Births are at their lowest level since 1977. Homes are less affordable, more young adults are living with their parents, and starting a family is getting harder.
My first house was £900 ! married ione year one child - had another after two years was earning less than £10 pw ( my wife didn't work) Mortgage on the £300 I borrowed (our parents gave us the the rest) was 8.25% This was 1970 and we ate well and enjoyed life
A £900 house sounds like fantasy fiction to anyone in their twenties today, Phil! Even with that 8.25% interest rate, the price-to-earnings maths was from another planet compared to the 7-to-8 times earnings young couples face now. Shows just how radically the foundation for starting a family has shifted.
I think the problems started when banks persuaded councils to sell off their houses. They may have got a cash boost at the time BUT lost a massive cash flow from rents. They never replaced the housing stock so lost all that rent and have struggled to find cash ever since.
There are several separate problems that reinforce each other. First, inflation: money today is worth less than 5% of its 1970 value. Then competition for housing caused by excessive population. Then banks lending far too much for mortgages. Michael Hudson has pointed out that the asking price of a house is usually just whatever a bank will lend to buy it. Also, many people nowadays are willing to put up with much less living space. Furniture is so old-fashioned; so are books. I am used to seeing small houses with 2 or 3 expensive cars parked outside.
One of Thatcher's most catastrophic policies imho, the policy of allowing tenants to buy their houses at a huge discount. Or at any price for me. The money was supposed to be ringfenced as I recall. But of course it disappeared into the black hole and there was never a chance of those houses being replaced. We are living the consequences, of course massively exacerbated by low-wage immigration which benefits the corporations at everybody else's expense both fiscally and socially.
You know, if they think letting in millions of immigrants will help pay for the old folk they are not looking properly at who they are letting in. The immigrants from the sub-continent and Africa are mostly not brain surgeons or entrepeneurs are they? They are low skilled, low paid and often dependent on benefits. So they take social housing because the government prioritises immigrants into social housing. So the idea that the native birth rate is falling so the native population is getting smaller so the tax receipts and care workers are disappearing so we need to import people to replace the babies not being born misses the point. Most young native women want to have children - many appear to want to be quite traditional and stay at home with babies - but mortgages and rents are too high to allow this. There are plenty of homes but they are not available for native workers who are not entitled to benefits because they go to work and are expected to buy or privately rent those homes. I know people who have low paid jobs who should be entitled to social housing (and would have been once upon a time) because they will never afford a mortgage. They get given a months' rent and a deposit and told to find private rented accommodation. They are then removed from the social housing list and the social housing units go to foreigners, drug addicts, unemployed, travellers and all those people who don't pay in. Then there are the London boroughs who buy up housing estates outside London and relocate their (mostly immigrant) tenants. That takes away housing and imports social issues. We don't need more housing. We need a fairer system and a halt to immigration.
You hit on the exact contradiction at the heart of this: family formation is fundamentally constrained by housing costs. When young workers are priced out of both homeownership and social housing, starting a family gets pushed down the road. Whatever levers governments pull on migration, ignoring how it directly interacts with the housing market just keeps the wheel spinning.
My first house was £900 ! married ione year one child - had another after two years was earning less than £10 pw ( my wife didn't work) Mortgage on the £300 I borrowed (our parents gave us the the rest) was 8.25% This was 1970 and we ate well and enjoyed life
A £900 house sounds like fantasy fiction to anyone in their twenties today, Phil! Even with that 8.25% interest rate, the price-to-earnings maths was from another planet compared to the 7-to-8 times earnings young couples face now. Shows just how radically the foundation for starting a family has shifted.
I think the problems started when banks persuaded councils to sell off their houses. They may have got a cash boost at the time BUT lost a massive cash flow from rents. They never replaced the housing stock so lost all that rent and have struggled to find cash ever since.
There are several separate problems that reinforce each other. First, inflation: money today is worth less than 5% of its 1970 value. Then competition for housing caused by excessive population. Then banks lending far too much for mortgages. Michael Hudson has pointed out that the asking price of a house is usually just whatever a bank will lend to buy it. Also, many people nowadays are willing to put up with much less living space. Furniture is so old-fashioned; so are books. I am used to seeing small houses with 2 or 3 expensive cars parked outside.
One of Thatcher's most catastrophic policies imho, the policy of allowing tenants to buy their houses at a huge discount. Or at any price for me. The money was supposed to be ringfenced as I recall. But of course it disappeared into the black hole and there was never a chance of those houses being replaced. We are living the consequences, of course massively exacerbated by low-wage immigration which benefits the corporations at everybody else's expense both fiscally and socially.
Isn’t inflation wonderful? In London, 1974, my monthly budget was:
rent £20, food/drink £20, laundry/travel/etc. £10 – total £50.
You know, if they think letting in millions of immigrants will help pay for the old folk they are not looking properly at who they are letting in. The immigrants from the sub-continent and Africa are mostly not brain surgeons or entrepeneurs are they? They are low skilled, low paid and often dependent on benefits. So they take social housing because the government prioritises immigrants into social housing. So the idea that the native birth rate is falling so the native population is getting smaller so the tax receipts and care workers are disappearing so we need to import people to replace the babies not being born misses the point. Most young native women want to have children - many appear to want to be quite traditional and stay at home with babies - but mortgages and rents are too high to allow this. There are plenty of homes but they are not available for native workers who are not entitled to benefits because they go to work and are expected to buy or privately rent those homes. I know people who have low paid jobs who should be entitled to social housing (and would have been once upon a time) because they will never afford a mortgage. They get given a months' rent and a deposit and told to find private rented accommodation. They are then removed from the social housing list and the social housing units go to foreigners, drug addicts, unemployed, travellers and all those people who don't pay in. Then there are the London boroughs who buy up housing estates outside London and relocate their (mostly immigrant) tenants. That takes away housing and imports social issues. We don't need more housing. We need a fairer system and a halt to immigration.
You hit on the exact contradiction at the heart of this: family formation is fundamentally constrained by housing costs. When young workers are priced out of both homeownership and social housing, starting a family gets pushed down the road. Whatever levers governments pull on migration, ignoring how it directly interacts with the housing market just keeps the wheel spinning.