Housing Crisis - a novel idea

[sime42]

18 minutes ago, Steven P said:

The new houses being put up, to fill the golf courses around here are 5 bedroomed, 6 bathroom executive houses with 1% 'affordable' houses in the mix.

Never a confirmed bus or train link - which excludes anyone over 65 really looking to the future when they have to give up their cars.

350k+ to exclude anyone under 30

350k+ to exclude anyone with a young family and nursey fees

 

The ideal market I think are 50 year olds with teenage children

 

 

No community centres... a social wasteland

No religious centres... a moral wasteland

No shops... a community wasteland

...and no golf courses... a health wasteland

....

 

That's because the developers are not building houses for people, or community. They're building for profit and cars. (And sanitary ware companies!)

 

Mark Twain used to joke that "golf is a good walk spoiled." Apparently.

 

 

 

[Mike Hill]

1 hour ago, Slicer Dicer said:

But wouldn't there than be loads of empty properties in cities. They're being filled by someone which is probably why people are struggling to find anywhere to rent... 

No cities always fill up,it's where the jobs are

[sime42]

This explains the situation pretty well, the problem with the govt. cosying up with big development companies.

 

How big UK housebuilders have remained profitable without meeting housing supply targets

THECONVERSATION.COM

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A handful of large companies dominate the UK housing market, which may affect new-build supply.

 

[doobin]

4 hours ago, sime42 said:

This explains the situation pretty well, the problem with the govt. cosying up with big development companies.

 

How big UK housebuilders have remained profitable without meeting housing supply targets

THECONVERSATION.COM

---

A handful of large companies dominate the UK housing market, which may affect new-build supply.

 

Help to buy? Don’t make me laugh. Help for developer to profit. A fkin scandal. 

[Mike Hill]

How much do you think a two bed house should cost?

 

 

[pleasant]

You can build a load of affordable new homes for first time buyers, but when those first time buyers wish to start a family, or just want more room for whatever reason then they will need to be able to afford the 'next rung up the ladder' to move on and out of their affordable home for more first time buyers to move into. To enable this, the value of their 'affordable'  home needs to increase proportionally with the market to allow them to stay within touching distance of the next house up the ladder......thus in doing so it removes their current home out of the 'affordable' bracket for first time buyers. If the opposite happens and the affordable home stays relatively static in the marketplace, then those currently residing will never be able to afford to better themselves and will simply have to stay put and clog up the affordable housing sector

[doobin]

46 minutes ago, Mike Hill said:

How much do you think a two bed house should cost?

 

 

3.5 times the average wage, as it did twenty years ago. 

Edited December 1, 2023 by doobin

[pleasant]

31 minutes ago, doobin said:

3.5 times the average wage, as it did twenty years ago. 

I recall when I first purchased, the mortgage lenders standard yardstick for loans was 3 x an annual wage if a sole purchaser. I had to also provide a 5% deposit.....plus more from my savings to afford my 1 bed starter home. That was for the maximum load period of 25 years

Edited December 1, 2023 by pleasant

[doobin]

1 minute ago, pleasant said:

I recall when I first purchased, the mortgage lenders standard yardstick for loans was 3 x an annual wage if a sole purchaser. I had to also provide a 5% deposit.....plus more from my savings to afford my 1 bed starter home.

Yup. The more people are allowed to borrow the more they will bid. It’s all

gone to shit since. The banks have got people right where they want them on the debt treadmill, with abnormaly

low rates pushing up the capital cost higher still. The introduction of buy to let mortgages fuelled prices, and help to buy added £50k straight onto the purchase price of a new build (and Persimons profit per unit) in just two years. 
 

These misguided government interventions over just fifteen years have led to a massive divide between those who were born early enough to buy a house at sensible price to earnings ration and all those who come after them. Landlords have skewed this even further, with a few becoming shockingly rich at the expense of future generations. Buy to let mortgages were always an abomination. It never made sense that a landlord could put down ten percent on an interest only mortgage and cream a couple

of hundred a month off from the difference between an abnormally low interest rate and the rent. Banks lobbied for these changes. Suddenly anyone could become a landlord even without an income to support the loan, and the artificial increase in property values due to government intervention has saved their bacon from reality.  Anyone remember that scene from The Big Short, where the guy is in a strip clubhouse and he realises that a stripper has mortgages on six houses? 
 

This country needs a return to house prices as a sensible multiple of income, sensible interest rates that provide a return upon capital, and an economy based upon producing and manufacturing things of substance. Recently we as a country have lived in a dream state- a financial merry-go-round supported by artificially high property values, selling off national assets, importing cheap tat based upon arbitrage of third world labour, and unrealistically low interest rates allowing us to pretend that we are rich. When countries who sell us the things we are totally dependent upon (and that’s oil) start to refuse our currency, people are in for a rude awakening. 

[AHPP]

This fuqking fiddling while Rome burns drives me crackers. BAD MONEY is the root of all this. When money was vaguely real (linked to gold; finite, reliably hard to mine, durable), you could store wealth in money. Now the central banks print so much paper and digital bullshitcoin, that dilutes the money people have, people need to store wealth elsewhere. They buy land because the Bank of England can't print that and it drives the price up. Add all the rules about planning etc and the seesaw is set to slide one way only. 

 

Spend a few minutes looking up the history and reasoning behind the board game, Monopoly and prepare to be angry forever.

 

 

 

Edited December 1, 2023 by AHPP