If the planning process was overhauled and more houses built would everything be OK?

boliston

Mistermeaner wrote: »

And its quite right your bike has a good home.

We could however use lots of the unfarmed farmland on the edge of towns and cities to build lots and lots of housing.

Unused brownfield which tends to get used for housing now generally isn't suitable IMO due to infrastructure issues but tends to be easier to get planning on

The trouble with all this "edge of town" development is that it tends to be very car-centric as often too far away for walking and apart from London there is very little reliable public transport, with busses often hours apart.

Cakeguts

dktreesea wrote: »

But if you are on £18k a year, so not the minimum wage, can you buy much with a £72k mortgage?


In Leicestershire, (middle England), only 23 properties listed in the past month were £80k or under. Of these, some were showing £80k as a guide price.
http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/property/leicestershire/?added=30_days&new_homes=include&page_size=100&price_max=80000&q=Leicestershire&radius
=0&results_sort=lowest_price&search_source=refine


That's not many choices. Yorkshire looks better, but so many of the prices shown were the starting point for the auction, not the final price.


As you go south it gets worse. in Gloucestershire, only 19 properties listed in the last month fit the £80k or under criteria. Cornwall had many trailer homes or shared ownership for that price.

Depends how good you are at saving and/ or managing to do a second job.

cells

dktreesea wrote: »

But if you are on £18k a year, so not the minimum wage, can you buy much with a £72k mortgage?


In Leicestershire, (middle England), only 23 properties listed in the past month were £80k or under. Of these, some were showing £80k as a guide price.
http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/property/leicestershire/?added=30_days&new_homes=include&page_size=100&price_max=80000&q=Leicestershire&radius
=0&results_sort=lowest_price&search_source=refine


That's not many choices. Yorkshire looks better, but so many of the prices shown were the starting point for the auction, not the final price.


As you go south it gets worse. in Gloucestershire, only 19 properties listed in the last month fit the £80k or under criteria. Cornwall had many trailer homes or shared ownership for that price.

It is unrealistic for a single person to buy and that's reasonable. Take two people on £18k each and it gets a lot easier. More importantly £18k is a low wage from memory the mean full time adult male wage is more than twice that.

mwpt

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

I do not want to see the green belt and green spaces being built on.

It's a pity the people who built your current house didn't feel the same, now we have riffraff like you in the neighbourhood.

PasturesNew

If tonight, overnight, you magically constructed enough houses, in the right places, that people could afford ..... everybody who wasn't looking as they'd given up, or who were "making do" with shared houses or staying at home, would all then want one, creating a new lack of housing.

If the "norm" is to move out from shared/parents aged 30-40, then that's the norm .... if you suddenly make it possible for 17-19 year olds, they'd all want one. And everybody in between that was waiting until they were "the norm" age.

And that's not mentioning the fact that somebody in the EU would probably turn round and say "Look, England's got no housing shortage, let's send these random people there!"

mwpt

PasturesNew wrote: »

If tonight, overnight, you magically constructed enough houses, in the right places, that people could afford ..... everybody who wasn't looking as they'd given up, or who were "making do" with shared houses or staying at home, would all then want one, creating a new lack of housing.

If the "norm" is to move out from shared/parents aged 30-40, then that's the norm .... if you suddenly make it possible for 17-19 year olds, they'd all want one. And everybody in between that was waiting until they were "the norm" age.

And that's not mentioning the fact that somebody in the EU would probably turn round and say "Look, England's got no housing shortage, let's send these random people there!"

It is all tied together though. In the world we've created for ourselves with a debt based monetary system and unfunded retirement pensions, free healthcare, etc, we need the economy to keep producing more "money" to get the taxes to pay for all of this. In order to do that we can't have a shrinking population, unfortunately.

So we need somewhere to house people. If we don't then all the money is eventually going to be sucked out of the economy into housing and our businesses will not be able to compete because in order to have staff, they'll have to pay ridiculous salaries so people can actually live somewhere. At the moment we find the government is mass subsidising business by paying working people's rents, but that can't continue because we are already running a loss making country and not expanding quickly enough to cover that loss.

We are stumbling along, making it up as we do, and trying to keep the whole thing ticking. Why are we still on emergency low rates? Why is growth shrinking across the whole developed world? What will we do as this growth approaches zero but citizens still want their free "stuff" (pensions, etc)?

I don't really like to be a contrarian, I rebel against it generally, and am definitely not a conspiracy theorist, but in the case of the world economy my instinct tells me we're teetering on the verge of a complete mess.

As a technologist, my own personal hope is that we make some rapid rapid progress towards ultra cheap clean energy, growing food in laboratories, and so forth, because we're making a mess of the world currently. Happy Sunday everyone!

dktreesea

cells wrote: »

It is unrealistic for a single person to buy and that's reasonable. Take two people on £18k each and it gets a lot easier. More importantly £18k is a low wage from memory the mean full time adult male wage is more than twice that.

But the mean is misleading, because it takes into account higher income earners which pulls the average up.


Taking the median wage though, so £27,456 per annum (source: ONS, annual survey of hours and earnings, provision 2015 results)
then yes, if someone is doing better than 50% of full time workers they are not going to have the difficulty buying something that those on £18k and below would face.


Why should it be unrealistic for a single person to be able to buy a home, much less reasonable? Single people need affordable homes just like everyone else. We can't all live at home until we are 30 and have built up the savings and income to be able to buy a home.



Take the bottom 25% of full time employees, on less than £20k per annum. In a place like the UK where even in Scotland (which builds thousands of social homes each year) the provision of social housing is inadequate, are you really saying it is unrealistic for this group to expect to own a home, reasonable even? This isn't a small group of people. The number in this group runs to millions of workers.


To me, people should not have to feel they can only afford to buy a home if they are in a relationship. It's bad enough that the bottom 50% of full time workers can only raise a mortgage of £110,000 (4 * earnings, give or take) without having the bottom 25% only ever able to afford to rent.

dktreesea

PasturesNew wrote: »

If tonight, overnight, you magically constructed enough houses, in the right places, that people could afford ..... everybody who wasn't looking as they'd given up, or who were "making do" with shared houses or staying at home, would all then want one, creating a new lack of housing.

If the "norm" is to move out from shared/parents aged 30-40, then that's the norm .... if you suddenly make it possible for 17-19 year olds, they'd all want one. And everybody in between that was waiting until they were "the norm" age.

And that's not mentioning the fact that somebody in the EU would probably turn round and say "Look, England's got no housing shortage, let's send these random people there!"

But is that what should be normal, to stay at home or in shared accommodation until you are in your thirties? If so, then the number of children being born to people who, if housing costs didn't take such an enormous part of their incomes, would otherwise be able to afford a child is going to fall.


We should be wanting children to be born to people, in their own homes, in their 20s, not their 30s or 40s. It's healthier for the mother and child.

GwylimT

A big part of the issue is also the type of housing we are building. Around here virtually all the new build estates are four bedroom houses, with a few token two beds thrown in to meet so called affordable housing.

Where are the apartments? I really don't think we can carry on with our current method of house building.

Apartments are cheaper to build, require less land and cheaper to buy.

We live in a four bed ground floor apartment, it is the largest home we have lived in by far. We have a large private garden, but for those who are not ground floor we have a large communal garden with an allotment, play park, running track. Each apartment has at least two parking spaces and we have an onsite gym.

I couldn't afford a four bed house with the same square footage, three parking spaces or the garden size we have, nevermind pay to use a private gym on top!

Our block ranges from 2-4 bed properties, all bedrooms are a good size, in reality the single rooms are big enough for a double and bedroom furniture. Build quality is good, and its the quietest home I've lived in, and I've lived in a detached property!

We are a series of four storey blocks, positioned in a way that the buildings don't really over look each other. Over the road a new housing estate has been built on a slightly larger plot of land, it has 64 homes. We have around 150, each block is positioned so homes aren't over looked, parking is underground to save space, each block has its own entrance road to prevent congestion at busy time as well. There are five blocks with around thirty homes in each.

dktreesea

GwylimT wrote: »

A big part of the issue is also the type of housing we are building. Around here virtually all the new build estates are four bedroom houses, with a few token two beds thrown in to meet so called affordable housing.

Where are the apartments? I really don't think we can carry on with our current method of house building.

Apartments are cheaper to build, require less land and cheaper to buy.

We live in a four bed ground floor apartment, it is the largest home we have lived in by far. We have a large private garden, but for those who are not ground floor we have a large communal garden with an allotment, play park, running track. Each apartment has at least two parking spaces and we have an onsite gym.

I couldn't afford a four bed house with the same square footage, three parking spaces or the garden size we have, nevermind pay to use a private gym on top!

Our block ranges from 2-4 bed properties, all bedrooms are a good size, in reality the single rooms are big enough for a double and bedroom furniture. Build quality is good, and its the quietest home I've lived in, and I've lived in a detached property!

We are a series of four storey blocks, positioned in a way that the buildings don't really over look each other. Over the road a new housing estate has been built on a slightly larger plot of land, it has 64 homes. We have around 150, each block is positioned so homes aren't over looked, parking is underground to save space, each block has its own entrance road to prevent congestion at busy time as well. There are five blocks with around thirty homes in each.

Yes, but you're living in a ground floor apartment, so the same kind of access that you would have if you had a bungalow. Try living on the top floor. We have 60 stairs between us and the front door. No need for developers to install lifts in low rise housing. For health reasons it is now looking like we are going to have to move.