Families forced to share houses up 20% in just 2 years...

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

The number of homes being shared by two or more families has leapt almost 20% over the past two years, according to families and households data released last week.

The lack of publicity this data received seems surprising given the clear implication that it is potential evidence of the massive squeeze caused by housing shortages and lack of building.

http://brickonomics.building.co.uk/2012/11/more-families-share-homes-as-the-squeeze-on-housing-tightens/

A staggering percentage rise in such a short time.

wymondham

Maybe a good byproduct of this will be family generations sharing (if the house is big enough)? This will help with child development having grandparents around who have so much to offer and help older generations be surrounded by their loved ones rather than popped into a care home at hideous expense??

Time to bring familites together again?

Ronaldo_Mconaldo

Or another way to look at it is that there's going to be at least 20% more people to play Christmas Charades on Tuesday. You've really got to bring some optimism to these weird statistics and confusing wavey-line graphs.

shortchanged_2

Does this mean you believe there should be a massive house building programme in the UK Hamish?

chewmylegoff

To put this into context it appears that multi family households have increased from about 1% of households to about 1.2% of households, an increase of about 40,000. Probably more to do with people losing their jobs and having to move the wife and kids in with the grandparents than any massive housing shortage.

Mozette

wymondham wrote: »

Maybe a good byproduct of this will be family generations sharing (if the house is big enough)? This will help with child development having grandparents around who have so much to offer and help older generations be surrounded by their loved ones rather than popped into a care home at hideous expense??

Time to bring familites together again?

Depends on your family...:eek:

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

chewmylegoff wrote: »

To put this into context... .

To really put this into context, you'd need to add the 280,000 families sharing someone else's house, to the 1,000,000+ lodgers renting a room from a homeowner, then add all the HMO's, and then add the 50,000 homeless families (38,000 of which have kids) in council funded B&B 'temporary accommodation', and then realise that despite the number of people sharing houses increasing rapidly, the number of empty houses has been falling markedly.

Or you could just look at the basics.... That we build a little over 100K houses a year, but form 250,000+ additional households a year.

In order to alleviate the current housing shortage, and keep up with population growth and new household formation, we'd need to build at least 300,000 houses a year, every year, for the next 2 decades.

I suspect the chances of that happening are pretty much zero.

Which is why the chances of preventing both house prices and rents soaring over the next 2 decades are pretty much zero.

ILW

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

To really put this into context, you'd need to add the 280,000 families sharing someone else's house, to the 1,000,000+ lodgers renting a room from a homeowner, then add all the HMO's, and then add the 50,000 homeless families (38,000 of which have kids) in council funded B&B 'temporary accommodation', and then realise that despite the number of people sharing houses increasing rapidly, the number of empty houses has been falling markedly.

Or you could just look at the basics.... That we build a little over 100K houses a year, but form 250,000+ additional households a year.

In order to alleviate the current housing shortage, and keep up with population growth and new household formation, we'd need to build at least 300,000 houses a year, every year, for the next 2 decades.

I suspect the chances of that happening are pretty much zero.

Which is why the chances of preventing both house prices and rents soaring over the next 2 decades are pretty much zero.

Unless we go to a system of rent controls.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

ILW wrote: »

Unless we go to a system of rent controls.

Sure.

Then you can replace the free market solution of rationing limited goods through price (as we have now) with the socialist solution of rationing goods in limited supply through waiting lists or lottery draws.

Doesn't change the housing shortage.... And in fact will certainly worsen it.

Not that it's of any relevance, as you probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than seeing rent controls in the UK.

Graham_Devon

What have rent controls got to do with waiting lists and lottery draws?

Can you explain that one?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Graham_Devon wrote: »

What have rent controls got to do with waiting lists and lottery draws?

Can you explain that one?

If you haven't yet learned how supply and demand interact to set price, or how markets ration goods in limited supply though price, there's probably no hope for you.:(

If you choose not to ration goods in limited supply through price, you have to find another way.

Waiting lists and lottery draws are the most common....