Orwell upset his socialist friends with the book Road to Wigan Pier by pointing out that most landlords were retired old ladies trying to squeeze a meagre living out of one or two properties. I became an inadvertent landlord by buying the house I was renting an apartment in. All I can say is that not all tenants are a joy and being a landlord is a nuisance. The issue millennials don’t seem to want to acknowledge is the link between immigration and housing costs. Canada brought in 950,000 immigrants last year. That is almost triple the number that we used to admit. They all go to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. You can rail against landlords with their one bedroom investment condo all you like – but until these immigration numbers come down we will be in a perpetual housing affordability crisis.
I’m a Millennial, YIMBY and rented for around a decade before being able to buy with my wife and I agree on immigration completely. Mass migration and NIMBYism are the two plagues that are ruining this country and making life miserable for the majority.
In the US it was a government decision to make homes the only investment of the commons. One cannot build a national economy on housing you need factories.
In the US it was a government decision to make homes the only investment of the commons. One cannot build a national economy on housing you need factories.
With you that immigration is *part* of the problem but I’d say that the *demand* for housing by the wealthy (very much alive and kicking and far from ‘old’ as Matt Goodwin so deceivingly calls them) elite is the biggest and most under-discussed driver here. There is no shortage of housing. It is a distribution problem caused by a house building sector (which like any insufficiently regulated industry) serves the highest bidder, not those most in need. There are more houses than *households* in Britain, because of a growing asset class which is hoarding them as safe investments – a fact far more people need to be aware of.
There is no shortage of housing. The problem is that it is often not where people want to live.
You refer to the housebuilding sector as insufficiently regulated but in fact it is often the over-regulation that is the problem. Of course a commercial builder is only going to build if there is a profit in it for him and planning regulations make many schemes uneconomic. Regulations seek to force builders to build housing that is for the less-well-off and is consequently less profitable or even unprofitable and this pushes up the price of the other housing they are building as part of the development. House building is a low margin business.
Equally regulations that make it more difficult for landlords to get rid of nuisance tenants make many who buy for investment, to try to maintain the value of their money not necessarily to actually make a profit, reluctant to let the property out as it is more hassle than it is worth if they get a dud tenant that doesn’t pay and trashes the property. A lot of overseas investors keep their properties empty for this reason.
The problem is that there is a shortage of houses and flats to let where people want to live compared to the constantly increasing number of people in the UK.
If all you are after is very cheap housing buy a property in an one of the isolated Italian villages where you can get property for a few pounds. Or if you don’t want to go abroad there are plenty of very cheep properties in former mining villages in Durham. The problem is that most people want to live near where there is work and a thriving local economy. Supply and demand is always what drives prices not wicked greedy landlords.
This is what I have told young people and now my kids. Avoid the big cities. Move to a small town. Not only will housing be affordable – but they are desperate for many trades and professions. For example there are too many lawyers in cities but a shortage in rural areas. You may have a lower salary but the housing costs alone will offset that.
True nimbyism AND planning are issues. Between bat houses and newt protection it’s pretty much impossible to get a site to development under 2 years (and that’s going it). We are childless living in the home ounties. We want thwm to build but are astonishwd by the attitudes of our neigh ours who all have kids but don’t want new homes. Not sure how pulling up the ladder on your own offspring works in an evolutionary perspective. Since so many primary homes are now pensions perhaps survical of thw fittest stsrting with them.
Supply is controlled; real estate does not operate in a free market. Agents curb listings of lagging properties. Certainly with an appreciating asset putting a tenant in a property is a liability; especially since one is making so much money with the rising equity.
This is what I have told young people and now my kids. Avoid the big cities. Move to a small town. Not only will housing be affordable – but they are desperate for many trades and professions. For example there are too many lawyers in cities but a shortage in rural areas. You may have a lower salary but the housing costs alone will offset that.
True nimbyism AND planning are issues. Between bat houses and newt protection it’s pretty much impossible to get a site to development under 2 years (and that’s going it). We are childless living in the home ounties. We want thwm to build but are astonishwd by the attitudes of our neigh ours who all have kids but don’t want new homes. Not sure how pulling up the ladder on your own offspring works in an evolutionary perspective. Since so many primary homes are now pensions perhaps survical of thw fittest stsrting with them.
Supply is controlled; real estate does not operate in a free market. Agents curb listings of lagging properties. Certainly with an appreciating asset putting a tenant in a property is a liability; especially since one is making so much money with the rising equity.
Housing is the main cause of inflation. But the Catch 22 is that home values cannot be lowered because of the amount of profit those elite nobles and old ladies would lose.
True it would damage consumer confidence and so possibly crash the economy. Hence why researchers like Beth Stratford have proposed a scheme called the common ground trust where (after the raft of necessary measures starts bringing down house prices) the government would buy up the land under houses for a minimum price to prevent homeowners going into negative equity/lose money on their houses. This would also have the added advantage of putting more land into the hands of the state, ensuring that it can profit from house sales while not allowing prices to reach such atronomical heights again, as is the effect of state land ownership in Singapore, which the Tories say we’re supposed to be trying to be more like.
True it would damage consumer confidence and so possibly crash the economy. Hence why researchers like Beth Stratford have proposed a scheme called the common ground trust where (after the raft of necessary measures starts bringing down house prices) the government would buy up the land under houses for a minimum price to prevent homeowners going into negative equity/lose money on their houses. This would also have the added advantage of putting more land into the hands of the state, ensuring that it can profit from house sales while not allowing prices to reach such atronomical heights again, as is the effect of state land ownership in Singapore, which the Tories say we’re supposed to be trying to be more like.
There is no shortage of housing. The problem is that it is often not where people want to live.
You refer to the housebuilding sector as insufficiently regulated but in fact it is often the over-regulation that is the problem. Of course a commercial builder is only going to build if there is a profit in it for him and planning regulations make many schemes uneconomic. Regulations seek to force builders to build housing that is for the less-well-off and is consequently less profitable or even unprofitable and this pushes up the price of the other housing they are building as part of the development. House building is a low margin business.
Equally regulations that make it more difficult for landlords to get rid of nuisance tenants make many who buy for investment, to try to maintain the value of their money not necessarily to actually make a profit, reluctant to let the property out as it is more hassle than it is worth if they get a dud tenant that doesn’t pay and trashes the property. A lot of overseas investors keep their properties empty for this reason.
The problem is that there is a shortage of houses and flats to let where people want to live compared to the constantly increasing number of people in the UK.
If all you are after is very cheap housing buy a property in an one of the isolated Italian villages where you can get property for a few pounds. Or if you don’t want to go abroad there are plenty of very cheep properties in former mining villages in Durham. The problem is that most people want to live near where there is work and a thriving local economy. Supply and demand is always what drives prices not wicked greedy landlords.
Housing is the main cause of inflation. But the Catch 22 is that home values cannot be lowered because of the amount of profit those elite nobles and old ladies would lose.
I sometimes think about buying real estate as an investment and every time I investigate, I come away thinking its all a Ponzi scheme. Just look at the asking price on rental properties – add up the rents and deduct the cost of borrowing, maintenance and tax and you will find in all cases there’s not enough income there to provide a return on your equity. The only hope of getting ahead is that the value of the real estate will continue to increase and you can sell for a big ‘profit’ to the next sucker. Governments tell us that house price inflation is not real inflation, and instruct us to ignore their money printing and only to look at their heavily manipulated ‘consumer price indexes’ – but the massive money printing of the last 20 years is clearly the main culprit. The houses did not become more ‘valuable’ – the money became less valuable, and all that ‘new’ money had nowhere to go but housing (and crypto etc). But don’t call such gambling an ‘investment’. They turned the entire residential real estate market into a Ponzi scheme where the best you can hope for is more asset inflation and getting out before it crashes. Landlords in this situation will never invest in their units because they are already underwater paying the massive mortgages. They just poor money in and hope that asset inflation and immigration will keep the music playing just a little longer.
Exactly right
Where did all the printed money go? It is not under a mattress somewhere near you. It went into asset prices and the rich notionally got richer although if it all crashes the could find themselves significantly poorer
Indeed, if you buy property to let with a mortgage that is not fixed for the long term and interest rates go up and property values go down you can be wiped out financially. Socialists don’t factor in risk when they look at profit.
Naturally, because socialists know f**k-all about making a viable business or producing useful products. They have no real strategies for creating wealth, only redistributing wealth created by the evil capitalist blodgers.
Where in the south east of England (where most housing investment takes place) is it the case that landlords have lost money by investing in housing in the last 40 or more years? Genuinely the first time I’ve heard that buying a house is a risky investment, unless it’s on a cliff or something.
Certainly in the case of the landowner’s profits, Churchill was right when he said:
“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”
Naturally, because socialists know f**k-all about making a viable business or producing useful products. They have no real strategies for creating wealth, only redistributing wealth created by the evil capitalist blodgers.
Where in the south east of England (where most housing investment takes place) is it the case that landlords have lost money by investing in housing in the last 40 or more years? Genuinely the first time I’ve heard that buying a house is a risky investment, unless it’s on a cliff or something.
Certainly in the case of the landowner’s profits, Churchill was right when he said:
“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”
Indeed, if you buy property to let with a mortgage that is not fixed for the long term and interest rates go up and property values go down you can be wiped out financially. Socialists don’t factor in risk when they look at profit.
Exactly right
Where did all the printed money go? It is not under a mattress somewhere near you. It went into asset prices and the rich notionally got richer although if it all crashes the could find themselves significantly poorer
Lords of the Land. So some old ladies retirement is more important than a fair housing policy ? Here in the US rent is not going up because of a bunch of immigrants; it is rising because real estate has been set up as controlled investment for the upper class.
Bang on – perhaps the case of the US (what with its size and less regulated housing industry) more starkly demonstrates how rising house prices is a problem of not enough rather than too much government?
Bang on – perhaps the case of the US (what with its size and less regulated housing industry) more starkly demonstrates how rising house prices is a problem of not enough rather than too much government?
Yes. It’s immigration. As with so many other things (jobs, healthcare, energy, food, etc), there is plenty of cheap housing in England for the English. What we see everyday is that there is not enough for the whole world in this one tiny island. And regarding the plight of young people, how long have we sat back and watched as English youth were pushed to the back of the queue as immigrant groups were given preference?
How long have I, as a young Engishman, to sit back and watch while you and the right wing media falsely blame immigrants for the housing crisis while letting the hoarding asset class continue to keep supply artificially low in order to ensure maximum return on investment?
How long have I, as a young Engishman, to sit back and watch while you and the right wing media falsely blame immigrants for the housing crisis while letting the hoarding asset class continue to keep supply artificially low in order to ensure maximum return on investment?
I’m a Millennial, YIMBY and rented for around a decade before being able to buy with my wife and I agree on immigration completely. Mass migration and NIMBYism are the two plagues that are ruining this country and making life miserable for the majority.
With you that immigration is *part* of the problem but I’d say that the *demand* for housing by the wealthy (very much alive and kicking and far from ‘old’ as Matt Goodwin so deceivingly calls them) elite is the biggest and most under-discussed driver here. There is no shortage of housing. It is a distribution problem caused by a house building sector (which like any insufficiently regulated industry) serves the highest bidder, not those most in need. There are more houses than *households* in Britain, because of a growing asset class which is hoarding them as safe investments – a fact far more people need to be aware of.
I sometimes think about buying real estate as an investment and every time I investigate, I come away thinking its all a Ponzi scheme. Just look at the asking price on rental properties – add up the rents and deduct the cost of borrowing, maintenance and tax and you will find in all cases there’s not enough income there to provide a return on your equity. The only hope of getting ahead is that the value of the real estate will continue to increase and you can sell for a big ‘profit’ to the next sucker. Governments tell us that house price inflation is not real inflation, and instruct us to ignore their money printing and only to look at their heavily manipulated ‘consumer price indexes’ – but the massive money printing of the last 20 years is clearly the main culprit. The houses did not become more ‘valuable’ – the money became less valuable, and all that ‘new’ money had nowhere to go but housing (and crypto etc). But don’t call such gambling an ‘investment’. They turned the entire residential real estate market into a Ponzi scheme where the best you can hope for is more asset inflation and getting out before it crashes. Landlords in this situation will never invest in their units because they are already underwater paying the massive mortgages. They just poor money in and hope that asset inflation and immigration will keep the music playing just a little longer.
Lords of the Land. So some old ladies retirement is more important than a fair housing policy ? Here in the US rent is not going up because of a bunch of immigrants; it is rising because real estate has been set up as controlled investment for the upper class.
Yes. It’s immigration. As with so many other things (jobs, healthcare, energy, food, etc), there is plenty of cheap housing in England for the English. What we see everyday is that there is not enough for the whole world in this one tiny island. And regarding the plight of young people, how long have we sat back and watched as English youth were pushed to the back of the queue as immigrant groups were given preference?
Peter Johnson
10 months ago
Orwell upset his socialist friends with the book Road to Wigan Pier by pointing out that most landlords were retired old ladies trying to squeeze a meagre living out of one or two properties. I became an inadvertent landlord by buying the house I was renting an apartment in. All I can say is that not all tenants are a joy and being a landlord is a nuisance. The issue millennials don’t seem to want to acknowledge is the link between immigration and housing costs. Canada brought in 950,000 immigrants last year. That is almost triple the number that we used to admit. They all go to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. You can rail against landlords with their one bedroom investment condo all you like – but until these immigration numbers come down we will be in a perpetual housing affordability crisis.
Last edited 10 months ago by Peter Johnson
Malcolm Knott
10 months ago
The left likes to sort people neatly into victim/victimised categories:
Workers good, bosses bad.
Tenants good, landlords bad.
Labour good, Tories unspeakable.
Some of us believe that life is not that simple.
Yes but realistically, on balance – who deserves their money more? Those who work for it, or those who get it by sitting on assets? As Bertrand Russell once said:
‘Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.’
Get a job at your local tesco as a shelf stacker and see that difference for yourself.
I worked from the age of 16 until I was 78 with less than an month’s illness. I also inherited a single property which I let at a market rent to help provide for my retirement. Does that make me deserving or undeserving? See what I mean about it not being simple?
Oh come now. I have worked in two factories, painted houses, been a labourer. I am now a highly paid professional. It took 30 years of hard work to get from one to the other. I own my home but when we bought it we were terrified of the mortgage, we had tenants we didn’t really want for 15 years to help pay that mortgage. The house had been a rooming home for hippies in the 70’s so it wasn’t a real treat. Now it looks great – but we waited 20 years to save the money to fix it up. Most people are neither victims nor villains and very few people are just handed wealth.
To both of you – I’d say it doesn’t make you deserving or undeserving but it does, as the above article makes clear, make you quite possibly less deserving of your wealth than those generations below who may well have to work longer and harder for even less capital acquisition. BUT: As someone who wants a fairer society that rewards hard work, my solutions to the housing crisis would not hit hardest on those who have worked for their assets in their own lifetimes – of course I would want to go after the big landlords (like the Grosvenors) who have had astronomical wealth since the Norman invasion. For the same reason I was not massively keen even on Corbyn’s manifesto pledge to tax the top 1% because I know that most people even in that wealth bracket do work somewhat for their wealth – it’s that wealth contained in huge estates or offshore bank accounts (i.e. wealth at it’s most superfluous) that really needs to be taxed, and the taxing of which would affect very few people indeed. We are the 99.9% – me and you. Now let’s build a fairer system.
Sounds familiar: Tax the Rich! Or, rather, some of the rich; specifically those who have investments in land. Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.
You can laugh at me but what’s your alternative? Taxing those who have more than enough to live 10,000 lifetimes I doubt is an egregious idea to most people nor is compulsorily purchasing some of the land of families who have almost £10bn’s worth (often in London in the case of the Grosvenors) and have done nothing for it for generations. ‘Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.’ – what a laughable strawmanning of my point. Of course the cheaper and better located housing resulting from these measures will increase productivity – our economy will grow once more of ordinary people’s earnings goes into their own pockets and not those of their landlord.Tell me otherwise. You have a generation to persuade.
So your solution is legalised property theft and taxing landlords out of the market.
George Osbourne already tried the latter and succeeded only in massively reducing the supply of properties available to rent.
Desmond: I don’t think I am straw-manning you. Do you think my single property, a two-bedrooms semi (which my parents worked for all their lives and is now rented to a professional couple), should be confiscated? Perhaps you do, though I can assure you that would be most unwelcome to both me and my excellent tenants and if I thought it was a serious threat I would sell up.
Or is it only the Grosvenors whose property must be confiscated? I ask, because the only difference, economically speaking, is that they are richer than me and therefore in some mysterious way, less deserving.
I repeat, it’s the old mantra, Tax the rich!
To be clear: no I don’t think your second home should be confiscated! And as far as I know, no one in the labour party has ever suggested confiscating people’s second homes. As said above, I think council housing (and increased government powers to compulsorily buy land) is the main reform that’s needed. Although, many countries with more affordable housing (Austria, Singapore etc) do have taxes on second homes to try and disincentivise the hoarding of properties (but how much this does for housing affordability I don’t know – in the case of Singapore I suspect it’s more the fact that the government owns all the land; a strange consideration when you think how many globalist Tories aspire for the UK to become a Singapore on Thames).
The essential difference between you and the Grosvenors? A good question. Well the first difference would be use of property – if your second home is being used to house a couple who work in the UK (serving need) for a reasonable rate that is an essential difference to say a developer providing luxury flats for oligarchs (serving demand). Do you not also think that they are less deserving simply because for more generations they have been able to accrue capital simply by (I imagine) paying financial advisers to tell them where to invest whereas your family have all worked hard for what you have?
And yes I get that my proposal is an ‘old’ one. But not being original is not the same as not being effective, right?
To be clear: no I don’t think your second home should be confiscated! And as far as I know, no one in the labour party has ever suggested confiscating people’s second homes. As said above, I think council housing (and increased government powers to compulsorily buy land) is the main reform that’s needed. Although, many countries with more affordable housing (Austria, Singapore etc) do have taxes on second homes to try and disincentivise the hoarding of properties (but how much this does for housing affordability I don’t know – in the case of Singapore I suspect it’s more the fact that the government owns all the land; a strange consideration when you think how many globalist Tories aspire for the UK to become a Singapore on Thames).
The essential difference between you and the Grosvenors? A good question. Well the first difference would be use of property – if your second home is being used to house a couple who work in the UK (serving need) for a reasonable rate that is an essential difference to say a developer providing luxury flats for oligarchs (serving demand). Do you not also think that they are less deserving simply because for more generations they have been able to accrue capital simply by (I imagine) paying financial advisers to tell them where to invest whereas your family have all worked hard for what you have?
And yes I get that my proposal is an ‘old’ one. But not being original is not the same as not being effective, right?
Good point about danger of taxing landlords out of the market. You wouldn’t want to suddenly raise taxes on them because (as with rent controls too quickly implemented in some case studies) that can indeed lead to them exiting the market. When I wrote a thesis on the English housing crisis I concluded that renters’ rights would need to be introduced gradually and that rent controls are often too blunt an instrument. What does need to happen and which no one can rationally argue against from the point of view of fiscal sense, is a renaissance of council housing which could well require to compulsory purchase (not theft of property) of land currently being neglected by landowners or hoarded by developers. Some people shrilly shout in protest to that proposal saying it conflicts with human rights. It doesn’t. How do you think railways or even shopping centres get build? Do governments magically find lines that run through hundreds of miles of land all with landowners willing to sell up? No – the right of a government to buy land (especially for something as essential as housing) exists both in the UK and the US (there known as the power of eminent domain as you may remember). Hope that helps.
Desmond: I don’t think I am straw-manning you. Do you think my single property, a two-bedrooms semi (which my parents worked for all their lives and is now rented to a professional couple), should be confiscated? Perhaps you do, though I can assure you that would be most unwelcome to both me and my excellent tenants and if I thought it was a serious threat I would sell up.
Or is it only the Grosvenors whose property must be confiscated? I ask, because the only difference, economically speaking, is that they are richer than me and therefore in some mysterious way, less deserving.
I repeat, it’s the old mantra, Tax the rich!
Good point about danger of taxing landlords out of the market. You wouldn’t want to suddenly raise taxes on them because (as with rent controls too quickly implemented in some case studies) that can indeed lead to them exiting the market. When I wrote a thesis on the English housing crisis I concluded that renters’ rights would need to be introduced gradually and that rent controls are often too blunt an instrument. What does need to happen and which no one can rationally argue against from the point of view of fiscal sense, is a renaissance of council housing which could well require to compulsory purchase (not theft of property) of land currently being neglected by landowners or hoarded by developers. Some people shrilly shout in protest to that proposal saying it conflicts with human rights. It doesn’t. How do you think railways or even shopping centres get build? Do governments magically find lines that run through hundreds of miles of land all with landowners willing to sell up? No – the right of a government to buy land (especially for something as essential as housing) exists both in the UK and the US (there known as the power of eminent domain as you may remember). Hope that helps.
So your solution is legalised property theft and taxing landlords out of the market.
George Osbourne already tried the latter and succeeded only in massively reducing the supply of properties available to rent.
You can laugh at me but what’s your alternative? Taxing those who have more than enough to live 10,000 lifetimes I doubt is an egregious idea to most people nor is compulsorily purchasing some of the land of families who have almost £10bn’s worth (often in London in the case of the Grosvenors) and have done nothing for it for generations. ‘Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.’ – what a laughable strawmanning of my point. Of course the cheaper and better located housing resulting from these measures will increase productivity – our economy will grow once more of ordinary people’s earnings goes into their own pockets and not those of their landlord.Tell me otherwise. You have a generation to persuade.
Sounds familiar: Tax the Rich! Or, rather, some of the rich; specifically those who have investments in land. Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.
To both of you – I’d say it doesn’t make you deserving or undeserving but it does, as the above article makes clear, make you quite possibly less deserving of your wealth than those generations below who may well have to work longer and harder for even less capital acquisition. BUT: As someone who wants a fairer society that rewards hard work, my solutions to the housing crisis would not hit hardest on those who have worked for their assets in their own lifetimes – of course I would want to go after the big landlords (like the Grosvenors) who have had astronomical wealth since the Norman invasion. For the same reason I was not massively keen even on Corbyn’s manifesto pledge to tax the top 1% because I know that most people even in that wealth bracket do work somewhat for their wealth – it’s that wealth contained in huge estates or offshore bank accounts (i.e. wealth at it’s most superfluous) that really needs to be taxed, and the taxing of which would affect very few people indeed. We are the 99.9% – me and you. Now let’s build a fairer system.
Are you implying that landlords earn money by “sitting on assets?” I don’t discount the existence of slumlords, but most folks that I’ve known in the States who own rental properties work to make sure that they are kept up, and work more when tenants occasionally trash them. They certainly delegate some phyiscal work to maintenance workers, but they’re ultimately responsible for those properties. And they enjoy all the headaches of ownership, plus those of government regulations and rent controls in many areas.
Not entirely! But I do think it’s less work than making money through a full time job whilst also paying rent no? Again I’m not attacking small scale landlords (as I hope my above comments make clear)..
Not entirely! But I do think it’s less work than making money through a full time job whilst also paying rent no? Again I’m not attacking small scale landlords (as I hope my above comments make clear)..
I worked from the age of 16 until I was 78 with less than an month’s illness. I also inherited a single property which I let at a market rent to help provide for my retirement. Does that make me deserving or undeserving? See what I mean about it not being simple?
Oh come now. I have worked in two factories, painted houses, been a labourer. I am now a highly paid professional. It took 30 years of hard work to get from one to the other. I own my home but when we bought it we were terrified of the mortgage, we had tenants we didn’t really want for 15 years to help pay that mortgage. The house had been a rooming home for hippies in the 70’s so it wasn’t a real treat. Now it looks great – but we waited 20 years to save the money to fix it up. Most people are neither victims nor villains and very few people are just handed wealth.
Are you implying that landlords earn money by “sitting on assets?” I don’t discount the existence of slumlords, but most folks that I’ve known in the States who own rental properties work to make sure that they are kept up, and work more when tenants occasionally trash them. They certainly delegate some phyiscal work to maintenance workers, but they’re ultimately responsible for those properties. And they enjoy all the headaches of ownership, plus those of government regulations and rent controls in many areas.
Yes but realistically, on balance – who deserves their money more? Those who work for it, or those who get it by sitting on assets? As Bertrand Russell once said:
‘Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.’
Get a job at your local tesco as a shelf stacker and see that difference for yourself.
Malcolm Knott
10 months ago
The left likes to sort people neatly into victim/victimised categories:
Workers good, bosses bad.
Tenants good, landlords bad.
Labour good, Tories unspeakable.
Some of us believe that life is not that simple.
Last edited 10 months ago by Malcolm Knott
Malcolm Knott
10 months ago
Do people really believe that all was well with public housing before Margaret Thatcher sold off the estates? Have they forgotten the dreary working class ghettos; row upon row of flats and houses built like prison officers’ quarters where you couldn’t even choose the colour of your own front door; the ‘problem families’ rehoused next door by Social Services,; the interminable waiting lists (5, 6, 7 years), often queue-jumped by unmarried mothers who knew that getting pregnant was the passport to their own home? Have they forgotten how some of these estates (and the lives of the people who lived there) were transformed by Thatcher’s policies?
People remember not having to hand over well over half their weeks wages for a rundown rental though, and when a single average wage was enough to raise a family and buy a basic family home.
Also rough estates still exist, they may have been pushed to different areas of the city but are you suggesting that Thatcher selling off the council houses somehow caused rundown crime ridden estates to be consigned to the history books?
Two things have changed – a huge (threefold?) increase in housing costs in real terms; and a coddled youth who can’t believe everything is not up to the standard that mum and dad supply, reflecting their great importance (now some 80% of young people agree with the statement, ‘I am special’, up from 20% a couple of decades ago).
I believed I was special until I was about 70. Then I realised that I was completely nondescript and relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things. No a bad lesson, but learned too late.
Your confused, when you say coddling you mean emotionally neglected. Our parents weren’t good parents, they didn’t give us values, they left it up to us, and amongst such confusion it’s very clear that raising your self Importance is a grand strategy for not killing yourself or making something out of the kind of hole that you are in.
Moreover amongst this neglect of late 20th century parents they didn’t necessarily dedicate their lives to finding us the best education (or any education past the local state), they didn’t plan on how we could save for a house, they didn’t explain the necessity of a loving AND practical marriage etc. etc.
The point is they neglected us by making us weak but didn’t support us thereafter and we had to grow up in our twenties when it should of occurred in our teens. Clearly you can’t blame children for having neglectful, apathetic or absent minded parents.
And if you don’t believe me, a common comment by my mother is that I wasn’t breastfed as a child because I was ‘bitey’. Sure, I was a hungry bitey little baby, but guess who she blames for immediately stopping breastfeeding at few weeks old? Me of course. And it isn’t a joke unfortunately. My now mother in law is aghast when she hears this and she was born in the third world… So who is the real problem?
Boomers just can’t accept their failures and their flaws have to be corrected by their children on the MAX setting.
No I am not confused. To better understand my point you could read, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Jonathan Haidt. Yours is a quite different story, not typical I think of any particular generation, but all too frequent nonetheless.
No I am not confused. To better understand my point you could read, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Jonathan Haidt. Yours is a quite different story, not typical I think of any particular generation, but all too frequent nonetheless.
I believed I was special until I was about 70. Then I realised that I was completely nondescript and relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things. No a bad lesson, but learned too late.
Your confused, when you say coddling you mean emotionally neglected. Our parents weren’t good parents, they didn’t give us values, they left it up to us, and amongst such confusion it’s very clear that raising your self Importance is a grand strategy for not killing yourself or making something out of the kind of hole that you are in.
Moreover amongst this neglect of late 20th century parents they didn’t necessarily dedicate their lives to finding us the best education (or any education past the local state), they didn’t plan on how we could save for a house, they didn’t explain the necessity of a loving AND practical marriage etc. etc.
The point is they neglected us by making us weak but didn’t support us thereafter and we had to grow up in our twenties when it should of occurred in our teens. Clearly you can’t blame children for having neglectful, apathetic or absent minded parents.
And if you don’t believe me, a common comment by my mother is that I wasn’t breastfed as a child because I was ‘bitey’. Sure, I was a hungry bitey little baby, but guess who she blames for immediately stopping breastfeeding at few weeks old? Me of course. And it isn’t a joke unfortunately. My now mother in law is aghast when she hears this and she was born in the third world… So who is the real problem?
Boomers just can’t accept their failures and their flaws have to be corrected by their children on the MAX setting.
It was better then it was made less good by the adoption of “greatest need” as the basis of allocation. Remember East London in the 90s and the death of the housing list because immigrants had “greater need”. It was all just class war against the threat the British working class posed to the wealthy.
The dispossession of a nation, and the conversion from nation to state.
People remember not having to hand over well over half their weeks wages for a rundown rental though, and when a single average wage was enough to raise a family and buy a basic family home.
Also rough estates still exist, they may have been pushed to different areas of the city but are you suggesting that Thatcher selling off the council houses somehow caused rundown crime ridden estates to be consigned to the history books?
Two things have changed – a huge (threefold?) increase in housing costs in real terms; and a coddled youth who can’t believe everything is not up to the standard that mum and dad supply, reflecting their great importance (now some 80% of young people agree with the statement, ‘I am special’, up from 20% a couple of decades ago).
It was better then it was made less good by the adoption of “greatest need” as the basis of allocation. Remember East London in the 90s and the death of the housing list because immigrants had “greater need”. It was all just class war against the threat the British working class posed to the wealthy.
The dispossession of a nation, and the conversion from nation to state.
I remember Luton prefabs for sure! Yes it was rather grim.
Malcolm Knott
10 months ago
Do people really believe that all was well with public housing before Margaret Thatcher sold off the estates? Have they forgotten the dreary working class ghettos; row upon row of flats and houses built like prison officers’ quarters where you couldn’t even choose the colour of your own front door; the ‘problem families’ rehoused next door by Social Services,; the interminable waiting lists (5, 6, 7 years), often queue-jumped by unmarried mothers who knew that getting pregnant was the passport to their own home? Have they forgotten how some of these estates (and the lives of the people who lived there) were transformed by Thatcher’s policies?
Liam O'Mahony
10 months ago
I rented my 3 bed duplex for 15% below the going rate to a couple with a baby that no one else would rent to.. they vacated at their own behest 4 years later. In that time I refloored the dining room (carpet ruined by baby puke) and carried out every other repair promptly. I never increased the rent by a penny. Some of us landlords are driven by our Christian principles and not by greed.. I’m no saint, far from it, but neither am I a monster. I would expect every other landlord worthy of the title Christian (or Buddhist or Muslim) to do no less. Then I guess I’m old with old fashioned ideas..
Like Liam I rented my home (being posted abroad by my employer). I ensured that the house was always well maintained. Over the years I had four tenants, one of whom absconded owing me rent and having cost me a sizeable sum to treat the flea infestation. The others were excellent tenants and I was always on good terms with all of them. I did not use an agency!
Alll repairs and maintenance was done promptly and once a tenant signed the rent was never increased. I have rented previously, many years ago and was treated fairly. BTW, I’m an atheist!
I sold the house two years ago when I decided to remain abroad.
We are not all the selfish horrors that Nick Harris would have us believe.
Yes, it’s important not to tar us all with the same brush. I have rented out a small apartment in order to finance my pension. I therefore have a real interest in letting it to someone who is dependable and likely to stay. If a tenant were to trash the place incurring huge clean-up costs or were to stop paying the rent, I would soon find myself in serious difficulties. I am not a monster.
In my experience the vast majority of landlords behave in a very similar manner to your goodself.
Its a shame ‘Bash Rich Landlords’ is the only mantra what is acceptable in police society now.
When people ask me what I do for a job, I reply (without any irony) ”Oh! I am a Rouge Landlord” – I continue ‘because thats the only way I hear Landlords being described as these days”.
Its not true of course – at the start of COVID (as an example) I sent each of my tenants a Fortnum &M hamper with my best wishes and a contact number where there was a looming financial problem – with the polite note ”please do not skip the rent – as it will only pile up” (I still had service costs, repairs, agents and mortgages to pay).
My friends have two rental properties and they always try to give back 100% of the deposit and go in afterwards and clean from top to bottom and redecorate themselves. There are some good landlords out there. It is the slum landlords who are the problem. It should be easier to ban them from renting out their horrible substandard properties.
Like Liam I rented my home (being posted abroad by my employer). I ensured that the house was always well maintained. Over the years I had four tenants, one of whom absconded owing me rent and having cost me a sizeable sum to treat the flea infestation. The others were excellent tenants and I was always on good terms with all of them. I did not use an agency!
Alll repairs and maintenance was done promptly and once a tenant signed the rent was never increased. I have rented previously, many years ago and was treated fairly. BTW, I’m an atheist!
I sold the house two years ago when I decided to remain abroad.
We are not all the selfish horrors that Nick Harris would have us believe.
Yes, it’s important not to tar us all with the same brush. I have rented out a small apartment in order to finance my pension. I therefore have a real interest in letting it to someone who is dependable and likely to stay. If a tenant were to trash the place incurring huge clean-up costs or were to stop paying the rent, I would soon find myself in serious difficulties. I am not a monster.
In my experience the vast majority of landlords behave in a very similar manner to your goodself.
Its a shame ‘Bash Rich Landlords’ is the only mantra what is acceptable in police society now.
When people ask me what I do for a job, I reply (without any irony) ”Oh! I am a Rouge Landlord” – I continue ‘because thats the only way I hear Landlords being described as these days”.
Its not true of course – at the start of COVID (as an example) I sent each of my tenants a Fortnum &M hamper with my best wishes and a contact number where there was a looming financial problem – with the polite note ”please do not skip the rent – as it will only pile up” (I still had service costs, repairs, agents and mortgages to pay).
My friends have two rental properties and they always try to give back 100% of the deposit and go in afterwards and clean from top to bottom and redecorate themselves. There are some good landlords out there. It is the slum landlords who are the problem. It should be easier to ban them from renting out their horrible substandard properties.
Liam O'Mahony
10 months ago
I rented my 3 bed duplex for 15% below the going rate to a couple with a baby that no one else would rent to.. they vacated at their own behest 4 years later. In that time I refloored the dining room (carpet ruined by baby puke) and carried out every other repair promptly. I never increased the rent by a penny. Some of us landlords are driven by our Christian principles and not by greed.. I’m no saint, far from it, but neither am I a monster. I would expect every other landlord worthy of the title Christian (or Buddhist or Muslim) to do no less. Then I guess I’m old with old fashioned ideas..
Peter B
10 months ago
I scanned the article for any mention of supply and demand. There was none.
You would imagine that at this point the question “why ?” would be asked:
“Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young.”
But no.
Young people – with whom I have much sympathy here – have only themselves to blame if they fail to recognise and try to address the real reasons for expensive and low quality housing. Namely mass immigration with people ready and willing to accept sub-standard accomodation (by our quite reasonable standards) and a complete failure by government and local authorities to enforce these standards.
Not so – high demand from the super-rich and lack of regulation from the government is also key. There are more houses than households after all. That wouldn’t be the case if poor immigrants were the only people putting pressure on prices.
I very much doubt your assertion as being anything more than a second order effect. Please provide some evidence for it.
Certainly, the price of money (low interest rates) is a far more serious factor in the cost of housing. So is actual demand. Speculation far less so.
What exactly is it that the government can – and should – regulate here ?
I would argue that planning is over-regulated and far too restrictive and that government is not properly taxing land – in particular the development uplift windfall gains made by landowners.
But you’re asking for more regulation. On what ?
We’ve had some agreement in the past on the good sense of land tax, and I’d see that as part of what I see as a greater need for more active government in house building. I don’t buy your assumption that speculation is not actual demand – developers know they can make more money building luxury flats than affordable ones, and that wealthy elite wanting second homes are part of that demand. I don’t agree that more deregulation is the answer – the planning system has been streamlined to the point that 9/10 planning applications are now approved and it has made small difference to building output. The effect of immigration I’m less sure of, but I naturally regard with suspicion the invocations of media outlets (which, like unherd, are often owned by billionaires) for us to blame immigration first and foremost. Numbers should be lower I agree, but I’d be in favour of first taking measures that conflict with the interests of landowners before those of immigrants (who after all, for any of their unintended negative effects on wage growth, do actually come here to work and add to the economy, unlike landlords and landowners who suck up our wealth).
And if you want more details here is a thesis I wrote on the housing crisis back in 2019. Admittedly it reads more as an introductory pamphlet than a serious academic study, but I still stand by it’s diagnosis and suggested solutions. https://dw.convertfiles.com/files/0235890001686142935/housing%20crisis%20thesis%20final%20draft%20.doc.pdf
Thanks.
I agree that speculation is demand. No dispute there. I think it’s a second rather than first order effect though. I’m no great fan of speculation in general, though it does play an essential part in financial market liquidity and efficient pricing – but I’m not convinced that’s of any benefit in the housing market.
The current planning system is making building land far too expensive. The vast majority of housing cost is now land cost. Without lowering land costs, you won’t reduce the price of new build housing significantly.
Your assumption that all immigrants come here to work and add to the economy is not correct. Some do. Some don’t.
Personally, if there is ever a choice to be made, I rank the interests of exisiting citizens and taxpayers over those of people who want to come to this country and have contributed nothing yet. Once they are settled, integrated and contributing, I make no distinction. Non-contributory welfare (rights without and responsibilities) is a very poor way to operate in my book.
No fan of landlords. However at least some of them do provide a necessary service which people are prepared to pay for. Nothing wrong with that. It’s not really any different than providing any other service, for instance insurance.
Well serendiptidously much of what you said agrees with my thesis – land value capture was the key recommendation, which I suppose doesn’t classify straightforwardly as either more or less regulation since it could involve either a shift to zoing (i.e. less regular (but more widespread) state intervention in where houses can be built) or government capture of land price raises following the granting of case by case by planning permissions. Either way, it sounds like you’re not wholly opposed to more a more active state in this area. And being an evidence guided man, I imagine you won’t have any objections to the sheer financial sense of more social housing, which pays for itself as you know.
Again, I never assumed that all immigrants do come here to work (you’re pointing out the expected nuance that is true of any general trend or statement, just as you did wit my comment about the productivity gap, pointing out that not all sectors are lagging behind our European counterparts – well obviously, it would be truly remarkable of all of them were!) Saying that ‘some do, some don’t’ is platitudinous cover for the fact that you don’t want to admit that generally (see link below) people come here not to scrounge. Most people, work by the think tank Autonomy as researched this, have a need to work to feel a sense of dignity – the myth that humanity is riddled with wastrels is a myth cooked up by much of our media intent on turning working people against each other. https://smithstonewalters.com/2023/03/02/immigration-in-numbers-2022-statistics-revealed/
Well serendiptidously much of what you said agrees with my thesis – land value capture was the key recommendation, which I suppose doesn’t classify straightforwardly as either more or less regulation since it could involve either a shift to zoing (i.e. less regular (but more widespread) state intervention in where houses can be built) or government capture of land price raises following the granting of case by case by planning permissions. Either way, it sounds like you’re not wholly opposed to more a more active state in this area. And being an evidence guided man, I imagine you won’t have any objections to the sheer financial sense of more social housing, which pays for itself as you know.
Again, I never assumed that all immigrants do come here to work (you’re pointing out the expected nuance that is true of any general trend or statement, just as you did wit my comment about the productivity gap, pointing out that not all sectors are lagging behind our European counterparts – well obviously, it would be truly remarkable of all of them were!) Saying that ‘some do, some don’t’ is platitudinous cover for the fact that you don’t want to admit that generally (see link below) people come here not to scrounge. Most people, work by the think tank Autonomy as researched this, have a need to work to feel a sense of dignity – the myth that humanity is riddled with wastrels is a myth cooked up by much of our media intent on turning working people against each other. https://smithstonewalters.com/2023/03/02/immigration-in-numbers-2022-statistics-revealed/
Thanks.
I agree that speculation is demand. No dispute there. I think it’s a second rather than first order effect though. I’m no great fan of speculation in general, though it does play an essential part in financial market liquidity and efficient pricing – but I’m not convinced that’s of any benefit in the housing market.
The current planning system is making building land far too expensive. The vast majority of housing cost is now land cost. Without lowering land costs, you won’t reduce the price of new build housing significantly.
Your assumption that all immigrants come here to work and add to the economy is not correct. Some do. Some don’t.
Personally, if there is ever a choice to be made, I rank the interests of exisiting citizens and taxpayers over those of people who want to come to this country and have contributed nothing yet. Once they are settled, integrated and contributing, I make no distinction. Non-contributory welfare (rights without and responsibilities) is a very poor way to operate in my book.
No fan of landlords. However at least some of them do provide a necessary service which people are prepared to pay for. Nothing wrong with that. It’s not really any different than providing any other service, for instance insurance.
We’ve had some agreement in the past on the good sense of land tax, and I’d see that as part of what I see as a greater need for more active government in house building. I don’t buy your assumption that speculation is not actual demand – developers know they can make more money building luxury flats than affordable ones, and that wealthy elite wanting second homes are part of that demand. I don’t agree that more deregulation is the answer – the planning system has been streamlined to the point that 9/10 planning applications are now approved and it has made small difference to building output. The effect of immigration I’m less sure of, but I naturally regard with suspicion the invocations of media outlets (which, like unherd, are often owned by billionaires) for us to blame immigration first and foremost. Numbers should be lower I agree, but I’d be in favour of first taking measures that conflict with the interests of landowners before those of immigrants (who after all, for any of their unintended negative effects on wage growth, do actually come here to work and add to the economy, unlike landlords and landowners who suck up our wealth).
And if you want more details here is a thesis I wrote on the housing crisis back in 2019. Admittedly it reads more as an introductory pamphlet than a serious academic study, but I still stand by it’s diagnosis and suggested solutions. https://dw.convertfiles.com/files/0235890001686142935/housing%20crisis%20thesis%20final%20draft%20.doc.pdf
I very much doubt your assertion as being anything more than a second order effect. Please provide some evidence for it.
Certainly, the price of money (low interest rates) is a far more serious factor in the cost of housing. So is actual demand. Speculation far less so.
What exactly is it that the government can – and should – regulate here ?
I would argue that planning is over-regulated and far too restrictive and that government is not properly taxing land – in particular the development uplift windfall gains made by landowners.
But you’re asking for more regulation. On what ?
Firstly, understand the hard facts of the situation and start telling the truth. They are currently asking for policies which destroy their own futures. Secondly demand lower immigration. Thirdly, start studying serious subjects to fill actual labour shortages rather than “luxury subjects”. Fourthly, don’t regard living on welfare as an option.
If all the above fails, emigrate.
With you on the last bit of advice. I’ve emigrated to the Netherlands where stronger trade unions, renters’ rights, rent controls, and a greater social housing stock mean my rent here is 3x less than it would be in London.
With you on the last bit of advice. I’ve emigrated to the Netherlands where stronger trade unions, renters’ rights, rent controls, and a greater social housing stock mean my rent here is 3x less than it would be in London.
Well when it comes to this problem of housing, luckily they don’t need to worry too much about which party is promising to do most about immigration because immigration is only a part of this problem, while the rest of it is to do with a state that is not active enough in house building and in regulating our current stock, as well as a party (no guesses which one) which is in thrall to landed interests (as Roger Scruton himsef told Douglas Murray in his Spectator interview on the future of conservatism – of course Murray, afraid to upset those who pay for his platform, swiftly changed the subject). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w&t=1440s
Firstly, understand the hard facts of the situation and start telling the truth. They are currently asking for policies which destroy their own futures. Secondly demand lower immigration. Thirdly, start studying serious subjects to fill actual labour shortages rather than “luxury subjects”. Fourthly, don’t regard living on welfare as an option.
If all the above fails, emigrate.
Well when it comes to this problem of housing, luckily they don’t need to worry too much about which party is promising to do most about immigration because immigration is only a part of this problem, while the rest of it is to do with a state that is not active enough in house building and in regulating our current stock, as well as a party (no guesses which one) which is in thrall to landed interests (as Roger Scruton himsef told Douglas Murray in his Spectator interview on the future of conservatism – of course Murray, afraid to upset those who pay for his platform, swiftly changed the subject). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w&t=1440s
Not so – high demand from the super-rich and lack of regulation from the government is also key. There are more houses than households after all. That wouldn’t be the case if poor immigrants were the only people putting pressure on prices.
Exactly! It is too easy for the bad landlords to get away with it.
Peter B
10 months ago
I scanned the article for any mention of supply and demand. There was none.
You would imagine that at this point the question “why ?” would be asked:
“Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young.”
But no.
Young people – with whom I have much sympathy here – have only themselves to blame if they fail to recognise and try to address the real reasons for expensive and low quality housing. Namely mass immigration with people ready and willing to accept sub-standard accomodation (by our quite reasonable standards) and a complete failure by government and local authorities to enforce these standards.
Ben Jones
10 months ago
Another millennial writer bemoaning the housing crisis yet refusing to cite the million-plus people arriving in the UK every year on below-median wage. Who will require a roof over their heads.
Ben Jones
10 months ago
Another millennial writer bemoaning the housing crisis yet refusing to cite the million-plus people arriving in the UK every year on below-median wage. Who will require a roof over their heads.
John Dellingby
10 months ago
I’m a Millennial, and by contrast, I seem to have been quite lucky with my landlords. My last one in particular before my wife and I bought a house was extremely good. Our main issues were usually with the agencies who were often indifferent to any issues with the property. I did hear plenty of horror stories though from friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc though.
However, it is undeniable that housing has become an asset bubble in recent decades, and it is the Baby-Boomers who have benefited from this. This isn’t the main gripe of Millennials in of itself, but that in many cases, Boomers seem to have pulled up the ladder behind them, denying younger generations the same opportunities they got to enjoy. As others have and will point out, mass migration is a huge problem here (and even most Millennials are opposed to current levels based on polling I’ve seen), but NIMBY’s cannot be ignored in the damage they do. The frustrating thing is that many of them are our parents, aunts and uncles. I have absolutely no time for older homeowners who bemoan the inability of their children to get on the housing ladder while simultaneously e-mailing the council to file absurd planning objections for a new development 5 minutes down the road. People who do this are effectively attacking their children.
All true and I agree with that.
But you fail to acknowledge the demand side from massive immigration. It’s not only supply. There’s also the cheap money (decades of suppressed interest rates).
Apologies. I hadn’t properly read your comments.
Absolutely agree about the NIMBYs. I’d rather have lower house prices so my son and people of his generation can aspire to owning their own house without needing to be lucky in having rich parents. People need to be able to prosper based on their own efforts. We’ve gone horribly wrong in allowing this situation to develop. But it’s everywhere in the West now. Although Britain’s amongst the worst countries for housing affordability – and quite likely dead last for affordability vs quality and space.
Apologies. I hadn’t properly read your comments.
Absolutely agree about the NIMBYs. I’d rather have lower house prices so my son and people of his generation can aspire to owning their own house without needing to be lucky in having rich parents. People need to be able to prosper based on their own efforts. We’ve gone horribly wrong in allowing this situation to develop. But it’s everywhere in the West now. Although Britain’s amongst the worst countries for housing affordability – and quite likely dead last for affordability vs quality and space.
You really couldn’t be more wrong. I’m 67, in the US, and I live on the income of 18 leases from hard-earned properties. I didn’t set out to do this – I’m a lawyer but found more autonomy and reward in the real estate business. And I have 3 millennial children whose futures I care about.
After 35 years of brokering and investing in a hot market – Austin, Texas – I can say that federal subsidy of housing to people who can’t really afford to buy or support a mortgage, combined with at least 3 strong foreclosure cycles, has put a massive amount of rental housing into the hands of huge portfolios like BlackRock. (Yes, immigration has put more demand for rental housing, but largely because the immigrants are willing to work hard whereas millennials are not so much. The immigrants are some of my tenants. They will also live where millennials will not.)
Developers have a pact with City governments that benefits them with the gimmick of “affordable housing” and now the millennials are falling for that one too. Blocks of high rise buildings are going up on transit corridors that used to be farmland not too long ago. The price of surrounding land goes sky high along with it. Millennials confuse a box of air with a home – detached from any ground or fresh air that they can really own.
As with education, insurance, healthcare, transportation whether by car or subway or rail, the commoditization of housing subsidized by 3rd party money – largely government money – has made the prices of these necessities skyrocket. The government, in all its humanity and trickery, bought naively, wholesale, by the 2 generations behind me, have put you where you are.
All true and I agree with that.
But you fail to acknowledge the demand side from massive immigration. It’s not only supply. There’s also the cheap money (decades of suppressed interest rates).
You really couldn’t be more wrong. I’m 67, in the US, and I live on the income of 18 leases from hard-earned properties. I didn’t set out to do this – I’m a lawyer but found more autonomy and reward in the real estate business. And I have 3 millennial children whose futures I care about.
After 35 years of brokering and investing in a hot market – Austin, Texas – I can say that federal subsidy of housing to people who can’t really afford to buy or support a mortgage, combined with at least 3 strong foreclosure cycles, has put a massive amount of rental housing into the hands of huge portfolios like BlackRock. (Yes, immigration has put more demand for rental housing, but largely because the immigrants are willing to work hard whereas millennials are not so much. The immigrants are some of my tenants. They will also live where millennials will not.)
Developers have a pact with City governments that benefits them with the gimmick of “affordable housing” and now the millennials are falling for that one too. Blocks of high rise buildings are going up on transit corridors that used to be farmland not too long ago. The price of surrounding land goes sky high along with it. Millennials confuse a box of air with a home – detached from any ground or fresh air that they can really own.
As with education, insurance, healthcare, transportation whether by car or subway or rail, the commoditization of housing subsidized by 3rd party money – largely government money – has made the prices of these necessities skyrocket. The government, in all its humanity and trickery, bought naively, wholesale, by the 2 generations behind me, have put you where you are.
John Dellingby
10 months ago
I’m a Millennial, and by contrast, I seem to have been quite lucky with my landlords. My last one in particular before my wife and I bought a house was extremely good. Our main issues were usually with the agencies who were often indifferent to any issues with the property. I did hear plenty of horror stories though from friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc though.
However, it is undeniable that housing has become an asset bubble in recent decades, and it is the Baby-Boomers who have benefited from this. This isn’t the main gripe of Millennials in of itself, but that in many cases, Boomers seem to have pulled up the ladder behind them, denying younger generations the same opportunities they got to enjoy. As others have and will point out, mass migration is a huge problem here (and even most Millennials are opposed to current levels based on polling I’ve seen), but NIMBY’s cannot be ignored in the damage they do. The frustrating thing is that many of them are our parents, aunts and uncles. I have absolutely no time for older homeowners who bemoan the inability of their children to get on the housing ladder while simultaneously e-mailing the council to file absurd planning objections for a new development 5 minutes down the road. People who do this are effectively attacking their children.
Julian Farrows
10 months ago
This article could be applied to The Netherlands at this time. As from next year the Dutch government will impose a hard rent cap of 1000 euros on all privately owned rentals regardless of location or desirability. Prices will be adjusted based on energy labels, space and condition. This sounds fair in theory, but for locations like Amsterdam there is no way that 1000 euros will cover the costs landlords pay to own and maintain their properties.
Not only that, but local councils are now making it illegal to own empty properties, so landlords cannot just let them sit. They must be occupied. Property taxes are also set to rise drastically next year.
In truth rather than lower rental prices, many landlords will be forced to sell as they will no longer be able to cover their property costs. As a result there will be less affordable rentals in the housing market.
The arrogant stupidity of the Dutch government is so mind-boggling that it has either become pathologically incompetent or this is all ideologically motivated. I suspect the latter but cannot rule out the former either, as these new measures will be imposed in the name of ‘housing justice’ and ‘spatial inequality’.
This is a big blow to people of my generation who for decades were told by the government not to rely on state pensions and to invest in property as a means to provide for our old age.
Julian Farrows
10 months ago
This article could be applied to The Netherlands at this time. As from next year the Dutch government will impose a hard rent cap of 1000 euros on all privately owned rentals regardless of location or desirability. Prices will be adjusted based on energy labels, space and condition. This sounds fair in theory, but for locations like Amsterdam there is no way that 1000 euros will cover the costs landlords pay to own and maintain their properties.
Not only that, but local councils are now making it illegal to own empty properties, so landlords cannot just let them sit. They must be occupied. Property taxes are also set to rise drastically next year.
In truth rather than lower rental prices, many landlords will be forced to sell as they will no longer be able to cover their property costs. As a result there will be less affordable rentals in the housing market.
The arrogant stupidity of the Dutch government is so mind-boggling that it has either become pathologically incompetent or this is all ideologically motivated. I suspect the latter but cannot rule out the former either, as these new measures will be imposed in the name of ‘housing justice’ and ‘spatial inequality’.
This is a big blow to people of my generation who for decades were told by the government not to rely on state pensions and to invest in property as a means to provide for our old age.
Lesley Keay
10 months ago
An issue which seems to always get overlooked in this debate is the fact that many housing associations/councils are really bad landlords. Lets not forget that the recent change in legislation aimed at tackling mould in rented in properties came about as the result of the death of a child who lived in social housing.I was shown pictures just yesterday from someone who lives in HA property, which has now maintenance done for 16 years. The mould on the ceilings was terrible. I also have an elderly disabled brother who lives in a ground floor flat who has had constant problems getting repairs done, including dealing with mould. During last winter the person in the top floor flat had rainwater coming through the ceiling and when he called the repair people he was told, and I quote” what do you expect us to do about it, we can’t stop the rain”.
Lesley Keay
10 months ago
An issue which seems to always get overlooked in this debate is the fact that many housing associations/councils are really bad landlords. Lets not forget that the recent change in legislation aimed at tackling mould in rented in properties came about as the result of the death of a child who lived in social housing.I was shown pictures just yesterday from someone who lives in HA property, which has now maintenance done for 16 years. The mould on the ceilings was terrible. I also have an elderly disabled brother who lives in a ground floor flat who has had constant problems getting repairs done, including dealing with mould. During last winter the person in the top floor flat had rainwater coming through the ceiling and when he called the repair people he was told, and I quote” what do you expect us to do about it, we can’t stop the rain”.
R Wright
10 months ago
Ctrl + F ‘immigration’
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R Wright
10 months ago
Ctrl + F ‘immigration’
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Milton Gibbon
10 months ago
Finsbury Park – one of the trendiest areas of North London partly due to the great transport links. Why did the writer not look a litte further afield to somewhere like Stroud Green? Because you might have to walk for an extra mile to get to the tube or (heaven forfend) take a bus. Any young person looking to move to London should not live within the North Circular (being a north londoner myself I don’t pay much attention to what goes on south of the river) but should be as near a tube as possible. This is just practical advice that anyone from the capital can tell you.
Jobs becoming ever more concentrated in our major cities where an increasing number of workers can’t afford to live is a tremendous drag on a nation’s productivity though.
Is it? Productivity in cities is much more than in towns/rural areas. It might not be good for the workers but gone are the days when companies provided houses for their workers.
Is it? Productivity in cities is much more than in towns/rural areas. It might not be good for the workers but gone are the days when companies provided houses for their workers.
Jobs becoming ever more concentrated in our major cities where an increasing number of workers can’t afford to live is a tremendous drag on a nation’s productivity though.
Surely anywhere near the Tube will be subject to the same price inflation?
Milton Gibbon
10 months ago
Finsbury Park – one of the trendiest areas of North London partly due to the great transport links. Why did the writer not look a litte further afield to somewhere like Stroud Green? Because you might have to walk for an extra mile to get to the tube or (heaven forfend) take a bus. Any young person looking to move to London should not live within the North Circular (being a north londoner myself I don’t pay much attention to what goes on south of the river) but should be as near a tube as possible. This is just practical advice that anyone from the capital can tell you.
JP Martin
10 months ago
Working citizens, like the author, are expected to pay an exorbitant rent to live in filth. Meanwhile, any indolent infiltrator gets comfortable accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense. It’s pathological.
Working citizens, like the author, are expected to pay an exorbitant rent to live in filth. Meanwhile, any indolent infiltrator gets comfortable accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense. It’s pathological.
JR Stoker
10 months ago
Such nonsense. Rich people invest in many things: housing, shares, stocks, wine, classic cars. Classic cars are in pretty static supply, and so the price tends to go up and up. But housing is only in limited supply because we have made it so, mainly through manipulation of the planning system. If we made it easy to build new housing, land prices and thus housing costs would fall, and the supply would increase.
More homes to buy, more homes to rent. Better homes to rent as well, because landlords would compete on quality to get better tenants and a little premium on the rent that better tenants would bring. But rents would have gone down from the increasingly monopolistic position that landlords are now in. Win win win for everybody, apart from the professional whingeing classes
The Conservative government of the 1980’s knew this and put the necessary reforms in place, by liberating the market. The quality of rented housing improved enormously – though many former tenants could now buy and thus both demand and supply of rented tended to decrease. But it was a startling successful policy.
Now we have a government (and an opposition, and a Bank of England) which seems to have no understanding of the most basic economics and to have read no history, so the market is going back to what it was in the pre 1979 years, and it will go on getting worse until somebody goes back to the Thatcher reforms and sorts it all out again.
Which is not to say there are no bad landlords. But there is legislation in place to compel landlords to provide rented housing that is safe and fit to live in. The local councils won’t enforce it, mostly, because, not least, they themselves own some of the worst housing stock.
All these problems are easy to solve, but somebody has to want to do it.
Yes, the writer (who is clearly well-educated and politically astute) seems oblivious to free markets and property rights. These are circles to be squared in what is clearly a failing system, but you can’t solve the problem without acknowledging the principles. Unless, of course, 30 and 40-somethings want to live in a planned economy. Hey, give it a go. It might work this time *chuckles*
The generation that benefitted enormously from the state building the homes the country needed, complaining about any form of state assistance for the generations that follow. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic
Um.. the planning system has been liberalised (9/10 planning permission requests are now permitted as of the last few years, with no rise in out builds, because – surprise surprise – an unregulated market serves demand not need e.g. property developers sit on land until they can sell it to the highest bidder). Other countries with more affordable housing have more regulation and more social housing stock. Time to get real and stop lazily relying on the ‘free’ market to solve problems in essential services where it has manifestly failed (trains, water, NHS etc)
The generation that benefitted enormously from the state building the homes the country needed, complaining about any form of state assistance for the generations that follow. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic
Um.. the planning system has been liberalised (9/10 planning permission requests are now permitted as of the last few years, with no rise in out builds, because – surprise surprise – an unregulated market serves demand not need e.g. property developers sit on land until they can sell it to the highest bidder). Other countries with more affordable housing have more regulation and more social housing stock. Time to get real and stop lazily relying on the ‘free’ market to solve problems in essential services where it has manifestly failed (trains, water, NHS etc)
Yes, the writer (who is clearly well-educated and politically astute) seems oblivious to free markets and property rights. These are circles to be squared in what is clearly a failing system, but you can’t solve the problem without acknowledging the principles. Unless, of course, 30 and 40-somethings want to live in a planned economy. Hey, give it a go. It might work this time *chuckles*
JR Stoker
10 months ago
Such nonsense. Rich people invest in many things: housing, shares, stocks, wine, classic cars. Classic cars are in pretty static supply, and so the price tends to go up and up. But housing is only in limited supply because we have made it so, mainly through manipulation of the planning system. If we made it easy to build new housing, land prices and thus housing costs would fall, and the supply would increase.
More homes to buy, more homes to rent. Better homes to rent as well, because landlords would compete on quality to get better tenants and a little premium on the rent that better tenants would bring. But rents would have gone down from the increasingly monopolistic position that landlords are now in. Win win win for everybody, apart from the professional whingeing classes
The Conservative government of the 1980’s knew this and put the necessary reforms in place, by liberating the market. The quality of rented housing improved enormously – though many former tenants could now buy and thus both demand and supply of rented tended to decrease. But it was a startling successful policy.
Now we have a government (and an opposition, and a Bank of England) which seems to have no understanding of the most basic economics and to have read no history, so the market is going back to what it was in the pre 1979 years, and it will go on getting worse until somebody goes back to the Thatcher reforms and sorts it all out again.
Which is not to say there are no bad landlords. But there is legislation in place to compel landlords to provide rented housing that is safe and fit to live in. The local councils won’t enforce it, mostly, because, not least, they themselves own some of the worst housing stock.
All these problems are easy to solve, but somebody has to want to do it.
Jeffrey Mushens
10 months ago
The problem with high property prices and these relate to rents, as well, is the imbalance between supply and demand. Make it easier to build new houses, by cutting planning application times, reducing the scope judicial review and freeing up some greenbelt. Cut the cost of new housing – in Chelmsford, a developer has to pay a Community Infrastructure Levy of £17.5k for a 90m2 house – 1,000 sqft semi – plus Building Regs and Building Control, and get an environmental assessment done, and separately apply to Essex Roads and do a Statement of Needs, all of which costs. All in it costs £50k before a metaphorical spade is put in the ground. And Chelmsford is, by all accounts, pretty reasonable.
Then there’s the hidden increases by ratcheting up costs by revisions to Building Regs. Anecdote. A house in a road where I was collecting Christian Aid had been hit by lightning and the owners moved out while it was rebuilt. Big argument between insurers, council and owners, as if rebuilt on existing sq footage, the rooms would be smaller as building regs standards had changed so walls internal and external were thicker. If rebuilt with same size rooms, the building would be bigger. All sorted now, but those changes are reflected in new buildings costs.
For renters, the Government is requiring that rental properties from 2025 meet EPC C standards (current requirement is E). Upgrading to that requirement will cos between £10k – Government claim – and £50-70k – real world. Whatever happens renters will pay, but I suspect you’ll see a lot of rental properties withdrawn from the market with a consequent upwards shove to rents. Next, especially if Labour are elected, will be rent controls, with the complete wrecking of the rental market.
A better solution is to build lots more houses, easing planning restrictions, and make it easier to rent out property (I don’t let properties, thank you very much, I’ve got quite enough property exposure in my own home).
Controlling net immigration would also help. Where are the 600k immigrants going to live? At 4 per home, that’s 150,000 homes. At 2 per home that’s 300,000 homes – on top of domestic demand. And how much did we build last year?
Jeffrey Mushens
10 months ago
The problem with high property prices and these relate to rents, as well, is the imbalance between supply and demand. Make it easier to build new houses, by cutting planning application times, reducing the scope judicial review and freeing up some greenbelt. Cut the cost of new housing – in Chelmsford, a developer has to pay a Community Infrastructure Levy of £17.5k for a 90m2 house – 1,000 sqft semi – plus Building Regs and Building Control, and get an environmental assessment done, and separately apply to Essex Roads and do a Statement of Needs, all of which costs. All in it costs £50k before a metaphorical spade is put in the ground. And Chelmsford is, by all accounts, pretty reasonable.
Then there’s the hidden increases by ratcheting up costs by revisions to Building Regs. Anecdote. A house in a road where I was collecting Christian Aid had been hit by lightning and the owners moved out while it was rebuilt. Big argument between insurers, council and owners, as if rebuilt on existing sq footage, the rooms would be smaller as building regs standards had changed so walls internal and external were thicker. If rebuilt with same size rooms, the building would be bigger. All sorted now, but those changes are reflected in new buildings costs.
For renters, the Government is requiring that rental properties from 2025 meet EPC C standards (current requirement is E). Upgrading to that requirement will cos between £10k – Government claim – and £50-70k – real world. Whatever happens renters will pay, but I suspect you’ll see a lot of rental properties withdrawn from the market with a consequent upwards shove to rents. Next, especially if Labour are elected, will be rent controls, with the complete wrecking of the rental market.
A better solution is to build lots more houses, easing planning restrictions, and make it easier to rent out property (I don’t let properties, thank you very much, I’ve got quite enough property exposure in my own home).
Controlling net immigration would also help. Where are the 600k immigrants going to live? At 4 per home, that’s 150,000 homes. At 2 per home that’s 300,000 homes – on top of domestic demand. And how much did we build last year?
Simon Blanchard
10 months ago
I’m not sure if giving away all the council housing stock was intended to increase the number of owner occupiers (and thus likely Conservative voters) or if it was another case of turning publicly owned assets into investment vehicles over the longer term. But the pigeons (or is it chickens?) have certainly come home to roost. What could be more conservative than wishing for a decent home to settle in and securely bring up a family? I only hope that Millennial Rage does serious and lasting damage to the Conservative OCG at the next general election.
Quite. This has been coming for many years. It is surprising that the Conservatives either haven’t seen it, or have seen it, and decided to ignore it. Good article, by the way…
I agree. A triple tsunami has been rolling toward us since Thatcher and Blair first wiped out social housing replacement; then EU 6m free movers piled in unplanned; but the third and biggest shock was the era of zero interest rates from 2008. It allowed older boomers to secure & bank million pound capital gains as their mortgages were paid off easy. But the next generation – the sorry millennials – were sucked Golem like into the market in the belief that property prices only ever rose; and that a 1% mortgage was the new permanent normal. Its these naive buyers who are set to suffer terribly as much as those enduring rats and damp in overpriced rentals.
I agree. A triple tsunami has been rolling toward us since Thatcher and Blair first wiped out social housing replacement; then EU 6m free movers piled in unplanned; but the third and biggest shock was the era of zero interest rates from 2008. It allowed older boomers to secure & bank million pound capital gains as their mortgages were paid off easy. But the next generation – the sorry millennials – were sucked Golem like into the market in the belief that property prices only ever rose; and that a 1% mortgage was the new permanent normal. Its these naive buyers who are set to suffer terribly as much as those enduring rats and damp in overpriced rentals.
Privatisation is less often “giving away assets” than “giving away debts” and in the case of many council estates, the money wasn’t there to make the improvements needed that the new individual owners then carried out themselves.
I wouldn’t suggest you’re entirely wrong about that, but in my direct personal experience (my work took me into many ex-council properties) the council houses that were purchased were well looked after by the tenants already (almost by definition) and they were greatly improved after purchase by the new owners.
Yes, I agree with that, from observation and personal experience. As in living there, not “my work took me into”.
But, beyond keeping things clean and tidy, the good tenants were not able to make the desired improvements while they were tenants, only when they became owners.
Yes, I agree with that, from observation and personal experience. As in living there, not “my work took me into”.
But, beyond keeping things clean and tidy, the good tenants were not able to make the desired improvements while they were tenants, only when they became owners.
I wouldn’t suggest you’re entirely wrong about that, but in my direct personal experience (my work took me into many ex-council properties) the council houses that were purchased were well looked after by the tenants already (almost by definition) and they were greatly improved after purchase by the new owners.
Quite. This has been coming for many years. It is surprising that the Conservatives either haven’t seen it, or have seen it, and decided to ignore it. Good article, by the way…
Privatisation is less often “giving away assets” than “giving away debts” and in the case of many council estates, the money wasn’t there to make the improvements needed that the new individual owners then carried out themselves.
Simon Blanchard
10 months ago
I’m not sure if giving away all the council housing stock was intended to increase the number of owner occupiers (and thus likely Conservative voters) or if it was another case of turning publicly owned assets into investment vehicles over the longer term. But the pigeons (or is it chickens?) have certainly come home to roost. What could be more conservative than wishing for a decent home to settle in and securely bring up a family? I only hope that Millennial Rage does serious and lasting damage to the Conservative OCG at the next general election.
Janet G
10 months ago
A few factors in Australia:
More huge houses with fewer people living in each one.
Air b and b
Foreign investors who buy apartment blocks and leave them empty, I suppose hoping for a profit on eventual resale.
Governments that privatise everything and believe something called “the market” will sort it all out.
Same issues in NZ. The ratio of dwellings per capita is largely unchanged from 40 years ago, however house prices have risen from 3.5x the median salary to almost 13x now.
Same issues in NZ. The ratio of dwellings per capita is largely unchanged from 40 years ago, however house prices have risen from 3.5x the median salary to almost 13x now.
Janet G
10 months ago
A few factors in Australia:
More huge houses with fewer people living in each one.
Air b and b
Foreign investors who buy apartment blocks and leave them empty, I suppose hoping for a profit on eventual resale.
Governments that privatise everything and believe something called “the market” will sort it all out.
Economics and tax policy are a big part of the problem.
It costs money to build apartment buildings. Massive, whacking gobs of it, like you would not believe. The people doing the building do not have this capital: they must borrow it, at high rates of interest. This cost of capital means that the longer it is before resolution, the higher the cost of capital.
To build and rent out an apartment building requires you to keep this capital perpetually. If you consider a company that wants to build apartment buildings and rent them out, this means that the high cost of capital comes out of any profits made, perpetually. This not only raises rents, but it is not competitive with the other building strategy.
By contrast, if you build an apartment building as a condominium, you can sell the apartments *even before you finish building them*. This vastly reduces the cost of capital. You can even get private investors on board for this: they know how and when their money is coming back to them, and there is no chance they will be stuck running an apartment they don’t know how to deal with. The same is true of building single family homes.
This is the reason why our new developments are full of houses, and actually new aparment buildings are scarce.
In Canada, most of our apartment buildings were built 60’s to 80’s using a financial vehicle called a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Simply put, we recognized the burden that building apartments put on deal-makers and private capital, and gave it tax advantages. The result was a massive building of retail stock that the government did not have to finance. Because of the corporate tax structure, it was difficult to remove those investments once made.
Sadly, Canada was governed from the 90s by people who did not understand this history. They removed the tax protections of REITs. New apartment buildings are now scarce. Rentals are now small capitalists (usually retired people) cobbling together a house or two. And many of those are being taken off the market as AirBnBs instead.
In addition, a wave of NIMBY city councils removed the single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) and boarding houses of the 1900s and 1930’s homelessness responses, which means that there are many fewer cheap ways to get off the street. Instead of the former system that housed the poor at private expense, we now pay for housing with public money and an increased marginal tax rate.
We also pay in misery. I worked some years at the Calgary Drop-In Centre: whenever the City closed an SRO or rezoned an area that had boarding houses, the shelter population grew -around 1200 when I was last there, sometime sleeping on its internal staircases. Tents are often now seen in front.
The story is similar elsewhere. While immigration is a massive issue, it would be mitigated with a better vision of how capital, tax, and other policies affect housing, from the hobo jungle to the penthouse.
John Hilton-O’Brien
10 months ago
Economics and tax policy are a big part of the problem.
It costs money to build apartment buildings. Massive, whacking gobs of it, like you would not believe. The people doing the building do not have this capital: they must borrow it, at high rates of interest. This cost of capital means that the longer it is before resolution, the higher the cost of capital.
To build and rent out an apartment building requires you to keep this capital perpetually. If you consider a company that wants to build apartment buildings and rent them out, this means that the high cost of capital comes out of any profits made, perpetually. This not only raises rents, but it is not competitive with the other building strategy.
By contrast, if you build an apartment building as a condominium, you can sell the apartments *even before you finish building them*. This vastly reduces the cost of capital. You can even get private investors on board for this: they know how and when their money is coming back to them, and there is no chance they will be stuck running an apartment they don’t know how to deal with. The same is true of building single family homes.
This is the reason why our new developments are full of houses, and actually new aparment buildings are scarce.
In Canada, most of our apartment buildings were built 60’s to 80’s using a financial vehicle called a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Simply put, we recognized the burden that building apartments put on deal-makers and private capital, and gave it tax advantages. The result was a massive building of retail stock that the government did not have to finance. Because of the corporate tax structure, it was difficult to remove those investments once made.
Sadly, Canada was governed from the 90s by people who did not understand this history. They removed the tax protections of REITs. New apartment buildings are now scarce. Rentals are now small capitalists (usually retired people) cobbling together a house or two. And many of those are being taken off the market as AirBnBs instead.
In addition, a wave of NIMBY city councils removed the single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) and boarding houses of the 1900s and 1930’s homelessness responses, which means that there are many fewer cheap ways to get off the street. Instead of the former system that housed the poor at private expense, we now pay for housing with public money and an increased marginal tax rate.
We also pay in misery. I worked some years at the Calgary Drop-In Centre: whenever the City closed an SRO or rezoned an area that had boarding houses, the shelter population grew -around 1200 when I was last there, sometime sleeping on its internal staircases. Tents are often now seen in front.
The story is similar elsewhere. While immigration is a massive issue, it would be mitigated with a better vision of how capital, tax, and other policies affect housing, from the hobo jungle to the penthouse.
David Giles
10 months ago
I’m a mug. I’m a mug because I’m not being paid to write this comment, but some other mug of an an editor paid a moron called Nicholas Harris to write an article that they then published.
And he wrote “A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive.”
Yeah, acknowledged and not challenged by no-nothings like himself who genuinely believes that a property being classed as ‘private rental’ rather than ‘Council housing’ is the cause of any ill at all. A moron without the most basic grasp of supply and demand and so never thinks that a population growing from 60m to 70m without anything like that increase in the housing stock will be the main, nay the only cause of the problems he perceives.
As for Nicholas himself: drop a bucket of shit on his head and he would think the problem was the shit is private; not publicly owned.
David Giles
10 months ago
I’m a mug. I’m a mug because I’m not being paid to write this comment, but some other mug of an an editor paid a moron called Nicholas Harris to write an article that they then published.
And he wrote “A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive.”
Yeah, acknowledged and not challenged by no-nothings like himself who genuinely believes that a property being classed as ‘private rental’ rather than ‘Council housing’ is the cause of any ill at all. A moron without the most basic grasp of supply and demand and so never thinks that a population growing from 60m to 70m without anything like that increase in the housing stock will be the main, nay the only cause of the problems he perceives.
As for Nicholas himself: drop a bucket of shit on his head and he would think the problem was the shit is private; not publicly owned.
Kathie Lou Eldridge
10 months ago
The housing crisis also exists in to the USA. I live in a resort area where the unavailability of housing and exhorbitant rents force many to live in their cars during the summer. It is not that small landlords are the problem but investment groups buying up up property and then raising rents to benefit shareholders coupled along with the paucity of available housing and second, third , fourth and fifth homeowners who live where I live because there is no state income tax but they raise the property taxes so high that small landlords are also forced to raise rents in order to hold on to their property.
Kathie Lou Eldridge
10 months ago
The housing crisis also exists in to the USA. I live in a resort area where the unavailability of housing and exhorbitant rents force many to live in their cars during the summer. It is not that small landlords are the problem but investment groups buying up up property and then raising rents to benefit shareholders coupled along with the paucity of available housing and second, third , fourth and fifth homeowners who live where I live because there is no state income tax but they raise the property taxes so high that small landlords are also forced to raise rents in order to hold on to their property.
Billy Bob
10 months ago
The only way out of the current mess is for the government to build council houses en masse. Leaving it to the market is doomed to fail, as developers are never going to build at the rate required to drop prices as it’s not in their interests to do so.
A glut of council houses would allow hard working youngsters to move out of private rentals and into secure homes. This in turn would reduce demand for rentals causing rents to drop and landlords selling up, which in turn would lead to a drop in house prices and give hard working families a chance of owning a home of their own
No no no. Developers just want to make a profit. Nothing wrong with that providing their business produces safe housing and is non-monopolistic. Drop the land prices created by artificial shortages through planning and they will make the same profits but sell the housing for less per unit. The loser is only the landowner, who makes perhaps £1m an acre instead of the £10,000 an acre of agricultural value.
And as far turning young people into tenants of the state…. Horrendous. Look at the quality of state housing; consider people who have state jobs, live in state houses, and all the rest. We are in vassalage enough, set the people tonal least live free of the grip of the incompetent and stupid state.
Developers will never build enough houses to drop prices, the last 40 years has proven that. Why build 300k houses a year which you have to sell at a lower price when you can make the same money building 150k whilst keeping demand higher? Proponents of Thatcherism now resemble the attitudes shown by the Communists in that any negative effects that have arisen from following those policies is never the fault of the ideology, it’s simply because we haven’t tried it “properly” yet. I’m sure if we double down on what we’ve already tried and just deregulate that little bit more it’ll work next time
Developers will never build enough houses to drop prices, the last 40 years has proven that. Why build 300k houses a year which you have to sell at a lower price when you can make the same money building 150k whilst keeping demand higher? Proponents of Thatcherism now resemble the attitudes shown by the Communists in that any negative effects that have arisen from following those policies is never the fault of the ideology, it’s simply because we haven’t tried it “properly” yet. I’m sure if we double down on what we’ve already tried and just deregulate that little bit more it’ll work next time
No no no. Developers just want to make a profit. Nothing wrong with that providing their business produces safe housing and is non-monopolistic. Drop the land prices created by artificial shortages through planning and they will make the same profits but sell the housing for less per unit. The loser is only the landowner, who makes perhaps £1m an acre instead of the £10,000 an acre of agricultural value.
And as far turning young people into tenants of the state…. Horrendous. Look at the quality of state housing; consider people who have state jobs, live in state houses, and all the rest. We are in vassalage enough, set the people tonal least live free of the grip of the incompetent and stupid state.
Billy Bob
10 months ago
The only way out of the current mess is for the government to build council houses en masse. Leaving it to the market is doomed to fail, as developers are never going to build at the rate required to drop prices as it’s not in their interests to do so.
A glut of council houses would allow hard working youngsters to move out of private rentals and into secure homes. This in turn would reduce demand for rentals causing rents to drop and landlords selling up, which in turn would lead to a drop in house prices and give hard working families a chance of owning a home of their own
Andy Iddon
10 months ago
Asset taxation now. It is the only answer. Too much capital has accrued in the hands of too few people.
Andy Iddon
10 months ago
Asset taxation now. It is the only answer. Too much capital has accrued in the hands of too few people.
Susan Grabston
10 months ago
I wouldn’t worry too much. I was in the Isle of Man 2 weeks ago. The advisory class is doing roaring trade. Money is voting with its metaphoric feet. Met 2 people who had sold 30+ property portfolios in the past 12 months. At least Labour are openly floating their wildest ideas. The difference between conspiracy theory and reality is abput 18 months. Cavey ….
rob drummond
10 months ago
Interesting article – but I dont think there is the need for profanities to be honest. We are all grown ups here and know exactly what the issues were.
Yet another misinformed rant?
Shame this is yet another RANT about ”bad landlords” – and as if to put the boot in, the writer seeks to normalise landlords as ”all bad” by stating: ”everyone has a similar story” – this is simply not true at all.Just because you and perhaps someone else you know may have had a problem you cannot accuse all Landlords of malpractice. Far from it in fact. Tongue in Cheek:
I had thought the title would have been tounge in cheek, but its not – its yet another rant against ”Home Providers” – who (like me) are now quitting the business in droves, due to the continued ONSLAUGHT by this Tory Government over 13 years – with much more to come, and undoubtedly even more from Labour when they get in. Landlords:
Landlords are exiting the market (FACT) – what will that do to rents?
Thats easy – fewer rental properties will make the scramble for whats on the market even more stressful and eat-up even more of peoples wages as rents continue to rise.
London Mayor:
Labour hate Landlrods as well as the Tories it seems to me. London’s Mayor wants to cap rents or even freeze them. He is incapable of joining the dots, with landlrods mortgages rapidly rising (and if renters had a mortage the same would be true for them!), where KHAN was allowed to freeze rents what woudl happen?
YES, even more Landlords would have to exit – or go bust!
Bashing and/or blaming Landlords (continually) does not get anyone anywhere.
Last edited 10 months ago by rob drummond
rob drummond
10 months ago
Interesting article – but I dont think there is the need for profanities to be honest. We are all grown ups here and know exactly what the issues were.
Yet another misinformed rant?
Shame this is yet another RANT about ”bad landlords” – and as if to put the boot in, the writer seeks to normalise landlords as ”all bad” by stating: ”everyone has a similar story” – this is simply not true at all.Just because you and perhaps someone else you know may have had a problem you cannot accuse all Landlords of malpractice. Far from it in fact. Tongue in Cheek:
I had thought the title would have been tounge in cheek, but its not – its yet another rant against ”Home Providers” – who (like me) are now quitting the business in droves, due to the continued ONSLAUGHT by this Tory Government over 13 years – with much more to come, and undoubtedly even more from Labour when they get in. Landlords:
Landlords are exiting the market (FACT) – what will that do to rents?
Thats easy – fewer rental properties will make the scramble for whats on the market even more stressful and eat-up even more of peoples wages as rents continue to rise.
London Mayor:
Labour hate Landlrods as well as the Tories it seems to me. London’s Mayor wants to cap rents or even freeze them. He is incapable of joining the dots, with landlrods mortgages rapidly rising (and if renters had a mortage the same would be true for them!), where KHAN was allowed to freeze rents what woudl happen?
YES, even more Landlords would have to exit – or go bust!
Bashing and/or blaming Landlords (continually) does not get anyone anywhere.
Last edited 10 months ago by rob drummond
rob drummond
10 months ago
This just sums up this writer as a Marx fan (even though he may not admit it) – he quotes ”They (presumably in this case he means Landlrods) who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.
I wont go into a dialogue about how little the writer knows of his subject, suffice as to say ”There are (at least) TWO SIDES to every story!’
Someone please tell him to take off his Rose-Tinted specs and that Marxism is not the only ‘System” that failed spectacularly!
rob drummond
10 months ago
This just sums up this writer as a Marx fan (even though he may not admit it) – he quotes ”They (presumably in this case he means Landlrods) who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.
I wont go into a dialogue about how little the writer knows of his subject, suffice as to say ”There are (at least) TWO SIDES to every story!’
Someone please tell him to take off his Rose-Tinted specs and that Marxism is not the only ‘System” that failed spectacularly!
Alice Rowlands
10 months ago
Bring back council housing for those on low or even average pay.
Make it exclusively for British citizens.
Each tenant must sign a legally binding agreement that includes specific standards of good behaviour to be observed.
Any individual or family who makes their neighbours’ lives a misery must be evicted into a workhouse.
A former colleague of mine spent a couple of years in one as a child when her family became homeless and she was happy there.
Charge rents which are affordable for those on low to average pay.
Employ warders to police the estate to enforce good behaviour.
Many people will never earn enough to get on the housing ladder.
At least the money from the rent can be reinvested in maintaining the public housing stock whose value will appreciate over time.
That way public housing becomes a national asset.
There will still be plenty of tenants for private landlords due to high immigration.
But hopefully slum landlords deprived of housing benefit rent will disappear.
Only give housing benefit to British citizens.
John Riordan
10 months ago
It’s nice to see the odd lefty hagiography on Unherd. I don’t agree with it of course but it does remind me that this is a broad church publication with writers all across the political spectrum.
Orwell upset his socialist friends with the book Road to Wigan Pier by pointing out that most landlords were retired old ladies trying to squeeze a meagre living out of one or two properties. I became an inadvertent landlord by buying the house I was renting an apartment in. All I can say is that not all tenants are a joy and being a landlord is a nuisance. The issue millennials don’t seem to want to acknowledge is the link between immigration and housing costs. Canada brought in 950,000 immigrants last year. That is almost triple the number that we used to admit. They all go to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. You can rail against landlords with their one bedroom investment condo all you like – but until these immigration numbers come down we will be in a perpetual housing affordability crisis.
I’m a Millennial, YIMBY and rented for around a decade before being able to buy with my wife and I agree on immigration completely. Mass migration and NIMBYism are the two plagues that are ruining this country and making life miserable for the majority.
In the US it was a government decision to make homes the only investment of the commons. One cannot build a national economy on housing you need factories.
In the US it was a government decision to make homes the only investment of the commons. One cannot build a national economy on housing you need factories.
With you that immigration is *part* of the problem but I’d say that the *demand* for housing by the wealthy (very much alive and kicking and far from ‘old’ as Matt Goodwin so deceivingly calls them) elite is the biggest and most under-discussed driver here. There is no shortage of housing. It is a distribution problem caused by a house building sector (which like any insufficiently regulated industry) serves the highest bidder, not those most in need. There are more houses than *households* in Britain, because of a growing asset class which is hoarding them as safe investments – a fact far more people need to be aware of.
There is no shortage of housing. The problem is that it is often not where people want to live.
You refer to the housebuilding sector as insufficiently regulated but in fact it is often the over-regulation that is the problem. Of course a commercial builder is only going to build if there is a profit in it for him and planning regulations make many schemes uneconomic. Regulations seek to force builders to build housing that is for the less-well-off and is consequently less profitable or even unprofitable and this pushes up the price of the other housing they are building as part of the development. House building is a low margin business.
Equally regulations that make it more difficult for landlords to get rid of nuisance tenants make many who buy for investment, to try to maintain the value of their money not necessarily to actually make a profit, reluctant to let the property out as it is more hassle than it is worth if they get a dud tenant that doesn’t pay and trashes the property. A lot of overseas investors keep their properties empty for this reason.
The problem is that there is a shortage of houses and flats to let where people want to live compared to the constantly increasing number of people in the UK.
If all you are after is very cheap housing buy a property in an one of the isolated Italian villages where you can get property for a few pounds. Or if you don’t want to go abroad there are plenty of very cheep properties in former mining villages in Durham. The problem is that most people want to live near where there is work and a thriving local economy. Supply and demand is always what drives prices not wicked greedy landlords.
This is what I have told young people and now my kids. Avoid the big cities. Move to a small town. Not only will housing be affordable – but they are desperate for many trades and professions. For example there are too many lawyers in cities but a shortage in rural areas. You may have a lower salary but the housing costs alone will offset that.
They might also avoid the impeding joy of smart cities. Banning driving on a Sunday in cities posited today.
They might also avoid the impeding joy of smart cities. Banning driving on a Sunday in cities posited today.
True nimbyism AND planning are issues. Between bat houses and newt protection it’s pretty much impossible to get a site to development under 2 years (and that’s going it). We are childless living in the home ounties. We want thwm to build but are astonishwd by the attitudes of our neigh ours who all have kids but don’t want new homes. Not sure how pulling up the ladder on your own offspring works in an evolutionary perspective. Since so many primary homes are now pensions perhaps survical of thw fittest stsrting with them.
Supply is controlled; real estate does not operate in a free market. Agents curb listings of lagging properties. Certainly with an appreciating asset putting a tenant in a property is a liability; especially since one is making so much money with the rising equity.
This is what I have told young people and now my kids. Avoid the big cities. Move to a small town. Not only will housing be affordable – but they are desperate for many trades and professions. For example there are too many lawyers in cities but a shortage in rural areas. You may have a lower salary but the housing costs alone will offset that.
True nimbyism AND planning are issues. Between bat houses and newt protection it’s pretty much impossible to get a site to development under 2 years (and that’s going it). We are childless living in the home ounties. We want thwm to build but are astonishwd by the attitudes of our neigh ours who all have kids but don’t want new homes. Not sure how pulling up the ladder on your own offspring works in an evolutionary perspective. Since so many primary homes are now pensions perhaps survical of thw fittest stsrting with them.
Supply is controlled; real estate does not operate in a free market. Agents curb listings of lagging properties. Certainly with an appreciating asset putting a tenant in a property is a liability; especially since one is making so much money with the rising equity.
And the big four housebuilding companies basically have a monopoly and practice land hoarding to keep prices high.
Housing is the main cause of inflation. But the Catch 22 is that home values cannot be lowered because of the amount of profit those elite nobles and old ladies would lose.
True it would damage consumer confidence and so possibly crash the economy. Hence why researchers like Beth Stratford have proposed a scheme called the common ground trust where (after the raft of necessary measures starts bringing down house prices) the government would buy up the land under houses for a minimum price to prevent homeowners going into negative equity/lose money on their houses. This would also have the added advantage of putting more land into the hands of the state, ensuring that it can profit from house sales while not allowing prices to reach such atronomical heights again, as is the effect of state land ownership in Singapore, which the Tories say we’re supposed to be trying to be more like.
https://peg.primeeconomics.org/policybriefs/common-ground-trust
True it would damage consumer confidence and so possibly crash the economy. Hence why researchers like Beth Stratford have proposed a scheme called the common ground trust where (after the raft of necessary measures starts bringing down house prices) the government would buy up the land under houses for a minimum price to prevent homeowners going into negative equity/lose money on their houses. This would also have the added advantage of putting more land into the hands of the state, ensuring that it can profit from house sales while not allowing prices to reach such atronomical heights again, as is the effect of state land ownership in Singapore, which the Tories say we’re supposed to be trying to be more like.
https://peg.primeeconomics.org/policybriefs/common-ground-trust
There is no shortage of housing. The problem is that it is often not where people want to live.
You refer to the housebuilding sector as insufficiently regulated but in fact it is often the over-regulation that is the problem. Of course a commercial builder is only going to build if there is a profit in it for him and planning regulations make many schemes uneconomic. Regulations seek to force builders to build housing that is for the less-well-off and is consequently less profitable or even unprofitable and this pushes up the price of the other housing they are building as part of the development. House building is a low margin business.
Equally regulations that make it more difficult for landlords to get rid of nuisance tenants make many who buy for investment, to try to maintain the value of their money not necessarily to actually make a profit, reluctant to let the property out as it is more hassle than it is worth if they get a dud tenant that doesn’t pay and trashes the property. A lot of overseas investors keep their properties empty for this reason.
The problem is that there is a shortage of houses and flats to let where people want to live compared to the constantly increasing number of people in the UK.
If all you are after is very cheap housing buy a property in an one of the isolated Italian villages where you can get property for a few pounds. Or if you don’t want to go abroad there are plenty of very cheep properties in former mining villages in Durham. The problem is that most people want to live near where there is work and a thriving local economy. Supply and demand is always what drives prices not wicked greedy landlords.
And the big four housebuilding companies basically have a monopoly and practice land hoarding to keep prices high.
Housing is the main cause of inflation. But the Catch 22 is that home values cannot be lowered because of the amount of profit those elite nobles and old ladies would lose.
I sometimes think about buying real estate as an investment and every time I investigate, I come away thinking its all a Ponzi scheme. Just look at the asking price on rental properties – add up the rents and deduct the cost of borrowing, maintenance and tax and you will find in all cases there’s not enough income there to provide a return on your equity. The only hope of getting ahead is that the value of the real estate will continue to increase and you can sell for a big ‘profit’ to the next sucker. Governments tell us that house price inflation is not real inflation, and instruct us to ignore their money printing and only to look at their heavily manipulated ‘consumer price indexes’ – but the massive money printing of the last 20 years is clearly the main culprit. The houses did not become more ‘valuable’ – the money became less valuable, and all that ‘new’ money had nowhere to go but housing (and crypto etc). But don’t call such gambling an ‘investment’. They turned the entire residential real estate market into a Ponzi scheme where the best you can hope for is more asset inflation and getting out before it crashes. Landlords in this situation will never invest in their units because they are already underwater paying the massive mortgages. They just poor money in and hope that asset inflation and immigration will keep the music playing just a little longer.
Exactly right
Where did all the printed money go? It is not under a mattress somewhere near you. It went into asset prices and the rich notionally got richer although if it all crashes the could find themselves significantly poorer
Indeed, if you buy property to let with a mortgage that is not fixed for the long term and interest rates go up and property values go down you can be wiped out financially. Socialists don’t factor in risk when they look at profit.
Naturally, because socialists know f**k-all about making a viable business or producing useful products. They have no real strategies for creating wealth, only redistributing wealth created by the evil capitalist blodgers.
Where in the south east of England (where most housing investment takes place) is it the case that landlords have lost money by investing in housing in the last 40 or more years? Genuinely the first time I’ve heard that buying a house is a risky investment, unless it’s on a cliff or something.
Certainly in the case of the landowner’s profits, Churchill was right when he said:
“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”
Naturally, because socialists know f**k-all about making a viable business or producing useful products. They have no real strategies for creating wealth, only redistributing wealth created by the evil capitalist blodgers.
Where in the south east of England (where most housing investment takes place) is it the case that landlords have lost money by investing in housing in the last 40 or more years? Genuinely the first time I’ve heard that buying a house is a risky investment, unless it’s on a cliff or something.
Certainly in the case of the landowner’s profits, Churchill was right when he said:
“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”
Indeed, if you buy property to let with a mortgage that is not fixed for the long term and interest rates go up and property values go down you can be wiped out financially. Socialists don’t factor in risk when they look at profit.
Exactly right
Where did all the printed money go? It is not under a mattress somewhere near you. It went into asset prices and the rich notionally got richer although if it all crashes the could find themselves significantly poorer
Lords of the Land. So some old ladies retirement is more important than a fair housing policy ? Here in the US rent is not going up because of a bunch of immigrants; it is rising because real estate has been set up as controlled investment for the upper class.
Bang on – perhaps the case of the US (what with its size and less regulated housing industry) more starkly demonstrates how rising house prices is a problem of not enough rather than too much government?
Bang on – perhaps the case of the US (what with its size and less regulated housing industry) more starkly demonstrates how rising house prices is a problem of not enough rather than too much government?
Yes. It’s immigration. As with so many other things (jobs, healthcare, energy, food, etc), there is plenty of cheap housing in England for the English. What we see everyday is that there is not enough for the whole world in this one tiny island. And regarding the plight of young people, how long have we sat back and watched as English youth were pushed to the back of the queue as immigrant groups were given preference?
How long have I, as a young Engishman, to sit back and watch while you and the right wing media falsely blame immigrants for the housing crisis while letting the hoarding asset class continue to keep supply artificially low in order to ensure maximum return on investment?
How long have I, as a young Engishman, to sit back and watch while you and the right wing media falsely blame immigrants for the housing crisis while letting the hoarding asset class continue to keep supply artificially low in order to ensure maximum return on investment?
I’m a Millennial, YIMBY and rented for around a decade before being able to buy with my wife and I agree on immigration completely. Mass migration and NIMBYism are the two plagues that are ruining this country and making life miserable for the majority.
With you that immigration is *part* of the problem but I’d say that the *demand* for housing by the wealthy (very much alive and kicking and far from ‘old’ as Matt Goodwin so deceivingly calls them) elite is the biggest and most under-discussed driver here. There is no shortage of housing. It is a distribution problem caused by a house building sector (which like any insufficiently regulated industry) serves the highest bidder, not those most in need. There are more houses than *households* in Britain, because of a growing asset class which is hoarding them as safe investments – a fact far more people need to be aware of.
I sometimes think about buying real estate as an investment and every time I investigate, I come away thinking its all a Ponzi scheme. Just look at the asking price on rental properties – add up the rents and deduct the cost of borrowing, maintenance and tax and you will find in all cases there’s not enough income there to provide a return on your equity. The only hope of getting ahead is that the value of the real estate will continue to increase and you can sell for a big ‘profit’ to the next sucker. Governments tell us that house price inflation is not real inflation, and instruct us to ignore their money printing and only to look at their heavily manipulated ‘consumer price indexes’ – but the massive money printing of the last 20 years is clearly the main culprit. The houses did not become more ‘valuable’ – the money became less valuable, and all that ‘new’ money had nowhere to go but housing (and crypto etc). But don’t call such gambling an ‘investment’. They turned the entire residential real estate market into a Ponzi scheme where the best you can hope for is more asset inflation and getting out before it crashes. Landlords in this situation will never invest in their units because they are already underwater paying the massive mortgages. They just poor money in and hope that asset inflation and immigration will keep the music playing just a little longer.
Lords of the Land. So some old ladies retirement is more important than a fair housing policy ? Here in the US rent is not going up because of a bunch of immigrants; it is rising because real estate has been set up as controlled investment for the upper class.
Yes. It’s immigration. As with so many other things (jobs, healthcare, energy, food, etc), there is plenty of cheap housing in England for the English. What we see everyday is that there is not enough for the whole world in this one tiny island. And regarding the plight of young people, how long have we sat back and watched as English youth were pushed to the back of the queue as immigrant groups were given preference?
Orwell upset his socialist friends with the book Road to Wigan Pier by pointing out that most landlords were retired old ladies trying to squeeze a meagre living out of one or two properties. I became an inadvertent landlord by buying the house I was renting an apartment in. All I can say is that not all tenants are a joy and being a landlord is a nuisance. The issue millennials don’t seem to want to acknowledge is the link between immigration and housing costs. Canada brought in 950,000 immigrants last year. That is almost triple the number that we used to admit. They all go to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. You can rail against landlords with their one bedroom investment condo all you like – but until these immigration numbers come down we will be in a perpetual housing affordability crisis.
The left likes to sort people neatly into victim/victimised categories:
Workers good, bosses bad.
Tenants good, landlords bad.
Labour good, Tories unspeakable.
Some of us believe that life is not that simple.
Yes but realistically, on balance – who deserves their money more? Those who work for it, or those who get it by sitting on assets? As Bertrand Russell once said:
‘Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.’
Get a job at your local tesco as a shelf stacker and see that difference for yourself.
I worked from the age of 16 until I was 78 with less than an month’s illness. I also inherited a single property which I let at a market rent to help provide for my retirement. Does that make me deserving or undeserving? See what I mean about it not being simple?
Oh come now. I have worked in two factories, painted houses, been a labourer. I am now a highly paid professional. It took 30 years of hard work to get from one to the other. I own my home but when we bought it we were terrified of the mortgage, we had tenants we didn’t really want for 15 years to help pay that mortgage. The house had been a rooming home for hippies in the 70’s so it wasn’t a real treat. Now it looks great – but we waited 20 years to save the money to fix it up. Most people are neither victims nor villains and very few people are just handed wealth.
To both of you – I’d say it doesn’t make you deserving or undeserving but it does, as the above article makes clear, make you quite possibly less deserving of your wealth than those generations below who may well have to work longer and harder for even less capital acquisition. BUT: As someone who wants a fairer society that rewards hard work, my solutions to the housing crisis would not hit hardest on those who have worked for their assets in their own lifetimes – of course I would want to go after the big landlords (like the Grosvenors) who have had astronomical wealth since the Norman invasion. For the same reason I was not massively keen even on Corbyn’s manifesto pledge to tax the top 1% because I know that most people even in that wealth bracket do work somewhat for their wealth – it’s that wealth contained in huge estates or offshore bank accounts (i.e. wealth at it’s most superfluous) that really needs to be taxed, and the taxing of which would affect very few people indeed. We are the 99.9% – me and you. Now let’s build a fairer system.
Sounds familiar: Tax the Rich! Or, rather, some of the rich; specifically those who have investments in land. Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.
You can laugh at me but what’s your alternative? Taxing those who have more than enough to live 10,000 lifetimes I doubt is an egregious idea to most people nor is compulsorily purchasing some of the land of families who have almost £10bn’s worth (often in London in the case of the Grosvenors) and have done nothing for it for generations. ‘Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.’ – what a laughable strawmanning of my point. Of course the cheaper and better located housing resulting from these measures will increase productivity – our economy will grow once more of ordinary people’s earnings goes into their own pockets and not those of their landlord.Tell me otherwise. You have a generation to persuade.
So your solution is legalised property theft and taxing landlords out of the market.
George Osbourne already tried the latter and succeeded only in massively reducing the supply of properties available to rent.
Desmond: I don’t think I am straw-manning you. Do you think my single property, a two-bedrooms semi (which my parents worked for all their lives and is now rented to a professional couple), should be confiscated? Perhaps you do, though I can assure you that would be most unwelcome to both me and my excellent tenants and if I thought it was a serious threat I would sell up.
Or is it only the Grosvenors whose property must be confiscated? I ask, because the only difference, economically speaking, is that they are richer than me and therefore in some mysterious way, less deserving.
I repeat, it’s the old mantra, Tax the rich!
To be clear: no I don’t think your second home should be confiscated! And as far as I know, no one in the labour party has ever suggested confiscating people’s second homes. As said above, I think council housing (and increased government powers to compulsorily buy land) is the main reform that’s needed. Although, many countries with more affordable housing (Austria, Singapore etc) do have taxes on second homes to try and disincentivise the hoarding of properties (but how much this does for housing affordability I don’t know – in the case of Singapore I suspect it’s more the fact that the government owns all the land; a strange consideration when you think how many globalist Tories aspire for the UK to become a Singapore on Thames).
The essential difference between you and the Grosvenors? A good question. Well the first difference would be use of property – if your second home is being used to house a couple who work in the UK (serving need) for a reasonable rate that is an essential difference to say a developer providing luxury flats for oligarchs (serving demand). Do you not also think that they are less deserving simply because for more generations they have been able to accrue capital simply by (I imagine) paying financial advisers to tell them where to invest whereas your family have all worked hard for what you have?
And yes I get that my proposal is an ‘old’ one. But not being original is not the same as not being effective, right?
To be clear: no I don’t think your second home should be confiscated! And as far as I know, no one in the labour party has ever suggested confiscating people’s second homes. As said above, I think council housing (and increased government powers to compulsorily buy land) is the main reform that’s needed. Although, many countries with more affordable housing (Austria, Singapore etc) do have taxes on second homes to try and disincentivise the hoarding of properties (but how much this does for housing affordability I don’t know – in the case of Singapore I suspect it’s more the fact that the government owns all the land; a strange consideration when you think how many globalist Tories aspire for the UK to become a Singapore on Thames).
The essential difference between you and the Grosvenors? A good question. Well the first difference would be use of property – if your second home is being used to house a couple who work in the UK (serving need) for a reasonable rate that is an essential difference to say a developer providing luxury flats for oligarchs (serving demand). Do you not also think that they are less deserving simply because for more generations they have been able to accrue capital simply by (I imagine) paying financial advisers to tell them where to invest whereas your family have all worked hard for what you have?
And yes I get that my proposal is an ‘old’ one. But not being original is not the same as not being effective, right?
Good point about danger of taxing landlords out of the market. You wouldn’t want to suddenly raise taxes on them because (as with rent controls too quickly implemented in some case studies) that can indeed lead to them exiting the market. When I wrote a thesis on the English housing crisis I concluded that renters’ rights would need to be introduced gradually and that rent controls are often too blunt an instrument. What does need to happen and which no one can rationally argue against from the point of view of fiscal sense, is a renaissance of council housing which could well require to compulsory purchase (not theft of property) of land currently being neglected by landowners or hoarded by developers. Some people shrilly shout in protest to that proposal saying it conflicts with human rights. It doesn’t. How do you think railways or even shopping centres get build? Do governments magically find lines that run through hundreds of miles of land all with landowners willing to sell up? No – the right of a government to buy land (especially for something as essential as housing) exists both in the UK and the US (there known as the power of eminent domain as you may remember). Hope that helps.
Desmond: I don’t think I am straw-manning you. Do you think my single property, a two-bedrooms semi (which my parents worked for all their lives and is now rented to a professional couple), should be confiscated? Perhaps you do, though I can assure you that would be most unwelcome to both me and my excellent tenants and if I thought it was a serious threat I would sell up.
Or is it only the Grosvenors whose property must be confiscated? I ask, because the only difference, economically speaking, is that they are richer than me and therefore in some mysterious way, less deserving.
I repeat, it’s the old mantra, Tax the rich!
Good point about danger of taxing landlords out of the market. You wouldn’t want to suddenly raise taxes on them because (as with rent controls too quickly implemented in some case studies) that can indeed lead to them exiting the market. When I wrote a thesis on the English housing crisis I concluded that renters’ rights would need to be introduced gradually and that rent controls are often too blunt an instrument. What does need to happen and which no one can rationally argue against from the point of view of fiscal sense, is a renaissance of council housing which could well require to compulsory purchase (not theft of property) of land currently being neglected by landowners or hoarded by developers. Some people shrilly shout in protest to that proposal saying it conflicts with human rights. It doesn’t. How do you think railways or even shopping centres get build? Do governments magically find lines that run through hundreds of miles of land all with landowners willing to sell up? No – the right of a government to buy land (especially for something as essential as housing) exists both in the UK and the US (there known as the power of eminent domain as you may remember). Hope that helps.
So your solution is legalised property theft and taxing landlords out of the market.
George Osbourne already tried the latter and succeeded only in massively reducing the supply of properties available to rent.
You can laugh at me but what’s your alternative? Taxing those who have more than enough to live 10,000 lifetimes I doubt is an egregious idea to most people nor is compulsorily purchasing some of the land of families who have almost £10bn’s worth (often in London in the case of the Grosvenors) and have done nothing for it for generations. ‘Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.’ – what a laughable strawmanning of my point. Of course the cheaper and better located housing resulting from these measures will increase productivity – our economy will grow once more of ordinary people’s earnings goes into their own pockets and not those of their landlord.Tell me otherwise. You have a generation to persuade.
Sounds familiar: Tax the Rich! Or, rather, some of the rich; specifically those who have investments in land. Not because it will yield more revenue but because we resent their wealth and think we should be entitled to confiscate some of it.
To both of you – I’d say it doesn’t make you deserving or undeserving but it does, as the above article makes clear, make you quite possibly less deserving of your wealth than those generations below who may well have to work longer and harder for even less capital acquisition. BUT: As someone who wants a fairer society that rewards hard work, my solutions to the housing crisis would not hit hardest on those who have worked for their assets in their own lifetimes – of course I would want to go after the big landlords (like the Grosvenors) who have had astronomical wealth since the Norman invasion. For the same reason I was not massively keen even on Corbyn’s manifesto pledge to tax the top 1% because I know that most people even in that wealth bracket do work somewhat for their wealth – it’s that wealth contained in huge estates or offshore bank accounts (i.e. wealth at it’s most superfluous) that really needs to be taxed, and the taxing of which would affect very few people indeed. We are the 99.9% – me and you. Now let’s build a fairer system.
Are you implying that landlords earn money by “sitting on assets?” I don’t discount the existence of slumlords, but most folks that I’ve known in the States who own rental properties work to make sure that they are kept up, and work more when tenants occasionally trash them. They certainly delegate some phyiscal work to maintenance workers, but they’re ultimately responsible for those properties. And they enjoy all the headaches of ownership, plus those of government regulations and rent controls in many areas.
Not entirely! But I do think it’s less work than making money through a full time job whilst also paying rent no? Again I’m not attacking small scale landlords (as I hope my above comments make clear)..
Not entirely! But I do think it’s less work than making money through a full time job whilst also paying rent no? Again I’m not attacking small scale landlords (as I hope my above comments make clear)..
I worked from the age of 16 until I was 78 with less than an month’s illness. I also inherited a single property which I let at a market rent to help provide for my retirement. Does that make me deserving or undeserving? See what I mean about it not being simple?
Oh come now. I have worked in two factories, painted houses, been a labourer. I am now a highly paid professional. It took 30 years of hard work to get from one to the other. I own my home but when we bought it we were terrified of the mortgage, we had tenants we didn’t really want for 15 years to help pay that mortgage. The house had been a rooming home for hippies in the 70’s so it wasn’t a real treat. Now it looks great – but we waited 20 years to save the money to fix it up. Most people are neither victims nor villains and very few people are just handed wealth.
Are you implying that landlords earn money by “sitting on assets?” I don’t discount the existence of slumlords, but most folks that I’ve known in the States who own rental properties work to make sure that they are kept up, and work more when tenants occasionally trash them. They certainly delegate some phyiscal work to maintenance workers, but they’re ultimately responsible for those properties. And they enjoy all the headaches of ownership, plus those of government regulations and rent controls in many areas.
Yes but realistically, on balance – who deserves their money more? Those who work for it, or those who get it by sitting on assets? As Bertrand Russell once said:
‘Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.’
Get a job at your local tesco as a shelf stacker and see that difference for yourself.
The left likes to sort people neatly into victim/victimised categories:
Workers good, bosses bad.
Tenants good, landlords bad.
Labour good, Tories unspeakable.
Some of us believe that life is not that simple.
Do people really believe that all was well with public housing before Margaret Thatcher sold off the estates? Have they forgotten the dreary working class ghettos; row upon row of flats and houses built like prison officers’ quarters where you couldn’t even choose the colour of your own front door; the ‘problem families’ rehoused next door by Social Services,; the interminable waiting lists (5, 6, 7 years), often queue-jumped by unmarried mothers who knew that getting pregnant was the passport to their own home? Have they forgotten how some of these estates (and the lives of the people who lived there) were transformed by Thatcher’s policies?
People remember not having to hand over well over half their weeks wages for a rundown rental though, and when a single average wage was enough to raise a family and buy a basic family home.
Also rough estates still exist, they may have been pushed to different areas of the city but are you suggesting that Thatcher selling off the council houses somehow caused rundown crime ridden estates to be consigned to the history books?
Two things have changed – a huge (threefold?) increase in housing costs in real terms; and a coddled youth who can’t believe everything is not up to the standard that mum and dad supply, reflecting their great importance (now some 80% of young people agree with the statement, ‘I am special’, up from 20% a couple of decades ago).
I believed I was special until I was about 70. Then I realised that I was completely nondescript and relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things. No a bad lesson, but learned too late.
We are all unique and ordinary at the same time.
“Completely Nondescript” was my nickname in school!
We are all unique and ordinary at the same time.
“Completely Nondescript” was my nickname in school!
Your confused, when you say coddling you mean emotionally neglected. Our parents weren’t good parents, they didn’t give us values, they left it up to us, and amongst such confusion it’s very clear that raising your self Importance is a grand strategy for not killing yourself or making something out of the kind of hole that you are in.
Moreover amongst this neglect of late 20th century parents they didn’t necessarily dedicate their lives to finding us the best education (or any education past the local state), they didn’t plan on how we could save for a house, they didn’t explain the necessity of a loving AND practical marriage etc. etc.
The point is they neglected us by making us weak but didn’t support us thereafter and we had to grow up in our twenties when it should of occurred in our teens. Clearly you can’t blame children for having neglectful, apathetic or absent minded parents.
And if you don’t believe me, a common comment by my mother is that I wasn’t breastfed as a child because I was ‘bitey’. Sure, I was a hungry bitey little baby, but guess who she blames for immediately stopping breastfeeding at few weeks old? Me of course. And it isn’t a joke unfortunately. My now mother in law is aghast when she hears this and she was born in the third world… So who is the real problem?
Boomers just can’t accept their failures and their flaws have to be corrected by their children on the MAX setting.
No I am not confused. To better understand my point you could read, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Jonathan Haidt. Yours is a quite different story, not typical I think of any particular generation, but all too frequent nonetheless.
Just because you have a sob story does not mean every boomer is to blame.
No I am not confused. To better understand my point you could read, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Jonathan Haidt. Yours is a quite different story, not typical I think of any particular generation, but all too frequent nonetheless.
Just because you have a sob story does not mean every boomer is to blame.
I believed I was special until I was about 70. Then I realised that I was completely nondescript and relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things. No a bad lesson, but learned too late.
Your confused, when you say coddling you mean emotionally neglected. Our parents weren’t good parents, they didn’t give us values, they left it up to us, and amongst such confusion it’s very clear that raising your self Importance is a grand strategy for not killing yourself or making something out of the kind of hole that you are in.
Moreover amongst this neglect of late 20th century parents they didn’t necessarily dedicate their lives to finding us the best education (or any education past the local state), they didn’t plan on how we could save for a house, they didn’t explain the necessity of a loving AND practical marriage etc. etc.
The point is they neglected us by making us weak but didn’t support us thereafter and we had to grow up in our twenties when it should of occurred in our teens. Clearly you can’t blame children for having neglectful, apathetic or absent minded parents.
And if you don’t believe me, a common comment by my mother is that I wasn’t breastfed as a child because I was ‘bitey’. Sure, I was a hungry bitey little baby, but guess who she blames for immediately stopping breastfeeding at few weeks old? Me of course. And it isn’t a joke unfortunately. My now mother in law is aghast when she hears this and she was born in the third world… So who is the real problem?
Boomers just can’t accept their failures and their flaws have to be corrected by their children on the MAX setting.
I remember
It was better then it was made less good by the adoption of “greatest need” as the basis of allocation. Remember East London in the 90s and the death of the housing list because immigrants had “greater need”. It was all just class war against the threat the British working class posed to the wealthy.
The dispossession of a nation, and the conversion from nation to state.
I remember Luton prefabs for sure! Yes it was rather grim.
People remember not having to hand over well over half their weeks wages for a rundown rental though, and when a single average wage was enough to raise a family and buy a basic family home.
Also rough estates still exist, they may have been pushed to different areas of the city but are you suggesting that Thatcher selling off the council houses somehow caused rundown crime ridden estates to be consigned to the history books?
Two things have changed – a huge (threefold?) increase in housing costs in real terms; and a coddled youth who can’t believe everything is not up to the standard that mum and dad supply, reflecting their great importance (now some 80% of young people agree with the statement, ‘I am special’, up from 20% a couple of decades ago).
I remember
It was better then it was made less good by the adoption of “greatest need” as the basis of allocation. Remember East London in the 90s and the death of the housing list because immigrants had “greater need”. It was all just class war against the threat the British working class posed to the wealthy.
The dispossession of a nation, and the conversion from nation to state.
I remember Luton prefabs for sure! Yes it was rather grim.
Do people really believe that all was well with public housing before Margaret Thatcher sold off the estates? Have they forgotten the dreary working class ghettos; row upon row of flats and houses built like prison officers’ quarters where you couldn’t even choose the colour of your own front door; the ‘problem families’ rehoused next door by Social Services,; the interminable waiting lists (5, 6, 7 years), often queue-jumped by unmarried mothers who knew that getting pregnant was the passport to their own home? Have they forgotten how some of these estates (and the lives of the people who lived there) were transformed by Thatcher’s policies?
I rented my 3 bed duplex for 15% below the going rate to a couple with a baby that no one else would rent to.. they vacated at their own behest 4 years later. In that time I refloored the dining room (carpet ruined by baby puke) and carried out every other repair promptly. I never increased the rent by a penny. Some of us landlords are driven by our Christian principles and not by greed.. I’m no saint, far from it, but neither am I a monster. I would expect every other landlord worthy of the title Christian (or Buddhist or Muslim) to do no less. Then I guess I’m old with old fashioned ideas..
Are you looking for praise for getting somebody financially much worse off than yourself to pay your second mortgage?
He’s adding nuance as a counterweight to trite, splitting, identity politics viz – two legs (landlords) bad; four legs (renters) good.
My wife and I are doing very similar as Liam to help an immigrant family. And we’re not looking to make a profit.
And how do you think mortgages and expenses on rentals are covered? The Magic Money Tree?
He’s adding nuance as a counterweight to trite, splitting, identity politics viz – two legs (landlords) bad; four legs (renters) good.
My wife and I are doing very similar as Liam to help an immigrant family. And we’re not looking to make a profit.
And how do you think mortgages and expenses on rentals are covered? The Magic Money Tree?
Like Liam I rented my home (being posted abroad by my employer). I ensured that the house was always well maintained. Over the years I had four tenants, one of whom absconded owing me rent and having cost me a sizeable sum to treat the flea infestation. The others were excellent tenants and I was always on good terms with all of them. I did not use an agency!
Alll repairs and maintenance was done promptly and once a tenant signed the rent was never increased. I have rented previously, many years ago and was treated fairly. BTW, I’m an atheist!
I sold the house two years ago when I decided to remain abroad.
We are not all the selfish horrors that Nick Harris would have us believe.
The problem is not enough is done to punish the really bad ones so all landlords get a bad name.
The problem is not enough is done to punish the really bad ones so all landlords get a bad name.
Yes, it’s important not to tar us all with the same brush. I have rented out a small apartment in order to finance my pension. I therefore have a real interest in letting it to someone who is dependable and likely to stay. If a tenant were to trash the place incurring huge clean-up costs or were to stop paying the rent, I would soon find myself in serious difficulties. I am not a monster.
In my experience the vast majority of landlords behave in a very similar manner to your goodself.
Its a shame ‘Bash Rich Landlords’ is the only mantra what is acceptable in police society now.
When people ask me what I do for a job, I reply (without any irony) ”Oh! I am a Rouge Landlord” – I continue ‘because thats the only way I hear Landlords being described as these days”.
Its not true of course – at the start of COVID (as an example) I sent each of my tenants a Fortnum &M hamper with my best wishes and a contact number where there was a looming financial problem – with the polite note ”please do not skip the rent – as it will only pile up” (I still had service costs, repairs, agents and mortgages to pay).
My friends have two rental properties and they always try to give back 100% of the deposit and go in afterwards and clean from top to bottom and redecorate themselves. There are some good landlords out there. It is the slum landlords who are the problem. It should be easier to ban them from renting out their horrible substandard properties.
Are you looking for praise for getting somebody financially much worse off than yourself to pay your second mortgage?
Like Liam I rented my home (being posted abroad by my employer). I ensured that the house was always well maintained. Over the years I had four tenants, one of whom absconded owing me rent and having cost me a sizeable sum to treat the flea infestation. The others were excellent tenants and I was always on good terms with all of them. I did not use an agency!
Alll repairs and maintenance was done promptly and once a tenant signed the rent was never increased. I have rented previously, many years ago and was treated fairly. BTW, I’m an atheist!
I sold the house two years ago when I decided to remain abroad.
We are not all the selfish horrors that Nick Harris would have us believe.
Yes, it’s important not to tar us all with the same brush. I have rented out a small apartment in order to finance my pension. I therefore have a real interest in letting it to someone who is dependable and likely to stay. If a tenant were to trash the place incurring huge clean-up costs or were to stop paying the rent, I would soon find myself in serious difficulties. I am not a monster.
In my experience the vast majority of landlords behave in a very similar manner to your goodself.
Its a shame ‘Bash Rich Landlords’ is the only mantra what is acceptable in police society now.
When people ask me what I do for a job, I reply (without any irony) ”Oh! I am a Rouge Landlord” – I continue ‘because thats the only way I hear Landlords being described as these days”.
Its not true of course – at the start of COVID (as an example) I sent each of my tenants a Fortnum &M hamper with my best wishes and a contact number where there was a looming financial problem – with the polite note ”please do not skip the rent – as it will only pile up” (I still had service costs, repairs, agents and mortgages to pay).
My friends have two rental properties and they always try to give back 100% of the deposit and go in afterwards and clean from top to bottom and redecorate themselves. There are some good landlords out there. It is the slum landlords who are the problem. It should be easier to ban them from renting out their horrible substandard properties.
I rented my 3 bed duplex for 15% below the going rate to a couple with a baby that no one else would rent to.. they vacated at their own behest 4 years later. In that time I refloored the dining room (carpet ruined by baby puke) and carried out every other repair promptly. I never increased the rent by a penny. Some of us landlords are driven by our Christian principles and not by greed.. I’m no saint, far from it, but neither am I a monster. I would expect every other landlord worthy of the title Christian (or Buddhist or Muslim) to do no less. Then I guess I’m old with old fashioned ideas..
I scanned the article for any mention of supply and demand. There was none.
You would imagine that at this point the question “why ?” would be asked:
“Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young.”
But no.
Young people – with whom I have much sympathy here – have only themselves to blame if they fail to recognise and try to address the real reasons for expensive and low quality housing. Namely mass immigration with people ready and willing to accept sub-standard accomodation (by our quite reasonable standards) and a complete failure by government and local authorities to enforce these standards.
Not so – high demand from the super-rich and lack of regulation from the government is also key. There are more houses than households after all. That wouldn’t be the case if poor immigrants were the only people putting pressure on prices.
I very much doubt your assertion as being anything more than a second order effect. Please provide some evidence for it.
Certainly, the price of money (low interest rates) is a far more serious factor in the cost of housing. So is actual demand. Speculation far less so.
What exactly is it that the government can – and should – regulate here ?
I would argue that planning is over-regulated and far too restrictive and that government is not properly taxing land – in particular the development uplift windfall gains made by landowners.
But you’re asking for more regulation. On what ?
We’ve had some agreement in the past on the good sense of land tax, and I’d see that as part of what I see as a greater need for more active government in house building. I don’t buy your assumption that speculation is not actual demand – developers know they can make more money building luxury flats than affordable ones, and that wealthy elite wanting second homes are part of that demand. I don’t agree that more deregulation is the answer – the planning system has been streamlined to the point that 9/10 planning applications are now approved and it has made small difference to building output. The effect of immigration I’m less sure of, but I naturally regard with suspicion the invocations of media outlets (which, like unherd, are often owned by billionaires) for us to blame immigration first and foremost. Numbers should be lower I agree, but I’d be in favour of first taking measures that conflict with the interests of landowners before those of immigrants (who after all, for any of their unintended negative effects on wage growth, do actually come here to work and add to the economy, unlike landlords and landowners who suck up our wealth).
And if you want more details here is a thesis I wrote on the housing crisis back in 2019. Admittedly it reads more as an introductory pamphlet than a serious academic study, but I still stand by it’s diagnosis and suggested solutions.
https://dw.convertfiles.com/files/0235890001686142935/housing%20crisis%20thesis%20final%20draft%20.doc.pdf
Thanks.
I agree that speculation is demand. No dispute there. I think it’s a second rather than first order effect though. I’m no great fan of speculation in general, though it does play an essential part in financial market liquidity and efficient pricing – but I’m not convinced that’s of any benefit in the housing market.
The current planning system is making building land far too expensive. The vast majority of housing cost is now land cost. Without lowering land costs, you won’t reduce the price of new build housing significantly.
Your assumption that all immigrants come here to work and add to the economy is not correct. Some do. Some don’t.
Personally, if there is ever a choice to be made, I rank the interests of exisiting citizens and taxpayers over those of people who want to come to this country and have contributed nothing yet. Once they are settled, integrated and contributing, I make no distinction. Non-contributory welfare (rights without and responsibilities) is a very poor way to operate in my book.
No fan of landlords. However at least some of them do provide a necessary service which people are prepared to pay for. Nothing wrong with that. It’s not really any different than providing any other service, for instance insurance.
Well serendiptidously much of what you said agrees with my thesis – land value capture was the key recommendation, which I suppose doesn’t classify straightforwardly as either more or less regulation since it could involve either a shift to zoing (i.e. less regular (but more widespread) state intervention in where houses can be built) or government capture of land price raises following the granting of case by case by planning permissions. Either way, it sounds like you’re not wholly opposed to more a more active state in this area. And being an evidence guided man, I imagine you won’t have any objections to the sheer financial sense of more social housing, which pays for itself as you know.
Again, I never assumed that all immigrants do come here to work (you’re pointing out the expected nuance that is true of any general trend or statement, just as you did wit my comment about the productivity gap, pointing out that not all sectors are lagging behind our European counterparts – well obviously, it would be truly remarkable of all of them were!) Saying that ‘some do, some don’t’ is platitudinous cover for the fact that you don’t want to admit that generally (see link below) people come here not to scrounge. Most people, work by the think tank Autonomy as researched this, have a need to work to feel a sense of dignity – the myth that humanity is riddled with wastrels is a myth cooked up by much of our media intent on turning working people against each other.
https://smithstonewalters.com/2023/03/02/immigration-in-numbers-2022-statistics-revealed/
Well serendiptidously much of what you said agrees with my thesis – land value capture was the key recommendation, which I suppose doesn’t classify straightforwardly as either more or less regulation since it could involve either a shift to zoing (i.e. less regular (but more widespread) state intervention in where houses can be built) or government capture of land price raises following the granting of case by case by planning permissions. Either way, it sounds like you’re not wholly opposed to more a more active state in this area. And being an evidence guided man, I imagine you won’t have any objections to the sheer financial sense of more social housing, which pays for itself as you know.
Again, I never assumed that all immigrants do come here to work (you’re pointing out the expected nuance that is true of any general trend or statement, just as you did wit my comment about the productivity gap, pointing out that not all sectors are lagging behind our European counterparts – well obviously, it would be truly remarkable of all of them were!) Saying that ‘some do, some don’t’ is platitudinous cover for the fact that you don’t want to admit that generally (see link below) people come here not to scrounge. Most people, work by the think tank Autonomy as researched this, have a need to work to feel a sense of dignity – the myth that humanity is riddled with wastrels is a myth cooked up by much of our media intent on turning working people against each other.
https://smithstonewalters.com/2023/03/02/immigration-in-numbers-2022-statistics-revealed/
Thanks.
I agree that speculation is demand. No dispute there. I think it’s a second rather than first order effect though. I’m no great fan of speculation in general, though it does play an essential part in financial market liquidity and efficient pricing – but I’m not convinced that’s of any benefit in the housing market.
The current planning system is making building land far too expensive. The vast majority of housing cost is now land cost. Without lowering land costs, you won’t reduce the price of new build housing significantly.
Your assumption that all immigrants come here to work and add to the economy is not correct. Some do. Some don’t.
Personally, if there is ever a choice to be made, I rank the interests of exisiting citizens and taxpayers over those of people who want to come to this country and have contributed nothing yet. Once they are settled, integrated and contributing, I make no distinction. Non-contributory welfare (rights without and responsibilities) is a very poor way to operate in my book.
No fan of landlords. However at least some of them do provide a necessary service which people are prepared to pay for. Nothing wrong with that. It’s not really any different than providing any other service, for instance insurance.
Agreed, decades of low interest rates, even negative real interest rates have allowed those who can afford a deposit to push prices up
We’ve had some agreement in the past on the good sense of land tax, and I’d see that as part of what I see as a greater need for more active government in house building. I don’t buy your assumption that speculation is not actual demand – developers know they can make more money building luxury flats than affordable ones, and that wealthy elite wanting second homes are part of that demand. I don’t agree that more deregulation is the answer – the planning system has been streamlined to the point that 9/10 planning applications are now approved and it has made small difference to building output. The effect of immigration I’m less sure of, but I naturally regard with suspicion the invocations of media outlets (which, like unherd, are often owned by billionaires) for us to blame immigration first and foremost. Numbers should be lower I agree, but I’d be in favour of first taking measures that conflict with the interests of landowners before those of immigrants (who after all, for any of their unintended negative effects on wage growth, do actually come here to work and add to the economy, unlike landlords and landowners who suck up our wealth).
And if you want more details here is a thesis I wrote on the housing crisis back in 2019. Admittedly it reads more as an introductory pamphlet than a serious academic study, but I still stand by it’s diagnosis and suggested solutions.
https://dw.convertfiles.com/files/0235890001686142935/housing%20crisis%20thesis%20final%20draft%20.doc.pdf
Agreed, decades of low interest rates, even negative real interest rates have allowed those who can afford a deposit to push prices up
I very much doubt your assertion as being anything more than a second order effect. Please provide some evidence for it.
Certainly, the price of money (low interest rates) is a far more serious factor in the cost of housing. So is actual demand. Speculation far less so.
What exactly is it that the government can – and should – regulate here ?
I would argue that planning is over-regulated and far too restrictive and that government is not properly taxing land – in particular the development uplift windfall gains made by landowners.
But you’re asking for more regulation. On what ?
So what are the youngsters supposed to do? Which party has said they’ll reduce these numbers?
Firstly, understand the hard facts of the situation and start telling the truth. They are currently asking for policies which destroy their own futures. Secondly demand lower immigration. Thirdly, start studying serious subjects to fill actual labour shortages rather than “luxury subjects”. Fourthly, don’t regard living on welfare as an option.
If all the above fails, emigrate.
With you on the last bit of advice. I’ve emigrated to the Netherlands where stronger trade unions, renters’ rights, rent controls, and a greater social housing stock mean my rent here is 3x less than it would be in London.
With you on the last bit of advice. I’ve emigrated to the Netherlands where stronger trade unions, renters’ rights, rent controls, and a greater social housing stock mean my rent here is 3x less than it would be in London.
Well when it comes to this problem of housing, luckily they don’t need to worry too much about which party is promising to do most about immigration because immigration is only a part of this problem, while the rest of it is to do with a state that is not active enough in house building and in regulating our current stock, as well as a party (no guesses which one) which is in thrall to landed interests (as Roger Scruton himsef told Douglas Murray in his Spectator interview on the future of conservatism – of course Murray, afraid to upset those who pay for his platform, swiftly changed the subject).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w&t=1440s
Firstly, understand the hard facts of the situation and start telling the truth. They are currently asking for policies which destroy their own futures. Secondly demand lower immigration. Thirdly, start studying serious subjects to fill actual labour shortages rather than “luxury subjects”. Fourthly, don’t regard living on welfare as an option.
If all the above fails, emigrate.
Well when it comes to this problem of housing, luckily they don’t need to worry too much about which party is promising to do most about immigration because immigration is only a part of this problem, while the rest of it is to do with a state that is not active enough in house building and in regulating our current stock, as well as a party (no guesses which one) which is in thrall to landed interests (as Roger Scruton himsef told Douglas Murray in his Spectator interview on the future of conservatism – of course Murray, afraid to upset those who pay for his platform, swiftly changed the subject).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w&t=1440s
Exactly! It is too easy for the bad landlords to get away with it.
Not so – high demand from the super-rich and lack of regulation from the government is also key. There are more houses than households after all. That wouldn’t be the case if poor immigrants were the only people putting pressure on prices.
So what are the youngsters supposed to do? Which party has said they’ll reduce these numbers?
Exactly! It is too easy for the bad landlords to get away with it.
I scanned the article for any mention of supply and demand. There was none.
You would imagine that at this point the question “why ?” would be asked:
“Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young.”
But no.
Young people – with whom I have much sympathy here – have only themselves to blame if they fail to recognise and try to address the real reasons for expensive and low quality housing. Namely mass immigration with people ready and willing to accept sub-standard accomodation (by our quite reasonable standards) and a complete failure by government and local authorities to enforce these standards.
Another millennial writer bemoaning the housing crisis yet refusing to cite the million-plus people arriving in the UK every year on below-median wage. Who will require a roof over their heads.
Another millennial writer bemoaning the housing crisis yet refusing to cite the million-plus people arriving in the UK every year on below-median wage. Who will require a roof over their heads.
I’m a Millennial, and by contrast, I seem to have been quite lucky with my landlords. My last one in particular before my wife and I bought a house was extremely good. Our main issues were usually with the agencies who were often indifferent to any issues with the property. I did hear plenty of horror stories though from friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc though.
However, it is undeniable that housing has become an asset bubble in recent decades, and it is the Baby-Boomers who have benefited from this. This isn’t the main gripe of Millennials in of itself, but that in many cases, Boomers seem to have pulled up the ladder behind them, denying younger generations the same opportunities they got to enjoy. As others have and will point out, mass migration is a huge problem here (and even most Millennials are opposed to current levels based on polling I’ve seen), but NIMBY’s cannot be ignored in the damage they do. The frustrating thing is that many of them are our parents, aunts and uncles. I have absolutely no time for older homeowners who bemoan the inability of their children to get on the housing ladder while simultaneously e-mailing the council to file absurd planning objections for a new development 5 minutes down the road. People who do this are effectively attacking their children.
All true and I agree with that.
But you fail to acknowledge the demand side from massive immigration. It’s not only supply. There’s also the cheap money (decades of suppressed interest rates).
I do acknowledge it in another comment on here in fairness, but yes, can’t be ignored.
Apologies. I hadn’t properly read your comments.
Absolutely agree about the NIMBYs. I’d rather have lower house prices so my son and people of his generation can aspire to owning their own house without needing to be lucky in having rich parents. People need to be able to prosper based on their own efforts. We’ve gone horribly wrong in allowing this situation to develop. But it’s everywhere in the West now. Although Britain’s amongst the worst countries for housing affordability – and quite likely dead last for affordability vs quality and space.
Apologies. I hadn’t properly read your comments.
Absolutely agree about the NIMBYs. I’d rather have lower house prices so my son and people of his generation can aspire to owning their own house without needing to be lucky in having rich parents. People need to be able to prosper based on their own efforts. We’ve gone horribly wrong in allowing this situation to develop. But it’s everywhere in the West now. Although Britain’s amongst the worst countries for housing affordability – and quite likely dead last for affordability vs quality and space.
I do acknowledge it in another comment on here in fairness, but yes, can’t be ignored.
You really couldn’t be more wrong. I’m 67, in the US, and I live on the income of 18 leases from hard-earned properties. I didn’t set out to do this – I’m a lawyer but found more autonomy and reward in the real estate business. And I have 3 millennial children whose futures I care about.
After 35 years of brokering and investing in a hot market – Austin, Texas – I can say that federal subsidy of housing to people who can’t really afford to buy or support a mortgage, combined with at least 3 strong foreclosure cycles, has put a massive amount of rental housing into the hands of huge portfolios like BlackRock. (Yes, immigration has put more demand for rental housing, but largely because the immigrants are willing to work hard whereas millennials are not so much. The immigrants are some of my tenants. They will also live where millennials will not.)
Developers have a pact with City governments that benefits them with the gimmick of “affordable housing” and now the millennials are falling for that one too. Blocks of high rise buildings are going up on transit corridors that used to be farmland not too long ago. The price of surrounding land goes sky high along with it. Millennials confuse a box of air with a home – detached from any ground or fresh air that they can really own.
As with education, insurance, healthcare, transportation whether by car or subway or rail, the commoditization of housing subsidized by 3rd party money – largely government money – has made the prices of these necessities skyrocket. The government, in all its humanity and trickery, bought naively, wholesale, by the 2 generations behind me, have put you where you are.
All true and I agree with that.
But you fail to acknowledge the demand side from massive immigration. It’s not only supply. There’s also the cheap money (decades of suppressed interest rates).
You really couldn’t be more wrong. I’m 67, in the US, and I live on the income of 18 leases from hard-earned properties. I didn’t set out to do this – I’m a lawyer but found more autonomy and reward in the real estate business. And I have 3 millennial children whose futures I care about.
After 35 years of brokering and investing in a hot market – Austin, Texas – I can say that federal subsidy of housing to people who can’t really afford to buy or support a mortgage, combined with at least 3 strong foreclosure cycles, has put a massive amount of rental housing into the hands of huge portfolios like BlackRock. (Yes, immigration has put more demand for rental housing, but largely because the immigrants are willing to work hard whereas millennials are not so much. The immigrants are some of my tenants. They will also live where millennials will not.)
Developers have a pact with City governments that benefits them with the gimmick of “affordable housing” and now the millennials are falling for that one too. Blocks of high rise buildings are going up on transit corridors that used to be farmland not too long ago. The price of surrounding land goes sky high along with it. Millennials confuse a box of air with a home – detached from any ground or fresh air that they can really own.
As with education, insurance, healthcare, transportation whether by car or subway or rail, the commoditization of housing subsidized by 3rd party money – largely government money – has made the prices of these necessities skyrocket. The government, in all its humanity and trickery, bought naively, wholesale, by the 2 generations behind me, have put you where you are.
I’m a Millennial, and by contrast, I seem to have been quite lucky with my landlords. My last one in particular before my wife and I bought a house was extremely good. Our main issues were usually with the agencies who were often indifferent to any issues with the property. I did hear plenty of horror stories though from friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc though.
However, it is undeniable that housing has become an asset bubble in recent decades, and it is the Baby-Boomers who have benefited from this. This isn’t the main gripe of Millennials in of itself, but that in many cases, Boomers seem to have pulled up the ladder behind them, denying younger generations the same opportunities they got to enjoy. As others have and will point out, mass migration is a huge problem here (and even most Millennials are opposed to current levels based on polling I’ve seen), but NIMBY’s cannot be ignored in the damage they do. The frustrating thing is that many of them are our parents, aunts and uncles. I have absolutely no time for older homeowners who bemoan the inability of their children to get on the housing ladder while simultaneously e-mailing the council to file absurd planning objections for a new development 5 minutes down the road. People who do this are effectively attacking their children.
This article could be applied to The Netherlands at this time. As from next year the Dutch government will impose a hard rent cap of 1000 euros on all privately owned rentals regardless of location or desirability. Prices will be adjusted based on energy labels, space and condition. This sounds fair in theory, but for locations like Amsterdam there is no way that 1000 euros will cover the costs landlords pay to own and maintain their properties.
Not only that, but local councils are now making it illegal to own empty properties, so landlords cannot just let them sit. They must be occupied. Property taxes are also set to rise drastically next year.
In truth rather than lower rental prices, many landlords will be forced to sell as they will no longer be able to cover their property costs. As a result there will be less affordable rentals in the housing market.
The arrogant stupidity of the Dutch government is so mind-boggling that it has either become pathologically incompetent or this is all ideologically motivated. I suspect the latter but cannot rule out the former either, as these new measures will be imposed in the name of ‘housing justice’ and ‘spatial inequality’.
This is a big blow to people of my generation who for decades were told by the government not to rely on state pensions and to invest in property as a means to provide for our old age.
This article could be applied to The Netherlands at this time. As from next year the Dutch government will impose a hard rent cap of 1000 euros on all privately owned rentals regardless of location or desirability. Prices will be adjusted based on energy labels, space and condition. This sounds fair in theory, but for locations like Amsterdam there is no way that 1000 euros will cover the costs landlords pay to own and maintain their properties.
Not only that, but local councils are now making it illegal to own empty properties, so landlords cannot just let them sit. They must be occupied. Property taxes are also set to rise drastically next year.
In truth rather than lower rental prices, many landlords will be forced to sell as they will no longer be able to cover their property costs. As a result there will be less affordable rentals in the housing market.
The arrogant stupidity of the Dutch government is so mind-boggling that it has either become pathologically incompetent or this is all ideologically motivated. I suspect the latter but cannot rule out the former either, as these new measures will be imposed in the name of ‘housing justice’ and ‘spatial inequality’.
This is a big blow to people of my generation who for decades were told by the government not to rely on state pensions and to invest in property as a means to provide for our old age.
An issue which seems to always get overlooked in this debate is the fact that many housing associations/councils are really bad landlords. Lets not forget that the recent change in legislation aimed at tackling mould in rented in properties came about as the result of the death of a child who lived in social housing.I was shown pictures just yesterday from someone who lives in HA property, which has now maintenance done for 16 years. The mould on the ceilings was terrible. I also have an elderly disabled brother who lives in a ground floor flat who has had constant problems getting repairs done, including dealing with mould. During last winter the person in the top floor flat had rainwater coming through the ceiling and when he called the repair people he was told, and I quote” what do you expect us to do about it, we can’t stop the rain”.
An issue which seems to always get overlooked in this debate is the fact that many housing associations/councils are really bad landlords. Lets not forget that the recent change in legislation aimed at tackling mould in rented in properties came about as the result of the death of a child who lived in social housing.I was shown pictures just yesterday from someone who lives in HA property, which has now maintenance done for 16 years. The mould on the ceilings was terrible. I also have an elderly disabled brother who lives in a ground floor flat who has had constant problems getting repairs done, including dealing with mould. During last winter the person in the top floor flat had rainwater coming through the ceiling and when he called the repair people he was told, and I quote” what do you expect us to do about it, we can’t stop the rain”.
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Finsbury Park – one of the trendiest areas of North London partly due to the great transport links. Why did the writer not look a litte further afield to somewhere like Stroud Green? Because you might have to walk for an extra mile to get to the tube or (heaven forfend) take a bus. Any young person looking to move to London should not live within the North Circular (being a north londoner myself I don’t pay much attention to what goes on south of the river) but should be as near a tube as possible. This is just practical advice that anyone from the capital can tell you.
Surely anywhere near the Tube will be subject to the same price inflation?
Technically maybe but the actual price you pay won’t be as much as you move further from the centre.
Jobs becoming ever more concentrated in our major cities where an increasing number of workers can’t afford to live is a tremendous drag on a nation’s productivity though.
Is it? Productivity in cities is much more than in towns/rural areas. It might not be good for the workers but gone are the days when companies provided houses for their workers.
Let’s bring those days back (or closer) and demand companies do more for their workers, like give them a proper living wage
Let’s bring those days back (or closer) and demand companies do more for their workers, like give them a proper living wage
Is it? Productivity in cities is much more than in towns/rural areas. It might not be good for the workers but gone are the days when companies provided houses for their workers.
Jobs becoming ever more concentrated in our major cities where an increasing number of workers can’t afford to live is a tremendous drag on a nation’s productivity though.
Technically maybe but the actual price you pay won’t be as much as you move further from the centre.
Surely anywhere near the Tube will be subject to the same price inflation?
Finsbury Park – one of the trendiest areas of North London partly due to the great transport links. Why did the writer not look a litte further afield to somewhere like Stroud Green? Because you might have to walk for an extra mile to get to the tube or (heaven forfend) take a bus. Any young person looking to move to London should not live within the North Circular (being a north londoner myself I don’t pay much attention to what goes on south of the river) but should be as near a tube as possible. This is just practical advice that anyone from the capital can tell you.
Working citizens, like the author, are expected to pay an exorbitant rent to live in filth. Meanwhile, any indolent infiltrator gets comfortable accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense. It’s pathological.
Quite So!
Quite So!
Working citizens, like the author, are expected to pay an exorbitant rent to live in filth. Meanwhile, any indolent infiltrator gets comfortable accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense. It’s pathological.
Such nonsense. Rich people invest in many things: housing, shares, stocks, wine, classic cars. Classic cars are in pretty static supply, and so the price tends to go up and up. But housing is only in limited supply because we have made it so, mainly through manipulation of the planning system. If we made it easy to build new housing, land prices and thus housing costs would fall, and the supply would increase.
More homes to buy, more homes to rent. Better homes to rent as well, because landlords would compete on quality to get better tenants and a little premium on the rent that better tenants would bring. But rents would have gone down from the increasingly monopolistic position that landlords are now in. Win win win for everybody, apart from the professional whingeing classes
The Conservative government of the 1980’s knew this and put the necessary reforms in place, by liberating the market. The quality of rented housing improved enormously – though many former tenants could now buy and thus both demand and supply of rented tended to decrease. But it was a startling successful policy.
Now we have a government (and an opposition, and a Bank of England) which seems to have no understanding of the most basic economics and to have read no history, so the market is going back to what it was in the pre 1979 years, and it will go on getting worse until somebody goes back to the Thatcher reforms and sorts it all out again.
Which is not to say there are no bad landlords. But there is legislation in place to compel landlords to provide rented housing that is safe and fit to live in. The local councils won’t enforce it, mostly, because, not least, they themselves own some of the worst housing stock.
All these problems are easy to solve, but somebody has to want to do it.
Yes, the writer (who is clearly well-educated and politically astute) seems oblivious to free markets and property rights. These are circles to be squared in what is clearly a failing system, but you can’t solve the problem without acknowledging the principles. Unless, of course, 30 and 40-somethings want to live in a planned economy. Hey, give it a go. It might work this time *chuckles*
The generation that benefitted enormously from the state building the homes the country needed, complaining about any form of state assistance for the generations that follow. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic
Um.. the planning system has been liberalised (9/10 planning permission requests are now permitted as of the last few years, with no rise in out builds, because – surprise surprise – an unregulated market serves demand not need e.g. property developers sit on land until they can sell it to the highest bidder). Other countries with more affordable housing have more regulation and more social housing stock. Time to get real and stop lazily relying on the ‘free’ market to solve problems in essential services where it has manifestly failed (trains, water, NHS etc)
The generation that benefitted enormously from the state building the homes the country needed, complaining about any form of state assistance for the generations that follow. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic
Um.. the planning system has been liberalised (9/10 planning permission requests are now permitted as of the last few years, with no rise in out builds, because – surprise surprise – an unregulated market serves demand not need e.g. property developers sit on land until they can sell it to the highest bidder). Other countries with more affordable housing have more regulation and more social housing stock. Time to get real and stop lazily relying on the ‘free’ market to solve problems in essential services where it has manifestly failed (trains, water, NHS etc)
Yes, the writer (who is clearly well-educated and politically astute) seems oblivious to free markets and property rights. These are circles to be squared in what is clearly a failing system, but you can’t solve the problem without acknowledging the principles. Unless, of course, 30 and 40-somethings want to live in a planned economy. Hey, give it a go. It might work this time *chuckles*
Such nonsense. Rich people invest in many things: housing, shares, stocks, wine, classic cars. Classic cars are in pretty static supply, and so the price tends to go up and up. But housing is only in limited supply because we have made it so, mainly through manipulation of the planning system. If we made it easy to build new housing, land prices and thus housing costs would fall, and the supply would increase.
More homes to buy, more homes to rent. Better homes to rent as well, because landlords would compete on quality to get better tenants and a little premium on the rent that better tenants would bring. But rents would have gone down from the increasingly monopolistic position that landlords are now in. Win win win for everybody, apart from the professional whingeing classes
The Conservative government of the 1980’s knew this and put the necessary reforms in place, by liberating the market. The quality of rented housing improved enormously – though many former tenants could now buy and thus both demand and supply of rented tended to decrease. But it was a startling successful policy.
Now we have a government (and an opposition, and a Bank of England) which seems to have no understanding of the most basic economics and to have read no history, so the market is going back to what it was in the pre 1979 years, and it will go on getting worse until somebody goes back to the Thatcher reforms and sorts it all out again.
Which is not to say there are no bad landlords. But there is legislation in place to compel landlords to provide rented housing that is safe and fit to live in. The local councils won’t enforce it, mostly, because, not least, they themselves own some of the worst housing stock.
All these problems are easy to solve, but somebody has to want to do it.
The problem with high property prices and these relate to rents, as well, is the imbalance between supply and demand. Make it easier to build new houses, by cutting planning application times, reducing the scope judicial review and freeing up some greenbelt. Cut the cost of new housing – in Chelmsford, a developer has to pay a Community Infrastructure Levy of £17.5k for a 90m2 house – 1,000 sqft semi – plus Building Regs and Building Control, and get an environmental assessment done, and separately apply to Essex Roads and do a Statement of Needs, all of which costs. All in it costs £50k before a metaphorical spade is put in the ground. And Chelmsford is, by all accounts, pretty reasonable.
Then there’s the hidden increases by ratcheting up costs by revisions to Building Regs. Anecdote. A house in a road where I was collecting Christian Aid had been hit by lightning and the owners moved out while it was rebuilt. Big argument between insurers, council and owners, as if rebuilt on existing sq footage, the rooms would be smaller as building regs standards had changed so walls internal and external were thicker. If rebuilt with same size rooms, the building would be bigger. All sorted now, but those changes are reflected in new buildings costs.
For renters, the Government is requiring that rental properties from 2025 meet EPC C standards (current requirement is E). Upgrading to that requirement will cos between £10k – Government claim – and £50-70k – real world. Whatever happens renters will pay, but I suspect you’ll see a lot of rental properties withdrawn from the market with a consequent upwards shove to rents. Next, especially if Labour are elected, will be rent controls, with the complete wrecking of the rental market.
A better solution is to build lots more houses, easing planning restrictions, and make it easier to rent out property (I don’t let properties, thank you very much, I’ve got quite enough property exposure in my own home).
Controlling net immigration would also help. Where are the 600k immigrants going to live? At 4 per home, that’s 150,000 homes. At 2 per home that’s 300,000 homes – on top of domestic demand. And how much did we build last year?
The problem with high property prices and these relate to rents, as well, is the imbalance between supply and demand. Make it easier to build new houses, by cutting planning application times, reducing the scope judicial review and freeing up some greenbelt. Cut the cost of new housing – in Chelmsford, a developer has to pay a Community Infrastructure Levy of £17.5k for a 90m2 house – 1,000 sqft semi – plus Building Regs and Building Control, and get an environmental assessment done, and separately apply to Essex Roads and do a Statement of Needs, all of which costs. All in it costs £50k before a metaphorical spade is put in the ground. And Chelmsford is, by all accounts, pretty reasonable.
Then there’s the hidden increases by ratcheting up costs by revisions to Building Regs. Anecdote. A house in a road where I was collecting Christian Aid had been hit by lightning and the owners moved out while it was rebuilt. Big argument between insurers, council and owners, as if rebuilt on existing sq footage, the rooms would be smaller as building regs standards had changed so walls internal and external were thicker. If rebuilt with same size rooms, the building would be bigger. All sorted now, but those changes are reflected in new buildings costs.
For renters, the Government is requiring that rental properties from 2025 meet EPC C standards (current requirement is E). Upgrading to that requirement will cos between £10k – Government claim – and £50-70k – real world. Whatever happens renters will pay, but I suspect you’ll see a lot of rental properties withdrawn from the market with a consequent upwards shove to rents. Next, especially if Labour are elected, will be rent controls, with the complete wrecking of the rental market.
A better solution is to build lots more houses, easing planning restrictions, and make it easier to rent out property (I don’t let properties, thank you very much, I’ve got quite enough property exposure in my own home).
Controlling net immigration would also help. Where are the 600k immigrants going to live? At 4 per home, that’s 150,000 homes. At 2 per home that’s 300,000 homes – on top of domestic demand. And how much did we build last year?
I’m not sure if giving away all the council housing stock was intended to increase the number of owner occupiers (and thus likely Conservative voters) or if it was another case of turning publicly owned assets into investment vehicles over the longer term. But the pigeons (or is it chickens?) have certainly come home to roost. What could be more conservative than wishing for a decent home to settle in and securely bring up a family? I only hope that Millennial Rage does serious and lasting damage to the Conservative OCG at the next general election.
Quite. This has been coming for many years. It is surprising that the Conservatives either haven’t seen it, or have seen it, and decided to ignore it. Good article, by the way…
I agree. A triple tsunami has been rolling toward us since Thatcher and Blair first wiped out social housing replacement; then EU 6m free movers piled in unplanned; but the third and biggest shock was the era of zero interest rates from 2008. It allowed older boomers to secure & bank million pound capital gains as their mortgages were paid off easy. But the next generation – the sorry millennials – were sucked Golem like into the market in the belief that property prices only ever rose; and that a 1% mortgage was the new permanent normal. Its these naive buyers who are set to suffer terribly as much as those enduring rats and damp in overpriced rentals.
I agree. A triple tsunami has been rolling toward us since Thatcher and Blair first wiped out social housing replacement; then EU 6m free movers piled in unplanned; but the third and biggest shock was the era of zero interest rates from 2008. It allowed older boomers to secure & bank million pound capital gains as their mortgages were paid off easy. But the next generation – the sorry millennials – were sucked Golem like into the market in the belief that property prices only ever rose; and that a 1% mortgage was the new permanent normal. Its these naive buyers who are set to suffer terribly as much as those enduring rats and damp in overpriced rentals.
Privatisation is less often “giving away assets” than “giving away debts” and in the case of many council estates, the money wasn’t there to make the improvements needed that the new individual owners then carried out themselves.
I wouldn’t suggest you’re entirely wrong about that, but in my direct personal experience (my work took me into many ex-council properties) the council houses that were purchased were well looked after by the tenants already (almost by definition) and they were greatly improved after purchase by the new owners.
Yes, I agree with that, from observation and personal experience. As in living there, not “my work took me into”.
But, beyond keeping things clean and tidy, the good tenants were not able to make the desired improvements while they were tenants, only when they became owners.
Yes, I agree with that, from observation and personal experience. As in living there, not “my work took me into”.
But, beyond keeping things clean and tidy, the good tenants were not able to make the desired improvements while they were tenants, only when they became owners.
I wouldn’t suggest you’re entirely wrong about that, but in my direct personal experience (my work took me into many ex-council properties) the council houses that were purchased were well looked after by the tenants already (almost by definition) and they were greatly improved after purchase by the new owners.
Quite. This has been coming for many years. It is surprising that the Conservatives either haven’t seen it, or have seen it, and decided to ignore it. Good article, by the way…
Privatisation is less often “giving away assets” than “giving away debts” and in the case of many council estates, the money wasn’t there to make the improvements needed that the new individual owners then carried out themselves.
I’m not sure if giving away all the council housing stock was intended to increase the number of owner occupiers (and thus likely Conservative voters) or if it was another case of turning publicly owned assets into investment vehicles over the longer term. But the pigeons (or is it chickens?) have certainly come home to roost. What could be more conservative than wishing for a decent home to settle in and securely bring up a family? I only hope that Millennial Rage does serious and lasting damage to the Conservative OCG at the next general election.
A few factors in Australia:
More huge houses with fewer people living in each one.
Air b and b
Foreign investors who buy apartment blocks and leave them empty, I suppose hoping for a profit on eventual resale.
Governments that privatise everything and believe something called “the market” will sort it all out.
Same issues in NZ. The ratio of dwellings per capita is largely unchanged from 40 years ago, however house prices have risen from 3.5x the median salary to almost 13x now.
Same in UK no doubt
Same in UK no doubt
Same issues in NZ. The ratio of dwellings per capita is largely unchanged from 40 years ago, however house prices have risen from 3.5x the median salary to almost 13x now.
A few factors in Australia:
More huge houses with fewer people living in each one.
Air b and b
Foreign investors who buy apartment blocks and leave them empty, I suppose hoping for a profit on eventual resale.
Governments that privatise everything and believe something called “the market” will sort it all out.
Peter RACHMAN* anybody?
(* 1919-1962.)
..
..
Peter RACHMAN* anybody?
(* 1919-1962.)
Economics and tax policy are a big part of the problem.
It costs money to build apartment buildings. Massive, whacking gobs of it, like you would not believe. The people doing the building do not have this capital: they must borrow it, at high rates of interest. This cost of capital means that the longer it is before resolution, the higher the cost of capital.
To build and rent out an apartment building requires you to keep this capital perpetually. If you consider a company that wants to build apartment buildings and rent them out, this means that the high cost of capital comes out of any profits made, perpetually. This not only raises rents, but it is not competitive with the other building strategy.
By contrast, if you build an apartment building as a condominium, you can sell the apartments *even before you finish building them*. This vastly reduces the cost of capital. You can even get private investors on board for this: they know how and when their money is coming back to them, and there is no chance they will be stuck running an apartment they don’t know how to deal with. The same is true of building single family homes.
This is the reason why our new developments are full of houses, and actually new aparment buildings are scarce.
In Canada, most of our apartment buildings were built 60’s to 80’s using a financial vehicle called a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Simply put, we recognized the burden that building apartments put on deal-makers and private capital, and gave it tax advantages. The result was a massive building of retail stock that the government did not have to finance. Because of the corporate tax structure, it was difficult to remove those investments once made.
Sadly, Canada was governed from the 90s by people who did not understand this history. They removed the tax protections of REITs. New apartment buildings are now scarce. Rentals are now small capitalists (usually retired people) cobbling together a house or two. And many of those are being taken off the market as AirBnBs instead.
In addition, a wave of NIMBY city councils removed the single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) and boarding houses of the 1900s and 1930’s homelessness responses, which means that there are many fewer cheap ways to get off the street. Instead of the former system that housed the poor at private expense, we now pay for housing with public money and an increased marginal tax rate.
We also pay in misery. I worked some years at the Calgary Drop-In Centre: whenever the City closed an SRO or rezoned an area that had boarding houses, the shelter population grew -around 1200 when I was last there, sometime sleeping on its internal staircases. Tents are often now seen in front.
The story is similar elsewhere. While immigration is a massive issue, it would be mitigated with a better vision of how capital, tax, and other policies affect housing, from the hobo jungle to the penthouse.
Economics and tax policy are a big part of the problem.
It costs money to build apartment buildings. Massive, whacking gobs of it, like you would not believe. The people doing the building do not have this capital: they must borrow it, at high rates of interest. This cost of capital means that the longer it is before resolution, the higher the cost of capital.
To build and rent out an apartment building requires you to keep this capital perpetually. If you consider a company that wants to build apartment buildings and rent them out, this means that the high cost of capital comes out of any profits made, perpetually. This not only raises rents, but it is not competitive with the other building strategy.
By contrast, if you build an apartment building as a condominium, you can sell the apartments *even before you finish building them*. This vastly reduces the cost of capital. You can even get private investors on board for this: they know how and when their money is coming back to them, and there is no chance they will be stuck running an apartment they don’t know how to deal with. The same is true of building single family homes.
This is the reason why our new developments are full of houses, and actually new aparment buildings are scarce.
In Canada, most of our apartment buildings were built 60’s to 80’s using a financial vehicle called a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Simply put, we recognized the burden that building apartments put on deal-makers and private capital, and gave it tax advantages. The result was a massive building of retail stock that the government did not have to finance. Because of the corporate tax structure, it was difficult to remove those investments once made.
Sadly, Canada was governed from the 90s by people who did not understand this history. They removed the tax protections of REITs. New apartment buildings are now scarce. Rentals are now small capitalists (usually retired people) cobbling together a house or two. And many of those are being taken off the market as AirBnBs instead.
In addition, a wave of NIMBY city councils removed the single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) and boarding houses of the 1900s and 1930’s homelessness responses, which means that there are many fewer cheap ways to get off the street. Instead of the former system that housed the poor at private expense, we now pay for housing with public money and an increased marginal tax rate.
We also pay in misery. I worked some years at the Calgary Drop-In Centre: whenever the City closed an SRO or rezoned an area that had boarding houses, the shelter population grew -around 1200 when I was last there, sometime sleeping on its internal staircases. Tents are often now seen in front.
The story is similar elsewhere. While immigration is a massive issue, it would be mitigated with a better vision of how capital, tax, and other policies affect housing, from the hobo jungle to the penthouse.
I’m a mug. I’m a mug because I’m not being paid to write this comment, but some other mug of an an editor paid a moron called Nicholas Harris to write an article that they then published.
And he wrote “A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive.”
Yeah, acknowledged and not challenged by no-nothings like himself who genuinely believes that a property being classed as ‘private rental’ rather than ‘Council housing’ is the cause of any ill at all. A moron without the most basic grasp of supply and demand and so never thinks that a population growing from 60m to 70m without anything like that increase in the housing stock will be the main, nay the only cause of the problems he perceives.
As for Nicholas himself: drop a bucket of shit on his head and he would think the problem was the shit is private; not publicly owned.
I’m a mug. I’m a mug because I’m not being paid to write this comment, but some other mug of an an editor paid a moron called Nicholas Harris to write an article that they then published.
And he wrote “A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive.”
Yeah, acknowledged and not challenged by no-nothings like himself who genuinely believes that a property being classed as ‘private rental’ rather than ‘Council housing’ is the cause of any ill at all. A moron without the most basic grasp of supply and demand and so never thinks that a population growing from 60m to 70m without anything like that increase in the housing stock will be the main, nay the only cause of the problems he perceives.
As for Nicholas himself: drop a bucket of shit on his head and he would think the problem was the shit is private; not publicly owned.
The housing crisis also exists in to the USA. I live in a resort area where the unavailability of housing and exhorbitant rents force many to live in their cars during the summer. It is not that small landlords are the problem but investment groups buying up up property and then raising rents to benefit shareholders coupled along with the paucity of available housing and second, third , fourth and fifth homeowners who live where I live because there is no state income tax but they raise the property taxes so high that small landlords are also forced to raise rents in order to hold on to their property.
The housing crisis also exists in to the USA. I live in a resort area where the unavailability of housing and exhorbitant rents force many to live in their cars during the summer. It is not that small landlords are the problem but investment groups buying up up property and then raising rents to benefit shareholders coupled along with the paucity of available housing and second, third , fourth and fifth homeowners who live where I live because there is no state income tax but they raise the property taxes so high that small landlords are also forced to raise rents in order to hold on to their property.
The only way out of the current mess is for the government to build council houses en masse. Leaving it to the market is doomed to fail, as developers are never going to build at the rate required to drop prices as it’s not in their interests to do so.
A glut of council houses would allow hard working youngsters to move out of private rentals and into secure homes. This in turn would reduce demand for rentals causing rents to drop and landlords selling up, which in turn would lead to a drop in house prices and give hard working families a chance of owning a home of their own
No no no. Developers just want to make a profit. Nothing wrong with that providing their business produces safe housing and is non-monopolistic. Drop the land prices created by artificial shortages through planning and they will make the same profits but sell the housing for less per unit. The loser is only the landowner, who makes perhaps £1m an acre instead of the £10,000 an acre of agricultural value.
And as far turning young people into tenants of the state…. Horrendous. Look at the quality of state housing; consider people who have state jobs, live in state houses, and all the rest. We are in vassalage enough, set the people tonal least live free of the grip of the incompetent and stupid state.
Developers will never build enough houses to drop prices, the last 40 years has proven that. Why build 300k houses a year which you have to sell at a lower price when you can make the same money building 150k whilst keeping demand higher? Proponents of Thatcherism now resemble the attitudes shown by the Communists in that any negative effects that have arisen from following those policies is never the fault of the ideology, it’s simply because we haven’t tried it “properly” yet. I’m sure if we double down on what we’ve already tried and just deregulate that little bit more it’ll work next time
Developers will never build enough houses to drop prices, the last 40 years has proven that. Why build 300k houses a year which you have to sell at a lower price when you can make the same money building 150k whilst keeping demand higher? Proponents of Thatcherism now resemble the attitudes shown by the Communists in that any negative effects that have arisen from following those policies is never the fault of the ideology, it’s simply because we haven’t tried it “properly” yet. I’m sure if we double down on what we’ve already tried and just deregulate that little bit more it’ll work next time
No no no. Developers just want to make a profit. Nothing wrong with that providing their business produces safe housing and is non-monopolistic. Drop the land prices created by artificial shortages through planning and they will make the same profits but sell the housing for less per unit. The loser is only the landowner, who makes perhaps £1m an acre instead of the £10,000 an acre of agricultural value.
And as far turning young people into tenants of the state…. Horrendous. Look at the quality of state housing; consider people who have state jobs, live in state houses, and all the rest. We are in vassalage enough, set the people tonal least live free of the grip of the incompetent and stupid state.
The only way out of the current mess is for the government to build council houses en masse. Leaving it to the market is doomed to fail, as developers are never going to build at the rate required to drop prices as it’s not in their interests to do so.
A glut of council houses would allow hard working youngsters to move out of private rentals and into secure homes. This in turn would reduce demand for rentals causing rents to drop and landlords selling up, which in turn would lead to a drop in house prices and give hard working families a chance of owning a home of their own
Asset taxation now. It is the only answer. Too much capital has accrued in the hands of too few people.
Asset taxation now. It is the only answer. Too much capital has accrued in the hands of too few people.
I wouldn’t worry too much. I was in the Isle of Man 2 weeks ago. The advisory class is doing roaring trade. Money is voting with its metaphoric feet. Met 2 people who had sold 30+ property portfolios in the past 12 months. At least Labour are openly floating their wildest ideas. The difference between conspiracy theory and reality is abput 18 months. Cavey ….
Interesting article – but I dont think there is the need for profanities to be honest. We are all grown ups here and know exactly what the issues were.
Yet another misinformed rant?
Shame this is yet another RANT about ”bad landlords” – and as if to put the boot in, the writer seeks to normalise landlords as ”all bad” by stating: ”everyone has a similar story” – this is simply not true at all.Just because you and perhaps someone else you know may have had a problem you cannot accuse all Landlords of malpractice. Far from it in fact.
Tongue in Cheek:
I had thought the title would have been tounge in cheek, but its not – its yet another rant against ”Home Providers” – who (like me) are now quitting the business in droves, due to the continued ONSLAUGHT by this Tory Government over 13 years – with much more to come, and undoubtedly even more from Labour when they get in.
Landlords:
Landlords are exiting the market (FACT) – what will that do to rents?
Thats easy – fewer rental properties will make the scramble for whats on the market even more stressful and eat-up even more of peoples wages as rents continue to rise.
London Mayor:
Labour hate Landlrods as well as the Tories it seems to me. London’s Mayor wants to cap rents or even freeze them. He is incapable of joining the dots, with landlrods mortgages rapidly rising (and if renters had a mortage the same would be true for them!), where KHAN was allowed to freeze rents what woudl happen?
YES, even more Landlords would have to exit – or go bust!
Bashing and/or blaming Landlords (continually) does not get anyone anywhere.
Interesting article – but I dont think there is the need for profanities to be honest. We are all grown ups here and know exactly what the issues were.
Yet another misinformed rant?
Shame this is yet another RANT about ”bad landlords” – and as if to put the boot in, the writer seeks to normalise landlords as ”all bad” by stating: ”everyone has a similar story” – this is simply not true at all.Just because you and perhaps someone else you know may have had a problem you cannot accuse all Landlords of malpractice. Far from it in fact.
Tongue in Cheek:
I had thought the title would have been tounge in cheek, but its not – its yet another rant against ”Home Providers” – who (like me) are now quitting the business in droves, due to the continued ONSLAUGHT by this Tory Government over 13 years – with much more to come, and undoubtedly even more from Labour when they get in.
Landlords:
Landlords are exiting the market (FACT) – what will that do to rents?
Thats easy – fewer rental properties will make the scramble for whats on the market even more stressful and eat-up even more of peoples wages as rents continue to rise.
London Mayor:
Labour hate Landlrods as well as the Tories it seems to me. London’s Mayor wants to cap rents or even freeze them. He is incapable of joining the dots, with landlrods mortgages rapidly rising (and if renters had a mortage the same would be true for them!), where KHAN was allowed to freeze rents what woudl happen?
YES, even more Landlords would have to exit – or go bust!
Bashing and/or blaming Landlords (continually) does not get anyone anywhere.
This just sums up this writer as a Marx fan (even though he may not admit it) – he quotes ”They (presumably in this case he means Landlrods) who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.
I wont go into a dialogue about how little the writer knows of his subject, suffice as to say ”There are (at least) TWO SIDES to every story!’
Someone please tell him to take off his Rose-Tinted specs and that Marxism is not the only ‘System” that failed spectacularly!
This just sums up this writer as a Marx fan (even though he may not admit it) – he quotes ”They (presumably in this case he means Landlrods) who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.
I wont go into a dialogue about how little the writer knows of his subject, suffice as to say ”There are (at least) TWO SIDES to every story!’
Someone please tell him to take off his Rose-Tinted specs and that Marxism is not the only ‘System” that failed spectacularly!
Bring back council housing for those on low or even average pay.
Make it exclusively for British citizens.
Each tenant must sign a legally binding agreement that includes specific standards of good behaviour to be observed.
Any individual or family who makes their neighbours’ lives a misery must be evicted into a workhouse.
A former colleague of mine spent a couple of years in one as a child when her family became homeless and she was happy there.
Charge rents which are affordable for those on low to average pay.
Employ warders to police the estate to enforce good behaviour.
Many people will never earn enough to get on the housing ladder.
At least the money from the rent can be reinvested in maintaining the public housing stock whose value will appreciate over time.
That way public housing becomes a national asset.
There will still be plenty of tenants for private landlords due to high immigration.
But hopefully slum landlords deprived of housing benefit rent will disappear.
Only give housing benefit to British citizens.
It’s nice to see the odd lefty hagiography on Unherd. I don’t agree with it of course but it does remind me that this is a broad church publication with writers all across the political spectrum.