I love to blame Thatcher at every opportunity, but it’s far more complex than that. We’ve had 35 years since the iron bitch left government. Our population has grown on several fronts, we rightly want to regulate builders so they don’t make shoddy and/or unsafe housing and we’re increasingly aware of our environmental impact. Housing has been about the safest investment anyone could make, even excluding those council homes that funnily enough are now private lets.
Way more at play here than the sell off of public stock.
Should rename this to political memes as that’s all it seems to be
Are we seriously going to pretend that adding millions of people to the population didnt increase housing costs when supply hasn’t expanded at a similar rate.
There are lots of reasons why Britain has a housing crisis but it obviously comes down to not enough houses. There are issues on the demand and supply side, lots of issues. Thatcher certainly being one of them. Right to Buy isn’t unfixable though, we just need to build more homes.
Import 10 million people …whine when housing market over heats
Welcome to the mind of the Redditor incels in here
There’s probably as study that could be done on why there appears to be a correlation between memes being political and just being generally shit.
It’s not just Thatcher. Our restrictive development laws have meant we have been building less houses than we actually need every single year since the 1950s.
Thatcher selling the council homes off wasn’t the cause of the housing crisis it’s self. After all, it was already existing housing becoming privately owned instead of rented. The issue with it was that the houses were sold well, well under their market price, sometimes even under their construction price, so the councils weren’t able to replace the ones they sold with new council houses.
Right to Buy exacerbated the already existing problem of not enough houses being built. It didn’t cause it, and we still aren’t building enough houses every year to this day, even with a government who recognise the problem and are laying out plans to try and fix it.
Yeah that’s nonsense, we haven’t built enough homes to supply demand since the 1950s. Thatcher was terrible but those properties still exist and house people, in fact if we had enough supply people being able to buy their homes is an excellent idea.
Councils gave up building houses and sold off the houses they did own to housing associations so they could downsize their staff. Now it’s down to developers to build a percentage of “affordable” (i.e council/housing association) houses…
But it’s in the developer’s interest to intentionally keep supply of new houses as low as possible which keeps the prices high. Lets say you spend (completely made up numbers) 50 million on labour and materials and 2 years building 200 houses. You sell those houses for 400k each. 30 million profit. You now build those same 200 houses, but over 4 years. Labour costs a little more, so you spend 55 million. Supply of houses is lower, prices are higher so you sell them for 600k each. You’ve now worked half as hard, and made over double the profit.
Call me a conspiracy nut, but I work in the new housing industry and I see this time and time again. Developers generally only build 50-60 houses per site per year because they’re in no rush to build more.
There’s way more to the housing shortage today than just “bad tories sold the council houses”.
Having more than 2 homes should be banned. The fact people treat the housing market like stocks is why its fucked.
I’m genuinely unsure how “Right to buy” contributed to the housing crisis…
My parents rented a Council House, they bought it under “Right to buy” – when they were renting 1 House, 1 Household, when they’d bought it 1 House, 1 Household…no change
It’s not like 1 House magically disapeared from the Housing Stock when my parents bought it…is there?
The ‘right to buy’ was introduced in 1980, 45 years ago. No notable housing crisis for decades afterwards. After a recent period of very high immigration leading to population growth and higher demand for housing we have a serious housing crisis.
I think 45 years was long enough to put it right ffs blaming thatcher fml
Do you really think 2 million houses 60 years ago caused today’s problems? What about the 10 million new entries into the country the past decade in addition to normal demand of the youth looking to move out while the government has greenbelt swathes of the country stopping organic expansion and build almost no new houses themselves?
Well immigrants arent making things better, thats all i’m saying
Yeah, selling off £2m worth of council housing is the problem. Nothing to do with circa £20m + legal and illegal migration since 1990. 🫣. PS, no fan of Thatcher, her greatest crime was selling off the family jewels I.e. utilities etc..
You add people to our population they will need somewhere to live. The vast majority need social housing generally have larger families meaning they go to the top of the queue on the waiting lists. If any of you can’t understand this you are wilfully ignoring what’s blatantly obvious.
Always said social hoisting should never have been sold and it continues in England. However the massive increase in population due to immigration could have been predicted and catered for. You can blame British businesses with their insatiable thirst for cheap labour for it profit before country and its people.
So 250k net migration is irrelevant
Air bnbs & 2nd homes (of full liveable houses – not cabins and things) should be banned until the housing crisis is no longer an issue. I can’t believe there are full homes out there sitting empty 60% of the time. If people want to go on holiday they can stay in a hotel or campsite, which are purpose built.
Years of underfunding from successive governments meant social housing wasn’t being built and that leads to a shortage of homes. The solution is the government builds social housing.
Fun fact: Thatcher’s housing minister Ian Gow’s son owns dozens of ex-council houses, renting them out effectively as a property magnate. The idea as right to be being the first step in the property ladder was nonsense, it led to properties being bought up en masse and rented out at extortionate prices.
The politicians allowed their mates to change the rent market into villa timeshares.
There was a policy in Edinburgh for a while where airbnbs had to post a form outside the house with details of the bnb.
Almost every block of flats in town had piles of these forms outside. A block of 8 flats would have 6 airbnbs in it.
Landlords are scum.
The nimbys aren’t that big a problem the issue is that we have more vacant homes than we have homeless people someone owns these vacant homes. Given that there’s more than enough homes for all the families in this country I can understand why people wouldn’t want much more housing to be built
Not to mention housing developers artificial driving demand by withholding stock which drives up prices and makes it fundamentally unaffordable.
This is complete nonsense.
Population has gone up 12.2 million since the day she left office lol
Adding millions of people who also demand housing is obviously going to be a contributing factor to rising prices.
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I love to blame Thatcher at every opportunity, but it’s far more complex than that. We’ve had 35 years since the iron bitch left government. Our population has grown on several fronts, we rightly want to regulate builders so they don’t make shoddy and/or unsafe housing and we’re increasingly aware of our environmental impact. Housing has been about the safest investment anyone could make, even excluding those council homes that funnily enough are now private lets.
Way more at play here than the sell off of public stock.
Should rename this to political memes as that’s all it seems to be
Are we seriously going to pretend that adding millions of people to the population didnt increase housing costs when supply hasn’t expanded at a similar rate.
There are lots of reasons why Britain has a housing crisis but it obviously comes down to not enough houses. There are issues on the demand and supply side, lots of issues. Thatcher certainly being one of them. Right to Buy isn’t unfixable though, we just need to build more homes.
Import 10 million people …whine when housing market over heats
Welcome to the mind of the Redditor incels in here
There’s probably as study that could be done on why there appears to be a correlation between memes being political and just being generally shit.
It’s not just Thatcher. Our restrictive development laws have meant we have been building less houses than we actually need every single year since the 1950s.
Thatcher selling the council homes off wasn’t the cause of the housing crisis it’s self. After all, it was already existing housing becoming privately owned instead of rented. The issue with it was that the houses were sold well, well under their market price, sometimes even under their construction price, so the councils weren’t able to replace the ones they sold with new council houses.
Right to Buy exacerbated the already existing problem of not enough houses being built. It didn’t cause it, and we still aren’t building enough houses every year to this day, even with a government who recognise the problem and are laying out plans to try and fix it.
Yeah that’s nonsense, we haven’t built enough homes to supply demand since the 1950s. Thatcher was terrible but those properties still exist and house people, in fact if we had enough supply people being able to buy their homes is an excellent idea.
Councils gave up building houses and sold off the houses they did own to housing associations so they could downsize their staff. Now it’s down to developers to build a percentage of “affordable” (i.e council/housing association) houses…
But it’s in the developer’s interest to intentionally keep supply of new houses as low as possible which keeps the prices high. Lets say you spend (completely made up numbers) 50 million on labour and materials and 2 years building 200 houses. You sell those houses for 400k each. 30 million profit. You now build those same 200 houses, but over 4 years. Labour costs a little more, so you spend 55 million. Supply of houses is lower, prices are higher so you sell them for 600k each. You’ve now worked half as hard, and made over double the profit.
Call me a conspiracy nut, but I work in the new housing industry and I see this time and time again. Developers generally only build 50-60 houses per site per year because they’re in no rush to build more.
There’s way more to the housing shortage today than just “bad tories sold the council houses”.
Having more than 2 homes should be banned. The fact people treat the housing market like stocks is why its fucked.
I’m genuinely unsure how “Right to buy” contributed to the housing crisis…
My parents rented a Council House, they bought it under “Right to buy” – when they were renting 1 House, 1 Household, when they’d bought it 1 House, 1 Household…no change
It’s not like 1 House magically disapeared from the Housing Stock when my parents bought it…is there?
The ‘right to buy’ was introduced in 1980, 45 years ago. No notable housing crisis for decades afterwards. After a recent period of very high immigration leading to population growth and higher demand for housing we have a serious housing crisis.
I think 45 years was long enough to put it right ffs blaming thatcher fml
Do you really think 2 million houses 60 years ago caused today’s problems? What about the 10 million new entries into the country the past decade in addition to normal demand of the youth looking to move out while the government has greenbelt swathes of the country stopping organic expansion and build almost no new houses themselves?
Well immigrants arent making things better, thats all i’m saying
Yeah, selling off £2m worth of council housing is the problem. Nothing to do with circa £20m + legal and illegal migration since 1990. 🫣. PS, no fan of Thatcher, her greatest crime was selling off the family jewels I.e. utilities etc..
You add people to our population they will need somewhere to live. The vast majority need social housing generally have larger families meaning they go to the top of the queue on the waiting lists. If any of you can’t understand this you are wilfully ignoring what’s blatantly obvious.
Always said social hoisting should never have been sold and it continues in England. However the massive increase in population due to immigration could have been predicted and catered for. You can blame British businesses with their insatiable thirst for cheap labour for it profit before country and its people.
So 250k net migration is irrelevant
Air bnbs & 2nd homes (of full liveable houses – not cabins and things) should be banned until the housing crisis is no longer an issue. I can’t believe there are full homes out there sitting empty 60% of the time. If people want to go on holiday they can stay in a hotel or campsite, which are purpose built.
Years of underfunding from successive governments meant social housing wasn’t being built and that leads to a shortage of homes. The solution is the government builds social housing.
Fun fact: Thatcher’s housing minister Ian Gow’s son owns dozens of ex-council houses, renting them out effectively as a property magnate. The idea as right to be being the first step in the property ladder was nonsense, it led to properties being bought up en masse and rented out at extortionate prices.
The politicians allowed their mates to change the rent market into villa timeshares.
There was a policy in Edinburgh for a while where airbnbs had to post a form outside the house with details of the bnb.
Almost every block of flats in town had piles of these forms outside. A block of 8 flats would have 6 airbnbs in it.
Landlords are scum.
The nimbys aren’t that big a problem the issue is that we have more vacant homes than we have homeless people someone owns these vacant homes. Given that there’s more than enough homes for all the families in this country I can understand why people wouldn’t want much more housing to be built
Not to mention housing developers artificial driving demand by withholding stock which drives up prices and makes it fundamentally unaffordable.
This is complete nonsense.
Population has gone up 12.2 million since the day she left office lol
Adding millions of people who also demand housing is obviously going to be a contributing factor to rising prices.
Sure 10 million NET migration does not help
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