£300 a month or £3,000?

SingleSue

pickles110564 wrote: »

Everyone deserves somewhere nice to live and should not feel guilty about it.

Agreed but for my own personal morals etc, it would not sit nicely on me.

If the boot was on the other foot and I was one of those paying out 3k a month in mortgage, I would be furious at seeing a neighbour next to me renting for £300 a month.

Where is the incentive to work?

As said before, I DO live in social housing ... in fact a very nice social housing area but it has always been council/HA here and it's the people who have made it nice (we all spend a lot of time doing our gardens and being neighbourly). To have luxury flats sitting right next door to HA flats (as in the same building) with the unfortunate owners having to fork out excessive amounts of money for the same propery just seems a little bit of a pee take to me.

Combined social and owned housing can work but not when the differences being paid is so great.....it will breed anger from the owners and one upmanship from the renters, not a happy combination.

Edited to add - Just to point out just in case, you still need to pay rent in social housing, it is not free.

SingleSue

Trune wrote: »

Luck has nothing to do with it, its about what you do with your life, the oppertunities you take and miss. Everyone can get to a place in life where they can be financially stable. I just starting to pay silly rental prices which i cant really afford, but only because i havent used my full potential in life. I'm not unlucky, its my own fault. I dont see why anyone should get free accomodation. (except special cases).

i'd be very angry if i lived there, how ridiculous our government is building council houses in sandbanks.
there goes that neighbourhood. What drive would anyone have if they are given houses like that for doing nothing. Thats going to motivate them isnt it....

Luck does come into it.... I took opportunities and was doing well and then just pure bad luck happened (as in illness) and it all went down the pan.

Since then, I have taken every opportunity thrown at me in my quest to get back to where I was but so far, it's not happening as quickly as I would like!

GunJack

sue - I think the point was being made that although social housing is not free, a substantial people DO get it for free due to housing benefit, council tax benefit, and the raft of other benefits that some people seem to accrue out of, seemingly, nowhere.

That makes my blood boil, as the people like that are deffo extracting the urine. e.g., the single mum in the original article stated that her housing benefit was paying her rent....

SingleSue

I would be one of those making your blood boil as I get full housing benefit etc and I am also a single parent but the circumstances of how I got there could possibly be a fair bit different to the single parent stereotype that you are thinking about.

Pobby

I firmly believe in social housing. In the early 80`s my then recently widowed fil asked if I would like to buy his rather nice 3 bed semi council house for £12k. He intended to carry on paying rent but to me. Although it was easily affordable we didn`t give it a second thought as we were firmly against the sell off and we already owned a property. At the time, yea go on laugh, I was a very committed Labour party member.

At that time where he lived, bar one or two families were all hard working and very repectable.

Now, sadly, I have a distant relative who is unmarried, 3 kids, all planned who lives in social housing and on benefits. The last child was born a couple of months ago and we were expected to congratulate her!

TighterThanTwoCoatsOfPain

first comment would be that i dont believe for one second that all people in social housing etc are spongers (for want of a better word), BUT it should, where possible be a very temporary arrangement. All the people I used to know in Council houses were the ones with the newest cars, sky TV etc etc when my family could never afford it.

My latest 'jaw dropping' moment was this week at work when one of the girls in my team asked for a chat... she wanted to know if there was any chance of dropping down to part time. She was quite up front about the reasons why... She had done the research and would be better off by working about 20 hours per week instead of full time because of the benefits she'd be able to claim!!

Needless to say it will not be an option! Would rather someone with that attitude left the business before i submitted to that.

GunJack

sue - by the sound of it you may be far from the "stereotype" I am thinking of. I live in an area where, in the "council house" areas amongst the "skiver classes", it is the accepted thing for 14-16-ish girls to go and have babies in order to get a social house, move out from the family home, and never work again in their lives, perpetuating the lifestyle of their parents and quite possibly grandparents.

Genuine cases I have no beef with at all. Weren't the genuine cases the whole raison d'etre of the Welfare State? The Safety Net for when people fell on hard times despite their endeavours.

Bungarm2001

MANY years ago I was a council house tenant too...we were rehoused from a Rachmann-type flat that we rented because the council came and inspected it then declared it unfit to live in (I was quite upset..I'd just decorated it all too...! ) To be honest, I was pleased in many ways (the council house was brand new and on a brand new estate) and the rent was well cheap. AND we had central heating...yiipppeeee!!!!

BUT I soon changed me mind when I realised that most of the neighbours unfortunately were a bunch of toe-rags, particularly one family who, looking back, were the forerunner of todays families full of ASBO's.

I couldn't wait to get out of there...so we saved up like mad for a deposit and I bought my first house from there.

The toe-rags no doubt stayed and went on to breed more toe-rags...I'm not saying all the families were that bad, but you could see the way things were going.

I felt sorry for the owners of the privately owned houses that bordered the estate..not quite up to Sandbanks standards, but nevertheless, dead posh when compared to other parts of town. Your average joe wouldn't have been able to afford a mortgage on them, lets put it that way. I have no doubt that the owners were absolutely appalled at the type of tenant the council put in there, and I do know the whole estate, despite the efforts of the council to keep it 'nice,' went to hell in a handcart over a short period of time.

When we moved out, everyone thought we were nuts, but to be honest, if we hadn't been put in that sitution i.e. put amongst losers and dead beats, I doubt we would have been spurred on to buy and end up where I am today.

So there's an example of this kind of dynamic working in reverse...I do feel for the owners in the article who are now living with social housing right on their doorstep because it will inhevitably drag down the values even if they do try to stick to offering the social housing to nice 'safe' tenants like the lady in the article.