Vocal Voices

How big a crisis is it?

I got to wondering because in our village there is a new housing estate. Only two houses have been sold. The most expensive houses have just been reduced by £30,000. When first built the builders refused to take houses in part exchange. Now, they are.

A pub in the village was demolished two years since to make way for housing. The site hasn't been built on yet. In Wakefield most of the Merchant Gate development remains unsold.

So is it the case that there is a housing shortage in some parts of the country? Or that there is a shortage of a certain type of housing, like one bedroom accommodation?

I've just googled and there are 610,000 empty houses in England alone. Additionally there are another 711,000 "second" homes in England. That's 1.3 million houses that aren't permanently being lived in.

So is this 'crisis' mainly an opportunity for developers to try and make a shedload of money?

Here, they are fighting plans for between 6,000 and 10,000 new homes to be built on an arc of greenbelt, expanding NE Birmingham. That's like building a town double the size of Bridport, Dorset right next to Sutton Coldfield. The biggest objection is that the local infrastructure is nowhere near capable of absorbing that sort of increase in population. The land earmarked is currently farm land, and people are well aware that property speculators have been the owners for years.

The local weekly rag, however, has a story tonight about two brown-field sites, (previously small local schools which have been relocated), both of which are within the existing conurbation and only 1/4 mile from the green-belt boundary. Permission has been given to develop these, and a total of 69 new homes are to be erected. Now, how many more brown-field sites are there within the Birmingham area that can be similarly developed? You'd soon get up to your 6,000 - 10,000 mark .....

True Os but brownfield sites are dearer to develop than green field sites, so developers don't want them!

I don not always get this "brownfield sites are more expensive to develop" thing. A lot of them are where houses, schools, and offices used to be. They are not always ex industrial sites that need decontaminating. The major services are all to hand, as are the surrounding roads and other infrastructure. If anything they are the ideal places to build the smaller one and two bedroom homes we need the most. Developed imaginatively they can become quite desirable places to live.

I agree WM, they make more sense when viewed like that, but developers seem to think there is an inexhaustible demand for four bedroom detached overlooking fields.

We wouldn't need to build so many houses if we restricted
foreigners from coming into our country and staying here.

The biggest problem with the housing crisis is not the lack of housing but the lack of AFFORDABLE housing.

The biggest problem with the housing crisis is that Councils now no longer build houses. Or at least very few. I'm guessing that it is part2 of Maggies scheme which was never implemented.

Par1 was to get the properties out from council hands, virtually give them away to workers who could then make a killing on them and also remove the income from the councils, thus killing two birds with one stone. First they removed the security blanket of workers who might want to strike by making it impossible for them to do so unless they had the money to pay their mortgages/utilities. Second they made the councils totally beholden to Westminster funds and local taxes.

In Scotland, the canny Scots got round the issue of building properties which might then be force bought 3 years later by tenants, by building in public private partnership with Housing Associations. Because the properties were already partly private, the law forcing councils to sell their property if a tenant wanted to buy did no apply. This allowed them to build decent housing of the size they required and keep getting the rent from it. Or at least some of it.

What I believe phase2 should have been is to limit the tenant purchases to properties 25 years old or over. This would allow councils to build council housing, provide it to those who need it and recoup the costs (plus more), before it becomes available to be purchased. In that way there would never be a shortage of housing for those who really need it.

Notably, no government, since that time, has done anything about this. In fact, Labour in Scotland were trying to drive this to the limits and break up the big estates by mandating that smallholders working on large estates were to be able to force purchase from private owners. It didn't go through, that I know, but this is Labour for you. Buy votes rather than do something sensible...

I believe that what I've outlined above is all that needs to be done, both to redress council earnings and to provide available and affordable housing to those who need it most.

debih wrote:The biggest problem with the housing crisis is not the lack of housing but the lack of AFFORDABLE housing.

I think that's true. The tax breaks given to buy to let landlords don't help, the number of homes bought as holiday homes don't help. Because both of these mean that there are fewer houses available to buy.

That program on BBC 1, "Homes Under The Hammer". This week there were a family from Sussex who were buying a home in Blyth, Northumberland, as an investment - a buy to let. It cost them £60,000 pounds. That to me is affordable but local people can't buy it now because it's being used to get someone £450 a month in rent. This to me is wrong.

The boundary between "affordable" housing and "Luxury" housing, for most of my life, was the divide between council and private. Except in uni cities where extremely poor student accommodation could be had for a premium but cheaper and more available than council.

If they want to fix the issue then they need to go with protected council housing. That's my opinion.