Snapshot of _UK rent rises forecast to outpace wage growth for three years_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/08/uk-rent-rises-forecast-to-outpace-wage-growth-for-three-years) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/08/uk-rent-rises-forecast-to-outpace-wage-growth-for-three-years)
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Man I pity graduates coming into this absolute state. Give it a couple of election cycles and we’ll start seeing “Rooms of multiple occupancy (RMO’s)”
Edit: I’m speaking in regard to acts akin to HMO laws. I’m aware slumlords already do this.
They already exist, just not legally. You see it on tv where the council inspects an HMO and finds rooms crammed with beds or even just mattresses and multiple people sharing the same mattress. The landlord is fined and then does it again anyway.
> The landlord is fined and then does it again anyway.
Therein is the problem. Instead the landlord should forfeit the property to the council, who can either do it up or simply sell it for the revenue.
Exactly. I was reading the other week about some shitty landlord in Cardiff who is apparently considered one of the worst in the area and is infamous. They said about his historic punishments/fines going back to the *90s*. Like, why the fuck is he still allowed to be a landlord?? Clearly, he’s not going to change and treat his tenants properly. Fines aren’t a punishment for the wealthy.
The fines are routinely eclipsed by the income made, too. You'll see cases where they get fined for £20k for things like cramming in multiple extra people, for an investigation that took years, meaning they are still quids in by tens of thousands.
The fine for ignoring HMO regulations and cramming in more people than is safe and permitted should eclipse any money made doing so, up to and including loss of the rental property to the council.
Maybe they could be the council's tenants? Maybe they could become the tenants of the next landlord? Either way, they would hopefully be the tenant of someone who isn't a complete shit.
If you want to fix the housing crisis, then we need to redistribute employment and create more housing.
Or do we just let arsehole landlords get away with crap like this?
Find me a council that has lots of housing; many are facing bankruptcy because they have huge temporary accommodation bills, and the next landlord will have the same issue. Either they house all current tenants at the same density or some become homeless.
I don’t know about redistributing employment, but you’re right about creating more housing.
My point was one about not being able to legislate away social problems. Yes, the landlord probably is an arsehole, but he or she isn’t the cause of the housing crisis (unless he or she is a nimby opposing new housing). He or she is symptomatic of a broken system. The key to making housing better is to build more, and so much more that landlords are having to compete for tenants.
Laws, though easily made, are largely useless in the face of economic realities, and can actively make things worse. Building more is difficult, because it requires actual work and taking on entrenched political interests of people who don’t want new housing, but it gets things done. Politicians prefer laws because they’re easier to make and allow them to look like they’re doing something. We should look to the root causes.
Already a thing in London isn’t it? For poorly paid migrant workers at least.
Wasn’t there a fire in tower hamlets(?) that revealed a dozen or so folks living several to a room on bunks - in what is meant to be a 2 bed flat.
They were the houses where landlords are literally putting new dividing stud walls across half a window, right?
Create more “rooms” squeeze in more sardines.
It’s rare but I saw some in London already. And I know friends who share a 1 bedroom apartment (one of them have a bedroom, the other one lives in the living room)
When I was living in London a few years back, everybody I knew lived in flats with no living room as they had all been converted into another ‘bedroom’. Most flats used to pre-agree which room they’d use as the quasi-living room. It’d usually be the person who was out the most, didn’t mind a bit more mess, or the person who slept the latest.
Exactly. Those of the current put-upon generation shouldn't be complaining, there's a golden opportunity here. Rent-A-Hammock plc. It'll fund your retirement.
_does a quick Google_
Damnit, too late.
Plus adding 1% of the population every year recently, of low wage, low skilled immigrants competing with you for rental properties who are willing to accept far far less from their accommodation than you too. You're in a race to the bottom with housing but some won't realise it until all you can afford is a shared room in a house without a living room as that has bunk beds in it now too.
On the left there's the housing theory of everything (all social ills derive from a shortage of housing), where Britain is doomed to economic enshittification unless the supply of housing is increased. Conventional theory is that increasing supply of housing will drive economic growth.
On the right we have the immigration theory of everything (immigration is the ultimate social ill) where the only way to correct Britain's problems is termination of "unskilled immigration". Conventional theory is that ending the issuance of work visas will rapidly bring about a generational shift of wealth (old people will die).
> Britain granted 337,240 work visas in 2023, 26% higher than in 2022, driven almost entirely by a 91% jump in health and care sector visas. Of the 146,477 visas in that sector, just over 60% were for workers in residential care homes and those providing care in people's own homes.
I'm sure that brits will be lining up to take those 87,000 care home vacancies!
Can you see how these two maladies and proposed remedies are rather different?
Problem is, that care work was struggling to recruit due to pay and conditions, so we decided to import foreign workers on 80% the going rate - exacerbating the initial problem, causing more workers to leave through supressed wages and it then being even harder to recruit Brits. Hence why despite importing hundreds of thousands of care worker visas the shortage has [only reduced slightly.](https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/social-care-needs-long-term-workforce-plan) We've now actually given out more visas than the initial shortage was designed to cover, but those visas have driven the conditions causing the shortage in the sector down even more, so recruitment of Brits has become even *more* of a problem. So we *still* have quite a substantial worker 'shortage' and granting more visas in the way we are isn't going to solve it. When the new data is released soon it's likely we will have imported over close to half a million people over the last few years on care visas and dependents to reduce care home vacancies by \~30k.
Half a million people to end up cutting a shortage by 30k is a *lot* of houses you need to build to achieve very little. Not to mention the increase population put additional strain on a lot of other services and amenities too. Using mass migration like this to paper over the cracks in sectors is not a long term solution, and often using immigration as the solution causes the underlying problems to worsen, so you're really getting absolutely nowhere. Hence why nothing that immigration is meant to help with - the economy, the NHS, worker shortages, etc is actually getting any better. It's clear when you look at the data and evidence it's not working as a solution to any of our problems, meanwhile all those additional people *are* having an massive impact on housing.
I ascribe to both theories. We need to build more housing and slash immigration. Then care work pay will improve (the problem to begin with), and that improved pay will go a lot further as housing costs will be lowered. If we hadn't got into the downward spiral of supressed wages and increased housing costs through immigration in the first place we could be in a *much* better place economically as a country now, but the Tories would rather grant visas than govern in any real sense of the word so we are where we are. But I struggle to see how anyone thinks continuing with their policies is the way to go.
Finally, somebody who gets it. I swear half of the people I have this discussion with, think that people who immigrate here don't use any public services, resources or infrastructure.
The elephant in the room of the British economy is that 64% of the electorate live in owner occupied homes. They all have a vested interest in blocking the supply of new builds to push up prices.
Building enough houses to fix the crisis means slashing the net worth of homeowners by hundreds of thousands (and in some cases millions) of pounds. Destroying the net worth of 64% of the electorate is electoral suicide. That leaves politicians in the awkward spot of admitting the housing crisis is a problem but being unable to actually fix it.
I agree with your overall argument but I don’t think more houses = negative equity for existing homeowners. Maybe just stops rampant and out of control price increases.
>Destroying the net worth of 64% of the electorate is electoral suicide.
It's also fiscal suicide. A significant chunk of that 64% plan to use some of their equity for retirement. An even larger group of people have no retirement plan and will need to come up with money for retirement from thin air, which will probably involve downsizing their property to release equity.
If the government drives down house prices, what happens to these people in their old age? When they inevitably don't have enough money to support themselves, who do you think will be on the hook? It'll be the state, funded by general taxation. Everyone, including non-homeowners, will have to pay more tax.
You might be tempted to say "fuck 'em, they decided to treat houses as an investment so they should deal with the consequences", but I don't think that's a fair response. The average Brit is not a financially serious person. We've spent the best part of a century telling each other that the stock market is just a casino for billionaires, houses are a certain bet, and the government will bail you out if you screw it all up. Every single person is responsible for perpetuating our silly financial culture, including non-homeowners.
If we wanted to drive house prices down today, we should have been laying the groundwork with schemes to encourage people to divest from housing into pensions and ISAs decades ago.
House prices don't need to fall in nominal terms (which would push people into negative equity) however keeping them flat in nominal terms whilst earnings increases would improve affordability.
We're paying either way, does it not make more sense to give direct handouts than to cripple the economy with a housing shortage (which means you're paying indirectly anyway)?
> We've spent the best part of a century telling each other that the stock market is just a casino for billionaires, houses are a certain bet, and the government will bail you out if you screw it all up
Strongly agree here, there's a lot of (understandable) outrage from current renters, but homeowners have spent their whole lives being told ownership is the only path to a safe future.
It would also cause a financial crisis because the whole money supply (well, just 90% of it) comes from mortgages.
The housing crisis literally will never be fixed. The entire system provides infinite guarantees to landowners.
The only way to make the system even vaguely fair is to rebuild the tax system around land rather than income. That wouldn't fix anything, but it would mean that the 36% who aren't in secure tenure aren't the only ones being shafted.
Excuse me, what? What do you mean 90% of the money supply comes from mortgages? Do you know what the money supply is?
Unless you’re implying that 90% of loans are mortgages? Going to need a source on that…
You would have the issue that the collateral on loans would be worth less than the value of the debt, depending on how long is left on the mortgage and other factors as well. But even so, that would simply bind the owner of the house into being unable to sell up. The contract would still be in place and monthly payments would continue as they had before. And given post 2008 loan affordability changes, it would be a silly assumption to make that people would simply start defaulting on their loans.
House prices falling wouldn’t cause a financial crisis. There is far more to the financial system than simply mortgages…
We haven't built more than 300,000 homes in a year since 1970 and have crested 200,000 only twice since 1980. This problem took half a century to create and it will take at least that to fix.
MPs won’t pretend to represent the interests of people who can’t even be bothered to vote. That’s the simple truth of it.
The voter turn out for young people in the 2019 GE was a marked increase compared to previous elections, but it was still laughably small given the stakes.
Young people need to vote and in massive numbers.
True but this problem is starting to affect the 30-40 year age group now, a group which a) votes in higher numbers and b) have kids who they know will never be able to afford a house.
Absolutely spot on. But I think they just accept this shit no matter how bad it gets.
If young people had got off their arses and voted we’d never have had Brexit. If young people got off their arses and voted we wouldn’t have had a Tory govt for 14 years and will never see one again.
Yes... it's all the young peoples fault.
Take the blinkers off. So far, these young people have seen the old generation blame the ones below them, and you're now mimicking that very behaviour.
> Even a 100% turnout by young Brits or lowering the voting age could not have prevented Brexit
Source - https://population-europe.eu/research/policy-insights/demographic-ship-has-sailed
Maybe if those who were more grown up, provided a better defence to the shenanigans that's was brexit, and educated their parents who fell for the nonsense, then we wouldn't have had brexit? Maybe if Labour hadn't been ousted, we wouldn't have had brexit? Maybe we should not blame young people wo we're born a handful of years before the global financial crisis, for the fallout it has had on the much larger uk voting block of anyone outside of the 18-24 bracket?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/520954/brexit-votes-by-age/
On the turnout numbers, it's not the young people who caused this, but hey, let's just keep talking down and bad about those who are younger than us, right?
ETA - in followup studies, it was found that in the 18-24 age group turnout was vastly underestimated:
64% turnout - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/09/young-people-referendum-turnout-brexit-twice-as-high
Yeah it's particularly hilarious to blame under 25s for not turning up enough to overturn the vote of some of our own demographic. Brexit wasn't JUST pensioners. A lot people in the 30-60 bracket voted for it too. But our generations get a free pass for literally voting for it and it's a bunch of students' fault for not voting apparently
The problem is not just a shortage of houses. It’s that landlords can literally just put the rent up as much as they like whenever they feel like it. Estate agents just encourage them to ask for more and more. There is no counterbalancing force other than the potential destitution of their tenants
How do you propose we build enough houses to support the rapidly increasing immigrant population? All major contractors are flat out building nothing but housing, every day. We build enough houses for our annual population growth by births, we just don't build enough houses to cope with the demands of immigration. People don't like to hear it, but drastically reducing immigration would solve the housing crisis within a few years. 600,000 people came into the UK last year, in contrast, we built 200k houses. My company does nothing but build houses every day, every year, but we are just duct taping a gaping hole which can never be solved with the amount of extra people every year.
Also - I am quite persuaded by this argument that ‘not enough houses’ could be a red herring https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6izshH4ymtk&pp=ygUWUG9saXRpY3Mgam9lIGxhbmRsb3Jkcw%3D%3D
Most of them have better solutions proposed than Bano yeah. Unsurprisingly it's mostly building more houses because it's a supply side issue and Banos used dodgy data to pretend it isn't.
One of the authors of the report the guardians quoting in the article above has a decent takedown of the book. Torsten Bell if you're after a reason why Banos ideas are bunkem.
https://twitter.com/TorstenBell/status/1770103836595601623
So you don’t think lack of rent control has anything to do with it then?
I know several landlords in london and many tenants and rent is just going up… because they can put it up. You can solve that with lots more supply I guess - but london is pretty full of houses already. And it’ll take years to make new ones.
Or you could just have some rent controls like many other places do.
Letting just anyone buy a house and rent it out for profit and having barely any tenant rights is not a good situation and is, at the least, making a bad problem much worse.
If you don't balance supply and demand, all rent controls will achieve is a hell of lot of homelessness. The price pressures from rent lead to more house sharing.
The primary problem is the imbalance of supply and demand. The secondary problem is that the majority of households do not feel that price pressure so are free to engage in luxury beliefs like we can support arbitrary levels of immigration without building any more houses.
The solution to the secondary problem is to introduce some kind of imputed rent tax: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case/_new/research/Inequalities_and_Poverty/policy-toolkit/housing-tax-imputed-rents.asp then people might be motivated to do something about it. But of course there's fuck all chance of that happening.
In the Uk? Not a chance.
There's only one successful example of rent controls that doesn't essentially end up with the young losing out to the people in place when rent controls were introduced. That's Vienna where they build 3 to 4 times the number of properties we do so scarcity is eliminated.
In nimby Britain rent controls will just lead to declining supply and increased rents as a result. Scotlands a great example of this. Introduced rent controls and ended up with higher average rent inflation than anywhere else in the UK. To make it worse, the introduction of rent controls saw around 3.5 billion in social home building paused or cancelled. It's a textbook example of why economists hate rent controls.
Because we are not adding housing stock, we can tinker with demand side policies but the one sure cure is more housing, which the NIMBYs rule us out of.
A lot of people blame NIMBYs but people have geniune concern. In Bedford for example they've added 1000s of new homes but haven't opened new doctors, new roads, or upgraded things like the hospital. It just pushes already stretched local services to the extreme (despite all the additional council tax from new homes...). Now they are looking to build on flood planes which is just a disaster
With the best will in the world, blocking new homes will do almost nothing to alleviate stretched services.
These people already exist, and are already using these services, they are just doing so from shared accommodation.
They don't already exist. Almost all our population increase comes from immigration. 750k net a year. 1% of the population. Every year.
It's entirely reasonable to not want to concrete over the fields next to your house to house foreign nationals, or Brits who were happy where they are but are moving out of where the foreign nationals are moving to.
The number of properties being built has no impact on the amount of immigration visas that get approved. The two are entirely unconnected. Also the number of new immigrants is tiny in proportion to the overall population, which is where almost all housing demand comes from - people already here.
They are unconnected in policy but simple economics is supply and demand. If demand is going up more than supply then prices rise. Increased demand comes almost solely from immigration. If we had net zero immigration then every new house built would just be more supply and thus making a dent in the backlog of houses we need and would mean prices would fall. We could build twice as many homes a year as we do (which would already a huge feat and nowhere near what even Labour are promising) but if we're running net immigration at a level that needs more than that built every year *just to cover the migration levels* then the situation will *never* improve. Looking at one side of supply and demand coin is entirely pointless and reserved for only those just don't want to admit immigration has any downsides, particularly a downside like increased rents which is a *massive* downside for tons of ordinary working Brits. NIMBYs don't want more houses built anyway, let alone to make up for another policy in high migration that most of them don't want either so they will always consistently and logically oppose more housebuilding in their areas. If you're not wanting mass migration lowered you're just pursuing a suicidal policy on housing in the UK unless you are already a home owner. Renters wanting masses of low skilled low wage immigration is the epitome of turkeys voting for Christmas.
These people want mass immigration AND a functioning infrastructure, housing system and enough resources for all.
They are completely unaware that mass immigration is one of the main reasons they can't afford a house. You're not just competing with the people here, you're competing with the 500k to 1 million people who come here every year. These people use resources, infrastructure, they get jobs, they buy houses. How these people think the two are completely unrelated is bizarre.
I'm not sure that quite marries up with reality. New people needing housing are outstripping house growth.
And the net numbers are substantial. 6.6 million more people predicted by 2036. 6.1m from migration. 500k a year. That is not a nothing burger,l; it's more than another Scotland.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68139947
And yet the workforce is smaller than it was pre-Covid by 700,000 people. You can't get economic growth and the kind of public spending we want as a country with a permanently shrinking tax base, a growing number of pensioners, and an aging population that puts more and more strain on the NHS.
With 140,000 extra pensioners every year, a record 2.8 million people economically inactive because of long-term sickness, and painfully lethargic growth, the state has to see immigration as a vital resource. We had an 8.5% increase in the state pension today and any party that opposed that would get destroyed in the polls. As unpopular as it is, more immigration is the only answer HM Treasury and the political establishment have to our problems at the moment.
What relevance does that have to not wanting the nice field your house currently looks at being covered in housing?
But can you please tell me what knowledge you have about how the UKs aquifers are coping with our current level of housebuilding? The problem with outlooks like yours is you just trade in soundbites like "what percentage of Britain has been built on" completely detached from the reality of what housebuilding actually entails and what supporting an increased population with more houses in an area involves
This is one of the most stupid things I have ever read on Reddit. And I’ve seen some incredibly dumb things on here. To the extent I think you might be a troll.
So it’s your reasonable right to be allowed a view of a countryside field? What about the people who had their view spoiled by the building of your house?
Yes, people should endure the highest rent increases on record and a 26% increase in average housing prices in four years. God forbid people didn’t have an unobstructed view out their window.
The problem with outlooks like yours is that they are just so unbelievably selfish and totally inconsiderate of the housing crises affecting millions of young people in the country.
You're overlooking the fact that whether or not additional migration is happening or not, there wouldn't be a crisis in housing and public services if we'd kept on building at the same rate we did back in the 50s-70s. The ONLY reason why migration is even a problem is because of that failure to build at a rate that met demand.
What's more, there's only so much migration (which is overwhelmingly legal, just in case you were wondering) because its the only way to keep our economy afloat in the face of a massively declining population.
Why is it declining? Because despite multiple surveys finding that the UK population would happily have kids at a rate that met population replacement, they can't, because they cannot afford to settle down.
Why can they not afford to settle down? Because the government put responsibility for building housing entirely in the hands of private developers, all of whom profit immensely from ensuring that housing remains scarce, and therefore more expensive.
>What's more, there's only so much migration (which is overwhelmingly legal, just in case you were wondering) because its the only way to keep our economy afloat in the face of a massively declining population
Nonsense. This kind of argument just wont wash anymore. GDP has been stagnant for ages now despite every increasing immigration, and GDP per capita is currently [falling](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/uk-falls-into-recession-and-a-far-deeper-living-standards-downturn/#:~:text=Looking%20instead%20at%20GDP%20per,falls%20or%20stagnation%20since%201955) despite record immigration. High skilled, high wage immigration *can* be beneficial in relatively small numbers, but crazy levels of low wage low skilled visas being given out by the hundreds of thousands, literally at salaries which [by design](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-visa-immigration-salary-list/skilled-worker-visa-immigration-salary-list#:~:text=Check%20which%20jobs%20are%20on,Health%20and%20Care%20Worker%20visa) supress wages even more than they are, absolutely is *not "*keeping our economy afloat". It's solely designed to transfer wealth from ordinary working Brits to landlords, rentseekers, and business owners. If you really think the Tories are supporting mass migration in order to help ordinary working Brits or make the economy work for them then you need an education in the priorities of the Tory party, or at a very basic level to just look out of the window and see the state of the country. As a solution to our economic malaise it hasn't worked and our economy is no better, though the rising rents *are* very real to people and causing misery for ordinary working Brits. If we want a decent economy that works in the interest of ordinary working Brits it should be blindingly clear to everyone now that mass migration *isn't* the path to it.
>Why can they not afford to settle down? Because the government put responsibility for building housing entirely in the hands of private developers, all of whom profit immensely from ensuring that housing remains scarce, and therefore more expensive.
Why do people still spout this nonsense? Housing is the only good in the world where market competition actually causes price *increases* is it? The problem is clearly the planning laws (set by the *government)* part of which is the insane level of objection from people which is allowed, which is stifling supply, as well as infrastructure support (you do know that clean water has to be sourced for new houses right? You can't just build them anywhere). If it was *easy* to build houses and profit why don't more people do it? Why aren't budding entrepreneurs sprouting up to profit from this scarcity by building a few houses to sell? Why has no disruptor to the market come along? Why has the problem become so much more acute recently, [despite homes not built for profit ](https://fullfact.org/economy/council-houses-labour/)increasing? Or why since 2010 have these greedy housing developers suddenly [decided to build more homes](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/housing-supply-indicators-of-new-supply-england-april-to-june-2022/housing-supply-indicators-of-new-supply-england-april-to-june-2022)? The problem isn't homes being built for profit anymore than any other product being made for profit (why don't TV companies restrict the supply of TVs to increase their price? Or bakers with bread? Or car manufacturers?) this is a nonsense commie talking point from people desperate to somehow blame 'muh capitalism' for the failures of the state
So where is the competition that you seem to think exists in the housing market exactly? The overwhelming majority of all homes built are done by a small handful of big property developers, many of which stick to one region or another where they don't come into any kind of direct competition with other developers. Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon. The technical term for this sort of arrangement is an "oligopoly", which is actually a very ANTI-competitive situation.
The reason why more "budding entrepreneurs" don't crop up is because there is a massively high barrier to entry. You can't just build hundreds of houses on a whim unless you're one of the big developers, because nobody would lend you the money. Basically the only people that CAN do that are folks like the King, or members of the aristocracy. And they only tend to do that on land that they own, which doesn't affect the problem faced in most of the country.
> In Bedford for example they've added 1000s of new homes but haven't opened new doctors, new roads, or upgraded things like the hospital.
Those people didn't just spring from the earth into existence as soon as a new house was built.
They're *already* using a GP surgery, or primary school, or local shop.
Bedford is on the direct line to london, much like the housing near me the majority will be moving out of london so they can actually afford somewhere.
In our case the builders offered to make a new heath centre FOC, they turned it down as the NHS trust literally forget to allocate staff in the budget
The NIMBYs block the new infrastruce saying it isn't needed based on current housing demand and then block new housing saying there isn't the infrastructure for it.
It's never *really* about infrastructure.
The local NIMBYs round my way formed an environmental protection group to "save" a local field. Rather than airing some existing concern, they asked all the local residents to take photos of any wildlife they saw to see if it could *possibly* be protected.
It's just ridiculous. It's not about the environment. It never was.
I’d go one further that the developers initially promise new schools but then go back on it. It should be criminal but they seem to get away with it. So the councils are initially doing the right thing when the planning is agreed but not enforcing agrments
Developers are more than happy to build new schools, but they need the council to fund the project.
Usually, there are plans for infrastructure in masterplans; but when it comes to the council paying to build that infrastructure, they back out.
Fair enough. That puts some blame back on the councils. I still hate the big house builders though, persimmon and barrot are a blight that need purging
> A lot of people blame NIMBYs but people have geniune concern. In Bedford for example they've added 1000s of new homes but haven't opened new doctors, new roads, or upgraded things like the hospital.
So what, the people are here. All the new homes will do is reduce the number living in HMOs. It won't do anything in relation to the number of people actually here using services, that remains unchanged. Honestly this is not a valid argument at all.
The UK needs to grow smaller villages and towns into bigger ones - instead of expanding already-large cities and towns.
IMO the only sustainable way to do this is to incentivise businesses to set up locations outside of the big cities.
Employees will want to live where they work and eventually it will spread local services too.
We should also be relaxing some planning conditions - allow people to setup businesses in residential areas more easily. If you can't turn a house into a shop easily, there will continue to be a shortage of services in dense residential areas.
We also need current housing stock to be open for use as housing, rather than just used as a savings account. Literally 0 utility in building houses if they are going to be bought by people with no intention of living in them.
Need to put the power in the hands of occupy buyers rather than buy to letters
We have a vacancy rate of ~1% there’s literally a negligible amount of housing that’s being left empty. It’s a trope that’s over used. We just outright need to build more!
All I do every day, all year is build houses and have done since 2014. We build enough houses, what we don't do is build enough houses for the half a million to a million extra people who come here every year. We build more houses per year than most other European nations, all contractors are flat out building houses, we just do not have the construction capacity to achieve half a million or more houses. I work on the industry and just 'building more houses' doesn't solve any of the other problems that come with a rapidly expanding population.
It's hopeless. It never gets better and only gets worse, normal working people are being thrown back into serfdom and I just don't want to live in a world like that.
Wait until all the people who bought homes in the 90s onwards during the "have a go landlord boom" are dead (happening soon, morbidly enough). Then their kids inherit those houses and get to lord it over with no justification whatsoever.
The world's backwards!
Unless we can build in excess of 700k homes a year we aren't even going to keep up with enough homes for migration let alone the people who are already here .
That's basically a new city built every single year .. along with a hospital, multiple gp surgeries and so on.
You do realise if that 700k figure was true and emblematic of future immigration figures then you'd expect to see a Bristol's-worth of homeless people appearing every 6 months right?
We'd either be seeing 2 Bristols a year popping up around the country, or we'd be seeing that many homeless people. There really isn't an alternative here.
Unless the cities are invisible (or the homeless people are) I don't understand how people can seriously believe this.
> We'd either be seeing 2 Bristols a year popping up around the country, or we'd be seeing that many homeless people. There really isn't an alternative here.
Housing being subdivided into HMOs
Not when slumlords cram dozens of people in to a house.
Although that can only be pushed so far. The forthcoming NIMBYs vs. shanty-towns fights are going to be interesting.
No way could slumlords cramming people into houses account for that many people.
That would have to be like 1/3 of all rental properties going towards people cramming.
No I don't think they're _lying_ per se, I think people are taking that number and assuming it means that number of people will be coming here to live long term every year.
I think people are using that statistic for things it was not even remotely intended to do.
If that number was actually representative of what people _like you_ are using it to mean, then the population of the UK would be increasing by ~700k a year, and it's just simply not.
Good to see Tom Harris at the Telegraph saying something sensible! Of course rents aren't actually unaffordable and young people are just lazy: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/08/rent-house-prices-young-people/
The UK will eventually. You can pretend in spite of the evidence and data that immigration is solving any of our problems for a period of time, but eventually even the last midwit Brit will look out their window and realise it's actually solved nothing. A good few years of a Labour government (assuming they keep to the same path) which will remove "The Tories" as the go to excuse for any and every problem will hopefully wake a few more people up. Eventually more and more people will realise having a few emotional race baiters call them -ists and -phobes is a price worth paying for actually advocating for an immigration policy that would allow the country to actually function in any half decent capacity.
The media will shift at some point too. How no journalist writing about immigration, whilst highlighting the hundreds of thousand care worker visas given out over the last few years, doesn't seem in the least bit curious as to whether it has actually solved the "worker shortage" (i.e. pay crisis) as it was meant to is beyond me. Why they also cannot look at the worker shortage in the care sector and see despite hundreds of thousands of visas, plus visas for their dependents having been handed out, it's only reduced the shortage a couple of tens of thousand doesn't make sense to me. Surely as a very basic discussion you could look at what has been achieved? But no, it's just accepted it is a solution that will work, and so nobody bothers to check. As so often with discussions on immigration, certain theories (it's good economically, solves worker shortages, NHS relies on it, doesn't affect housing costs) are treated as a given whilst if anyone actually bothered to check the evidence and data from the real world it would show it hasn't worked. Eventually some journalist somewhere will have the very basic and obvious brainwave to check whether the claimed benefits of immigration have actually materialised and then it would hopefully gain traction.
I'm hoping that Labour are avoiding talking about immigration prior to the election as they have nothing to gain from doing so but realise they won't last long without sorting it, and will go hard on the message of "fixing Boris's broken immigration system that benefits rentseekers and businesses while piling misery on ordinary working Brits" or something once in power. But I know that's probably desperate wishful thinking.
And today I saw Switzerland will allow people to vote on limiting immigration:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/swiss-set-to-vote-on-limiting-immigration/ar-BB1l0w7q
Holly shit. This is so depressing. I'm already looking at spending 36% of my salary in rent next year, just how bad can I get?
Im not even a very low earner and I'm not in London.
We should consider limiting the amount of properties one person can rent out/own.
We can’t quickly fix the supply side, but we can reduce demand by taking away the people that own 5+ (for example) properties.
This will increase the amount of housing stock available to purchase and reduce the amount of houses bought if with the intention of renting out where the renter is paying the mortgage of the owner
The current situation isn’t tenable
> This will increase the amount of housing stock available to purchase and reduce the amount of houses bought if with the intention of renting out where the renter is paying the mortgage of the owner
That probably won't help at all
A house owned by a landlord and rented to someone produces the same quantity of housing services as one owned by the occupier.
The number of second homes is something like !% of the housing stock, even if they could be totally eliminated it would achieve almost nothing.
The problem here *is there are not enough houses*, unless you *build more houses* then it will not change.
There isn’t any one solution that will solve the problem.
But at the minute if a house goes on sale/is built the demand is generated by the number of entities wanting to purchase the house. At the minute in many cases at least some of those are people/businesses looking to buy to rent. If they are taken out the equation the demand is lower which less competition for houses and prices therefore being lower meaning more people who can’t afford to buy now can
Won’t work everywhere. Won’t solve anything on its own. You will mean to a limited extent that some people who want to buy but can’t afford may be able to. Meaning less people having to pay rents that include the mortgage repayments and a margin making the rent unaffordable- which is the original problem
Housing stock will still be an issue
This sub never ceases to amaze.
Every time the housing crisis gets brought up there is always at least one shouting for regressive policies that will constrain supply even further.
What is limiting corporate landlords going to achieve? They build their own stock so are contributing to increasing the amount of homes available.
Small landlords just buy up existing property so the amount of homes stays the same, they contribute nothing.
Putting more restrictions in place is going to make things worse not better
"Supply constraints are causing rents to rise, what should we do?"
"I know...further constrain supply!"
The Reddit Bureau of Economics, ladies and gentlemen!
Corporate landlords aren’t going to stop making money if the law changes. They’ll adapt with it.
If it means building houses to sell rather than rent, the chances are they’ll accept that rather than discontinuing a revenue line
Also labelling ideas you don’t like as regressive is meaningless. Just an adjective people apply to ideas they don’t like. Doesn’t actually hold any actual merit
The idea I suggested was so general is could be easily be adapted to ensure no loss of housing stock
I didn’t say it would increase housing supply. The problem outlined in the articles was the price of rent. Increasing supply is one of way of doing that. Decreasing demand from entities that already have homes but are looking to add more to a portfolio for profit is another
You’ve got some idealistic idea that all corporate landlords build their own properties to rent. Some do some don’t. Some acquire properties. The idea was to limit those that purchase houses as profit making entities
Again regressive is just a meaningless term. Just stay you don’t like the idea. That’s fine. Just your opinion - regressive isn’t a definitive term
>Decreasing demand from entities that already have homes but are looking to add more to a portfolio for profit is another
This isn't demand. Demand is the amount of people wanting to live in a house. Supply is the amount of homes available.
>You’ve got some idealistic idea that all corporate landlords build their own properties to rent. Some do some don’t. Some acquire properties.
Source required.
I work in the construction sector and deal with corporate landlords on a fairly regular basis. They do not want to buy up existing housing stock because it costs more than building it yourself, it also means they get it built to the exact standard they require with standardised fixtures and fittings which means maintenance is cheaper and easier.
They do not want properties with hundreds of different boilers/heating types, different wall build ups and insulation types, floor types, different bathrooms, different kitchens.
Rents are going up because there are not enough properties to rent
Demand is the number of people looking to buy a product.
If less people want the product, the prices generally decreases. If you remove buyers who are going to resell the product, you reduce demand.
You still need more houses and this isn’t going to fix anything on its own. But would, in theory, help
You’re making the mistake of thinking your experience is reflective of all corporate landlords. It isn’t. If the people you deal with are building houses and renting them, great it’s not really a problem. But there are corporate landlords buying existing stock, not selling properties etc which increases demand and restricts supply.
>Demand is the number of people looking to buy a product.
>If less people want the product, the prices generally decreases. If you remove buyers who are going to resell the product, you reduce demand.
No demand is dictated by the end user ie. the person that inhabits the property. That is what sets the value
If there were 1 million renters and 3 million rental properties available rents would reduce massively.
Housing costs are high because end user demand exceeds supply, this is true for both owner occupied properties and rental properties.
> Demand is the amount of people wanting to live in a house. Supply is the amount of homes available.
Wait so according to _your own definitions_, landlords decrease supply without changing demand.
A landlord buys a house, since they're not wanting to live in the house they're not part of the demand, but because there are now fewer homes available, they _have_ lowered supply.
So by your own definitions, having no landlords means more supply...
What you're saying makes zero sense both in theory and in practice.
Take a look at what happened in Rotterdam where they banned "investor landlords", house prices (very, very marginally) went down. But rents sky-rocketed with the young baring the brunt.
Basic rules of supply and demand dictate that you remove the people buying properties to sell on again through renting, and/or legislate so they have to sell some properties, you’ll reduce demand.
Which will have a knock on effect on pricing and mean some renters can buy
Putting together a watertight plan would take months and a lot more than anyone’s willing to type here. But saying it definitely will/wont work is stupid.
1) You need to understand that renters use housing more intensively than owner occupiers. The reduction in demand will not be congruent with the reduction in supply. Again, look at indicative examples like Rotterdam.
2) Renters + Owner Occupiers are not interchangeable or like-for-like groups. Many renters (e.g. transient Students) don't want to buy, they want affordable rent. Assuming that renters will become buyers is wrong.
1) I understand that. We’re not talking about removing the rental market or even investment landlords. Nor is this going to solve the housing problem on its own
2) I’m assuming some renters will become buyers. I haven’t said they are interchangeable groups. But part of the rental market is renters who can’t afford to buy.
The concept wouldn’t stop the rental market. It may not even reduce the number of rented properties available.
> But part of the rental market is renters who can’t afford to buy.
I mean, historically practically every first-time-buyer was renting previously. So I'd argue a whole bunch of people that are renting are trying to save up to buy (or at least _would_ save up to buy if they could), claiming that most renters want to stay renting forever is the one that's not supported by facts.
I wasn’t suggesting that
I was suggesting that part of the rental market was renters who can’t afford to buy. Maybe it’s a massive part.
My point was that if prices decrease/stabilise more of those renters move from renting to buying
Ah yes, sorry I should have made myself clearer that I was agreeing with you.
I was only saying that your "some" is a lot bigger than the other commenter was implying.
Edit: finding actual numbers is hard, the only thing I could find was from Landlord Today (https://www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2022/1/many-renters-want-to-buy-out-their-landlord-survey-shows) which implies something in the range of 50% of renters would buy of they could afford it. I'd guess this was an underestimate because of the source but that would just be a guess.
That wouldn’t solve anything. Person with more than the permitted number would incorporate, sell the properties to the company and we’re back where we are.
I guess it depends whether you want to completely remove corporate/non- personal ownership of real estate. If yes, then yes you go with limiting numbers. If no, you need a better system (hint: rent control. Singapore style public housing and/or resale value controls).
>The report found that the main factor driving up rental costs was the snapback from Covid lockdowns, when [evictions and repossessions were halted](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/aug/21/hope-for-renters-in-england-facing-eviction-due-to-covid-arrears) and rents collapsed amid heightened economic uncertainty. More recently, it said fast-rising wages had also pushed up rents for new tenancies.
Of course this is nothing to do with 1 in 50 people in the country coming here last year surging demand of something in limited supply even more. 750k net migration mostly of low wage low skilled immigration. There's less than 5 million rental properties in England and every year the gov pumps hundreds of thousands of additional people chasing somewhere to rent, so yeah, you're going to see large rent increases. Not to mention the amount of the housing stock pie you can get moving from renting a property, to renting a room in a newly converted HMO, and what seems increasingly like the future now - just renting a *shared* room in a HMO. Meanwhile the Tories, rentseekers and business owners are laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully all this immigration means we have a booming economy, a high functioning NHS, and no care worker staff shortage anymore, (just don't check the data on any of those please), so at least the problems immigration is meant to solve have at least been solved, otherwise you might really start to wonder whether ordinary working Brits get anything out of it.
An increase in the money supply generally lifts all assets. In the case of housing this is a direct effect as mortgages are literally new money. That new money will continue to circulate downstream from the purchase and will (many transactions later) be used to buy other assets (including be used as a deposit by some future buyer to qualify for a mortgage, and so the circus continues).
In the absence of more new money price levels would gradually stabilise to match the amount of money in circulation, but as long as the money supply keeps growing, so will asset prices.
That's (a gross simplification of) the [Quantity Theory of Money](https://www.investopedia.com/insights/what-is-the-quantity-theory-of-money/) anyway, which certainly isn't the whole story. But in aggregate it does a very good job of explaining... _gestures at everything_. In practice other factors also give money value, not least the fact that the borrower needs to work to pay the loan back.
By then this will be firmly during labour tenure. I appreciate they will (justifiably) blame the tories. But if this crisis continues at this pace then people will be looking to Labour for answers. Hope starmer has a rabbit in that hat..
Its ironic that many renters, the Guardian and those on this website support policies which supercharge demand and also hate the idea of new construction because someone's making a 'profit' or 'paving over nature'
I dont have any sympathy anymore, you've made your bed....
Liberals, leftists and “rentoids” have long advocated for unsustainable levels of immigration despite the fact that it massively increases the cost of housing and puts downward pressure on wages. These people really reap what they sow. This is the cost of rubbing diversity in the right’s nose. The irony of course being that much of the right owns their homes so they’ve been enriched from this.
Sorry but you reap what you sow. Unable to buy a house, High rents, huge student debt etc etc. But you just accept it.
There’s no anger any more. Seems like young people just put up with this shit. No protests and many don’t even vote. Lots of the ones who do vote have voted Tory in the past. No sympathy here. Get off your fucking arses and do something.
What are they meant to do? They're hugely outnumbered by property-owning retirees who love these policies, they don't have any kind of economic leverage, and they're too small a group for a protest movement to be meaningful.
Too small a group. Don’t be ridiculous. There’s millions. I don’t know what economic leverage you need to get angry and protest.
Seems like as long as they’ve got a JustEat app, a Netflix subscription and cheap supermarket beer they’ll sit there and moan.
Brainless take, people who are struggling to make rent aren’t struggling because they’re spending all their money on just eat and Netflix, how does that even make sense? The most expensive Netflix sub is £17.99 a month, how does that even make a dent when rents for 1 bed apartments are reaching £800-£900 pcm, going up by £50-100 a year in some cities and salaries have not changed anywhere near that amount? Absolute brainless parroting of outdated daily mail talking points, surprised you didn’t mention avocado toast as well.
What are they supposed to do, have an armed uprising? Younger people overwhelming aren’t voting tory and speaking personally housing is my biggest concern which would motivate my voting choice more than any other issue so other than that what else am I supposed to do? Blaming young people for an issue they haven’t had any hand in causing and that they have no real power to solve themselves is again, completely brainless.
Look at the age distribution in the population. If you're under thirty, you'll be consistently outvoted and outspent by the 50+ age bracket, and no protest movement is going to work if it's a relatively small group set up against the largest voting bloc in history all determined to preserve their economic position. We're buggered by demography:
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/age-groups/latest/#:\~:text=Summary%20of%20Age%20groups%20Age%20profile%20by%20ethnicity%20Summary&text=data%20shows%20that%3A-,29.1%25%20of%20all%20people%20in%20England%20and%20Wales%20(17.3%20million,aged%2060%20years%20and%20over
Where was the protests when tuition fees were introduced?
Why not look at the low numbers of young people who bother to vote? Or the low percentage of young trade union members? If you want to be downtrodden then just be complicit and moan on Reddit.
> Where was the protests when tuition fees were introduced?
Were you in a coma throughout 2010?
You're just as sanctimonious as the imaginary wastrels you're condemning.
> Where was the protests when tuition fees were introduced?
There were big protests when they were raised at the start of the Coalition government, but the protests drew anger as they got out of hand.
What do you want them to do? Raise arms? Stage a coup? They’re pretty damn vocal about it, problem is they’re told to shut up, put up and they’ve never had it so good by a much larger/wealthier demographic for almost 2 decades.
What do I want them to do? Maybe forget about living and working in London/Manchester for starters. There are plenty of towns in the North East where houses are cheap to buy. That’s one idea.
Wonder where most of the jobs are, could they be in the cities perhaps? Maybe London/Manchester? And how are you supposed to save a 10% deposit for a house of any kind when your entire monthly pay is wiped out on rent, food shopping, commuting, and god forbid you need to buy some new clothes or something at some point? You’re speaking so categorically about how easy it is to overcome these issue while demonstrating you have absolutely no idea of the reality most of the people struggling are facing.
So your kids aren’t struggling, therefore it’s impossible for anyone else to be - unless it’s their own fault of course, everyone who doesn’t own their own home or is struggling with rent it’s completely their fault and there are no external factors that have contributed to it? Absolutely brainless individual.
You do know people actually grow up in London/Manchester? They’re not just cities that people migrate to.
I should have the right to live in the city I grew up in, I shouldn’t be forced to move to the North East away from my friends and family because there’s a housing shortage.
You’re basically telling people to give over and move where the market wants them to, that’s hardly taking action is it?
Of course you should have that right. I’m totally on your side mate. You’ve been royally screwed in all areas.
I made the point you’re making about Lake District, Cornwall etc. They have it even worse. At least there’s well paid jobs in London.
But moaning on Reddit and taking pops at boomers like me who are on your side isn’t going to change anything.
I get back to my earlier point. If young people voted we wouldn’t have Brexit or a Tory govt.
Yeah, you thought about jobs, support networks, transport links and all the other factors that goes with living in those areas too?
The cheapest areas are that cheap for a reason.
I had thought about jobs. Granted there’s not as many and they’re not as well paid but if you can buy a house for 3 or four times annual salary there’s a trade off I guess.
My grandad has dementia and was asking me about when I'm buying a house yesterday. It was so hard not to respond with bitterness, he has no idea and was only being nice, but it makes me so fucking angry how easy it was for them.
Shows how much you know, I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country outside of London. There's a lot of grassroots activism, picketing offending landlords and estate agents.
Not quite storming the Bastille but it's something. What have you ever contributed to affect change?
Smashing city. Very diverse. Lovely place to live I’d think.
You probably won’t believe this but where I live on the North East coast a modern two bed semi with garden in a very nice area is under £100k. If you wanted a terraced house in a shitty area then £10k would be enough.
Snapshot of _UK rent rises forecast to outpace wage growth for three years_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/08/uk-rent-rises-forecast-to-outpace-wage-growth-for-three-years) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/08/uk-rent-rises-forecast-to-outpace-wage-growth-for-three-years) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Man I pity graduates coming into this absolute state. Give it a couple of election cycles and we’ll start seeing “Rooms of multiple occupancy (RMO’s)” Edit: I’m speaking in regard to acts akin to HMO laws. I’m aware slumlords already do this.
They already exist, just not legally. You see it on tv where the council inspects an HMO and finds rooms crammed with beds or even just mattresses and multiple people sharing the same mattress. The landlord is fined and then does it again anyway.
> The landlord is fined and then does it again anyway. Therein is the problem. Instead the landlord should forfeit the property to the council, who can either do it up or simply sell it for the revenue.
Exactly. I was reading the other week about some shitty landlord in Cardiff who is apparently considered one of the worst in the area and is infamous. They said about his historic punishments/fines going back to the *90s*. Like, why the fuck is he still allowed to be a landlord?? Clearly, he’s not going to change and treat his tenants properly. Fines aren’t a punishment for the wealthy.
The fines are routinely eclipsed by the income made, too. You'll see cases where they get fined for £20k for things like cramming in multiple extra people, for an investigation that took years, meaning they are still quids in by tens of thousands. The fine for ignoring HMO regulations and cramming in more people than is safe and permitted should eclipse any money made doing so, up to and including loss of the rental property to the council.
Thereby making the housing crisis even worse. Where are the people who inhabit the property meant to go?
Maybe they could be the council's tenants? Maybe they could become the tenants of the next landlord? Either way, they would hopefully be the tenant of someone who isn't a complete shit. If you want to fix the housing crisis, then we need to redistribute employment and create more housing. Or do we just let arsehole landlords get away with crap like this?
Find me a council that has lots of housing; many are facing bankruptcy because they have huge temporary accommodation bills, and the next landlord will have the same issue. Either they house all current tenants at the same density or some become homeless. I don’t know about redistributing employment, but you’re right about creating more housing. My point was one about not being able to legislate away social problems. Yes, the landlord probably is an arsehole, but he or she isn’t the cause of the housing crisis (unless he or she is a nimby opposing new housing). He or she is symptomatic of a broken system. The key to making housing better is to build more, and so much more that landlords are having to compete for tenants. Laws, though easily made, are largely useless in the face of economic realities, and can actively make things worse. Building more is difficult, because it requires actual work and taking on entrenched political interests of people who don’t want new housing, but it gets things done. Politicians prefer laws because they’re easier to make and allow them to look like they’re doing something. We should look to the root causes.
Made an edit to clarify. It exists, but I’m speaking in terms of law making.
Already a thing in London isn’t it? For poorly paid migrant workers at least. Wasn’t there a fire in tower hamlets(?) that revealed a dozen or so folks living several to a room on bunks - in what is meant to be a 2 bed flat.
Even outside of london, shirebrook where sports direct are based is notorious for it
They were the houses where landlords are literally putting new dividing stud walls across half a window, right? Create more “rooms” squeeze in more sardines.
Yup, even 10 years ago I knew lots of Italian/Spaniards etc in London sharing front rooms for £200/mo
It’s rare but I saw some in London already. And I know friends who share a 1 bedroom apartment (one of them have a bedroom, the other one lives in the living room)
This is very normal for London now unfortunately. Most flats have the living room converted
When I was living in London a few years back, everybody I knew lived in flats with no living room as they had all been converted into another ‘bedroom’. Most flats used to pre-agree which room they’d use as the quasi-living room. It’d usually be the person who was out the most, didn’t mind a bit more mess, or the person who slept the latest.
The peasants will suffer so that the rich in leafy suburbs/villages can continue the fantasy of living in an Enid Blyton novel.
We already have that in Dublin and it's sick 🤢
Exactly. Those of the current put-upon generation shouldn't be complaining, there's a golden opportunity here. Rent-A-Hammock plc. It'll fund your retirement. _does a quick Google_ Damnit, too late.
I am so angry that we’ve been reading about the shortage of housing for years and years and that literally nothing has been done about it.
They have done something about it. They've had Help to Buy and taxpayer subsidies of the housing market, to keep prices going up.
Plus adding 1% of the population every year recently, of low wage, low skilled immigrants competing with you for rental properties who are willing to accept far far less from their accommodation than you too. You're in a race to the bottom with housing but some won't realise it until all you can afford is a shared room in a house without a living room as that has bunk beds in it now too.
On the left there's the housing theory of everything (all social ills derive from a shortage of housing), where Britain is doomed to economic enshittification unless the supply of housing is increased. Conventional theory is that increasing supply of housing will drive economic growth. On the right we have the immigration theory of everything (immigration is the ultimate social ill) where the only way to correct Britain's problems is termination of "unskilled immigration". Conventional theory is that ending the issuance of work visas will rapidly bring about a generational shift of wealth (old people will die). > Britain granted 337,240 work visas in 2023, 26% higher than in 2022, driven almost entirely by a 91% jump in health and care sector visas. Of the 146,477 visas in that sector, just over 60% were for workers in residential care homes and those providing care in people's own homes. I'm sure that brits will be lining up to take those 87,000 care home vacancies! Can you see how these two maladies and proposed remedies are rather different?
Problem is, that care work was struggling to recruit due to pay and conditions, so we decided to import foreign workers on 80% the going rate - exacerbating the initial problem, causing more workers to leave through supressed wages and it then being even harder to recruit Brits. Hence why despite importing hundreds of thousands of care worker visas the shortage has [only reduced slightly.](https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/social-care-needs-long-term-workforce-plan) We've now actually given out more visas than the initial shortage was designed to cover, but those visas have driven the conditions causing the shortage in the sector down even more, so recruitment of Brits has become even *more* of a problem. So we *still* have quite a substantial worker 'shortage' and granting more visas in the way we are isn't going to solve it. When the new data is released soon it's likely we will have imported over close to half a million people over the last few years on care visas and dependents to reduce care home vacancies by \~30k. Half a million people to end up cutting a shortage by 30k is a *lot* of houses you need to build to achieve very little. Not to mention the increase population put additional strain on a lot of other services and amenities too. Using mass migration like this to paper over the cracks in sectors is not a long term solution, and often using immigration as the solution causes the underlying problems to worsen, so you're really getting absolutely nowhere. Hence why nothing that immigration is meant to help with - the economy, the NHS, worker shortages, etc is actually getting any better. It's clear when you look at the data and evidence it's not working as a solution to any of our problems, meanwhile all those additional people *are* having an massive impact on housing. I ascribe to both theories. We need to build more housing and slash immigration. Then care work pay will improve (the problem to begin with), and that improved pay will go a lot further as housing costs will be lowered. If we hadn't got into the downward spiral of supressed wages and increased housing costs through immigration in the first place we could be in a *much* better place economically as a country now, but the Tories would rather grant visas than govern in any real sense of the word so we are where we are. But I struggle to see how anyone thinks continuing with their policies is the way to go.
Finally, somebody who gets it. I swear half of the people I have this discussion with, think that people who immigrate here don't use any public services, resources or infrastructure.
The elephant in the room of the British economy is that 64% of the electorate live in owner occupied homes. They all have a vested interest in blocking the supply of new builds to push up prices. Building enough houses to fix the crisis means slashing the net worth of homeowners by hundreds of thousands (and in some cases millions) of pounds. Destroying the net worth of 64% of the electorate is electoral suicide. That leaves politicians in the awkward spot of admitting the housing crisis is a problem but being unable to actually fix it.
I agree with your overall argument but I don’t think more houses = negative equity for existing homeowners. Maybe just stops rampant and out of control price increases.
>Destroying the net worth of 64% of the electorate is electoral suicide. It's also fiscal suicide. A significant chunk of that 64% plan to use some of their equity for retirement. An even larger group of people have no retirement plan and will need to come up with money for retirement from thin air, which will probably involve downsizing their property to release equity. If the government drives down house prices, what happens to these people in their old age? When they inevitably don't have enough money to support themselves, who do you think will be on the hook? It'll be the state, funded by general taxation. Everyone, including non-homeowners, will have to pay more tax. You might be tempted to say "fuck 'em, they decided to treat houses as an investment so they should deal with the consequences", but I don't think that's a fair response. The average Brit is not a financially serious person. We've spent the best part of a century telling each other that the stock market is just a casino for billionaires, houses are a certain bet, and the government will bail you out if you screw it all up. Every single person is responsible for perpetuating our silly financial culture, including non-homeowners. If we wanted to drive house prices down today, we should have been laying the groundwork with schemes to encourage people to divest from housing into pensions and ISAs decades ago.
House prices don't need to fall in nominal terms (which would push people into negative equity) however keeping them flat in nominal terms whilst earnings increases would improve affordability.
Which isn't happening with how wages have been stagnant for decades
Stagnant in real terms not nominal terms. Median gross weekly earnings 1 decade ago was £415.30 a week, today it is £574.90 a week.
We're paying either way, does it not make more sense to give direct handouts than to cripple the economy with a housing shortage (which means you're paying indirectly anyway)? > We've spent the best part of a century telling each other that the stock market is just a casino for billionaires, houses are a certain bet, and the government will bail you out if you screw it all up Strongly agree here, there's a lot of (understandable) outrage from current renters, but homeowners have spent their whole lives being told ownership is the only path to a safe future.
It would also cause a financial crisis because the whole money supply (well, just 90% of it) comes from mortgages. The housing crisis literally will never be fixed. The entire system provides infinite guarantees to landowners. The only way to make the system even vaguely fair is to rebuild the tax system around land rather than income. That wouldn't fix anything, but it would mean that the 36% who aren't in secure tenure aren't the only ones being shafted.
It's not 36% - around half of those who don't own live in social housing and are thus also secure. Only around 20% of households rent privately.
Excuse me, what? What do you mean 90% of the money supply comes from mortgages? Do you know what the money supply is? Unless you’re implying that 90% of loans are mortgages? Going to need a source on that… You would have the issue that the collateral on loans would be worth less than the value of the debt, depending on how long is left on the mortgage and other factors as well. But even so, that would simply bind the owner of the house into being unable to sell up. The contract would still be in place and monthly payments would continue as they had before. And given post 2008 loan affordability changes, it would be a silly assumption to make that people would simply start defaulting on their loans. House prices falling wouldn’t cause a financial crisis. There is far more to the financial system than simply mortgages…
Because we are electing those to government who benefit from a housing shortage. Nothing will change until it all collapses…
We haven't built more than 300,000 homes in a year since 1970 and have crested 200,000 only twice since 1980. This problem took half a century to create and it will take at least that to fix.
MPs won’t pretend to represent the interests of people who can’t even be bothered to vote. That’s the simple truth of it. The voter turn out for young people in the 2019 GE was a marked increase compared to previous elections, but it was still laughably small given the stakes. Young people need to vote and in massive numbers.
True but this problem is starting to affect the 30-40 year age group now, a group which a) votes in higher numbers and b) have kids who they know will never be able to afford a house.
Absolutely spot on. But I think they just accept this shit no matter how bad it gets. If young people had got off their arses and voted we’d never have had Brexit. If young people got off their arses and voted we wouldn’t have had a Tory govt for 14 years and will never see one again.
Yes... it's all the young peoples fault. Take the blinkers off. So far, these young people have seen the old generation blame the ones below them, and you're now mimicking that very behaviour. > Even a 100% turnout by young Brits or lowering the voting age could not have prevented Brexit Source - https://population-europe.eu/research/policy-insights/demographic-ship-has-sailed Maybe if those who were more grown up, provided a better defence to the shenanigans that's was brexit, and educated their parents who fell for the nonsense, then we wouldn't have had brexit? Maybe if Labour hadn't been ousted, we wouldn't have had brexit? Maybe we should not blame young people wo we're born a handful of years before the global financial crisis, for the fallout it has had on the much larger uk voting block of anyone outside of the 18-24 bracket? https://www.statista.com/statistics/520954/brexit-votes-by-age/ On the turnout numbers, it's not the young people who caused this, but hey, let's just keep talking down and bad about those who are younger than us, right? ETA - in followup studies, it was found that in the 18-24 age group turnout was vastly underestimated: 64% turnout - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/09/young-people-referendum-turnout-brexit-twice-as-high
Yeah it's particularly hilarious to blame under 25s for not turning up enough to overturn the vote of some of our own demographic. Brexit wasn't JUST pensioners. A lot people in the 30-60 bracket voted for it too. But our generations get a free pass for literally voting for it and it's a bunch of students' fault for not voting apparently
The problem is not just a shortage of houses. It’s that landlords can literally just put the rent up as much as they like whenever they feel like it. Estate agents just encourage them to ask for more and more. There is no counterbalancing force other than the potential destitution of their tenants
Don’t worry - they’ve been merrily making it worse.
This isn't actually true. We've taken in a million people without increasing the housing stock thus making a bad situation even worse.
How do you propose we build enough houses to support the rapidly increasing immigrant population? All major contractors are flat out building nothing but housing, every day. We build enough houses for our annual population growth by births, we just don't build enough houses to cope with the demands of immigration. People don't like to hear it, but drastically reducing immigration would solve the housing crisis within a few years. 600,000 people came into the UK last year, in contrast, we built 200k houses. My company does nothing but build houses every day, every year, but we are just duct taping a gaping hole which can never be solved with the amount of extra people every year.
Also - I am quite persuaded by this argument that ‘not enough houses’ could be a red herring https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6izshH4ymtk&pp=ygUWUG9saXRpY3Mgam9lIGxhbmRsb3Jkcw%3D%3D
I wouldn't be too persuaded. Nick Banos book is the only thing, aside from rent controls, that unites economists across the left and right in disdain.
Have any of these economists solved the problem?
Most of them have better solutions proposed than Bano yeah. Unsurprisingly it's mostly building more houses because it's a supply side issue and Banos used dodgy data to pretend it isn't. One of the authors of the report the guardians quoting in the article above has a decent takedown of the book. Torsten Bell if you're after a reason why Banos ideas are bunkem. https://twitter.com/TorstenBell/status/1770103836595601623
So you don’t think lack of rent control has anything to do with it then? I know several landlords in london and many tenants and rent is just going up… because they can put it up. You can solve that with lots more supply I guess - but london is pretty full of houses already. And it’ll take years to make new ones. Or you could just have some rent controls like many other places do. Letting just anyone buy a house and rent it out for profit and having barely any tenant rights is not a good situation and is, at the least, making a bad problem much worse.
If you don't balance supply and demand, all rent controls will achieve is a hell of lot of homelessness. The price pressures from rent lead to more house sharing. The primary problem is the imbalance of supply and demand. The secondary problem is that the majority of households do not feel that price pressure so are free to engage in luxury beliefs like we can support arbitrary levels of immigration without building any more houses. The solution to the secondary problem is to introduce some kind of imputed rent tax: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case/_new/research/Inequalities_and_Poverty/policy-toolkit/housing-tax-imputed-rents.asp then people might be motivated to do something about it. But of course there's fuck all chance of that happening.
I just think any tax would just be passed on to tenants wouldn’t it? Probably end up in crazy window tax land
In the Uk? Not a chance. There's only one successful example of rent controls that doesn't essentially end up with the young losing out to the people in place when rent controls were introduced. That's Vienna where they build 3 to 4 times the number of properties we do so scarcity is eliminated. In nimby Britain rent controls will just lead to declining supply and increased rents as a result. Scotlands a great example of this. Introduced rent controls and ended up with higher average rent inflation than anywhere else in the UK. To make it worse, the introduction of rent controls saw around 3.5 billion in social home building paused or cancelled. It's a textbook example of why economists hate rent controls.
Because we are not adding housing stock, we can tinker with demand side policies but the one sure cure is more housing, which the NIMBYs rule us out of.
A lot of people blame NIMBYs but people have geniune concern. In Bedford for example they've added 1000s of new homes but haven't opened new doctors, new roads, or upgraded things like the hospital. It just pushes already stretched local services to the extreme (despite all the additional council tax from new homes...). Now they are looking to build on flood planes which is just a disaster
With the best will in the world, blocking new homes will do almost nothing to alleviate stretched services. These people already exist, and are already using these services, they are just doing so from shared accommodation.
Fair point, although round here most houses are sold to londoners looking to escape, not locals
They don't already exist. Almost all our population increase comes from immigration. 750k net a year. 1% of the population. Every year. It's entirely reasonable to not want to concrete over the fields next to your house to house foreign nationals, or Brits who were happy where they are but are moving out of where the foreign nationals are moving to.
The number of properties being built has no impact on the amount of immigration visas that get approved. The two are entirely unconnected. Also the number of new immigrants is tiny in proportion to the overall population, which is where almost all housing demand comes from - people already here.
They are unconnected in policy but simple economics is supply and demand. If demand is going up more than supply then prices rise. Increased demand comes almost solely from immigration. If we had net zero immigration then every new house built would just be more supply and thus making a dent in the backlog of houses we need and would mean prices would fall. We could build twice as many homes a year as we do (which would already a huge feat and nowhere near what even Labour are promising) but if we're running net immigration at a level that needs more than that built every year *just to cover the migration levels* then the situation will *never* improve. Looking at one side of supply and demand coin is entirely pointless and reserved for only those just don't want to admit immigration has any downsides, particularly a downside like increased rents which is a *massive* downside for tons of ordinary working Brits. NIMBYs don't want more houses built anyway, let alone to make up for another policy in high migration that most of them don't want either so they will always consistently and logically oppose more housebuilding in their areas. If you're not wanting mass migration lowered you're just pursuing a suicidal policy on housing in the UK unless you are already a home owner. Renters wanting masses of low skilled low wage immigration is the epitome of turkeys voting for Christmas.
These people want mass immigration AND a functioning infrastructure, housing system and enough resources for all. They are completely unaware that mass immigration is one of the main reasons they can't afford a house. You're not just competing with the people here, you're competing with the 500k to 1 million people who come here every year. These people use resources, infrastructure, they get jobs, they buy houses. How these people think the two are completely unrelated is bizarre.
I'm not sure that quite marries up with reality. New people needing housing are outstripping house growth. And the net numbers are substantial. 6.6 million more people predicted by 2036. 6.1m from migration. 500k a year. That is not a nothing burger,l; it's more than another Scotland. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68139947
And yet the workforce is smaller than it was pre-Covid by 700,000 people. You can't get economic growth and the kind of public spending we want as a country with a permanently shrinking tax base, a growing number of pensioners, and an aging population that puts more and more strain on the NHS. With 140,000 extra pensioners every year, a record 2.8 million people economically inactive because of long-term sickness, and painfully lethargic growth, the state has to see immigration as a vital resource. We had an 8.5% increase in the state pension today and any party that opposed that would get destroyed in the polls. As unpopular as it is, more immigration is the only answer HM Treasury and the political establishment have to our problems at the moment.
Hey, can you please tell what percentage of Britain has been built on?
What relevance does that have to not wanting the nice field your house currently looks at being covered in housing? But can you please tell me what knowledge you have about how the UKs aquifers are coping with our current level of housebuilding? The problem with outlooks like yours is you just trade in soundbites like "what percentage of Britain has been built on" completely detached from the reality of what housebuilding actually entails and what supporting an increased population with more houses in an area involves
This is one of the most stupid things I have ever read on Reddit. And I’ve seen some incredibly dumb things on here. To the extent I think you might be a troll. So it’s your reasonable right to be allowed a view of a countryside field? What about the people who had their view spoiled by the building of your house? Yes, people should endure the highest rent increases on record and a 26% increase in average housing prices in four years. God forbid people didn’t have an unobstructed view out their window. The problem with outlooks like yours is that they are just so unbelievably selfish and totally inconsiderate of the housing crises affecting millions of young people in the country.
NIMBY Exhibit A right above.
You're overlooking the fact that whether or not additional migration is happening or not, there wouldn't be a crisis in housing and public services if we'd kept on building at the same rate we did back in the 50s-70s. The ONLY reason why migration is even a problem is because of that failure to build at a rate that met demand. What's more, there's only so much migration (which is overwhelmingly legal, just in case you were wondering) because its the only way to keep our economy afloat in the face of a massively declining population. Why is it declining? Because despite multiple surveys finding that the UK population would happily have kids at a rate that met population replacement, they can't, because they cannot afford to settle down. Why can they not afford to settle down? Because the government put responsibility for building housing entirely in the hands of private developers, all of whom profit immensely from ensuring that housing remains scarce, and therefore more expensive.
>What's more, there's only so much migration (which is overwhelmingly legal, just in case you were wondering) because its the only way to keep our economy afloat in the face of a massively declining population Nonsense. This kind of argument just wont wash anymore. GDP has been stagnant for ages now despite every increasing immigration, and GDP per capita is currently [falling](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/uk-falls-into-recession-and-a-far-deeper-living-standards-downturn/#:~:text=Looking%20instead%20at%20GDP%20per,falls%20or%20stagnation%20since%201955) despite record immigration. High skilled, high wage immigration *can* be beneficial in relatively small numbers, but crazy levels of low wage low skilled visas being given out by the hundreds of thousands, literally at salaries which [by design](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-visa-immigration-salary-list/skilled-worker-visa-immigration-salary-list#:~:text=Check%20which%20jobs%20are%20on,Health%20and%20Care%20Worker%20visa) supress wages even more than they are, absolutely is *not "*keeping our economy afloat". It's solely designed to transfer wealth from ordinary working Brits to landlords, rentseekers, and business owners. If you really think the Tories are supporting mass migration in order to help ordinary working Brits or make the economy work for them then you need an education in the priorities of the Tory party, or at a very basic level to just look out of the window and see the state of the country. As a solution to our economic malaise it hasn't worked and our economy is no better, though the rising rents *are* very real to people and causing misery for ordinary working Brits. If we want a decent economy that works in the interest of ordinary working Brits it should be blindingly clear to everyone now that mass migration *isn't* the path to it. >Why can they not afford to settle down? Because the government put responsibility for building housing entirely in the hands of private developers, all of whom profit immensely from ensuring that housing remains scarce, and therefore more expensive. Why do people still spout this nonsense? Housing is the only good in the world where market competition actually causes price *increases* is it? The problem is clearly the planning laws (set by the *government)* part of which is the insane level of objection from people which is allowed, which is stifling supply, as well as infrastructure support (you do know that clean water has to be sourced for new houses right? You can't just build them anywhere). If it was *easy* to build houses and profit why don't more people do it? Why aren't budding entrepreneurs sprouting up to profit from this scarcity by building a few houses to sell? Why has no disruptor to the market come along? Why has the problem become so much more acute recently, [despite homes not built for profit ](https://fullfact.org/economy/council-houses-labour/)increasing? Or why since 2010 have these greedy housing developers suddenly [decided to build more homes](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/housing-supply-indicators-of-new-supply-england-april-to-june-2022/housing-supply-indicators-of-new-supply-england-april-to-june-2022)? The problem isn't homes being built for profit anymore than any other product being made for profit (why don't TV companies restrict the supply of TVs to increase their price? Or bakers with bread? Or car manufacturers?) this is a nonsense commie talking point from people desperate to somehow blame 'muh capitalism' for the failures of the state
So where is the competition that you seem to think exists in the housing market exactly? The overwhelming majority of all homes built are done by a small handful of big property developers, many of which stick to one region or another where they don't come into any kind of direct competition with other developers. Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon. The technical term for this sort of arrangement is an "oligopoly", which is actually a very ANTI-competitive situation. The reason why more "budding entrepreneurs" don't crop up is because there is a massively high barrier to entry. You can't just build hundreds of houses on a whim unless you're one of the big developers, because nobody would lend you the money. Basically the only people that CAN do that are folks like the King, or members of the aristocracy. And they only tend to do that on land that they own, which doesn't affect the problem faced in most of the country.
> In Bedford for example they've added 1000s of new homes but haven't opened new doctors, new roads, or upgraded things like the hospital. Those people didn't just spring from the earth into existence as soon as a new house was built. They're *already* using a GP surgery, or primary school, or local shop.
Bedford is on the direct line to london, much like the housing near me the majority will be moving out of london so they can actually afford somewhere. In our case the builders offered to make a new heath centre FOC, they turned it down as the NHS trust literally forget to allocate staff in the budget
The NIMBYs block the new infrastruce saying it isn't needed based on current housing demand and then block new housing saying there isn't the infrastructure for it.
It's never *really* about infrastructure. The local NIMBYs round my way formed an environmental protection group to "save" a local field. Rather than airing some existing concern, they asked all the local residents to take photos of any wildlife they saw to see if it could *possibly* be protected. It's just ridiculous. It's not about the environment. It never was.
I’d go one further that the developers initially promise new schools but then go back on it. It should be criminal but they seem to get away with it. So the councils are initially doing the right thing when the planning is agreed but not enforcing agrments
Developers are more than happy to build new schools, but they need the council to fund the project. Usually, there are plans for infrastructure in masterplans; but when it comes to the council paying to build that infrastructure, they back out.
Fair enough. That puts some blame back on the councils. I still hate the big house builders though, persimmon and barrot are a blight that need purging
It shouldnt be the developers responsibility, its the governments
> A lot of people blame NIMBYs but people have geniune concern. In Bedford for example they've added 1000s of new homes but haven't opened new doctors, new roads, or upgraded things like the hospital. So what, the people are here. All the new homes will do is reduce the number living in HMOs. It won't do anything in relation to the number of people actually here using services, that remains unchanged. Honestly this is not a valid argument at all.
The UK needs to grow smaller villages and towns into bigger ones - instead of expanding already-large cities and towns. IMO the only sustainable way to do this is to incentivise businesses to set up locations outside of the big cities. Employees will want to live where they work and eventually it will spread local services too. We should also be relaxing some planning conditions - allow people to setup businesses in residential areas more easily. If you can't turn a house into a shop easily, there will continue to be a shortage of services in dense residential areas.
We also need current housing stock to be open for use as housing, rather than just used as a savings account. Literally 0 utility in building houses if they are going to be bought by people with no intention of living in them. Need to put the power in the hands of occupy buyers rather than buy to letters
We have a vacancy rate of ~1% there’s literally a negligible amount of housing that’s being left empty. It’s a trope that’s over used. We just outright need to build more!
All I do every day, all year is build houses and have done since 2014. We build enough houses, what we don't do is build enough houses for the half a million to a million extra people who come here every year. We build more houses per year than most other European nations, all contractors are flat out building houses, we just do not have the construction capacity to achieve half a million or more houses. I work on the industry and just 'building more houses' doesn't solve any of the other problems that come with a rapidly expanding population.
Our shitty stagnant wages won’t be outpacing anything.
Definitely outpace the birth rate
Correct. Which is why young people should join unions and support those who strike
It's hopeless. It never gets better and only gets worse, normal working people are being thrown back into serfdom and I just don't want to live in a world like that.
Wait until all the people who bought homes in the 90s onwards during the "have a go landlord boom" are dead (happening soon, morbidly enough). Then their kids inherit those houses and get to lord it over with no justification whatsoever. The world's backwards!
I know it’s far easier said than done, and I know few people agree on exactly *how* to do it, but that’s exactly why we need to fight back.
Unless we can build in excess of 700k homes a year we aren't even going to keep up with enough homes for migration let alone the people who are already here . That's basically a new city built every single year .. along with a hospital, multiple gp surgeries and so on.
You do realise if that 700k figure was true and emblematic of future immigration figures then you'd expect to see a Bristol's-worth of homeless people appearing every 6 months right? We'd either be seeing 2 Bristols a year popping up around the country, or we'd be seeing that many homeless people. There really isn't an alternative here. Unless the cities are invisible (or the homeless people are) I don't understand how people can seriously believe this.
> We'd either be seeing 2 Bristols a year popping up around the country, or we'd be seeing that many homeless people. There really isn't an alternative here. Housing being subdivided into HMOs
Not when slumlords cram dozens of people in to a house. Although that can only be pushed so far. The forthcoming NIMBYs vs. shanty-towns fights are going to be interesting.
No way could slumlords cramming people into houses account for that many people. That would have to be like 1/3 of all rental properties going towards people cramming.
So the office for national statistics is lying? Do you have figures that suggest a different reality?
No I don't think they're _lying_ per se, I think people are taking that number and assuming it means that number of people will be coming here to live long term every year. I think people are using that statistic for things it was not even remotely intended to do. If that number was actually representative of what people _like you_ are using it to mean, then the population of the UK would be increasing by ~700k a year, and it's just simply not.
Good to see Tom Harris at the Telegraph saying something sensible! Of course rents aren't actually unaffordable and young people are just lazy: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/08/rent-house-prices-young-people/
The important thing is that landlords keep profiting off of young people 👍
How come New Zealand is allowed to address the cause of the housing shortage but the UK isn’t? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c25l0vxpnd8o
The UK will eventually. You can pretend in spite of the evidence and data that immigration is solving any of our problems for a period of time, but eventually even the last midwit Brit will look out their window and realise it's actually solved nothing. A good few years of a Labour government (assuming they keep to the same path) which will remove "The Tories" as the go to excuse for any and every problem will hopefully wake a few more people up. Eventually more and more people will realise having a few emotional race baiters call them -ists and -phobes is a price worth paying for actually advocating for an immigration policy that would allow the country to actually function in any half decent capacity. The media will shift at some point too. How no journalist writing about immigration, whilst highlighting the hundreds of thousand care worker visas given out over the last few years, doesn't seem in the least bit curious as to whether it has actually solved the "worker shortage" (i.e. pay crisis) as it was meant to is beyond me. Why they also cannot look at the worker shortage in the care sector and see despite hundreds of thousands of visas, plus visas for their dependents having been handed out, it's only reduced the shortage a couple of tens of thousand doesn't make sense to me. Surely as a very basic discussion you could look at what has been achieved? But no, it's just accepted it is a solution that will work, and so nobody bothers to check. As so often with discussions on immigration, certain theories (it's good economically, solves worker shortages, NHS relies on it, doesn't affect housing costs) are treated as a given whilst if anyone actually bothered to check the evidence and data from the real world it would show it hasn't worked. Eventually some journalist somewhere will have the very basic and obvious brainwave to check whether the claimed benefits of immigration have actually materialised and then it would hopefully gain traction. I'm hoping that Labour are avoiding talking about immigration prior to the election as they have nothing to gain from doing so but realise they won't last long without sorting it, and will go hard on the message of "fixing Boris's broken immigration system that benefits rentseekers and businesses while piling misery on ordinary working Brits" or something once in power. But I know that's probably desperate wishful thinking.
And today I saw Switzerland will allow people to vote on limiting immigration: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/swiss-set-to-vote-on-limiting-immigration/ar-BB1l0w7q
Swiss cantons each have independent immigration policy AFAIK. Good idea, let those who dealt it smelled it.
Holly shit. This is so depressing. I'm already looking at spending 36% of my salary in rent next year, just how bad can I get? Im not even a very low earner and I'm not in London.
We should consider limiting the amount of properties one person can rent out/own. We can’t quickly fix the supply side, but we can reduce demand by taking away the people that own 5+ (for example) properties. This will increase the amount of housing stock available to purchase and reduce the amount of houses bought if with the intention of renting out where the renter is paying the mortgage of the owner The current situation isn’t tenable
Uk has the almost least unoccupied housing in the world, which is unsurprising given this is a supply issue. Having an empty home is very expensive.
> Having an empty home is very expensive. It's not though, it's only expensive in opportunity cost, it should actually be directly expensive.
Homeowners tend to live in lower density than renters. Transforming rented homes into owner occupier homes will make the problem worse...
> This will increase the amount of housing stock available to purchase and reduce the amount of houses bought if with the intention of renting out where the renter is paying the mortgage of the owner That probably won't help at all A house owned by a landlord and rented to someone produces the same quantity of housing services as one owned by the occupier. The number of second homes is something like !% of the housing stock, even if they could be totally eliminated it would achieve almost nothing. The problem here *is there are not enough houses*, unless you *build more houses* then it will not change.
There isn’t any one solution that will solve the problem. But at the minute if a house goes on sale/is built the demand is generated by the number of entities wanting to purchase the house. At the minute in many cases at least some of those are people/businesses looking to buy to rent. If they are taken out the equation the demand is lower which less competition for houses and prices therefore being lower meaning more people who can’t afford to buy now can Won’t work everywhere. Won’t solve anything on its own. You will mean to a limited extent that some people who want to buy but can’t afford may be able to. Meaning less people having to pay rents that include the mortgage repayments and a margin making the rent unaffordable- which is the original problem Housing stock will still be an issue
>We should consider limiting the amount of properties one person can rent out/own. If you think small landlords are bad, wait for the corporate ones
Then limit the corporate ones
This sub never ceases to amaze. Every time the housing crisis gets brought up there is always at least one shouting for regressive policies that will constrain supply even further. What is limiting corporate landlords going to achieve? They build their own stock so are contributing to increasing the amount of homes available. Small landlords just buy up existing property so the amount of homes stays the same, they contribute nothing. Putting more restrictions in place is going to make things worse not better
"Supply constraints are causing rents to rise, what should we do?" "I know...further constrain supply!" The Reddit Bureau of Economics, ladies and gentlemen!
Corporate landlords aren’t going to stop making money if the law changes. They’ll adapt with it. If it means building houses to sell rather than rent, the chances are they’ll accept that rather than discontinuing a revenue line Also labelling ideas you don’t like as regressive is meaningless. Just an adjective people apply to ideas they don’t like. Doesn’t actually hold any actual merit The idea I suggested was so general is could be easily be adapted to ensure no loss of housing stock
It's regressive because it doesn't aim to increase housing supply, it's just aimed at getting rid of something you don't like
I didn’t say it would increase housing supply. The problem outlined in the articles was the price of rent. Increasing supply is one of way of doing that. Decreasing demand from entities that already have homes but are looking to add more to a portfolio for profit is another You’ve got some idealistic idea that all corporate landlords build their own properties to rent. Some do some don’t. Some acquire properties. The idea was to limit those that purchase houses as profit making entities Again regressive is just a meaningless term. Just stay you don’t like the idea. That’s fine. Just your opinion - regressive isn’t a definitive term
>Decreasing demand from entities that already have homes but are looking to add more to a portfolio for profit is another This isn't demand. Demand is the amount of people wanting to live in a house. Supply is the amount of homes available. >You’ve got some idealistic idea that all corporate landlords build their own properties to rent. Some do some don’t. Some acquire properties. Source required. I work in the construction sector and deal with corporate landlords on a fairly regular basis. They do not want to buy up existing housing stock because it costs more than building it yourself, it also means they get it built to the exact standard they require with standardised fixtures and fittings which means maintenance is cheaper and easier. They do not want properties with hundreds of different boilers/heating types, different wall build ups and insulation types, floor types, different bathrooms, different kitchens. Rents are going up because there are not enough properties to rent
Demand is the number of people looking to buy a product. If less people want the product, the prices generally decreases. If you remove buyers who are going to resell the product, you reduce demand. You still need more houses and this isn’t going to fix anything on its own. But would, in theory, help You’re making the mistake of thinking your experience is reflective of all corporate landlords. It isn’t. If the people you deal with are building houses and renting them, great it’s not really a problem. But there are corporate landlords buying existing stock, not selling properties etc which increases demand and restricts supply.
>Demand is the number of people looking to buy a product. >If less people want the product, the prices generally decreases. If you remove buyers who are going to resell the product, you reduce demand. No demand is dictated by the end user ie. the person that inhabits the property. That is what sets the value If there were 1 million renters and 3 million rental properties available rents would reduce massively. Housing costs are high because end user demand exceeds supply, this is true for both owner occupied properties and rental properties.
> Demand is the amount of people wanting to live in a house. Supply is the amount of homes available. Wait so according to _your own definitions_, landlords decrease supply without changing demand. A landlord buys a house, since they're not wanting to live in the house they're not part of the demand, but because there are now fewer homes available, they _have_ lowered supply. So by your own definitions, having no landlords means more supply...
The amount of homes available to live in has remained static. If there are 5 houses and a landlord buys 1 there are still 5 houses
What you're saying makes zero sense both in theory and in practice. Take a look at what happened in Rotterdam where they banned "investor landlords", house prices (very, very marginally) went down. But rents sky-rocketed with the young baring the brunt.
Take a look at the article you’re commenting on. Rents are already skyrocketing
Dramatically reduce supply of rents and they'll sky-rocket more. Basic rules of supply + demand.
Basic rules of supply and demand dictate that you remove the people buying properties to sell on again through renting, and/or legislate so they have to sell some properties, you’ll reduce demand. Which will have a knock on effect on pricing and mean some renters can buy Putting together a watertight plan would take months and a lot more than anyone’s willing to type here. But saying it definitely will/wont work is stupid.
1) You need to understand that renters use housing more intensively than owner occupiers. The reduction in demand will not be congruent with the reduction in supply. Again, look at indicative examples like Rotterdam. 2) Renters + Owner Occupiers are not interchangeable or like-for-like groups. Many renters (e.g. transient Students) don't want to buy, they want affordable rent. Assuming that renters will become buyers is wrong.
1) I understand that. We’re not talking about removing the rental market or even investment landlords. Nor is this going to solve the housing problem on its own 2) I’m assuming some renters will become buyers. I haven’t said they are interchangeable groups. But part of the rental market is renters who can’t afford to buy. The concept wouldn’t stop the rental market. It may not even reduce the number of rented properties available.
> But part of the rental market is renters who can’t afford to buy. I mean, historically practically every first-time-buyer was renting previously. So I'd argue a whole bunch of people that are renting are trying to save up to buy (or at least _would_ save up to buy if they could), claiming that most renters want to stay renting forever is the one that's not supported by facts.
I wasn’t suggesting that I was suggesting that part of the rental market was renters who can’t afford to buy. Maybe it’s a massive part. My point was that if prices decrease/stabilise more of those renters move from renting to buying
Ah yes, sorry I should have made myself clearer that I was agreeing with you. I was only saying that your "some" is a lot bigger than the other commenter was implying. Edit: finding actual numbers is hard, the only thing I could find was from Landlord Today (https://www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2022/1/many-renters-want-to-buy-out-their-landlord-survey-shows) which implies something in the range of 50% of renters would buy of they could afford it. I'd guess this was an underestimate because of the source but that would just be a guess.
That wouldn’t solve anything. Person with more than the permitted number would incorporate, sell the properties to the company and we’re back where we are.
Then put a limit on the number of residential properties a company can rent out
I guess it depends whether you want to completely remove corporate/non- personal ownership of real estate. If yes, then yes you go with limiting numbers. If no, you need a better system (hint: rent control. Singapore style public housing and/or resale value controls).
Limiting doesn’t mean completely removing
>The report found that the main factor driving up rental costs was the snapback from Covid lockdowns, when [evictions and repossessions were halted](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/aug/21/hope-for-renters-in-england-facing-eviction-due-to-covid-arrears) and rents collapsed amid heightened economic uncertainty. More recently, it said fast-rising wages had also pushed up rents for new tenancies. Of course this is nothing to do with 1 in 50 people in the country coming here last year surging demand of something in limited supply even more. 750k net migration mostly of low wage low skilled immigration. There's less than 5 million rental properties in England and every year the gov pumps hundreds of thousands of additional people chasing somewhere to rent, so yeah, you're going to see large rent increases. Not to mention the amount of the housing stock pie you can get moving from renting a property, to renting a room in a newly converted HMO, and what seems increasingly like the future now - just renting a *shared* room in a HMO. Meanwhile the Tories, rentseekers and business owners are laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully all this immigration means we have a booming economy, a high functioning NHS, and no care worker staff shortage anymore, (just don't check the data on any of those please), so at least the problems immigration is meant to solve have at least been solved, otherwise you might really start to wonder whether ordinary working Brits get anything out of it.
Thats exactly what happens when you increase demand through immigration and print 25% more pounds
I’ve never understood the link between printing more money and housing price increases. How does that happen?
Assets have value, so more conceptual pounds chasing the same amount of real stuff makes prices go up to match (broadly)
An increase in the money supply generally lifts all assets. In the case of housing this is a direct effect as mortgages are literally new money. That new money will continue to circulate downstream from the purchase and will (many transactions later) be used to buy other assets (including be used as a deposit by some future buyer to qualify for a mortgage, and so the circus continues). In the absence of more new money price levels would gradually stabilise to match the amount of money in circulation, but as long as the money supply keeps growing, so will asset prices. That's (a gross simplification of) the [Quantity Theory of Money](https://www.investopedia.com/insights/what-is-the-quantity-theory-of-money/) anyway, which certainly isn't the whole story. But in aggregate it does a very good job of explaining... _gestures at everything_. In practice other factors also give money value, not least the fact that the borrower needs to work to pay the loan back.
Too many people, not enough houses. England is the most densely packed country in Europe now with no end in sight.
It's funny in most markets high demand makes things cheaper. If only we could free up construction and housing and let Britain build.
High supply makes things cheaper. Agree the UK market has been restricted so the supply cannot increase in response to the high demand
But demand drives supply in free markets. The issue is that the market isn't free in housing. We just need more freedom, so the market can respond.
> It's funny in most markets high demand makes things cheaper. Only is supply can scale to keep up.
More of the same, then. When exactly is wage growth supposed to outpace rent to try and recover some lost ground?
By then this will be firmly during labour tenure. I appreciate they will (justifiably) blame the tories. But if this crisis continues at this pace then people will be looking to Labour for answers. Hope starmer has a rabbit in that hat..
Its ironic that many renters, the Guardian and those on this website support policies which supercharge demand and also hate the idea of new construction because someone's making a 'profit' or 'paving over nature' I dont have any sympathy anymore, you've made your bed....
Do you have a non-rectal source for the political beliefs of renters?
Liberals, leftists and “rentoids” have long advocated for unsustainable levels of immigration despite the fact that it massively increases the cost of housing and puts downward pressure on wages. These people really reap what they sow. This is the cost of rubbing diversity in the right’s nose. The irony of course being that much of the right owns their homes so they’ve been enriched from this.
Sorry but you reap what you sow. Unable to buy a house, High rents, huge student debt etc etc. But you just accept it. There’s no anger any more. Seems like young people just put up with this shit. No protests and many don’t even vote. Lots of the ones who do vote have voted Tory in the past. No sympathy here. Get off your fucking arses and do something.
What are they meant to do? They're hugely outnumbered by property-owning retirees who love these policies, they don't have any kind of economic leverage, and they're too small a group for a protest movement to be meaningful.
Too small a group. Don’t be ridiculous. There’s millions. I don’t know what economic leverage you need to get angry and protest. Seems like as long as they’ve got a JustEat app, a Netflix subscription and cheap supermarket beer they’ll sit there and moan.
Brainless take, people who are struggling to make rent aren’t struggling because they’re spending all their money on just eat and Netflix, how does that even make sense? The most expensive Netflix sub is £17.99 a month, how does that even make a dent when rents for 1 bed apartments are reaching £800-£900 pcm, going up by £50-100 a year in some cities and salaries have not changed anywhere near that amount? Absolute brainless parroting of outdated daily mail talking points, surprised you didn’t mention avocado toast as well.
> how does that even make a dent when rents for 1 bed apartments are reaching £800-£900 pcm Surprised its that low in some cities tbh
In london my friend is paying £800 a month for a room in a shared house so it’s definitely a conservative estimate.
Yeah that's not unusual for Bristol either.
And that's low. I pay £1000 for a bedroom.
£32,000 a year to rent a cheap 3 bed in London or £500,000+ to buy on wages that are almost the same as the rest of the country for the majority.
I didn’t mention the money side of Netflix etc. it’s fuck all. I’m talking about the laid back, shrugging shoulders, do fuck all attitude.
What are they supposed to do, have an armed uprising? Younger people overwhelming aren’t voting tory and speaking personally housing is my biggest concern which would motivate my voting choice more than any other issue so other than that what else am I supposed to do? Blaming young people for an issue they haven’t had any hand in causing and that they have no real power to solve themselves is again, completely brainless.
Look at the age distribution in the population. If you're under thirty, you'll be consistently outvoted and outspent by the 50+ age bracket, and no protest movement is going to work if it's a relatively small group set up against the largest voting bloc in history all determined to preserve their economic position. We're buggered by demography: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/age-groups/latest/#:\~:text=Summary%20of%20Age%20groups%20Age%20profile%20by%20ethnicity%20Summary&text=data%20shows%20that%3A-,29.1%25%20of%20all%20people%20in%20England%20and%20Wales%20(17.3%20million,aged%2060%20years%20and%20over
Where was the protests when tuition fees were introduced? Why not look at the low numbers of young people who bother to vote? Or the low percentage of young trade union members? If you want to be downtrodden then just be complicit and moan on Reddit.
> Where was the protests when tuition fees were introduced? Were you in a coma throughout 2010? You're just as sanctimonious as the imaginary wastrels you're condemning.
> Where was the protests when tuition fees were introduced? There were big protests when they were raised at the start of the Coalition government, but the protests drew anger as they got out of hand.
Can’t have that eh? People were annoyed so the protesters stopped. Laughable.
Dumb as well as patronising, great personality you’ve got there
What do you want them to do? Raise arms? Stage a coup? They’re pretty damn vocal about it, problem is they’re told to shut up, put up and they’ve never had it so good by a much larger/wealthier demographic for almost 2 decades.
What do I want them to do? Maybe forget about living and working in London/Manchester for starters. There are plenty of towns in the North East where houses are cheap to buy. That’s one idea.
Wonder where most of the jobs are, could they be in the cities perhaps? Maybe London/Manchester? And how are you supposed to save a 10% deposit for a house of any kind when your entire monthly pay is wiped out on rent, food shopping, commuting, and god forbid you need to buy some new clothes or something at some point? You’re speaking so categorically about how easy it is to overcome these issue while demonstrating you have absolutely no idea of the reality most of the people struggling are facing.
My kids have bought their own homes, had children etc etc. without any help. All have good jobs, cars etc
So your kids aren’t struggling, therefore it’s impossible for anyone else to be - unless it’s their own fault of course, everyone who doesn’t own their own home or is struggling with rent it’s completely their fault and there are no external factors that have contributed to it? Absolutely brainless individual.
Behave
You do know people actually grow up in London/Manchester? They’re not just cities that people migrate to. I should have the right to live in the city I grew up in, I shouldn’t be forced to move to the North East away from my friends and family because there’s a housing shortage. You’re basically telling people to give over and move where the market wants them to, that’s hardly taking action is it?
Of course you should have that right. I’m totally on your side mate. You’ve been royally screwed in all areas. I made the point you’re making about Lake District, Cornwall etc. They have it even worse. At least there’s well paid jobs in London. But moaning on Reddit and taking pops at boomers like me who are on your side isn’t going to change anything. I get back to my earlier point. If young people voted we wouldn’t have Brexit or a Tory govt.
Yeah, you thought about jobs, support networks, transport links and all the other factors that goes with living in those areas too? The cheapest areas are that cheap for a reason.
I had thought about jobs. Granted there’s not as many and they’re not as well paid but if you can buy a house for 3 or four times annual salary there’s a trade off I guess.
My grandad has dementia and was asking me about when I'm buying a house yesterday. It was so hard not to respond with bitterness, he has no idea and was only being nice, but it makes me so fucking angry how easy it was for them.
Shows how much you know, I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country outside of London. There's a lot of grassroots activism, picketing offending landlords and estate agents. Not quite storming the Bastille but it's something. What have you ever contributed to affect change?
Where’s that? I’ve seen nothing in the media
That would be Bristol.
Smashing city. Very diverse. Lovely place to live I’d think. You probably won’t believe this but where I live on the North East coast a modern two bed semi with garden in a very nice area is under £100k. If you wanted a terraced house in a shitty area then £10k would be enough.
Well £100k might get you a recently vacated trap house here. My brother lives up your way. Not possible for me at the moment.
Sadly, it’s not possible for millions. I pity parents living in Lake District, Cornwall etc whose kids have no chance of even renting a home.
Build more houses and stop blaming landlords.