Britain is booming. House prices in England and Wales have reached their highest ever level,
which is great news for the wealthy, the government and the forgetful.
Because in 2008, the last time this happened – the last time houses
turned to gold, the bricks of mansion blocks flaking saffron – we
learned quickly that booms go bust. We learned that our houses should
not be treated as centrally heated investments, that we should start
thinking about success in different ways. We learned also, that what is
good news for one person can be crushingly, life-alteringly bad for
another.
How many of us are really cheering at the rise of house prices? Scrolling through property website Zoopla is my low-level self-harm – fork scratches instead of razors. Savills says the average price of its London stock has reached £3.2m, so here are the houses I will never own. Here are the kitchens I'll never argue in, the bathrooms I'll never paint regrettable shades of green. But mine is a sad and secretive habit.
In my world, my world that reaches horizontally to the London suburbs and vertically into the internet, my friends don't talk about house prices. They talk about the impossibility of paying rent. And we're working, we're all delighted to be working. We're working in kitchens, offices, bars, other people's front rooms, and the conversation when we get home is never of houses but of rising rents and frozen salaries.
There is no point in saving, now. Not only is interest so low as to be meaningless, but, without a charity cheque from a deceased relative or rich parent, my peers will be 62 before they can afford their own home. Largely due to foreign investors, rents have gone up eight times faster than wages; for my generation, the threat of homelessness feels far more real than concerns about home-owning.
Every week, more friends are trickling down motorways from their homes of over a decade, another weekend of shovelling mattresses into vans in the awful tarmac sun, another forwarded email: "Does anybody want my wardrobe?"
When possible, they move into their mums' houses; when possible, their mums give them their savings. Last year, parents gave their children £2bn to help with housing costs; Shelter has launched a campaign imploring the government to build more new, affordable homes, because the current situation, it says, is unsustainable. The increase in the supply of mortgages (one in 10 of which is buy-to-let) and a chronic shortage of housing mean prices are rising at the fastest rate ever. We need more homes. We are overheating. We are the summer of 2008.
Last Thursday, Channel 4's provocatively named How to Get a Council House visited my east London borough, a diverse and thick-aired place, where each week 24,000 people hope to get one of the 40 council properties available. To me, it painted a portrait of a system that is as humiliating as it is impenetrable, but Twitter's hashtag showed that much of Britain was seeing something quite different.
The hashtag #howtogetacouncilhouse revealed a humming swarm of racism and anger. "What a bunch of lazy, scrounging, teenage pregnant scum"; "Can someone knock me up please? I'm bored of paying a mortgage"; "How to get a council house? Become a Somali, have eight kids and then get a £2m house in London for a grand a month". If their opinions didn't exactly mirror those of Kirstie Allsopp, they certainly reflected them in a dirty puddle. She claims that young people are "losing the concept that you make sacrifices to get on the ladder". Sian Astley, a TV presenter, agreed. "Many twentysomethings seem to want Hollywood and handbags, rather than pensions and property… Hard work reaps rewards."
People shock me, constantly. Who still believes this? Who, in these times of zero-hours contracts still believes that the unemployed, the poor, the young, are simply not working hard enough? Who still believes that it is possible to buy a house on a single income, without an injection of family money?
There's a moment in Noah Baumbach's new film Frances Ha, where Greta Gerwig's character is told by her flatmate (a bohemian writer whose parents' wealth is evident in his every eye-roll): "You're not poor." Saying you're poor, he says, "is offensive to actual poor people". And yet. And yet she is living on the very edge of comfort. She, like so many people I know, is floating. It was a reminder that as summer 2013 fades to a close, gradations of poverty get ever murkier.
When did social housing become the last stop, the final sigh? When did it stop being desirable, a place of hope and gardens? Today, those claiming housing benefits are routinely dismissed as scroungers, yet more and more, there are clues that this is a title that might better fit their landlords. Landlords who are profiting from exploiting their tenants' desperation – these are the people screwing the system, not the tenants. They just want a bed.
Simon Childs, a reporter for Vice magazine, went to the Property Investor show in London, where he sat through a talk by Mike Frisby, a "housing benefit expert" with Cameron hair who teaches landlords how to squeeze every penny from the local housing allowance. Key to this, he said, was charging the highest possible rents on the lowest value properties (the difference is paid by the council and taxpayers), and remembering that you can get more money from four single LHA tenants than a family of four. One in 12 families in Britain is on the waiting list for social housing. But, increasingly, as a housing benefit cap (at £500 per week for couples and £350 for singles) is being introduced, private landlords are turning down tenants on benefits, simply because they won't be able to afford the rent.
And me? I have this great idea. Where all my friends and I club together and buy an office block. And in it we build a modest utopia, with amazing broadband and a really good bin rota. I just want out of it, really, all this. All this news that means the carpet you walk on is a mirage, moving. I don't want to be at the mercy of hungry landlords or to scratch together that extra 3% stamp duty on top of the £250,000 I'm borrowing for a tiny flat above a fried chicken shop. I want to sit there, in a home I can afford, and eat pasta with my friends and wait for the bubble to burst. And then, we can start again.
Article Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/housing-renting-rising-property-prices
How many of us are really cheering at the rise of house prices? Scrolling through property website Zoopla is my low-level self-harm – fork scratches instead of razors. Savills says the average price of its London stock has reached £3.2m, so here are the houses I will never own. Here are the kitchens I'll never argue in, the bathrooms I'll never paint regrettable shades of green. But mine is a sad and secretive habit.
In my world, my world that reaches horizontally to the London suburbs and vertically into the internet, my friends don't talk about house prices. They talk about the impossibility of paying rent. And we're working, we're all delighted to be working. We're working in kitchens, offices, bars, other people's front rooms, and the conversation when we get home is never of houses but of rising rents and frozen salaries.
There is no point in saving, now. Not only is interest so low as to be meaningless, but, without a charity cheque from a deceased relative or rich parent, my peers will be 62 before they can afford their own home. Largely due to foreign investors, rents have gone up eight times faster than wages; for my generation, the threat of homelessness feels far more real than concerns about home-owning.
Every week, more friends are trickling down motorways from their homes of over a decade, another weekend of shovelling mattresses into vans in the awful tarmac sun, another forwarded email: "Does anybody want my wardrobe?"
When possible, they move into their mums' houses; when possible, their mums give them their savings. Last year, parents gave their children £2bn to help with housing costs; Shelter has launched a campaign imploring the government to build more new, affordable homes, because the current situation, it says, is unsustainable. The increase in the supply of mortgages (one in 10 of which is buy-to-let) and a chronic shortage of housing mean prices are rising at the fastest rate ever. We need more homes. We are overheating. We are the summer of 2008.
Last Thursday, Channel 4's provocatively named How to Get a Council House visited my east London borough, a diverse and thick-aired place, where each week 24,000 people hope to get one of the 40 council properties available. To me, it painted a portrait of a system that is as humiliating as it is impenetrable, but Twitter's hashtag showed that much of Britain was seeing something quite different.
The hashtag #howtogetacouncilhouse revealed a humming swarm of racism and anger. "What a bunch of lazy, scrounging, teenage pregnant scum"; "Can someone knock me up please? I'm bored of paying a mortgage"; "How to get a council house? Become a Somali, have eight kids and then get a £2m house in London for a grand a month". If their opinions didn't exactly mirror those of Kirstie Allsopp, they certainly reflected them in a dirty puddle. She claims that young people are "losing the concept that you make sacrifices to get on the ladder". Sian Astley, a TV presenter, agreed. "Many twentysomethings seem to want Hollywood and handbags, rather than pensions and property… Hard work reaps rewards."
People shock me, constantly. Who still believes this? Who, in these times of zero-hours contracts still believes that the unemployed, the poor, the young, are simply not working hard enough? Who still believes that it is possible to buy a house on a single income, without an injection of family money?
There's a moment in Noah Baumbach's new film Frances Ha, where Greta Gerwig's character is told by her flatmate (a bohemian writer whose parents' wealth is evident in his every eye-roll): "You're not poor." Saying you're poor, he says, "is offensive to actual poor people". And yet. And yet she is living on the very edge of comfort. She, like so many people I know, is floating. It was a reminder that as summer 2013 fades to a close, gradations of poverty get ever murkier.
When did social housing become the last stop, the final sigh? When did it stop being desirable, a place of hope and gardens? Today, those claiming housing benefits are routinely dismissed as scroungers, yet more and more, there are clues that this is a title that might better fit their landlords. Landlords who are profiting from exploiting their tenants' desperation – these are the people screwing the system, not the tenants. They just want a bed.
Simon Childs, a reporter for Vice magazine, went to the Property Investor show in London, where he sat through a talk by Mike Frisby, a "housing benefit expert" with Cameron hair who teaches landlords how to squeeze every penny from the local housing allowance. Key to this, he said, was charging the highest possible rents on the lowest value properties (the difference is paid by the council and taxpayers), and remembering that you can get more money from four single LHA tenants than a family of four. One in 12 families in Britain is on the waiting list for social housing. But, increasingly, as a housing benefit cap (at £500 per week for couples and £350 for singles) is being introduced, private landlords are turning down tenants on benefits, simply because they won't be able to afford the rent.
And me? I have this great idea. Where all my friends and I club together and buy an office block. And in it we build a modest utopia, with amazing broadband and a really good bin rota. I just want out of it, really, all this. All this news that means the carpet you walk on is a mirage, moving. I don't want to be at the mercy of hungry landlords or to scratch together that extra 3% stamp duty on top of the £250,000 I'm borrowing for a tiny flat above a fried chicken shop. I want to sit there, in a home I can afford, and eat pasta with my friends and wait for the bubble to burst. And then, we can start again.
Article Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/housing-renting-rising-property-prices
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