My personal opinion is that allowing working class people to financially benefit from the house they live in is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is in the lack of new social housing built.Originally Posted by Jordi Culé
My family history is that both sets of grandparents died in council housing. Nothing was passed onto my parents. My ex partners father bought his council house and when he passed was the first of his family to pass any wealth of note onto his family. I don't view that as a dreadful thing, as wealth is power and when working class people are largely prevented from obtaining it that isn't a great thing.
But I also don't support a declining social housing stock. I think we need to do more of it and I'd happily see this organised at a UK level (GB housing?) to streamline procurement etc. Not sure it would work in practice but I'd be okay with it.
But the big issue is this. The article talks about 96000 homes sold since 2012. All of whom we assume went to people who previously lived in them, so people effectively bought their own homes.
But those 96000 homes. Maybe they house 250,000, all of which are of course still housed and the receipts can be used to build new social housing, even if not enough of it.
In those same years since 2012 net immigration was about 3million. More than 10 times that figure.
We could have not sold a single council house in the UK. We could have built one for everyone one sold. We could have built five for every one sold and it still would only be half the net immigration figure.
The reality is it's all pissing in the wind until demand is kept under greater control. Not just on immigration, but second homes, Airbnb and the rest of it too. It's completely distorting both the housing market and in turn land values more generally. Like your local community pub? Forget that when you can get 35 flats on the same plot of land
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