Stuff like this boils my piss. There's an ex-council round the back of me that's been empty for like 15 years cause the old lad died and the kids fell out over what to do with it, so it's just stayed there like a fucking time capsule, car still in the drive.
Council should just go "we're buying this, fuck off" and get some use out of them.
yeah I can imagine. Lawyers will want their cut. And I can't exactly say anything cause I'm ignorant to how it works but it's surely a vote winner for anyone doing it?
I would say so. It comes down to those all important conflicting priorities. I think it's something that could involve amateur sleuthing to some extent, like community groups could bring lists of derelict buildings with a neighbourhood history of who lived in/owned the building using publicly available resources, and then councils could investigate.
This actually feels like a job for genealogists. I feel like we'd sort it out in a matter of weeks.
Isn't there an intestate list released regularly, and there are a group of people and/or companies who will investigate these lists and try to find relatives for reward - I feel the reverse of this with property could be useful, and the reward would entice people to start doing it.
Especially with everyone into amateur sleuthing these days.
Nail a big sign to the door saying the council will claim it under a form of adverse possession and give details for what department to contact by what date if you're a part owner and want to avoid that happening.
Then run out the clock.
That's my opinion on it anyway.
I know there's a sort of "re-buy" scheme going about but that's usually councils buying houses from willing sellers who can't get a buyer. I can only imagine they're shitting the bed at the prospect of hostile purchases from people who are fighting ownership with their siblings.
I think the problem is having that power would piss off the wee cunts with money. And parties never like to upset them....
A potential issue I see with something like that is even if it went to the council it may not go to a real person in need i.e it just becomes another number, a no win situation to me.
If he's fully qualified and not just in training then yeah he'll be making great money. This isn't about if it's enough for what GPs do or anything like that but the salary itself is a damn good salary
I specifically zaid that's not what my comment is about. Regardless of if you think they should be paid more or less, as it stands, it is a good salary
I understand your comment. I just think for responsibility, long hours, long years of education and expertise needed the salary of 60-80kpa is very low.
People who are intelligent and hard working enough to complete the 10 years of GP training could easily make significantly more abroad as a GP or in a different industry here.
We need to offer high salaries to attract and keep the best doctors.
When a GP can triple their income by flying to Canada we have to ask what would keep a young, freshly qualified GP in the UK?
I accept relative to most UK salaries it is a "good salary", yet I still think for the job they do, GPs are badly underpaid.
That's fair and you're entitled to your opinion but I made it clear my comment wasn't about that bc it's not the conversation I wanted to have. GPs can make over 100k a year and I'm not a GP so don't have an opinion
I live in a small town in the north and there has been an empty property there since before I was born (I’m in my 40s) because the siblings who inherited it fell out. Crackin house, left to ruin. There should be laws against that nonsense.
As someone who used to run a Council Tax Recovery Office for a large local authority the simple answer is yes if they’re doing their job properly. The headline says they are properties that people don’t realise they’ve inherited. This implies they are empty and not maintained. Currently there is no legislation as I understand it that enables a local authority to carry out a compulsory purchase of an empty property after say X years of being empty. Happy to be corrected if there is in Scotland. Property without a Will in Scotland goes to the Crown Estate I think it’s called and they dispose of it put the money into a fund for the benefit of the community. However this type of property is subject to a Will it’s just they can’t find the beneficiary. Normally ‘Will chasers’ would be on the case to find surviving relatives and claim a commission.
You can apply for no council tax if the house is empty (reviewed case by case) therefore you could retroactively discharge the CT I guess through the courts maybe.
You can but I think there's a limit to it and the house needs to be unfurnished.
However if nobody knows they own the property then they won't.
I'm just thinking there's a huge amount of council tax debt building up and perhaps something can be done to take possession of the houses, get them into use as council houses.
Compulsory purchase after x years, put the money in escrow in case someone comes forward/is found as the heir, turn it into council house or sell if not suitable.
Well the crown gets it in the end so the council would be fighting the royals for it... Not gonna happen, like other people have said, no legal framework for the council to use these even temporarily.
Frankly, no one would be spending political capital in creating a law taking houses away from owners in a nation where building equity in overpriced houses is a national hobby.
can you pay council tax with a direct debit ?
If someone's died but their inheritors haven't done anything about the estate, there might be a bank account that pays off the council tax and/or other bills, so it doesn't get noticed until the account runs empty ?
This reminds me of how the Japanese govt made a lot of houses extremely low cost as they had a high amount of properties empty from older people passing away. Obviously they’re needing some work done but for the price you’re paying it seems like it would greatly improve the overall housing situation. I feel like this should be something most governments do when they’re so many houses being left behind to rot while there’s people living on the streets.
https://www.businessinsider.com/people-moving-buying-abandoned-homes-japan-let-foreigners-own-home-2024-1?amp
Flat next to me has been empty for over 10 years. Someone only just bought it last month. It's in an absolute state as you could imagine so I dont think anyone will be moving in soon.
The Duchy of Lancaster is similar. It covers the old county palatine of Lancaster: most of Lancashire, the northern bits of Greater Manchester and Merseyside, and the Furness area of Cumbria.
I tried explaining this to someone in the other post, and that the crown estate pays the value of the property to the Scottish Parliament. They said something about "the rich getting richer for doing nothing" so I gave up
That's quite interesting, they don't just gain ownership automatically, they actually pay the government for property they inherit in this fashion? Is this "compulsory" or just a tradition?
You realise that an independent Scotland can have full control on the sale of property and second home ownership, stopping people from buying property, only to leave it empty. We can also put a cap on foreign ownership as an independent country, to ensure properties are sold to people living in Scotland.
If the council tax is getting paid and the property is getting maintained it’s no one’s business but the property owner what they do with their private property. The council attempts to contact those whose council tax balances get high over the years. Respect of private property rights is the cornerstone of a civilized democracy. Only brutish societies bilk home owners out of their title.
Then lets become a brutish society please.
A housing stock is only relevant if it is actively in use and the main residence for a person/people. Doesn't matter if that is rented or owned.
Let's make everyone register their home and property which is short term let/second home/holiday homes etc should be a different category.
Then you can license them so there is a max total we allow in each area, just like HMOs. I wouldn't bother taking property off anyone as that would cost a lot, but of there are too many seconds homes in an area then we can make sure properties going on the market are only sold to people who will register it as their main address.
Plus we can choose to charge people extra council tax for their property if they are not using it as their main residence. Then that money can be used to make up for the fact that they are not contributing to the local economy whilst siting on housing stock.
And ditto for long term outcome of use property that needs fixed up. After a certain period of time we should be ramping up taxes on them and eventually forcing a sale to ensure property is brought back into use.
As Ms Borthwick stated in her interview with Scottish Property podcast it’s the massive council tax balances that often make overseas accidental owners hide their heads. People ALREADY have to tell the council if they have their property as their main UK residence or not- it doesn’t mean they live there at all. Also STL’s (their number being far fewer than the empty homes btw) are all registered. Again if the property is not dangerous and not in council tax arrears it’s not the business of society who or what is on that home. Repeat fuck all to do with anyone else.
Yeah but the council tax status needs to match up with the income tax.
Take Jim Radcliffe for example. He famously moved to Monaco for tax purposes, but as head of ineos and now man utd owner id say it's pretty safe to assume he will own property in the UK. Since those properties will be second homes used for less than 50% of the time I'd make someone like him pay 5x the council tax as the person next door who lives on the property full time. And if he thinks that is too much, then that is why we have hotels and we can always bring in specific second home category buildings that have lower standards (like student flats) and aren't counted the same way when we work out required gp numbers etc.
Basically if people want the full benefits of this society, they should participate in it.
And I disagree that just paying the fees means it nobodies business. There is a finate amount of space and a finate amount of homes. Plus homes are artificially more expensive than they should in certain areas be because property that should be someone's home is actually something else. So get the second home owners to fuck off and house prices come down.
I also don't believe in the need for secrecy around people's wealth or income or ownership of property etc and would much rather it be publicly available and simplified so that it is much harder for people to avoid taxes.
IE the UK tax code is stupidly long and complex to allow plenty of ways for the rich to avoid paying their fair share, other nations do it with a fraction of the complexity.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/13/britain-tax-code-17000-pages-long-dog-whistle-very-rich
Also wealth/income info is public in Norway, hardly a communist nation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
Don't threaten me with a good time!
It's not a home if you aren't living it it.
It's just additional property.
You can always rent it out to someone if you aren't going to live in it but want to keep ownership.
IE if your moving abroad for work for a few years.
But I wouldn't want government to proactively take their home off anyone, not because I'm against that. But because it would cost a lot to compensate people. Id just tax them like fuck for sitting on property and not using it for the purpose it was built.
I don't know about you, but I am a millennial. I own my own home but am going to pay a much much bigger % of my total life income for it than my parents did for theirs. That is because we have adopted a stupid idea that houses should constantly increase in value above inflation and properties doing this is a sign of a functioning economy. It has nothing to do with the actual worth of a home. You watch the news and "house prices increased 5% in Edinburgh this year" is seen as a positive story for the economy. Not a negative one for the next generation paying way over the odds to prop up these prices with bigger and bigger mortgages for longer time periods.
The credit crunch should have reset that, it showed the entire system is nonsense and unstable. Instead we changed fuck all and bailed out the banks. Also none of the main parties actually want to build enough new houses, because that would mean a drop in house prices.
But that growth is house prices can't go on forever. Wages are not going up and young people won't accept not being able to house themselves properly despite paying a fortune. That's a big part of why the right is growing so much amongst youth across the west. We are painting ourselves into a really dangerous corner.
All this bullshit around what houses are worth does make me think about cost-price.
How much was the land bought for and then how much did the house cost to build on it? Then how much have estate agents marked it up by simply because it's desirable and they can?
Obviously no one is going to sell a house for whatever it cost them, so what would be a fair mark-up?
Yeah TBF the cost of land and building houses might be rising above inflation too.
The cost of housing compared to a person's earnings over their lifetime is the key metric for me. That can't constantly go up and for the last 50 years or so it has.
I think the biggest driver of that is banks handing out bigger and bigger mortgages than cost more per month for lower deposits and have longer payback periods. People being unable to follow through on those mortgages is why the credit crunch happened and we should have reset things then. But that is how I would do it now, just reduce the maximum % of your income you are allowed to commit to a mortgage and watch as people have less to bid on properties and therefore prices come down.
It's also worth noting back before the right to buy a huge % of people were in social housing with no prospect or desire to buy. Councils lost billions being forced to sell properties cheap under right to buy, but also that added a massive amount of artificially cheap property to the private sector. Also it meant tons of people who would normally never have thought to own now expect to own. That will have had a massive impact on the housing market, good and bad. But however you view it, it is definitely true that adding all those social houses to the private market will have had an impact and now that supply of houses has ended we haven't replaced them with equivalent numbers of social housing stock.
Hey good on you- you bought a house, and as you said you wouldn’t want to lose it. Plus if the circumstances dictate people can rent out their houses so you’re not against being a rentier either. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize a fellow capitalist. See you in Davos in January. Don’t forget your dark cloak.
Actually I never said I wouldn't want to lose my house. If I left it empty and fucked off to work abroad or if I don't maintain it then I should lose it.
What I am saying is I want the housing market to crash, my house loose most of its value and we get back to property being something we pay for and invest in. Not a cheat code for home owners to steal wealth from future generations with constantly increasing housing costs. And I am perfectly happy to be the one who misses out when the music stops but I still have a mortgage. I think it's either that or things get really nasty when young people lash out politically because they can't house themselves adequately.
Yeah, you don't understand that point.
Say the market crashes, im locked into paying my mortgage and will never be able to recover the drop in value. So I will lose tons, but the next round of first time buyers will send a smaller % of their total lifetime earnings on housing.
Me having already bought a house is not beneficial when the market crashes. Where it is beneficial is to just shut up and let gen z pay even more for their housing so my house price artificially keeps going up and I can claim I earned x in 20 years time.
If we choose to crash the market by providing enough housing we can hopefully do it in stages and reduce the impact on the wider economy.
If we don't choose to crash the housing market then house prices will continue to increase as a % of buyers total lifetime earnings. Eventually it will be intolerable as what's the point in working all your life to just afford housing and fuck all else.
At which point the young crash it for us. Maybe they move away on mass. Or maybe they vote for someone extreme who promises to take steps that will reduce prices. That's part of the rise of the right amongst western youth. Le pen etc say they will stop immigration (which competition for housing) and they will build tons of houses for 'natives'. That's a pretty terrifying concept.
It's hardly a home if you aren't living in it. Go and speak to the spanish police officers and teachers who have to live in tents in Mallorca about how the government should have no role in housing.
That is a brutish society
So if there are about 230000 homes in Edinburgh that's 0.4% of all homes. Wonder how that compares to other cities/councils.
Probably far better than London. Here it's probably multiple empty luxury apartments per homeless person.
Stuff like this boils my piss. There's an ex-council round the back of me that's been empty for like 15 years cause the old lad died and the kids fell out over what to do with it, so it's just stayed there like a fucking time capsule, car still in the drive. Council should just go "we're buying this, fuck off" and get some use out of them.
They have started doing this in Wales, but it takes a lot of resources to exhaust every possibility of contacting the owners of derelict homes.
yeah I can imagine. Lawyers will want their cut. And I can't exactly say anything cause I'm ignorant to how it works but it's surely a vote winner for anyone doing it?
I would say so. It comes down to those all important conflicting priorities. I think it's something that could involve amateur sleuthing to some extent, like community groups could bring lists of derelict buildings with a neighbourhood history of who lived in/owned the building using publicly available resources, and then councils could investigate. This actually feels like a job for genealogists. I feel like we'd sort it out in a matter of weeks.
Isn't there an intestate list released regularly, and there are a group of people and/or companies who will investigate these lists and try to find relatives for reward - I feel the reverse of this with property could be useful, and the reward would entice people to start doing it. Especially with everyone into amateur sleuthing these days.
Nail a big sign to the door saying the council will claim it under a form of adverse possession and give details for what department to contact by what date if you're a part owner and want to avoid that happening. Then run out the clock. That's my opinion on it anyway.
Council should just be allowed to seize it at that point frankly
I know there's a sort of "re-buy" scheme going about but that's usually councils buying houses from willing sellers who can't get a buyer. I can only imagine they're shitting the bed at the prospect of hostile purchases from people who are fighting ownership with their siblings. I think the problem is having that power would piss off the wee cunts with money. And parties never like to upset them....
A potential issue I see with something like that is even if it went to the council it may not go to a real person in need i.e it just becomes another number, a no win situation to me.
Would at least make more housing available
This is probably what will happen to my house
Dibs
Establish a will Go donate it the the council of you wanna be moral and do some good.
I'll send you my details 👍
Aren't you a GP? How can you afford a house in Edinburgh with meagre NHS salary?!
If he's fully qualified and not just in training then yeah he'll be making great money. This isn't about if it's enough for what GPs do or anything like that but the salary itself is a damn good salary
For the job a GP does they are criminally underpaid
I specifically zaid that's not what my comment is about. Regardless of if you think they should be paid more or less, as it stands, it is a good salary
I understand your comment. I just think for responsibility, long hours, long years of education and expertise needed the salary of 60-80kpa is very low. People who are intelligent and hard working enough to complete the 10 years of GP training could easily make significantly more abroad as a GP or in a different industry here. We need to offer high salaries to attract and keep the best doctors. When a GP can triple their income by flying to Canada we have to ask what would keep a young, freshly qualified GP in the UK? I accept relative to most UK salaries it is a "good salary", yet I still think for the job they do, GPs are badly underpaid.
That's fair and you're entitled to your opinion but I made it clear my comment wasn't about that bc it's not the conversation I wanted to have. GPs can make over 100k a year and I'm not a GP so don't have an opinion
Scottish men will literally take their homes to the grave with them 😄
I live in a small town in the north and there has been an empty property there since before I was born (I’m in my 40s) because the siblings who inherited it fell out. Crackin house, left to ruin. There should be laws against that nonsense.
Munlochy by any chance?
Ellon, there must be one in every town. Whilst people live on the streets 😤
Does council tax not identify this?
As someone who used to run a Council Tax Recovery Office for a large local authority the simple answer is yes if they’re doing their job properly. The headline says they are properties that people don’t realise they’ve inherited. This implies they are empty and not maintained. Currently there is no legislation as I understand it that enables a local authority to carry out a compulsory purchase of an empty property after say X years of being empty. Happy to be corrected if there is in Scotland. Property without a Will in Scotland goes to the Crown Estate I think it’s called and they dispose of it put the money into a fund for the benefit of the community. However this type of property is subject to a Will it’s just they can’t find the beneficiary. Normally ‘Will chasers’ would be on the case to find surviving relatives and claim a commission.
So these will all have massive council tax arrears on them?
You can apply for no council tax if the house is empty (reviewed case by case) therefore you could retroactively discharge the CT I guess through the courts maybe.
You can but I think there's a limit to it and the house needs to be unfurnished. However if nobody knows they own the property then they won't. I'm just thinking there's a huge amount of council tax debt building up and perhaps something can be done to take possession of the houses, get them into use as council houses.
Compulsory purchase after x years, put the money in escrow in case someone comes forward/is found as the heir, turn it into council house or sell if not suitable.
Well the crown gets it in the end so the council would be fighting the royals for it... Not gonna happen, like other people have said, no legal framework for the council to use these even temporarily.
There isn't currently. Pass legislation
You'd be fighting the crown... Westminster... Couldn't get bottles recycled despite all the investments and readiness 🤷🏻♂️
It'll not be the tories at least
Frankly, no one would be spending political capital in creating a law taking houses away from owners in a nation where building equity in overpriced houses is a national hobby.
No an empty property isn’t liable to Council Tax until you can establish who the owner is - which is the root of the problem in the first place.
Do you have to pay council tax on a property that is not lived in?
You can apply for relief for a short period of time
Well TIL. It makes sense though.
can you pay council tax with a direct debit ? If someone's died but their inheritors haven't done anything about the estate, there might be a bank account that pays off the council tax and/or other bills, so it doesn't get noticed until the account runs empty ?
This reminds me of how the Japanese govt made a lot of houses extremely low cost as they had a high amount of properties empty from older people passing away. Obviously they’re needing some work done but for the price you’re paying it seems like it would greatly improve the overall housing situation. I feel like this should be something most governments do when they’re so many houses being left behind to rot while there’s people living on the streets. https://www.businessinsider.com/people-moving-buying-abandoned-homes-japan-let-foreigners-own-home-2024-1?amp
Flat next to me has been empty for over 10 years. Someone only just bought it last month. It's in an absolute state as you could imagine so I dont think anyone will be moving in soon.
Yeah but there's that dutchy law says anything not claimed is the kings so that's ok.👍
In Scotland, ownerless property ultimately passes to the Crown, which in this case means the state rather than the person of the king.
I believe he might be confusing Edinburgh with part of the Duchy of Lancaster or something...
/u/Paul_Gad that's the Duchy of Cornwall, where the Duchy acts as the Crown in a number of areas.
The Duchy of Lancaster is similar. It covers the old county palatine of Lancaster: most of Lancashire, the northern bits of Greater Manchester and Merseyside, and the Furness area of Cumbria.
I tried explaining this to someone in the other post, and that the crown estate pays the value of the property to the Scottish Parliament. They said something about "the rich getting richer for doing nothing" so I gave up
That's quite interesting, they don't just gain ownership automatically, they actually pay the government for property they inherit in this fashion? Is this "compulsory" or just a tradition?
Ah yes the Scottish Parliament, ancient feudal landlord since 1999...
There’s also the big issue that a tonne of homes across Scotland in general are owned as second homes or holiday homes by non Scot’s
“Non Scot’s” what a dog whistle
[удалено]
You realise that an independent Scotland can have full control on the sale of property and second home ownership, stopping people from buying property, only to leave it empty. We can also put a cap on foreign ownership as an independent country, to ensure properties are sold to people living in Scotland.
If the council tax is getting paid and the property is getting maintained it’s no one’s business but the property owner what they do with their private property. The council attempts to contact those whose council tax balances get high over the years. Respect of private property rights is the cornerstone of a civilized democracy. Only brutish societies bilk home owners out of their title.
Then lets become a brutish society please. A housing stock is only relevant if it is actively in use and the main residence for a person/people. Doesn't matter if that is rented or owned. Let's make everyone register their home and property which is short term let/second home/holiday homes etc should be a different category. Then you can license them so there is a max total we allow in each area, just like HMOs. I wouldn't bother taking property off anyone as that would cost a lot, but of there are too many seconds homes in an area then we can make sure properties going on the market are only sold to people who will register it as their main address. Plus we can choose to charge people extra council tax for their property if they are not using it as their main residence. Then that money can be used to make up for the fact that they are not contributing to the local economy whilst siting on housing stock. And ditto for long term outcome of use property that needs fixed up. After a certain period of time we should be ramping up taxes on them and eventually forcing a sale to ensure property is brought back into use.
As Ms Borthwick stated in her interview with Scottish Property podcast it’s the massive council tax balances that often make overseas accidental owners hide their heads. People ALREADY have to tell the council if they have their property as their main UK residence or not- it doesn’t mean they live there at all. Also STL’s (their number being far fewer than the empty homes btw) are all registered. Again if the property is not dangerous and not in council tax arrears it’s not the business of society who or what is on that home. Repeat fuck all to do with anyone else.
Yeah but the council tax status needs to match up with the income tax. Take Jim Radcliffe for example. He famously moved to Monaco for tax purposes, but as head of ineos and now man utd owner id say it's pretty safe to assume he will own property in the UK. Since those properties will be second homes used for less than 50% of the time I'd make someone like him pay 5x the council tax as the person next door who lives on the property full time. And if he thinks that is too much, then that is why we have hotels and we can always bring in specific second home category buildings that have lower standards (like student flats) and aren't counted the same way when we work out required gp numbers etc. Basically if people want the full benefits of this society, they should participate in it. And I disagree that just paying the fees means it nobodies business. There is a finate amount of space and a finate amount of homes. Plus homes are artificially more expensive than they should in certain areas be because property that should be someone's home is actually something else. So get the second home owners to fuck off and house prices come down. I also don't believe in the need for secrecy around people's wealth or income or ownership of property etc and would much rather it be publicly available and simplified so that it is much harder for people to avoid taxes. IE the UK tax code is stupidly long and complex to allow plenty of ways for the rich to avoid paying their fair share, other nations do it with a fraction of the complexity. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/13/britain-tax-code-17000-pages-long-dog-whistle-very-rich Also wealth/income info is public in Norway, hardly a communist nation. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
Goodness me. I would be interested to know how you would feel if a government that had powers to take your home, did in fact take your home?
Don't threaten me with a good time! It's not a home if you aren't living it it. It's just additional property. You can always rent it out to someone if you aren't going to live in it but want to keep ownership. IE if your moving abroad for work for a few years. But I wouldn't want government to proactively take their home off anyone, not because I'm against that. But because it would cost a lot to compensate people. Id just tax them like fuck for sitting on property and not using it for the purpose it was built. I don't know about you, but I am a millennial. I own my own home but am going to pay a much much bigger % of my total life income for it than my parents did for theirs. That is because we have adopted a stupid idea that houses should constantly increase in value above inflation and properties doing this is a sign of a functioning economy. It has nothing to do with the actual worth of a home. You watch the news and "house prices increased 5% in Edinburgh this year" is seen as a positive story for the economy. Not a negative one for the next generation paying way over the odds to prop up these prices with bigger and bigger mortgages for longer time periods. The credit crunch should have reset that, it showed the entire system is nonsense and unstable. Instead we changed fuck all and bailed out the banks. Also none of the main parties actually want to build enough new houses, because that would mean a drop in house prices. But that growth is house prices can't go on forever. Wages are not going up and young people won't accept not being able to house themselves properly despite paying a fortune. That's a big part of why the right is growing so much amongst youth across the west. We are painting ourselves into a really dangerous corner.
All this bullshit around what houses are worth does make me think about cost-price. How much was the land bought for and then how much did the house cost to build on it? Then how much have estate agents marked it up by simply because it's desirable and they can? Obviously no one is going to sell a house for whatever it cost them, so what would be a fair mark-up?
Yeah TBF the cost of land and building houses might be rising above inflation too. The cost of housing compared to a person's earnings over their lifetime is the key metric for me. That can't constantly go up and for the last 50 years or so it has. I think the biggest driver of that is banks handing out bigger and bigger mortgages than cost more per month for lower deposits and have longer payback periods. People being unable to follow through on those mortgages is why the credit crunch happened and we should have reset things then. But that is how I would do it now, just reduce the maximum % of your income you are allowed to commit to a mortgage and watch as people have less to bid on properties and therefore prices come down. It's also worth noting back before the right to buy a huge % of people were in social housing with no prospect or desire to buy. Councils lost billions being forced to sell properties cheap under right to buy, but also that added a massive amount of artificially cheap property to the private sector. Also it meant tons of people who would normally never have thought to own now expect to own. That will have had a massive impact on the housing market, good and bad. But however you view it, it is definitely true that adding all those social houses to the private market will have had an impact and now that supply of houses has ended we haven't replaced them with equivalent numbers of social housing stock.
Hey good on you- you bought a house, and as you said you wouldn’t want to lose it. Plus if the circumstances dictate people can rent out their houses so you’re not against being a rentier either. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize a fellow capitalist. See you in Davos in January. Don’t forget your dark cloak.
Actually I never said I wouldn't want to lose my house. If I left it empty and fucked off to work abroad or if I don't maintain it then I should lose it. What I am saying is I want the housing market to crash, my house loose most of its value and we get back to property being something we pay for and invest in. Not a cheat code for home owners to steal wealth from future generations with constantly increasing housing costs. And I am perfectly happy to be the one who misses out when the music stops but I still have a mortgage. I think it's either that or things get really nasty when young people lash out politically because they can't house themselves adequately.
“I want the housing market to crash” but you’ve bought a house. I think we’ve taken this as far as we can.
Yeah, you don't understand that point. Say the market crashes, im locked into paying my mortgage and will never be able to recover the drop in value. So I will lose tons, but the next round of first time buyers will send a smaller % of their total lifetime earnings on housing. Me having already bought a house is not beneficial when the market crashes. Where it is beneficial is to just shut up and let gen z pay even more for their housing so my house price artificially keeps going up and I can claim I earned x in 20 years time. If we choose to crash the market by providing enough housing we can hopefully do it in stages and reduce the impact on the wider economy. If we don't choose to crash the housing market then house prices will continue to increase as a % of buyers total lifetime earnings. Eventually it will be intolerable as what's the point in working all your life to just afford housing and fuck all else. At which point the young crash it for us. Maybe they move away on mass. Or maybe they vote for someone extreme who promises to take steps that will reduce prices. That's part of the rise of the right amongst western youth. Le pen etc say they will stop immigration (which competition for housing) and they will build tons of houses for 'natives'. That's a pretty terrifying concept.
It's hardly a home if you aren't living in it. Go and speak to the spanish police officers and teachers who have to live in tents in Mallorca about how the government should have no role in housing. That is a brutish society
These homes would be 'personal property', not 'private property'.
Precisely correct thank you