You save money by building houses!

[chem1st]

Most people want other people to produce lots of food, not themselves.

 

Why do we have allotment waiting lists then?

 

A list of people queuing to pay to grow their own food?

 

And CAP payments for landowners for 'farming' whereby they need not actually produce any food...

[chem1st]

A number of people on this forum have complained about the rents charged by landlords. In the past, if you owned a property and rented it out, then you received the net rent (after operating costs and before taxes) and you could also expect to make money from annual increases in the value of the house. I've no doubt some people made a lot of money.

 

House prices are not increasing, so if you were to buy a house for, say, £150,000 and rent it out, then your return on investment would be rent less (running costs and taxes.) You would have to take the risk of the tenant trashing the house and doing a runner (Been there.)

 

Were you to invest that £150,000, then your return would be whatever you could get less taxes. If the net proceeds from the rent are less than you could get elsewhere, why bother renting out the house?

 

If the 'buy to let' landlords make less than they would make investing the money elsewhere, what would that do to the number of houses available for rent? - Those who were stuck with houses wouldn't have much choice, but those considering 'buy to rent' would probably run a mile.

 

The buy to let landlord uses debt to purchase a house that already exists, he creates nothing new except for a debt obligation with interest.

 

All he does is make society poorer and himself and the banks that bit richer.

 

He is nothing but a damn dirty purveyor of usury. Forcing prices upwards and skimming money from the poorest in society (With the help of our despicable government).

 

If he built a house to rent it would be a very different matter, but these dirty devils do not. They now buy more houses than people who treat houses as 'homes'/.

 

Parasitic usurious scum. They should be ashamed of themselves, there is a special part of hell set aside for them.

[anywebsite]

Hardly.

 

But why build new houses on greenfield sites when there is no shortage of existing unused buildings which could be converted into housing?

 

How many disused breweries, factories, shops and other commercial premises are there in Sheffield?

 

They all have foundations, they all have outside walls. Most of them (I assume) have roofs, there are already roads running past them, gas, electricity, water and sewers could - if not already connected - be connected at minimal expense.

...

 

There are a lot of brownfield sites that could be built on. A lot of the dilapidated buildings would be cheaper to knock down & rebuild than get into a safe habitable condition, they often don't have roofs & the walls might not be great either. There aren't that many empty buildings that would be suitable to be converted into housing that haven't already been converted. Park Hill is still mostly stood empty though, we don't even need to look at converting old churches, pubs, shops & factories.

 

The factories that closed down in Sheffield closed during, or before the early 1980s. Any that are still left empty are in a dangerous condition.

 

We don't need to be building on vast swathes of countryside to create a lot of new housing, but we do need to do some building & not be too shy about letting cities expand. Planning laws, green belt, listed buildings & other regulations hamper people wanting to build.

 

The main problem at the moment of course is the banks still aren't lending, so people are losing their jobs & nobody can get a mortgage. When the banks were lending like they used to then there was a lot of building going on in Sheffield.

 

So we need a huge council house building programme, to bring rents down. We haven't really had any new council housing since the 1960s. Sorting the banking system out could take longer, that needs to be done too.

 

If the rents are too high for shops in the city centre, then why would they be any cheaper for residential properties? You pay a premium to live in the city centre & there are plenty of offices & a bit of light industrial stuff too to compete with. There are plans to get the city centre back to, or even better than it was, it's just they knocked everything down & then the 2008 financial crisis hit, so the money to rebuild ran out & the plans stalled. We've been left with a big hole in the Moor for about 4 or 5 years now, they knocked half of it down to build a new market, which still hasn't been started. The lack of shops there has had a knock on effect on the rest of the moor & is starting to spread to the rest of town.

[Number Six]

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently, and I think Jon Snow is right too - although I've not watched the video link.

 

I think a lot of people who are 25-40 now are going to end up less well off than their parents because of the shifts in the world economy, which have been too large and swift for many to effectively manage. This obviously will lead to huge problems in 20 to 40 years as those people retire, perhaps with no home of their own and so still paying rent (or more likely having rent paid by the state), or retire with a home with equity, but with very little to live actually live on.

 

The answer is more homes, as Jon Snow says - or a relaxation of planning. I'd love to buy a little plot in Scotland (which has little agricultural value, don't worry about the missing food space!) and put on it one static caravan in which I can while away my final years, looking at loveliness. This would allow me to sell my house, pass on some money to my kid to help her out, and to buy the land and caravan. However, planning permission to do this is very hard to get.

 

If something is not done there will be a lot of pensioners struggling to keep a roof over their head in the future, not to mention the fact that if they do keep a roof over their heads there will be fewer real houses for their kids to raise families in.

 

So, Park Homes is my solution. Currently it seems to be almost as much to get a Park Home as a real home and the site owners sell you the caravan (at a markup) and keep a percentage of the sale (at a markup). The government should set up state owned park home sites where you can place a home you have bought yourself. In order to prevent a bad environment on such sites, there should be proper controls over what you can and can't do and a system whereby ultimately your home will be put on a trailer and shifted if you misbehave. I'd live somewhere like that now! Small home, low maintenance, lots of outdoor space, little bit of land next to the home to grow some flowers and veg. Perfect. And it needn't cost a fortune - the government can buy the land and then rent it out forever at a reasonable rate, and eventually it will make them money. As wireless connectivity improves almost daily it seems, and more people are able to work remotely, there is no reason this won't be a viable way to live.

[vwkittie]

Build all they want on brownfield sites, redevelop the empty homes that are just sat there doing nothing, but keep our countryside intact! Once it's gone, it gone!

 

It's disgusting that in some cities vast areas of houses have been CPO'd then NOTHING done with them. They stand there empty and wasted while people suggest we should destroy our precious countryside? No way!

[Icanc4miles]

I was listening to a hoity toity radio 4 programme when this was a hot topic a while ago, the posh pompous people on there were discussing it and they were fudging the issue saying that it wasn't even clear what "affordable housing" actually meant, making out there was no clear definition and therefore, by implication, buildng them wasn't necessary. It was all hiperbole because these I'm-alright-jack snobs dont want or need an affordable house building programme to happen.