The dissapearing property ladder

Graham_Devon

Viewpoint article on the BBC looking at "the disappearing property ladder".

A couple of highlights from the article which hit home with me....

I was lucky. I come from a generation that rolled a six and, for the most part, landed on a ladder on the property board. I bought my first flat in London when I was 21, and it cost about four times the very ordinary salary I was earning.

In the past few weeks, I've been back to my old place. As I walked around it, I was struck again by the emotional power of a home. There were memories and ghosts in every room.

The flat is unchanged in lots of ways, but transformed in one - today, the young person that I was wouldn't have a chance of buying it. At about £400,000, it costs maybe 15 times the salary I'd be earning in an equivalent job today. That's not just a London problem, something similar would be true in large parts of the country.

The turnaround in the past decade has been dramatic. Ten years ago 59% of 25 to 34 year-olds owned their own home in England - now it's 36%. What are they doing instead? They're renting from private landlords - 21% were doing that 10 years ago, now it's 48%.

Lord Best has spent a lifetime working in social housing and sums up how things stand: "Everybody under 40 has got some kind of housing problem. They're paying too much for their mortgage, they're paying too much for their rent, they're in trouble one way or the other."

That wasn't true for my generation, and it raises some profound questions for us. How does a country as a whole manage to feel secure when so many of its people are feeling insecure about a fundamental aspect of their lives?

Think Lord Best has used a bit of poetic license to get his point across!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31762127

Only reason I came across this article was that it was in the top 10 most read articles, which says something in itself.

purch

Has Mariella Frostrup still got that voice ?? (trembly knees :eek:)

If so I might watch it.

IveSeenTheLight

Graham_Devon wrote: »

The turnaround in the past decade has been dramatic. Ten years ago 59% of 25 to 34 year-olds owned their own home in England - now it's 36%. What are they doing instead? They're renting from private landlords - 21% were doing that 10 years ago, now it's 48%.

One important stat they missed here was the number of people renting council homes.

If 59% were owners and 21% were rented privately, that 20% were renting council homes.

I seem to recall the split was higher in favour of council homes.

I find it hard to conceive that council homes have only reduced 4%, so it would be great to see the link to these stats

Loughton_Monkey

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

One important stat they missed here was the number of people renting council homes.

If 59% were owners and 21% were rented privately, that 20% were renting council homes.

I seem to recall the split was higher in favour of council homes.

I find it hard to conceive that council homes have only reduced 4%, so it would be great to see the link to these stats

You may be missing the clues here.

This is a pre-election 'campaign' by the BBC which (despite the concept of neutrality) aims to ensure we get a Socialist government. One that will have other things to do than scrutinise the 'State Organ' of news.

The recipe is always the same. Pull out a few 'celebrity lefties' who are privy to what Miliband will gripe about, and get them to whinge and gripe using anecdote, feelings, and weasel words rather than any facts or correct statistics.

The fact that it has created a spark of interest in MSE's own 'celebrity leftie' - an avowed Labour voter - in the form of the original poster gives us a clue as to how much weight we should ascribe to this 'article'.

As a respectable and valued member of the 'rentier' community - without whom these young wretches would not have a place to live in (let alone buy) - you should keep calm, carry on, and ignore such 'anti-landlord' propaganda.

IveSeenTheLight

It's worthwhile considering the summation of the root cause which is lacking in the OP's selective "highlights"

And usefully, although we may be short of new homes, we're certainly not short of statistics to describe the problem. It's hard to think of a national failure that's quite as well documented as this one, and here's the scale of it in a nutshell - the UK needs about 245,000 new homes a year to keep pace with demand, and for the past six years the country has built about half that number. We haven't built fewer in peacetime since the 1920s.

IveSeenTheLight

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

You may be missing the clues here.

This is a pre-election 'campaign' by the BBC which (despite the concept of neutrality) aims to ensure we get a Socialist government. One that will have other things to do than scrutinise the 'State Organ' of news.

The recipe is always the same. Pull out a few 'celebrity lefties' who are privy to what Miliband will gripe about, and get them to whinge and gripe using anecdote, feelings, and weasel words rather than any facts or correct statistics.

The fact that it has created a spark of interest in MSE's own 'celebrity leftie' - an avowed Labour voter - in the form of the original poster gives us a clue as to how much weight we should ascribe to this 'article'.

As a respectable and valued member of the 'rentier' community - without whom these young wretches would not have a place to live in (let alone buy) - you should keep calm, carry on, and ignore such 'anti-landlord' propaganda.

LOL, I'm very calm indeed, not worried at all.

I rarely frequent this forum nowadays and have just recently popped my head back in.

It appears there's not much difference as time has went by, still the same old stories with the same old root causes

Loughton_Monkey

Graham_Devon wrote: »

......Think Lord Best has used a bit of poetic license to get his point across!!....

This is one of Bernard Woolley's "irregular verbs".....

I am making a powerful argument.
You are using 'poetic license'
He is 'lying through his teeth'

Lord Best has spent a lifetime working in social housing and sums up how things stand: "Everybody under 40 has got some kind of housing problem. They're paying too much for their mortgage, they're paying too much for their rent, they're in trouble one way or the other."

That wasn't true for my generation, and it raises some profound questions for us. How does a country as a whole manage to feel secure when so many of its people are feeling insecure about a fundamental aspect of their lives?

So he doesn't think the 15% mortgage rates his generation paid was "too much"?

He should divert his attention back to the Joseph Rowntree political group where he belongs. The JR Charitable Trust seems to prefer rather extreme donees than, say, the UK young homeless for handouts....

The Trust donated £305,000 to Cageprisoners whose spokesman Asim Qureshi called on Muslims to support jihad at an extremist rally, and described militant Mohammed Emwazi, as a "beautiful young man".

ruggedtoast

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

This is one of Bernard Woolley's "irregular verbs".....

I am making a powerful argument.
You are using 'poetic license'
He is 'lying through his teeth'



So he doesn't think the 15% mortgage rates his generation paid was "too much"?

He should divert his attention back to the Joseph Rowntree political group where he belongs. The JR Charitable Trust seems to prefer rather extreme donees than, say, the UK young homeless for handouts....

Boomers paid 15% mortgage rates for about 5 minutes. Youngsters today are trapped into vertiginous house prices and rates for a lifetime.

Whats worse, paying 5% on a £200k mortgage in a time of real term falls in standards of living, or 10% on a £15,000 one in a time when the economy is growing exponentially and every Budget day is another Boomer handout?

As always you are picking out the things that were harder for the boomer generations and focusing on them to the exclusion of everything else.

ukcarper

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Boomers paid 15% mortgage rates for about 5 minutes. Youngsters today are trapped into vertiginous house prices and rates for a lifetime.

Whats worse, paying 5% on a £200k mortgage in a time of real term falls in standards of living, or 10% on a £15,000 one in a time when the economy is growing exponentially and every Budget day is another Boomer handout?

As always you are picking out the things that were harder for the boomer generations and focusing on them to the exclusion of everything else.

talking rubbish as usual.

[Deleted User]

I'll sit here and wait for a 55 year old who could buy their home with one salary to come in and tell the youngsters it's all their fault for buying iPhones and going on holidays. I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the rise of feminism, 'two person mortgages', the use of homes as pensions by BLT landlords and the reduction in home building (creating a supply/demand issue).

PS. Expect a pension crisis in 30 years time as all those youngsters realise they were paying for mortgages instead of investing in pensions

Blacklight

Usual 'I earn 26k and can't buy a 400k property in central London' tripe.

I'm not even going to comment on 'paying too much for you mortgage'.