British millennials have a particularly bad combo of low wages and world beating house prices to contend with.
Older people will vote conservative, and block as many new housing projects as possible to ensure they keep "theirs".
Older people will vote conservative, and block as many new housing projects as possible to ensure they keep "theirs".
The city is overwhelmingly liberal across all age groups yet the population is pretty evenly divided into those who want more housing/development and those who believe the city is losing its character and charm with such rapid change. I've only been here a short while and many parts of the city look radically different now than they did a decade ago.
This is both a supply and demand issue, although low interest rates and various help to buy schemes have also contributed.
As a home owner I’m far more frightened that people will get fed up of the costs of mass migration than labour attempting (and almost certainly failing) to keep up with our growing housing demand.
except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage. Why on gods green earth would anyone want to add kids to that mess? If the baby boomer generation passed any lessons down, it's that stability in childhood is an absolute must. These are not conditions even remotely representing stability.
All these do is allow people to borrow more which increases the demand for housing, pushing prices up further. As a home owner you want the government to past more help to buy schemes because these schemes will always inadvertently raise the price of your home because of supply & demand dynamics.
> except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage
The reason house prices are up is because the government have been helping people to buy while pumping money into the economy to ensure people and businesses don’t have to bare the economic consequences of the recession. This is while we had another 300,000 migrants arrive who also need to be homed. If you want house prices to fall you basically need to do the exact opposite. If governments didn’t intervene people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay more for housing and might instead be forced to sell their home like you would expect to see in a recession. And as I touched on before, if governments didn’t import people to prop up GDP growth, housing demand would crash. Btw, I’m not making a political judgement about whether this is good or bad. Recessions suck, but historically they have been good equalisers because those with nothing to lose, lose nothing, while those with homes and businesses lose greatly.
Also to your point on affordability, everyone with kids under the age of forty in my family live in social housing and those who own their own homes and have good jobs are the ones who are childless. I don’t think this is a coincident — these groups clearly have different priorities. This anecdote is also supported by evidence that educational achievement is negatively correlated with birth rates.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...