Find out where you can afford to buy or rent in Great Britain | Hacker News Reader

Find out where you can afford to buy or rent in Great Britain

theguardian.com

44 pointsarethuza95 comments

This is why I’m leaving the country. If I’m going to have to rent for the rest of my life I’ll give my money to a foreign landlord out of spite. The leaders and elders of this country have betrayed the youth and torn up the social contract. I’ll go rent in Ireland for 5 years and get my EU passport back. Fuck em.

Housing affordability and supply is a massive issue in Ireland too.

I'm not sure there's NOT an EU major city that isn't having this problem. Lisbon citizens are being priced out of their own city by people with the same plan as you. So you can solve your problem by leaving the UK but then you just create a problem for someone else.

I don't think there's a solution to this problem until people start living on boats.

Yeah there is a solution. Build more housing. It's a political issue and nothing more

Ya turn the country into one massive council estate. Brilliant. I'd rather live on a boat

We're far away from any country becoming a housing estate.

Of course it's a political issue. Policies on housing ownership have pushed housing as an investment to normal people for decades, as something that will, almost certainly, go up in value. Many, many people have bought a house they might not even be very happy with just for the sake of parking their money in a "safe investment" that they can live inside in the meantime, until they can sell and purchase the next one, rinse and repeat.

If you want to crash prices by building more housing then you'll have a lot of angry common people who are paying a lot for their mortgages which will go under water, of course these people will push as much as possible, politically speaking, for that to not happen.

Personally I'd be extremely happy if more housing is built and housing prices are pushed down but we can't deny that the reality of policies that took us here, those policies were wrong, housing should have never been part of a speculative market and been traded as another kind of commodity. It's not a commodity, it's not a pure asset, it's shelter for humans, economical policies thought by and implemented by ideologues pushed down our throats that housing is just like any other tradable asset... And now we have a lot of people that would never want to see prices go down because they will lose their life savings.

So yes, how can this not be political? Saying that it's a "political issue and nothing more" is like denying the reality that it is political, there's no other way. You can't remove the political aspect of this issue, there's no "just build more housing" without the parties/politicians that implement it being absolutely hated by a segment of society. Would you still vote for a party that enacts policies that make your life investments lose 50% of value? In a democracy most things are political, that's the hard part of the solution for most social issues...

I'd rather have a trailer/minivan rather than rent with no chance of ownership.

Wóz Drzymały for the modern age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a%27s_wagon

I’m planning on living in a house share and I’ll be working my arse off and contributing to whatever community I become a part of, I’m not convinced I’m a massive part of the problem.

The solution to the problem is to build more houses regardless of what NIMBYs say combined with an exponential property tax to effectively make being a mass landlord unprofitable which should lead to a flood of properties on the market.

> I don't think there's a solution to this problem until people start living on boats.

Less people, globally or nationally. the japanese may be on to something here.

Less corporate ownership of housing

Higher taxes on houses after your first

Constructing more housing

Banning dubious actors from the market, e.g. Chinese or Saudi wealth funds

Good luck in Ireland, you’ll need it: the housing crisis is dire there, especially in Dublin.

I know mate, but like I said this is out of spite now. I’d rather give my rent to an Irishman in a free republic than some aristocratic toff in a sham democracy anyway. You guys seem to get what life’s all about, good craic and music in the pub with your mates. Contrast with these fucking buffoons who can’t get over the fact they don’t have an empire anymore and shut us off from the rest of the world.

I'm not Irish but I did live in Dublin for a bit.

I'm not sure what you're referring to by "free republic". The Irish Free State, which existed 1922-1937?

I think you're mixing up "not British" with "good". Don't get me wrong, I had a nice time in Ireland, I think some things there are done well in their society, I think they're much better educated, and so on, but do you think Ireland doesn't have billionaire landlords, political scandals, corruption, and so on? A centre-right party has been in power since 2020. Not to mention the huge tax schemes upon which modern Ireland became prosperous.

And it takes much more than being anti-English to get an Irish person to warm up to you and embrace you with open arms, especially if you're English.

I should also add that it could take 7 years to get a passport. The 5 years is about eligibility to apply. It can take a very long time to complete the process.

Again, I don't want to offend any Irish people reading this. I enjoyed my time in Ireland and I respect a lot of things about the place.

Couldn't you just move to a city that isn't London or one of the more popular cities?

Yes there is a housing problem, but one of the reasons is because people want to live in the cities or popular places. If you are willing to own a car and add a commute, there is plenty of housing available.

We used that logic in several other countries. This might work for your generation, but you will royally screw over the next without a plan. When there's no system in place to help push down housing prices / build according to the demand / population growth, or push companies to spread across the country, the problem will continue to grow.

> or push companies to spread across the country

Isn't that what "moving to another city" is? If you can move, it means you can have your income there somehow, either with a local office or working remotely.

In France, the government has tried to spread companies a bit, which didn't exactly work, not even at the Paris region level. Everyone and their dog wants to be in Paris proper or La Defense (the local business district, which, while technically not inside Paris, is right outside).

Now that more and more companies are accepting that people are full-time remote, I've actually seen people up and leave Paris for smaller cities.

Of course, not all companies are open to the full-remote arrangement. I'd even say most aren't judging by the absurd levels of traffic around Paris.

I already live in one of the shit holes of the country mate with some of the cheapest housing but with not a lot of good jobs available unless you became a tradie out of school (wish I had to be honest). Half of those guys seem to have gotten out of here anyway, they can often earn six figures abroad or on the oil platforms.

Been working my arse off for a decade and the only reason I can afford to move away is because a relative died and I got some inheritance. I can either move somewhere else in the UK or take a chance on a better life somewhere else. At this point, I’m that angry with this country, it’s blatant hypocrisies, mismanagement and corruption, that I’d rather leave and take a chance elsewhere than continue on here. I know everywhere has its own problems but I really think this place (England) is a piss take compared to elsewhere.

I would have been out of the country permanently pre-Brexit if I’d have had enough money at the time but I didn’t have a pot to piss in. Felt like that scene in the movie where the door starts coming down but the characters don’t have enough time to escape so they get locked in and resign themselves to having to take the hard way to get out.

If I was going to stay here, I’d be moving to Glasgow or elsewhere in Scotland. Much more competently run place than England with much friendlier people. Hopefully they’ll find a way to get their second referendum because they don’t deserve to have been sucked into this Brexit shit show like they have been and they’ll do just fine without the rest of the UK.

FYI I have a relative who is in their 20s and has just nought a perfectly nice flat in a town within an easy commute of Dundee and it was ~£45K.

The rot set in when dim people voted in Thatcher in the late 70s. She is why the country is in such a mess. Years of cuts and divisive politics has had a deleterious effect on the social fabric. I, too, long to gtfo.

One of the news outlets in my country did the article with the similar title, something like "When you can afford buying your own house if you save money from average salary". The article was from one word: "Never."

Was expecting to see something similar here.

To be fair, average salary varies per city* and if you earn the average salary in any city*, chances are you'll be able to rent but not buy. I've tried a few London post codes and their average salaries: deep red can't buy can't rent. I've also picked a few random places up north and around Manchester, and it came out orange. I wouldn't be surprised if the conclusion was the same for most of the country!

edit: fixed postcode->city typo.

Link please?

The majority of people cannot afford their own home at today's prices. That is the simplest metric I've found for the intergenerational robbery taking place.

The government will try their best to keep housing pegged but it will blow the gaskets off commodities and the cost of living.

> The government will try their best to keep housing pegged

Pegged to what?

Assuming OP means, "The government will try their best to keep house price increasing" although I'm aware that the use of the word pegged is confusing.

A common opinion is that governments feel that increasing house prices will keep the voters coming in as people work their butts off to get onto the housing ladder (escalator) and then want the bubble to keep expanding as it's their main form of savings. Western society is all in on the Ponzi scheme here.

I've heard it's less about voters directly, and more about the retirement savings being tied up in real estate so deeply that breaking the housing market would not only cost you votes, but probably turn the country into a humanitarian crisis.

Pegging also means being buttfucked with a strap-on.

I remember thinking the same thing 30 years ago talking with my friends’ parents. And they said the same about the previous generation.

Right, but the data goes worse [0] (uk-1980/2013). Some selected headlines :

> Declining number of first time buyers

> Decreasing numbers of younger homeowners

Edit: data until 2021 [1] follow this trend.

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

We shouldn't forget the role of the financial industry in this. There's been an enormous wealth grab by the financial sector in the past 50 years or so. Those buildings in the City and Canary Wharf don't pay for themselves. They come from the money they hold back every time house prices rise.

For all the Americans using this tool, be sure to kneecap your household income. Particularly software engineers, as a typical entry level salary can be around 45k. In London.

It doesn't look like any young person can own their own home in the UK anytime soon, is this the picture of setting them up to fail?

So when are we expecting a housing crash in the UK? 3, 5 years?

This really cannot go on.

There's a million immigrants per year and a tenth of that in new builds

Now do the math

Yes and the prescription is even more new builds. We need immigration, we are aging.

Ok, bring 50 million then, and build accordingly

We are aging and your argument is irrefutable

Right wing commentators, which is basically the whole media, like to blame immigration for all the problems in the country. It’s much simpler and less awkward for them than trying to explain what is really going on.

Immigration is demand, while supply has been sticky, prices have gone up massively. It's economics 101.

But you think there's a kind of boomer conspiracy instead (ageist and racist undertones).

To be fair, a lot of the griping about immigration also reads to me to have racist undertones. (That could be influenced by my American reading, but it doesn't seem 100% that.)

Japan is still a first world nation. The world hasn't ended for them. Can we stop pretending that having a population that isn't exponentially growing is a bad thing.

> having a population that isn't exponentially growing is a bad thing.

I want social programs, but you got to have a tax base to pay for it

But those immigrants are never going to earn the necessary 5%, never mind 10% for a deposit.

That’s with an established stream of income. Without, the deposit would be almost 50% leaving the homes to be scooped not by immigrants but those with high capital.

No immigrant is buying a home. It’s banks buying them up, landlords, foreign nationals as investments.

The UK housing is a commodity worth investing with no regard to the people who need them. Something has to give.

It’s simple economics. Immigrants want to rent houses, which increases rents, which increases rental yields, which in turn increases properties values.

They increase demand at the lower end which reduces the supply on the lower end. More-so for renting than owning, but that trends towards owning as they get established in the country.

Theres no way around it. More people means less supply of housing. Canada has this same problem.

Increases in housing demand (without increases in supply) will almost always cause house price increases by pushing more marginal buyers into the buying market.

Without any increase in supply, more people wanting emergency accommodation or council homes increase wait times. The person on the edge of deciding between council housing or private rental will go for the latter. The new renter will have to try and outbid other renters causing rental rates to go up. Ultimately that nudges the person on the edge of deciding between private rental and buying with a mortgage to enter the buying market and try to outbid other buyers - causing an increase in overall prices.

There's suffering at each stage of this process, where high demand forces people to engage in transactions that stretch them financially. Over time many people will just 'drop out' by staying with parents or going abroad.

The only real solution is to build more houses. In the 1960s the UK built >400k new homes per year [1] - enough to comfortably a million new migrants annually whilst also increasing house choice and affordability for people already resident.

[1] https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/status/12041546940519997... (chart is for England, I've extrapolated a peak of 350k for England to justify a claim of >400k for the wider UK)

> But those immigrants are never going to earn the necessary 5%, never mind 10% for a deposit.

Why not? Immigrants to the UK mostly live in wealthier places, and while it's hard to find figures, either earn very close to what locals do, or more. A software engineer in London usually earns enough to buy in the city, and definitely earns enough to buy in the London suburbs.

I am a software engineer and earn more than 95% of income earners according to HMRC statistics. So how is this relevant? If nobody worked those other 95% of jobs life would collapse.

Because HN is overwhelming software engineers, and more than half the developers I've worked with have been immigrants. So I figured telling people what the housing situation is like for software engineers is probably relevant.

> A software engineer in London usually earns enough to buy in the city

Maybe at FAANG salaries and maybe 10 years ago. Definitely not now at normal salaries.

(Source: me, a software engineer in London for the last 25 years)

Definitely now, because I'm in my late 20s and I'm seeing software engineering friends buying places in zone 2 and 3. Usually apartments and often with something like shared ownership or a lower-earning partner, but buying all the same. None work in FAANG or high-paying places, think in the £60-70k range.

(just realised I said "the city" in my original comment and realised that could mean the City of London - I meant London itself, sorry if any misunderstanding!)

You'd think so, but it has carried on for several decades so far. Things flattened for years in the 90s and there was a ~20% drop in 2008/2009, but in terms of an actual "a median family can afford a median house on a median income" no history points to a "crash" substantial enough to make that happen.

Australia, Canada and New Zealand all have more expensive housing than the UK in price to income ratio [1]. NZ has been above the UK's current ratio since at least 2017 [2]. So unfortunately this might continue getting worse for a while.

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count... [2] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...

Australia is below the UK on both of those tables!

Which doesn’t surprise me, I recently moved from the UK to Aus and AFAICT you get more for your money here. There is still the same problem of young people being able to access the market, but it’s not quite as bad and what you get for your money here tends to have much more space.

My bad - I used the Irish figure for the UK! Australia should be omitted from the first claim and NZ claim should be amended to 2019.

> Which doesn’t surprise me, I recently moved from the UK to Aus and AFAICT you get more for your money here.

Houses in the UK are generally smaller than other countries but house prices are generally expressed as per unit rather than per sqft. This distorts statistics because by making countries with small houses seem cheaper than they are.

I recently moved from NZ to London and I have been very surprised how poor the quality of housing is relative to the cost compared to NZ.

Last month two colleagues (less than 30yr old) bought their own houses. There are young people in the UK who can afford it. They saved for years...

Means nothing without quantifying income and location.

Since you're on HN I'm assuming you and your colleagues are SWEs, which is already painting a poor picture since SWEs often have a well above average income.

It's London. Colleagues do have slightly above average salary but nothing extraordinary.

Gut reaction to the headline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Kilda,_Scotland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Georgia_Island

GB is geographical while UK is political.

I knew a pedant would visit you so I figured it might as well be me.

Quite true. And legal permission to live on St. Kilda or Rockall might be a tad difficult to obtain. South Georgia, OTOH... The UK has political reasons to want a permanent civilian population, and the handful of British Antarctic Survey members on South Georgia might wish to see some fresh faces.

The biggest problem is that buying is simply the only option, because renter protections are poor and the government constantly shovels taxpayer money into the pockets of homeowners. And so house prices are artificially inflated with help to buy schemes that inject taxpayer money, instead of being their real value.

The reality is that in the UK, a house is no longer a house, it is a government backed asset that will never be allowed to fall, lest the pension funds fail.

I thought some of the results were sus. Renting a 5 bedroom house in Beaconsfield or Sevenoaks (~30 miles outside London) surely couldn't average £4000-6000 a month? Took a look on Rightmove and eek.. Glad I moved up north 20 years ago!

The problem in the UK is under-occupation of houses, rather than a shortage of houses. In other words, there are more than enough houses for the population to fit into, the problem is that a lot of home owners have a lot of unused bedrooms.

The culprits here are the owner-occupiers rather than the landlords. IIRC, 50% of owner-occupied houses have two or more spare bedrooms, but only 25% of rental houses have two or more spare bedrooms.

The solution is to have a spare bedroom tax rather than a property tax.

Yes, an empty bedroom license, why not. I'm eagerly awaiting the spicy "oi m8! U got a loicence for dat bedroom?" memes.

Or we could just build more homes, rather than cramming everyone into a smaller space.

You know, like when we built a ton of social housing in the 60s.

Enforcing the flatshare life on everyone is about the worst idea I can think of.

edit: build up, build out, build down, do whatever. I'd prefer normal homes with gardens and I think most people would - I see no reason to limit ourselves - but right now we could do with anything. Shuffling the deckchairs solves nothing.

There is nothing in principle preventing us from building rows of town houses again and giving families somewhere to grow and live. We don't need to handicap ourselves with Dickensian/third world notions of one room per person.

  > Or we could just build more
  > homes, rather than cramming
  > everyone into a smaller space.

With a spare bedroom tax, the average space per-person doesn't change, but the median rises and the cost drops dramatically.

  > This message written from my
  > study, which you'd tax me to
  > be in because of course any
  > luxury must be eliminated.

A spare bedroom tax only applies to houses with two or more spare bedrooms. It also replaces propert tax, and so in your case you'd be better off financially.

> spare bedroom tax

This idea is ridiculous

Build up not out.

London could use more multistory apartments.

I feel the problem with the way the UK builds apartments is just so unsatisfying. The ones built targetting the luxury demographic seem to be habitable and provide ammenities that a commuinity would have. Such as grassland and seperate outdoor space.

Outside of these the rest just don't provide actual living spaces. They seem to be thrown up without any care for quality of living.

Edit: I do agree with you, I just wish living in an apartment didn't feel so reclusive.

> The solution is to have a spare bedroom tax rather than a property tax.

I honestly can't tell if this is satire.

In addition to your points, having a net-migration of ~600K[0] and only ~255,000 homes being built[1] per year (March 2022-2023), we're getting stuffed. Barely enough supply to house the new people coming.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-65669832

[1] https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/347070-0/... (Apologies, the correct source is DLUHC)

Nonsense. The fact that we could squeeze everyone into the currently available bedrooms does not make sane housing policy.

I guess a spare bedroom tax would cause people to open out their (typically small) rooms or convert them into other uses.

You still see bricked up windows from when a window tax was operated.

A spare bedroom tax doesn't change the average space per person, but it does increase the median space, as well as dramatically reducing the cost.

As for tax avoidance, that's a problem, but not insurmountable. For example a similar idea operates for social housing.

For social housing, it is not a tax but rather that housing benefits can be reduced if there are surplus rooms.

Various studies have shown that it did not incentivise people to move, although of those who did move, some of them downsized.

All the major parties in the UK except the conservatives oppose it.

The number of children per family is smaller than when the homes were built.

So what do you want to do - create larger families? Chop off unused bedrooms? Or should we all take in lodgers?

There are lots of good options if your house is bigger than you need. Where I live in Bath, UK it's common to turn a floor of a large house into a self-contained flat. Also there's the option of renting a room to a lodger.

Interestingly, owner-occupiers tended to support the "bedroom tax" when it was being proposed for those on benefits and in social housing[0].

[0] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/more-support-opposition-bedroom-...

This is also why in-country remote work is so dangerous to property owners. The one thing that could allow equitable access to housing cannot be allowed to happen.

I own a house in one of the red zones on the map, bought a few years ago.

It's pretty bizarre to see this stuff continually. If I thought it was actually hopeless I would have left the country long ago. Cannot fathom the idea of thinking "I will never own a house". I don't get why people stay.

I respect The Guardian but sometimes they beat too much of the leftist/socialist agenda (everything should be free for everyone).

I work in tech (like everyone else on this site). So, to buy my house I did the standard tech thing of selling the company I built. Why doesn't everyone just do that?

Jokes aside, the housing situation in the UK is a joke right now. Places like Skye are forcing out locals because rich people are buying holiday homes there that are empty 99% of the time. This also means there is lots of job vacancies because its impossible to afford to live there and do minimum wage work.

Article about Skye from last year https://news.stv.tv/highlands-islands/families-forced-to-lea...

The trouble with that country is that everything is central to London which is almost a city-state unto itself. Until you break the cycle of centralizing industry in that location then you can't crash property prices. What you need is for central government to be moved out of London to reduce the dependency on this single region. As it is, London is susceptible to severe flooding as global warming continues to increase temperatures. That alone should move industry elsewhere.

Elephant in the room -- with all the "cost of living" crisis striking across the lower, middle and even sometimes higher ranks of incomes, the MSM are starting to wake up to one stone-hard reality: house prices are f*ing bonkers. Irony -- after praising the "feel rich" wave that has been plaguing Western countries since the dotdom bubble burst.

We know the income multipliers from the article, and the article hints at the pain of those households who are going to get caught when remortgaging (the act of having to re-negotiate your borrowing conditions after a period of time has expired, basically).

2020 from the daily mail, BBC, guardian (aka grauniad), telegraph (aka torygraph) and others: . "House prices are rising and god that's wonderful" . "Buy now before it's too late! Don't miss out!" . "How to borrow sensibly over 35 years" (lol) . "Rates are low, now is a good time to get on the housing ladder!" . in a word, property porn, sprinkled with a generous amount of "Fear Of Missing Out".

Despicable.

Successive governments, big fans of the "free market": . Help to buy . Various loan garantees . Lobbying and land hoarding from a cartel of (very large, very connected) building companies/groups.

This is a fucking mess. Prices as high as this haven't been seen in the UK since Victorian times. And we all know Victorian times were great from all perspectives, don't we?) and the only entities benefiting from them are: . Governments (stamp duty, etc) . Banks (longer mortgages) . Some law firms/professions . Estate agents.

Despicable.

The rest suffer from: . being tied to inordinate amounts of debt for what is most people's __entire__ professional life . tied -> less mobility . tied -> more fear, more docility . etc, etc.

Not to mention that with interest rates rises, those monthly payment aren't exactly coming down (Anytime soon? pivot one day?). On top of food prices. On top of energy prices. On top of tax banding. etc, etc.

And now the MSM has the galling audacity to vomit such articles. Makes you wonder: . They are probably crying for help to the government (in "gimme gibs" mode) . Writers may or may not be up to the hilt in a very very long mortgagy relationships with a bank . Whether they should be confronted with the appalling content they exposed to a (unfortunately and too-often-ly) financially illiterate readership. And make them pay. Somehow.

Everyone's blood should start boiling when reading such hypocrisy coming from a publication like the Guardian (see list above).

They play both sides. You can find hand wringing articles when house prices go up by only 0.8% instead of what homeowners would like. The same day as they decry housing as unaffordable.

I believe the difference between SA15 (£154,995) and SA16 (£220,000) is a single wealthy individual who's been buying up everything in SA16 to rent.

I left in '09 and I 'aint coming back.

See ya later, shitlords.

tl;dr: if you live in the middle of fucking nowhere you're probs ok, otherwise landlord monopoly!

A job or a house: choose one

That's a false dichotomy. A soul-destroying commute is also available!

If you want to buy as close as possible to London, need at least 2-bedrooms and have a median household income without too much saving, then you're literally commuting in from Wales.

And with the money saved you can buy a small plane for the commute!

Or Rugby, which I do.

Yes, the season ticket works out to £800 a month, but I'd be paying multiples of that each month for my house in London. Commute is 1h15m door to door, and the majority of that is on the high speed train from Rugby to Euston where I can either get work done, or read/listen to a podcast.

Or Rugby, which I do.

When did you buy? The Guardian map is red or orange for Rugby and all surrounding areas.

2016, so point taken, it might be worse now.

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