up a deposit on their own place. (A trend that is coming back) Houses were much fuller!!!!

Now you could - ironically for this discussion - lay some of that under-crowding at the door of progress in gender equality. When women were entirely financially dependent on a husband and could accumulate no assets of their own they often didn't have any choice than to stick around and stick it out. 2 people in 1 house. Now, thankfully, we're far freer to live independently and many of us choose to do so.

That's true too, but wasn't what I was initially thinking of.

What I was thinking about was the way that, whereas where DH is from, it'd be normal for a couple to live in a one-bed flat with maybe a kitchen-living room and a bedroom and a bathroom, it's 'aspirational' in the UK for a couple to live in a two-up, two-down house, so they've got a spare room, and a living room downstairs, and so on. It just takes more space. By and large, I think people in the UK want to move out of flats and see high-rise buildings as undesirable. Even though for lots of people that is what is affordable.

The flats near me standing empty are right up against small two-up two-down houses that you'd rent for over a grand a month. It seems absurd no-one wants to live there.

I don't think aspirations of more house-room are uniquely British tbh. There is that ideal of 'your own front door' I suppose, we have a history of building truly horrible tower-blocks, and it's true that ownership definitely trumps rental in British culture. But, working as closely as I do with people from all kinds of European countries, I know they love that extra bit of living space just as much as the rest of us.

There is a huge effort now to support elderly people living longer in their homes as it is considered much cheaper than supporting them in care homes. The elderly people I know have home help coming in several times a day to look after them - I don't know how long this policy has been in place, and I don't know the details of what costs are taken into account when they make these comparisons. Obviously the benefits of this policy are harder still to measure, and support to remain in their own homes is exactly what the people in question seem to want.

Life expectancy has increased massively, and many of these elderly people are in homes which are very poorly suited to their changing needs (tiny bathrooms that can't be adapted, steps to front and back doors, narrow doorways and no space for a downstairs loo etc).

I also know some young families who don't have space for a dining table, or where the parents are sleeping in the living room, and there is no realistic prospect of them "moving up a rung" on the property ladder.

In theory it would be good if it was more common for people to move into retirement flats before they become infirm - so that they have the good health and energy to get themselves established in a community, and to free up more housing which would be suitable for families. However, none of the older people I know would be willing to consider it.

"DH reckons there's a funny British resistance to living in flats or any kind of dense housing"

I think that's because the dense housing we tend to have here is both tiny and grim (much like many houses actually) unlike in other countries.

I could live in the nice bit of downtown Vancouver, in a 1200sq ft 2 bed/bath flat with facilities. For the same price, in a grottier bit of outer london I can afford a 2 bed flat with no facilities, and it's less than half the size. I couldn't afford to live in the equivalent bit of London at all.

People in the UK live in rabbit hutches in comparison to most other countries I've lived in (Hong Kong being the exception)

I went to view a flat in a grim tower block a couple of years ago - one of those horrible, scary looking ones that went up in the 60s. Its location was so ideal for DH and I, and the advertised rent was so cheap, we felt we had to check it out. The maisonette flat had been very thoughtfully designed, with lots of storage space and decent sized rooms. The flat was fabulous, and we offered more than the advertised rent, only to find that somebody else had offered them even more . The owner had told us that that ugly style of tower block was designed from the inside out, with function being prioritised over external appearance.

I would much sooner have lived there than the newbuild flats we viewed which did not have any storage space whatsoever and had miserably poky rooms.

Fair enough cogito, my point was only anecdotal, you'd know better.

I did wonder about what chunky says being true though - we do seem to be really bad at building decent flats.