the housing shortage.

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fatdog said:
We all know we have not for enough houses at present its causing prices to rise so a lot of people can only dream of owning their own home. Building houses everywhere is ruining towns and villages as the services are not being added. What is the answer you ask?

I give you..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...ouncil-houses-is-occupied-by-a-foreigner.html

do you think should we be housing the world if you come here you should be able to provide a roof over you're own head and have a job to provide for yourself and family surely it's not much to ask if you want to live in this wonderful country.

Am I being unreasonable, some here no doubt of the liberal kind will think so but why?
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Just a heads up in case you thought you were actually adding anything, or challenging anything, or doing anything, or making a difference in any way : this íslamist' thing you're doing in every thread since you joined a few weeks ago probably doesn't add to the debate you think you're starting because we have a few of a similar type here already and they also have a comical grasp of politics and the English language and people who are not them, their family or their friends.

I'm genuinely curious as to why you joined a computer forum to talk about UKIP and why foreigners are awful. That's not a personal attack but it is a pointed question.

Thanks for answering in advance :-)
 
cheesyboy said:
So why is the solution "bash the foreigner" rather than "build houses AND appropriate services"?
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Whilst foreigner bashing from this angle is wrong, it does play part. More so the super rich buying up homes either to rent or just leave empty until they decide to use it 2 weeks of the year.

As has been said, where are we going to get the money to build huge amount of housing and infrastructure?

If we do find a massive money tree what Government is really going to fix the housing crisis?

'Home owners of the UK, we are going to fix the housing crisis and meet demand with supply devaluing your current homes by many 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. Yep, your retirement plans will be screwed. Please vote for us.'
 
balky12 said:
Whilst foreigner bashing from this angle is wrong, it does play part. More so the super rich buying up homes either to rent or just leave empty until they decide to use it 2 weeks of the year.

As has been said, where are we going to get the money to build huge amount of housing and infrastructure?

If we do find a massive money tree what Government is really going to fix the housing crisis?

'Home owners of the UK, we are going to fix the housing crisis and meet demand with supply devaluing your current homes by many 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. Yep, your retirement plans will be screwed. Please vote for us.'
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this is surely another serious problem, because so many people have their house as their main asset. People are mortgaged to the maximum. If lots of new housing were built then surely it would devalue all existing stock.
 
I worked for a firm that supplied safety gear ETC to the building trade which included most of the major house builders. Many of them bought up land, acquired the necessary planning permissions then sat on the land waiting on the value to increase before selling it on or building houses which would now be worth a fair bit more.

Of course many of them were caught out by the crash of 2008 and were left with land that they could not afford to build on.
 
balky12 said:
If we do find a massive money tree what Government is really going to fix the housing crisis?

'Home owners of the UK, we are going to fix the housing crisis and meet demand with supply devaluing your current homes by many 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. Yep, your retirement plans will be screwed. Please vote for us.'
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Bingo. Rising house prices is a vote winner. Particularly among the wealthy baby-boomer generation who, coincidentally, are both large in number and consistently high in voting turn-out. They also happen to be total ***** with regard NIMBYism; further preventing new housing development.

And whilst we're pandering to that demographic, we'll just carry on ****ing over those who follow.

As for paying for it; the housing market is inflating at a rate far above GDP. Anything that gets built will be gobbled up with a pretty tasty return for developers.
 
neocon said:
this is surely another serious problem, because so many people have their house as their main asset. People are mortgaged to the maximum. If lots of new housing were built then surely it would devalue all existing stock.
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Managed devaluation of the housing stock is a good thing. We should target sub-inflationary rises in house prices for the foreseeable future. Providing house prices don't actually fall the effect on home owners will not be negative; it would push people to stop treating their homes as an investment which is another positive benefit.

Money in housing is doing minimal useful work; much better for people to invest in more productive areas of the economy.

Since I bought my current house three years I have received somewhere around a 50% return on the money I put in as a deposit - that's more than I've paid in mortgage interest even ignoring the additional benefits of home ownership (not paying rent, being able to rent a room out, stability, etc.). That's great for me, obviously, but it's a stupid way to set up a economy. I get money, literally, for nothing.
 
cheesyboy said:
As for paying for it; the housing market is inflating at a rate far above GDP. Anything that gets built will be gobbled up with a pretty tasty return for developers.
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Who will in turn sit on their return. Not wanting the money train to slow down.

In it's simplist terms... save save save. Save 1 - 2 years gross salary then put it on a deposit for a house and join the gravy train.
 
Mr Jack said:
Since I bought my current house three years I have received somewhere around a 50% return on the money I put in as a deposit - that's more than I've paid in mortgage interest even ignoring the additional benefits of home ownership (not paying rent, being able to rent a room out, stability, etc.). That's great for me, obviously, but it's a stupid way to set up a economy. I get money, literally, for nothing.
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Old man bought his current house in 2000 for £300k. During its peak it hit about £800k, now floating around £600k.

Don't have to be good at maths to figure out he hasn't done too badly without the need to go into mortgage payments over the last 14 years...

edit. It forms a very nice chunk of his retirement plans... so he is one of those who would like to see the trend continue. Can you blame him. Like you said, all that money for doing very little...
 
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We should be building houses people can afford.

Current government schemes are pushing up prices, it's developers throwing up the worst quality of housing on overcrowded estates usually with cheap polish labour, ruining areas of natural beauty or knocking down listed buildings for it, and selling them for a ridiculous markup because the mortgages are supported by the government.

People then get locked into mortgages they can barely afford and with negative equity in an increasingly scummy estate in a house which will fall to bits.

There needs to be more regulation in terms of the quality of houses, the location, the supporting services and the inevitable FAIR sale of houses to buyers.

It's just making things worse at the moment while developers fill their pockets. Why can't the government support the people of Britain for once, hire some British developers and British tradesmen to build proper houses and sell them for a fair price, it's not too much to ask?

Or even, like my great grandfather did, community house building projects. Pity the red tape can be lifted for developers but no one else.
 
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fatdog said:
do you think should we be housing the world if you come here you should be able to provide a roof over you're own head and have a job to provide for yourself and family surely it's not much to ask if you want to live in this wonderful country.

Am I being unreasonable, some here no doubt of the liberal kind will think so but why?
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Are council houses exclusively the domain of people who don't have jobs? Do people in council houses always not provide for themselves and their families? If the answer to either of those questions is no then your starting premise is flawed and any argument you make from it is at best diminished if not outright wrong.

While we're on the subject the 2011 census gives the foreign born population as around 7.5m which equated to around 12% of the population so a reasonable conclusion might be that 12% of council housing would also go to them if it was a consistent level of need across British born and foreign born nationals. Yet you actually see that it's about 9% of council homes (according to that article) which are occupied by foreigners so if anything they're under-represented - perhaps the figures behind the headline don't make for such exciting rhetoric though?
 
neocon said:
I think it'll keep growing uncontrollably or crash and I'm betting on growth. It's a religion
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It will crash at some point. has to... it's driven by first time buyers, who are struggling. Although the help to buy scheme helped a bit, and drove prices up further.... making it slowly more difficult again.

Famous last words.
 
Anyone want to cost me up an extra 1 million houses, including costing for increased provisions for the following: water, electricity, sewage, road systems, new hospitals including increased NHS costs, doctors, dentists, schools, public services, public transport services...

It's all well and good building houses to house increasing numbers, but the current systems can't physically cope with the number of people using them, so what's the point?
 
bloodiedathame said:
Anyone want to cost me up an extra 1 million houses, including costing for increased provisions for the following: water, electricity, sewage, road systems, new hospitals including increased NHS costs, doctors, dentists, schools, public services, public transport services...

It's all well and good building houses to house increasing numbers, but the current systems can't physically cope with the number of people using them, so what's the point?
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Correct. The area where I'm at is overloaded. Go further into other areas near and they are overloaded too.

Can't build any more houses without effecting the above. There's just too many people in the world and services are crumbling.
 
Nobody is denying that it would be expensive, but an increasing population size isn't a new thing, it shouldn't have surprised anyone, but that hasn't stopped successive governments spending 30 years not building enough new homes.
 
BTL doesn't help the situation but it's coming up with a way that makes it not as attractive to hold large amounts of property assets without any rise in cost or taxes simply being passed on to tenants.

Two things that could be looked at:-
Limit BTL mortgages to 50% LTV
Tax income from rental more heavily, or, remove the ability to write off mortgage interest against tax.
 
If services are unable to cope, why are we not clamoring for more investment into services? Why is the government continuing to make cuts, and continuing to pressure councils into not increasing council tax?

Besides which, more houses doesn't equal more NHS costs.
 
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