The scandal of empty homes when others are homeless

My DD lives with friends in a flat in a tower block in central London. Parents of one of her friends bought the flat that cost over £1million. DD and friends pay rent. Most of the other flats in the tower are empty, bought by foreign investors who are sitting on their investment whilst the flats go up in price. There should be some way of making these flats become available for those who need homes. Ilovecheese your idea could work but where would Councils get that sort of money from. Developers should not be able to get permission to build unless they make a certain percentage of the development for social housing. Also we should do away with Thatcher’s law making social housing available to buy after tenants have lived there for so long.

If our granny flat is not rented out our council come round after six months to inspect it and ask us why it has no tenant.

I saw that too Nelliemoser but I can't remember which programme it was on.
People always think of the north, particularly north-east, as a deprived area but rural areas which may seem idyllic can be just as deprived.

One big problem is that many of the empty properties are in places where people cannot find work because of poor transport etc.
There were some people in Devon talkng on the TV (Possibly countryfile)??? who were making the point that in their region there is little affordable transport and very little well paying work so the people leave the area and have little option but to head for the bigger towns and cities.

The rural dream? it does not work well. The more remote the area the less people want to live there.
The richer can afford to commute longer distances for work.

Taking property from people is wrong. And students have to live somewhere.

There was a housing shortage after the war and prefabs were errected, would people now choose to live in prefabs ?

Surely better to build warm secure basic housing than start taking property off people.

The problem where I live is the newer social housing has high rents so families faced with almost 100 per week rents will look for cheaper accommodation. The only ones who can afford these houses are those on benefit where the rent is free. btw older rented housing is average 75.00 pw which is a lot unless you get benefit. Some of the lovely new homes nearby are like war zones full of drug users and drunks. Normal families quickly move out.

A re-think is needed on housing. We live close to a large university so we are surrounded by HMOs (Houses of Multiple of Occupancy). Most have been enlarged to accommodate more students. Some are detached houses, some semis and many are modest terraced houses that would have been affordable housing. HMOs are empty for almost half the year, a scandalous waste of property. Tony Blair's mantra of 50% of young people going to university has had an effect on housing round here. There are also quite a number of Airbnb properties in the city - airbnb is skewing the property market all over Europe.

Has anyone insisted to rent out rooms Lioness68 I must hav emissed that post.I think the issue is that there are many people who buy properties with no intention of ever living in them or even letting them out .There has to be a solution to it,people need homes and no they AREN'T all illegal or even legal immigrants .Just folk struggling on minimum wages and zero hour contracts to survive

the posts just go in chronological order Lioness; if someone posts quickly in between it could appear before yours

MY reply was to AnnieBach. I am not sure why it didn't post onto hers.

Most certainly not. We have six bedrooms, our daughter lives with us at the moment, but is saving for the deposit on her own house. The fact that we have spare rooms is no-one's business but ours. The house is on the market at the moment and we intend to downsize to a three bed. The house is paid for and we pay full council tax. Why should we rent rooms out to strangers?

Jalima1108
I should think that it's perfectly possible to buy a property with a London postcode IF you are a canny buyer and can see the value in something which perhaps needs modernisation or can get help as a key worker in certain sectors which is a pressing need.
I certainly wouldn't dismiss claims that people have been able to buy in town.
None of my children own properties anywhere near London but that's because they live near their work.

I agree with gmelon
Also, some of those who purported to be living in Grenfell Towers were illegally claiming benefits after the fire...taxpayers money. They were not living there at all.
The government should stick to the regeneration of brownfield sites and stop the appalling number of immigrants breaching our borders.
New Zealand and Canada are much more vigilant.

I think when it comes to buying a property in London then their salaries may not be sufficient GabriellaG, depending on area.
Although when I stated on another thread that two members of my family had managed to get on the housing ladder in London (teacher and nurse) I was more or less accused of fabricating the story.

Teachers, nurses and social workers on very modest salaries? Hahaha

Well - they must have confidence in UK business!

According to Business Insider: "Foreign ownership of UK shares has soared since the early 1990s from less than 20% to its current level (54%)."

the Office for National Statistics states that the major investors in the UK businesses are foreign. Around 55% are Americans - not of course ordinary Americans.

I'm quite surprised at that grannypauline as I always thought that institutions, eg pension funds, mutual and insurance funds owned most shares in UK companies.

Unless, of course, those institutions are American

newnanny, yes I am more leftwing than Corbyn. And I have just given you a solution to the problems of food and housing.

If you have an solution other than mine (nationalisation and planning to achieve proper housing and food for everyone) let us know.

Near where I live all the 2 & 3-bedroom houses on a new estate have been bought by landlords who then put them on the rental market, at prices the low-paid cannot afford, so building hundreds of new homes is not helping at all.

Also, of course we have far too many people in this small country of ours.

Ilovecheese, I agree with you re more homeless people being in towns and cities. I live in a rural community where there are at most four homeless people, but it doesn’t make it any the less awful. One young man spends all his time sitting or sleeping in the doorway of a shop that closed down years ago. It’s still habitable, but he is sitting outside. In our village, we have a post office, two pubs, a village hall and a church the homeless are not welcome in any of them.

It's not just the state of empty homes when so many are homeless that annoys, angers, and upsets me but the amount of time council tower blocks of flats are left empty and standing prior to demolition when they should be occupied that really angers me and their eventual destruction of course, when so many people need to be housed. In my immediate area four tower blocks have been demolished over the past ten years, with a fifth still standing after years of being emptied, ready to go, but at the end of the estate there's a huge amount of very unkempt overgrown land empty of any property except for an electric grid. Strangely there's some sort of paving and tarmac road structure in the ground, so it appears that the council wanted to build on the land but there's nothing there except for trees rubbish, and bushes and weeds it's a complete mess and waste of the land. The land at the end of my road either side where two of the tower blocks used to stand is now waste ground, grassed over, same goes for the land at the end of the adjacent road where the other tower block used to be. So imagine five prominent tower blocks each up to 19 stories, four flats on each, that's an awful lot of housing demolished and so it's very hard to house people and find council accommodation if you want to move. There's also talk of many more tower blocks being demolished too.

Anniebach, once again I didn’t suggest ‘giving over’ churches. I suggested sharing them. Is that really so hard? Do we 'the haves' continue to ignore the have-nots? Much like grannypauline , I despair.

All this need for rented accommodation and government making it harder for private landlords to trade. If all private landlords sold up tomorrow LA could not find enough B&B to accommodate families. If these houses came back on market homeless could not afford deposit.

quiz queen, I and others were making an observation about foreign nationals who buy property in the UK for speculative purposes only and have no intention of living in that home. I don't think anyone has suggested that settled migrants should be precluded from buying property, that wasn't the implication.