Snobbery towards Shared Ownership/Social Housing

brit1234

Where I work (west London) I see lots of people really regretting shared ownership due to being next door/surrounded by troublesome blocks or having housing association in the same block. It only takes one family to make a living hell for you. We are talking extreme violence, thefts, burglaries, people being let into the communal stairways to buy drugs and inject in the stairways and then there is the widespread ASB or domestics.

Most of the shared ownership places are terrible. However I know of 2 which are not and they are shared ownership blocks in luxury estates where only key workers are allowed and they don't have to pay the rent element. They have swimming pools and no social housing. However they still have all the normal bad economic stuff associated with shared ownership and nothing more than tiny rabbit hutches.

EmmyLou30

I'm not sure I'd call it snobbery exactly, it's more that every house purchase carries the risk of a bad neighbour and your average person sees social housing as a higher risk so avoids it. You get bad home owners and bad private tenants (but how many of these 'private' tenants are actually social housing as well funded by the state due to the lack of council housing) and bad social tenants....it's a lottery. But the odds are that more social means more problems and you can argue that this isn't the case but reality says otherwise (though maybe not where the OP lives luckily).

There has to be a reason why a high percentage of owner occupiers in an area make houses sell for more and are more desirable and it's not because all the residents are snobs!

neilio

Frankly, it annoys me that people tar social housing and shared ownership with the same brush. This thread has given oft-justifiable reasons why people don't like being near social housing tenants (despite the fact that you never know what your neighbours will be like, regardless of "status"). But, if anything, and from my experience, shared ownership people care as much about their surroundings as full ownership people.

mije1983

Newbie78 wrote: »

About 3 months ago friends of ours were due to buy a home on a new estate and at the last minute pulled out, the reason was they would have been next to shared ownership/social housing


We recently bought a share of and moved into our shared ownership house on the same new estate

Assume you mean 'former friends'.

cloo

Problem is the media (and a few people's very bad experiences) have convinced a lot of people that everyone in social housing is a jobless layabout/drug addict/badly behaved whereas, guess what? They're people. The vast majority are employed. The unemployed ones are mostly not ASBO-harvesting crims.

I do laugh bitterly when I hear about someone pulling out of buying a place when they realise the 'nice neighbourhood' is full of social housing, despite there being no evidence of any problems. If the neighbourhood is quiet and well kept, then it's probably a nice one.

Newbie78

EmmyLou30 wrote: »

I'm not sure I'd call it snobbery exactly, it's more that every house purchase carries the risk of a bad neighbour and your average person sees social housing as a higher risk so avoids it. You get bad home owners and bad private tenants (but how many of these 'private' tenants are actually social housing as well funded by the state due to the lack of council housing) and bad social tenants....it's a lottery. But the odds are that more social means more problems and you can argue that this isn't the case but reality says otherwise (though maybe not where the OP lives luckily).

There has to be a reason why a high percentage of owner occupiers in an area make houses sell for more and are more desirable and it's not because all the residents are snobs!

No didn't means all are snobs. It was strange they felt this way in our area as it is a very popular estate and the HA is being very picky when selecting people to rent and take on shared ownership

neilio wrote: »

Frankly, it annoys me that people tar social housing and shared ownership with the same brush. This thread has given oft-justifiable reasons why people don't like being near social housing tenants (despite the fact that you never know what your neighbours will be like, regardless of "status"). But, if anything, and from my experience, shared ownership people care as much about their surroundings as full ownership people.

Yes we really do, we ourselves thought of it but we know that anyone can be a bad neighbour, we had both rented for years and had good and bad experiences

mije1983 wrote: »

Assume you mean 'former friends'.

Haha no we didn't judge but we did enjoy telling them our new address LOL

NOVAMET21

I heard that 40% of the house in a new development goes to the housing association (in our estate anyway). In our estate, the fully owners, shared owners and renters only are all mixed in blocks. So, there might be a block of 8 terraced fully owners but then at one end there could be block of 4 shared owners and at the other end could be block of 2 rented houses.


Even though my neighbours are mixed they are all good but then few blocks down the estate lives people who are constantly creating problems for the people around the whole estate. So buying a house in a new development, you are bound to come against all kind of people.

TBagpuss

pinkshoes wrote: »

I have also lived on a street with shared ownership and housing association rental.

Most my neighbours were indeed lovely, BUT... one neighbour was not, and because they were housing association renters, it was a nightmare to get anything done about them.

Vandalism, stereos ripped out of cars, bikes stolen, trees ripped up by their kids, late night music, shouting, violence, people bashing on their door etc...

I moved out and a previous neighbour told me that eventually this tenant was moved on after YEARS and the crime rate dropped!

I also had a noisy/antisocial private tenant neighbour too, but the private LL did not want a troublesome tenant, so they were evicted once their 6 month tenancy was up. A much easier process!

Interesting. I had almost the opposite experience. I lived in a property on an estate which had originally all been owned by a housing association, quite a lot (including both my immediate neighbours) still were. When one of my neighbours caused problems, the HA addressed it very quickly, after I contacted them. I don't know exactly what they said to the neighbour, but I got an apology from her and there was no further trouble, so it must have been fairly robust. From what I gathered from other neighbours they also acted fairly promptly to deal with an aggressive vandal elsewhere on the estate.

The private landlord who owned the property a street away from me, next door to a friend of mine, on the other hand, didn't care at all that his tenant was causing massive issues. Presumably he was paying his rent, and the landlord didn't care beyond that.

I think that there are good ad bad HA landlords and tenants, as well as good and bad private landlords and tenants, and private owners.

bobobski

I live in a block with social tenants and will actively avoid doing so in future. All of the stereotypes are true. I live in a prime location in a "posh" town, yet this family - where the mother does not appear to have a job and is constantly having screaming matches with this week's boyfriend (swearing prolifically for all the neighbours to hear) and the kids are always running riot, walking on the roofs, breaking into the car park and damaging cars/stealing bikes/breaking the electric gate etc - gets to live here for next to nothing. It's not snobbery, it's a simple sense of the lack of fairness. My friends with good jobs, who would be good tenants, cannot afford to live here.

And OP, perhaps this part is snobbery: please learn the difference between the past tense of "bring" and "buy" - it would make your posts a little easier to read.

Red-Squirrel_2

Newbie78 wrote: »

Haha funny thing is the place they brought in the end is surrounded by other home owners, 2 who are causing them grief :)

Are these people really friends?