‘Vast’ growth in value of England rentals since 1990 would have built 3m council homes | Housing | The Guardian

7 comments

1. It only really makes a mockery of the asset base hasn’t also increased in value.

2. We need to build more council owned and managed properties and ensure they remain under ownership of the councils.

   We should also significantly increase and ring fence budgets to enable Councils to carry out enforcement actions against Landlords who break the law and fail to maintain their properties to the legal minimum.

3. Lol. The guardian are essentially proposing nationalising the gains of BTL. Nice.

   Let’s instead look to nationalise the gains of offshore trusts based for decades in shady tax havens, liberal use of SPVs to reduce or avoid tax on the various noncore business interests, etc etc of certain national newspapers? Pot, it’s kettle on line 2.

   I wonder how many houses we could have built with footballers image rights. Or maybe public sector pensions. Or maybe EU contributions. Or U2s Netherlands based royalty fund (where no tax accrues to IP).

   Its a totally irrelevant piece of politicking by a shameful rag that loves nothing like it loves hypocrisy.

4. It’s nice to see the private sector built 3m homes for us instead. Oh wait that didn’t happen?

5. So if councils had bought up lots of private houses, and if that hadn’t affected property values at all, then the increased values of those houses, on paper, would now be sufficient to build 3m council houses?

   That’s great but where would councils have got the hundreds of billions required to buy those houses? And what effect would that have had on other council services over the last 30 years if they had spent all that money buying houses instead of funding services?

   And surely if the council had bought all those houses, it would have suppressed house prices massively?

   And even if they had made all that money on paper, how would they have released that money to be able to spend it on anything else?

   And why do we need 3m council houses anyway? There are currently less than 300,000 households who are technically homeless (which means living in unsuitable or temporary accommodation, rather than actually being out on the streets).

   Seem like a total nonsense statistic.

6. 3 million flipping houses? Where are they supposed to go exactly? Crammed in random bits of brownfield within cities and on greenbelts surrounding them, adding more pressure on schools/hospitals/services even basic infrastructure like traffic congestion and transport. Think of the carbon footprint as well. This country needs less bloody people and less houses, not more, probably about 40 million max. And that’s not an anti immigrant thing I’d gladly swap some feckless UK citizens for bloody neptunians if they were going to contribute.

7. Renting housing shouldn’t be a business.

   If you can’t agree on that then at least agree that people should not be taking out mortgages on properties to rent them out.

   Having tennants pay effectively what is the mortgage + a profit to the landlord is what keeps the poor poor and the folk who are rich enough to take out a mortgage in the first place, getting richer.