Millennial don’t need living rooms!

[Crofter]

Any housing solution that doesn't address the role of buy to let is working with a hand tied behind its back.

Not that I blame individuals for choosing to invest this way, maybe if there was more pension security or other safe investments it would help though. Also build to let should be encouraged as an alternative.

[ProDave]

There are certainly a lot of conflicting signals doing the rounds at the moment.

 

So we have a housing shortage? and (in some parts of the country) record breaking house prices and a booming market.

 

But today we are told the construction sector shrunk 3.3% in the first quarter of this year. If that continues, that's a 12% decline in a year.  So why is that? And that's not going to get all the houses the politicians promised built is it?

 

I don't have the solution, other than why do so many crave to be in the SE of England? That's where the silly high house prices are and the "shortage" of housing. The rest of the UK does not really have a problem.  Yet nobody seems to even talk about that let alone address it.

 

Personally we were happy to leave the overcrowded SE 15 years ago and there is no way I would ever go back.

[SteamyTea]

My end of the SW has an affordability problem, even though house prices are pretty low (last time I looked PZ was similar to MK).

One problem is employment, or the lack of permanent employment, lenders don't want to lend to 'Gig' workers and Gig workers cannot rely on a steady income.  Cornwall has been Gigging for decades, just the way it is down here.

Edited April 27, 2018 by SteamyTea

[StructuralEngineer]

On 27/04/2018 at 15:21, daiking said:

I’m not going to waste my time reading it if the word planning has not come up in any of the précis.

Actually I think the whole point of the article is that planning and other government interventions need to be relaxed. You might like the article.

[newhome]

I think one of the issues is the one size fits all approach to building regs so every new build home must have a downstairs cloakroom that can fit a wheelchair in. That means that some starter homes have a downstairs loo almost the same size as their kitchen. The first home I bought was pretty tiny with a small living room and a kitchen downstairs and a very small bathroom and 2 beds (1 single, 1 double) upstairs. If it needed an accessible cloakroom to be added that would have been the living room pretty much gone leaving a kitchen come living room I guess. If you ask millennials if they would rather have a separate living room than a large downstairs loo I imagine the majority would say yes. It’s not that I don’t see a need for accessible houses, but there are many issues with affordability of housing today and some of the building regs do nothing to help address this. 

[newhome]

On 27/04/2018 at 19:37, ProDave said:

Personally we were happy to leave the overcrowded SE 15 years ago and there is no way I would ever go back.

 

I guess people want to live near their friends and family for the most part. It didn’t bother me when I moved up with my husband but now that I’m on my own I will return to the SE once I retire. I do love the fact that there are far fewer people up here however and I know that my downsized property is likely to cost more than this relatively large one, but I can’t envisage staying here on my own forever. Different if you have family around you. 

 

[Crofter]

3 hours ago, newhome said:

I think one of the issues is the one size fits all approach to building regs so every new build home must have a downstairs cloakroom that can fit a wheelchair in. That means that some starter homes have a downstairs loo almost the same size as their kitchen. The first home I bought was pretty tiny with a small living room and a kitchen downstairs and a very small bathroom and 2 beds (1 single, 1 double) upstairs. If it needed an accessible cloakroom to be added that would have been the living room pretty much gone leaving a kitchen come living room I guess. If you ask millennials if they would rather have a separate living room than a large downstairs loo I imagine the majority would say yes. It’s not that I don’t see a need for accessible houses, but there are many issues with affordability of housing today and some of the building regs do nothing to help address this. 

 

Do we need accessibility features for every single new home? If it is causing other problems, maybe the system could be arranged such that incentives are put in place to ensure at least a certain proportion of dwellings comply.

[newhome]

7 minutes ago, Crofter said:

 

Do we need accessibility features for every single new home? If it is causing other problems, maybe the system could be arranged such that incentives are put in place to ensure at least a certain proportion of dwellings comply.

 

I think there should be exceptions dependent on the size of the ground floor and the target market. So what would traditionally be a starter home could be exempt because the risk that accessibility may be needed in those properties is less than homes targeted at the retirement sector for example. I don’t know why absolutely everything has to be on a one size fits all basis. 

[Ferdinand]

On 27/04/2018 at 18:21, Crofter said:

Any housing solution that doesn't address the role of buy to let is working with a hand tied behind its back.

Also build to let should be encouraged as an alternative.

 

Would be interested in seeing some proposals on that.

 

Mr Osborne crippled Buy to Let in his 2014 and 2015 budgets, and new money via BTL mortgages went down by 50-80% depending whether you measure from trend or the March 2016 spike, and has not recovered. And many of the measures such as business expenses being treated as taxable income have still to come in.

 

Scotland has taken measures that increased rents and will now restrict supply of rental by making evictions much harder, so will be interesting to watch, and has just locked the poorest up in Council Estates permanently by ending council house sales.

 

Quite a number of Council Landlord Licensing schemes in England require landlords to sign up to breach their tenants’ privacy rights, which is itself criminal iirc. Liverpool has been a fiasco.

 

Dipstick Andy Burnham wants to spend 10s more millions of tenants money on a citywide licensing scheme in Manchester, when the last very similar one was canned a decade ago because it did not deliver the predicted benefits, as was demonstrated by independent research.

 

Criminalising rentals to people with no right to work will leave those people in the illegal sector or on the street - how are the rough sleeping figures looking, ma’am?

 

And Ireland has rolled back some similar measures taken 20 years ago because it wrecked the market.

 

One of the issues is that perhaps £30bn a year of investment into housing has now been choked off, of which a large chunk was refurbishing houses that ftbs cannot touch. Who is going to cover the gap?

 

Interesting times.

 

F

Edited April 30, 2018 by Ferdinand

[SteamyTea]

23 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

how are the rough sleeping figures looking, ma’am?

About 5000 people nationally, 100 in Cornwall, the third worse place in the UK.

So realistically not a large problem, one that needs sorting and would be cheap to do so.

[newhome]

16 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

About 5000 people nationally, 100 in Cornwall, the third worse place in the UK.

So realistically not a large problem, one that needs sorting and would be cheap to do so.

 

Although there are other issues at play there that can’t be addressed by simply finding someone a place to live. Mental health issues for one. 

[SteamyTea]

Oh yeah.  It is a difficult problem, but the current policy of moving them on or criminalising them is not the solution.

[Ferdinand]

43 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

About 5000 people nationally, 100 in Cornwall, the third worse place in the UK.

So realistically not a large problem, one that needs sorting and would be cheap to do so.

 

I think the number has roughly trebled since 2010 (?).

 

Agree it is relatively straightforward to fix in theory, but not for those who want to sleep rough.

 

Politically TM is creating a spectacle that will damage her govt, and denying herself the means to fix it - which I find a little baffling. Even though she is as wooden as a tree-stump and as imaginative as a house brick, she should see that a mile away and have fixed it years ago.

 

[SteamyTea]

I should really have said rough sleeping, rather than homeless.

Many people are homeless i.e. B&B, hotels, etc, not many are actually rough sleeping.

 

My solution would be to have a mortgage tax that is independent of the interest rate. It would be set so that mortgaged property is 3 times median wage.  That could be set locally fairly easily as a house does not move.

As long as people know what the tax is based on, and why it is there (to keep house prices affordable), then I cannot see a problem with it.

Might also raise some useful revenue if it was administered via LAs.

Edited April 30, 2018 by SteamyTea