Young people struggling to buy their own homes in the UK...
Young people in Britain today are being priced out of the new housing market because of lack of supply of new housing...
The percentage of 25-34 year olds who own their own home in Britain is now only 41%, down from 67% in the mid 1990s.
The reason isn't rocket science: it's mainly down to there not being enough new housing supply to meet increasing demand as the population has grown, and demographics changed.
We built 3 million houses in Britain in the 1960s, but only 1 million a decade on average since, to 2010, and in Britain today we have only 409 dwellings per thousand inhabitants compared to over 500 per thousand in France and Germany.
As a result, the cost of houses in Britain has risen by 400% since the 1970s, compared to 'only' 180% in France and a much more reasonable 40% in Germany over the same period.
That's local, and national politics for you!
To my mind there are deeper, truly structural reasons for this inaction...
Namely highly restrictive local planning laws which make it very easy for local councils to block planning applications.
And then add to this 40 years of Tory government, which now also includes the Labour party who are basically just Tories calling themselves Labour... most of whom are over 50 and are benefitting from restricted housing supply because the houses they themselves bought in their early 30s have doubled or trebled in value.
And many of them will have second homes they rent out too, and so they need people to not be able to buy to keep up rental demand, but of course this is a balancing act as too little demand means falling house prices.
Combine this with developers who are happy to build slowly, because land is scarce in Britain and all the time they don't build the potential development land they have in their portfolios just keeps going up in value, and it's more profitable for them to build SLOWLY to make sure property prices stay high.
The twisted 'solution' adding to the pain
Then add on the fact that Britain is one of the financial hubs of the world, so our solution is to offer longer mortgages and help to buy schemes so that rather than sort out the supply of housing (by increasing it through policy) we make new buyers pay more over 30 or 35 years on their massive mortgages.
Meanwhile inaction over supply keeps those in power in richer.
What a mess!
Boomers will soon be dropping like flies. That should free up some housing. 😅
For their kids, yeah!
Buying a house at any age has been a dream in my country.
It's not easy that's for sure!
I feel for my kids. We will do what we can to help them, but it's so expensive. It seems the older generation pulled up the housing ladder after themselves. This government doesn't seem to care about young people, but their old supporters are dying off. We do need some sort of shift in national politics as the old system is not functioning.
I agree something has to change but I can't feel anything in the air!
Everything is just getting worse and I don't think the government is ready to do something about this.
They are not ready to help we young ones
and some think it is a lack of hard work that prevents ppl from being able to buy lol ignoring inflation altogether is quite convenient
The longer mortgages are one of the biggest causes of the increase in prices.
Paying the same per month, the buyers can pay more for a house. Thus all the prices rise.
And the govern-cements blocking new home builds to keep values high.
Unfortunately, prices are about to crash as demographics are crashing.
Soon it will be less people than available houses. 1250 dwellings per 1000 inhabitants