Gripe of the day - What is yours?

[Sir Trev]

Originally Posted by garynortheast

Stuff, including the understanding that if you are poor, you have pretty limited choices, and a singular lack of control over your own destiny.

Apologies for the early morning, philosophical angst. It's just particularly relevant for me currently.

Hope it turns around for you soon Gary.

[garynortheast]

Originally Posted by Sir Trev

Hope it turns around for you soon Gary.

Thanks Trev, so do I.

[garynortheast]

Housing. Still!
Chatting with one of the housing officers the other day and she was saying that in Powys alone there is a waiting list of more than 4000 (four thousand!!) people who need rehoming. Powys is a pretty sparsely populated county which makes that figure even more shocking.

[Adam Ef]

I know more and more people who are considering living in vans. Including my sister in law who works a vital job for the NHS. She's only got somewhere to live in Cornwall due to the kindness of a local farmer who saw her call for help on FB and offered her a small cottage on the farm at sympathetic rent. Meanwhile over half of the rest of the village houses are £1000+ per week holiday lets that are empty half the year leaving local communites desolate.



Something is very wrong with the systems we have in the UK.

[redtrummy]

Use to visit the NE coast for many years (camping) use to buy veg from the old boys in the village.Now the whole place is just holiday lets, its a real shame - the heart and soul just gone along with the village shop!

[svenrico]

Originally Posted by Adam Ef

I know more and more people who are considering living in vans. Including my sister in law who works a vital job for the NHS. She's only got somewhere to live in Cornwall due to the kindness of a local farmer who saw her call for help on FB and offered her a small cottage on the farm at sympathetic rent. Meanwhile over half of the rest of the village houses are £1000+ per week holiday lets that are empty half the year leaving local communites desolate.



Something is very wrong with the systems we have in the UK.

The selling off of council houses of course didn't help the housing situation.
Years ago I worked for a local authority on the design of council houses and flats and they built hundreds each year.Nowadays that local authority make a big song and dance about building a scheme of about 20 houses and even then they often aren't all 'council houses' as they used to be known.

[embee]

Selling council houses, or "right to buy", was a good idea in principle, people who lived somewhere for several years could gain a secure and stable future home. It also passed on the burden of maintenance to the new owners.
It also raises the standards of the area with the personal investment. The other side of my street is former council housing, built mostly just before WW2, and largely privately owned now. It's a nice area.

As is usual with central government ideas, it wasn't thought through properly. The regulation of who could buy, quick re-sale at profit, subsidised pricing, restriction of what the councils could do with the limited proportion of the money raised allocated to them etc, all meant that house prices were inflated and social housing stock was not replenished.

Typical stupid political dogma rather than pragmatic realism. It could have worked well, but with politicians in charge that's unlikely to ever happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Buy

[Ruffy]

Originally Posted by embee

... could gain a secure and stable future home. ...

This is what annoys me. It's a fallacy IMHO. There's no reason renting can't be structured to give long term stability and security. It works in much of mainland Europe. Unfortunately, the protection of landlords' investments and their underlying finances seems to be a higher priority for the policy and law makers than providing good homes for those who can't get into the ownership system (or don't want to) for whatever reason.

Compounding this is a shift in cultural attitude associated with renting in that renters are generally perceived as an irresponsible 'underclass', that seems to be becoming self-fulfilling.

I agree with the rest of the post that right to buy wasn't an intrinsically bad idea and it was the flaws in implementation that have triggered other problems. For a number of reasons, I am stressed by a lot of dealing with many realities of being a tenant and that leads me also to agree with Adam Ef: "Something is very wrong with the [property] systems we have in the UK".

[garynortheast]

This is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the way we view housing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57322524

[redtrummy]

OK we know the problem, what is the solution? No one living in a sought after house is going to sell at £200.000 when they can get £600,000.
Although I did learn that in France that the different owners of 12 ski chalets did agree amongst themselves they would not sell to the Russkies.