Should council house rents be at normal market value?

[Tony]

As you intimate, steady growth is much more preferable.

[donkey]

As you intimate, steady growth is much more preferable.

 

But if that growth starts to outstrip background inflation, you are into a boom and bust cycle. The longer and steadier it goes up....

[ricgem2002]

Because he can afford it. The line has to be drawn somewhere - or in theory we could have people on £100k a year complaining that council rent shouldn't be put up because they're only used to paying a weekly pittance.

whether he can afford it or not its not up to the government to dictate how people live their lives .if this has no effect on you personally i can understand why you are against it .wait till the government brings something else in what does affect you, i for one will not care about your bleating then .

[Tony]

But if that growth starts to outstrip background inflation, you are into a boom and bust cycle. The longer and steadier it goes up....

 

Possibly, but that depends on the deviation from the mean. That brings us in a roundabout way to the OP. Would market rents for social housing make it more sustainable?

[donkey]

whether he can afford it or not its not up to the government to dictate how people live their lives .if this has no effect on you personally i can understand why you are against it .wait till the government brings something else in what does affect you, i for one will not care about your bleating then .

 

Isn't that exactly what these issues boil down to? Not what is best for society at large, but what is best for the groups from among whom the politicians draw their supporters. Likewise, often the opinions expressed reflect the narrow interests of the poster, which they then dress up in ideology so effectively that they even manage to fool themselves they are being objective.

[donkey]

Possibly, but that depends on the deviation from the mean. That brings us in a roundabout way to the OP. Would market rents for social housing make it more sustainable?

 

Then my answer would be yes, but only if measures were put in place to keep the market stable. However, social housing would then become redundant, unless the market just wasn't physically producing enough rental properties.

[Tony]

It would be nice to imagine that market rents for quality social housing would either drive up private standards or push down private market prices. At the moment there is nothing aside from the market to drive either price or quality and since there is a chronic lack of housing in the UK there is little motivation for any other factor to come into play.

[Cyclone]

whether he can afford it or not its not up to the government to dictate how people live their lives .if this has no effect on you personally i can understand why you are against it .wait till the government brings something else in what does affect you, i for one will not care about your bleating then .

 

Aren't you saying that it's the government job to provide cheap housing though?

It seems a little bit perverse to say that the government are obliged to provide a cheapie, whilst it's not the governments job to determine if you actually need that cheapie!

[Cyclone]

No, because 'normal market value' is the artificial level

It's real, just inflated.

which houses are pushed to by the wholesale encouraging of speculation on homes to the point that there primary function now seems to be a way for people to make ridiculous sums of money for a disproportionately small amount of work.

Not really, it was more about cheap credit than anything else, something which no longer exists.

The end result being the continuing cycle of boom and bust, which causes housing which is artificially expensive when the market is up, but when it is down, invariably brings the rest of the economy down with it.

Without the cheap credit fuel the housing speculation the market has stagnated and will (in a couple more years) be approaching it's long term averages compared to incomes again.

 

What should be happening is that measures are put in place to keep housing at a value roughly proportionate to the labour and materials which went into it.

There's no need, the free market is self correcting.

Then we wouldn't need social housing. Buying a house would be available to anyone who wanted to work for it, and rents would remain reasonable.

Or builders would stop building as there'd be no profit it in anymore.

As long as the ability of millions of working people to own a house is left to the whims of the 'market' and the property sepculation which drives it, there will be people who - despite working hard - can not afford to buy,

Working hard is not a guarantee of anything. Nor should it be.

and will be unfairly expected to pay a disproportionate amount of their earning towards paying off someone elses mortgage through artificially high, 'market driven' rents.

Nothing artificial about the price of rents, I'm not sure you understand 'market driven' if you're going to keep calling it artificial.

While things stay that way, there will be a need for cheaper social housing, It is not the best solution, but as they say, you can't have your cake....

The only thing there's actually a requirement for is housing benefit, it may be cheaper for the government to provide social housing instead though.

[Mecky]

If I was paying the market rate, I'd be paying half of what I pay now, maybe less.