Resentment of this generation

CLAPTON

grizzly1911 wrote: »

Wind the clock back 30 years and we did have stable rented property, council housing.

It was then that the sell off started allowing houses to go at heavily discounted prices fueling the start of the boom.

I wonder if we went back to large scale "council housing", to provide a stable pool as option, this in its self would help moderate the market, as a whole and provide the additional housing needed.

In England about 30% of the council properties were sold off, some were transferred to housing trusts

so I would say we still have a large scale social housing sector

it seems strange that providing more houses for sale started a boom; usually increase in supply causes the prices to fall

the_flying_pig

all the old boomer classics cropping up on this thread :rotfl:.

'the big difference is that today's 20-somethings expect to be able to buy a really big/nice place as an FTB rather than a small one as we did in my day'.

almost too fatuous to be worthy of comment, really... today's young demonstrably live in shared places/smaller places up to much higher ages than the boomers did. prices are demonstrably far higher than in your day relative to wages. what on earth are you trying to argue here?

'to people in their 20s/30s the older generation ALWAYS looks impossibly affluent - you'll get your turn, just as we did'

er, no. 30 years back it was not true that [say] people born in the 50s had a vastly poorer standard of housing than [say] those born in the 30s. it was as good or better. can't you remember that far back? we can verify that you're talking rubbish on this one just by flipping through your old photo albums and/or remembering what your house was like relative to that of our grandparents when we were kids. the 1960s housebuilding boom [the sort of thing you probably lobby your MP and wave placards around in a bid to stop ever happening again] kind of helped you out here.

'there's some kind of magic equation that means that all generations have pretty much exactly the same living standards overall, e.g. we had cheaper housing than you did but you have cheaper holidays and it all pretty much balances out'

why say such foolish things? living standards can and do change over generations. don't you have a sneaking suspicion, for example, that you might have had things a tiny bit better than, say, people living in the Norman Conquest era, when life expectancies were in the region of 30-odd? why, then, is it so hard to grasp that change might still be happening, and that it mightn't always be for the better? the truth is that it's probably a better time than ever to be aged 15 or 16... you've no doubt got an ipod, a mobile, and whatnot, and your parents [probably born in 60s or very early 70s] were able to buy a decent house for you to live in... but being born in the mid 70s to mid 80s does not by any stretch of the imagination put you in any kind of generational sweetspot... and, with student debts etc it looks like today's teenagers might well have it worst still 10 years from now...

'why are you whingeing when there are people in the third world who are clearly so much worse off etc?'

this is such meaningless rubbish that it's not worthy of comment. go and give a slice of your unearned housing wealth to someone the third world if you care about them as much as you do yourself. presumably the Paris student riots were "whingeing" too, ditto the miners' strike, etc.

'ah but interest rates are so low now, they were high in my day'

you might well have had a couple of difficult years due to high interest rates. but wage inflation was rampant in the period you're talking about [that's kind of the reason why interest rates were high, believe it or not]. a year or two of that and your housing debt had dwindled into insignificance.


have i missed any other good ones?

fact is, the 50s, 60s or very early 70s were by a distance the best time to be born in the UK from the perspective of quality of life in mature adulthood [as opposed to childhood or teen/very early twenties]. they have it a lot better than the generation that followed them and this matters a good deal [incidentally they also had it better than the generation that preceded them]. i almost don't know what or who the fools one sees on these threads from time to time are trying to persuade to the contrary.

StevieJ

As I have already stated when I bought in 1988 housing p/e ratio was 4.8 now 4.4 (according to the Halifax) not to mention interest rates 7.5% - 15%.

almost too fatuous to be worthy of comment, really... today's young demonstrably live in shared places/smaller places up to much higher ages than the boomers did. prices are demonstrably far higher than in your day relative to wages. what on earth are you trying to argue here?

ukcarper

1972 you earn £1.5k and your partner earns £1k and the most you can borrow is 3x your income plus 1 x your partners income that means you can borrow £5.5k and average house is £7k.

Now you earn £25k and partner earns £16k and you can borrow 4x joint £164k and average house price £165k.

So it is easier now to take the initial step to buy a house. Whether it is easier pay mortgage once you have got it depends on mortgage rate and general cost of living. But as you can see buying a house in the early 70s was not as easy as some people would have you believe.

Graham_Devon

Why is it always about 1972?

the_flying_pig

StevieJ wrote: »

As I have already stated when I bought in 1988 housing p/e ratio was 4.8 now 4.4 (according to the Halifax) not to mention interest rates 7.5% - 15%.

there's a much less unreasonable [hence my not listing it alongside the stupid ones above] argument that goes 'yes OK there's an issue but let's not overstate the significance of it'. it's worthy of debate unlike the stupid ones that I list.

your choice of 1988 is a bit disingenuous since you're talking about a short peak of unaffordability, only a couple of years, when not many people bought, as opposed to the many years we've had now.

also as per my post above wage inflation was licking along at a double digit rate. three years of that and your debt had effectively reduced by one third anyway.

also [although I can't prove it] I'm sure that the Halifax 'average house' [price] has changed over time to become weighted more in favour of flats and very small houses [i guess that's because we build more of]. halifax claims that a house now costs 2.5 times what it did in late 1988 [£160k vs. about £65k], but I very much doubt that any boomer who has been in their current house for this long [especially not the ones who like to tell themselves that its value inflates by 20% p.a. no matter what] would find that their particular house [instead of a rather opaque notional 'average' one] has gone up in value by so little.

ukcarper wrote: »

1972 you earn £1.5k and your partner earns £1k and the most you can borrow is 3x your income plus 1 x your partners income that means you can borrow £5.5k and average house is £7k.

Now you earn £25k and partner earns £16k and you can borrow 4x joint £164k and average house price £165k.

So it is easier now to take the initial step to buy a house. Whether it is easier pay mortgage once you have got it depends on mortgage rate and general cost of living. But as you can see buying a house in the early 70s was not as easy as some people would have you believe.

Meaningless rubbish. It's beyond obvious that for a couple witless [unless they're infertile] enough to borrow the very maximum that the very slackest bank will lend them that it's not especially difficult to buy a reasonable house, to be the 'owner' of it in the legal sense, provided that you also rack up enough debt to do so. But, and I hate to be the one to break it to you, as a rule making repayments based on 4*2 incomes is not, all in all, as, how can I put it, nice as making repayments based on (3+1) incomes. it rather means that mummy has to work as a matter of necessity just to pay the mortgage [rather than having the choice to work to spend on things other than the mortgage].

ukcarper

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Why is it always about 1972?

Because that's when I first bought, you could pick various times from then to now when it has been better or worse.

But the point of the post was not the price of the house or the earning but if you can only borrow x and the cost house is a lot more than x it is just as hard to buy initially.

Graham_Devon

ukcarper wrote: »

But the point of the post was not the price of the house or the earning but if you can only borrow x and the cost house is a lot more than x it is just as hard to buy initially.

So your point was that it's not the house price that matters, it's the amount of debt you can get into which makes it easier or harder?

ukcarper

Graham_Devon wrote: »

So your point was that it's not the house price that matters, it's the amount of debt you can get into which makes it easier or harder?

Well to a point that's is what I'm saying. If you can’t afford to buy now if you were trying to buy in the 70s on equivalent pay you wouldn’t be able to buy then.

Graham_Devon

ukcarper wrote: »

Well to a point that's is what I'm saying. If you can’t afford to buy now if you were trying to buy in the 70s on equivalent pay you wouldn’t be able to buy then.

Yes, indeed.

But there is a difference in the affordability level and how far out of reach it becomes.