Houses are affordable!

ukcarper

Cakeguts wrote: »

Why is it a disgrace? You are never going to fix the market so that everyone can buy a house. There are always going to be people who can't afford to buy. I am fast coming to the conclusion that there aren't as many people who can't afford to buy anything as it seems. It is just that you hear more from them than the people who have bought. The only people I know who will not be able to afford a house are all disabled by some form of illness.

I suppose it depends where you live I think there are plenty where I live, as you would need to be earning over £40k to buy a 1 bed flat or a joint of over £50k for a couple to buy a 2 bed house.

GreatApe

aneary wrote: »

What the UK economy needs changes so rapidly it's impossible to know what the right thing is to study, the papers scream we need more this that and the other so a 15 year old picks their A-Levels based on that as they will need certain A-Levels for a degree course 6 years later once they have their so called prized degree the economy is flooded with people with the same degree and now the UK economy needs something else. So sorry it's not the 15 year old's fault for picking a subject that 6 years later isn't needed.

You are extremely narrow minded and come across with a massive chip on your shoulder.

Why not just do what most people have done for hundreds of years and that is to not go and do a pointless degree and just get a job. If you are smart or hard working you will move up in the world even without a degree.

And as a point of note the university you go to is probably more important than the subject you do. There are 6-8 good universities in the UK almost irrespective of what you study you will get a good job if you graduate from those universities.

GreatApe

LdnFtB wrote: »

My grandmother was a nurse, my grandfather was a teacher. When they started a family my grandmother stopped working.

They were able to buy a detached house in North Oxford on his salary alone.

That is simply not an option for today's teachers and nurses, and don't you dare suggest that people in those roles don't contribute anything to society. Stop blaming young people who had no part in engineering the conditions they're subject to.

Its a nice story but the facts are available in the national records.
Lets assume you are 35 then your grand parents would be ~90 so they might have bought in say 1951. If you look at the records you find that ownership in 1951 was less than 30% of the population. That is much lower than today

So if your grand parents were owners in the 1950s they were the lucky ones. They may have had more than you were told eg an inheritance to help them up

Also going by stats even today there is no problem.
Only 14% of UK born people rent privately and the majority of them need/want to
And it is a temporary tenure over 75% of renters in the uk buy their own home in less than 10 years of renting

GreatApe

leslieknope wrote: »

even the current conservative government has acknowledged there is a housing crisis

The 'government' is just half a dozen ministers.
People like May Gove Boris hardly a pack of intellectual superwights
What makes you think they know much more than the average person?

There is no housing crisis in the UK
This is evident from the fact that only 14% of UK born people in this country rent
And that renting is a temporary tenure people tend to rent when they are students and then for a handful of years as they get their first/second job and then they buy

The reason why so much of the media and May Gove Boris et al think there is a housing crisis is because they cant add 2 and 2 together

If you add 2 and 2 together you find out that 5 million recent migrants from 2004-2017 will invariably change the composition of housing tenure towards more rentals. 75% of recent migrants rent privately that is why renting has boomed.

i work in childrens services which i believe is a valuable service but i cannot afford a house in my area, especially while paying market rents in my area. (not london)

You need to couple up life is better and easier that way.

perhaps i could move 200 miles north and abandon my entire network of family and friends, but why should i have to do that?

You have choices

1: Get a better paid job
2: Find a partner and face the challenges of life (including buying a house) together
3: Opt for a smaller property in a lower priced part of town
4: Move to a cheaper area

GreatApe

LdnFtB wrote: »

They bought a semi detached house which at the time was about 10 years old so had all the mod cons.

Any more straws you'd care to clutch at? Or can you accept that what my parents and grandparents were able to do - buy an average house on a single average salary in a city with jobs - is tough for our generation.

Ownership kept going up from 1900-2004 it peaked in 2004 and then slowly it has fallen

So Arguably the most affordable time in the history of this country was 2004 not before that

You should then ask what happened so that ownership fell from 2004 onward?
Well there was a recession but that did not really kick in until 2008/9
What happened was mass migration kicked in
5 million migrants from 2004-2017 meant there were many more rentals because migrants have/want to rent.

If you look at just UK persons only 14% rent privately and nearly 80% of those private renters become owners in less than 10 years

GreatApe

Red-Squirrel wrote: »

But the question, why should you have to? You shouldn't have to, you should be able to live and work in the area you grew up in and where your community is, if that's what you want to do.

I'm trying to imagine your great great great x 50 grandfather

'Why should I chase that bloody rabbit to the next field I shouldn't have to. I should be able to sit here and the rabbit walk up to me, hit itself over the head with my stick, and then throw itself on that fire before it passes out'

GreatApe

rjwr wrote: »

i've yet to meet someone in their 50's who has stories of not being able to buy their own house unless its through self causes.

I ask anyone who believes different to stand in front of a room full of 20 year olds, who feel it they will NEVER be able to buy a house and tell them different.

At one point, my mother in law said she needed a £100 deposit for a mortgage. Whilst that maybe part of the cause of the problem with house prices rising, you still cannot deny that despite all the gloom stories of higher interest rates in the past, and oh you will never know what it was like, tell it to the people who CANNOT buy a house, but can afford to pay a mortgage.

Most UK born kids will have free housing handed down to them via their grandparents/parents or from their partners grandparents/parents or a combination of both.

fairleads

capital0ne wrote: »

In 1957 the average wage was £7 10s - equates to £390 per year
The average house cost £2,000 - 5 times salary

Fast forward to now

The average wage is about £20,000 per year (starting point for a civil servant in their early 20's)
A quick search on Rightmove and you can find two bed terraced houses or similar for under £100,000 (not in London of course)

Apparently all of us oldies are now glorying in our 'cheap' houses we bought back in the day in our twenties. Well it was just as hard for us back then as it is now, so what's different?

The difference is that we had a bit of discipline, we wanted to get our own place, and we saved, we bought what we could afford and where we could afford, and we didn't look for our four bed detached forever home full of brand new furnishings.

We bought second hand and made do for the first few years.

Sadly youngsters today 'need' and iPhone X (£50/month), Netflix/Amazon Prime £100+/year), gym membership (£100+/yr), Costa coffee(£60/month), Takeaways (£100/month), new card (£199/month) plus others - this is all adding up to £5,000+/yr, which is your 5% deposit saved in one year.

It is doable - you just need to do it - get out of your parents house now and get on with your life while you know everything!:D

So where's the problem? Your argument is based on a false premise. Average 1957 house price outside of the london area was far less than 2K, more like 1 to 1.25K

ukcarper

GreatApe wrote: »

Ownership kept going up from 1900-2004 it peaked in 2004 and then slowly it has fallen

So Arguably the most affordable time in the history of this country was 2004 not before that

You should then ask what happened so that ownership fell from 2004 onward?
Well there was a recession but that did not really kick in until 2008/9
What happened was mass migration kicked in
5 million migrants from 2004-2017 meant there were many more rentals because migrants have/want to rent.

If you look at just UK persons only 14% rent privately and nearly 80% of those private renters become owners in less than 10 years

You claim to understand statistics but it’s not the amount of people that own but the amount that buy in any particular year that defines affordability.

GreatApe

ukcarper wrote: »

You claim to understand statistics but it’s not the amount of people that own but the amount that buy in any particular year that defines affordability.

Even by that metric things are good roughly 1/3rd of properties go to FTBs 1/3rd go to 2nd-time-buyers and 1/6th go to landlords and 1/6th to other