This "charity" that has dreamed up this idea about us and our family homes!

Perhaps the housing answer might lie in how we work. The more people can work from home, the less crowded metropolitan areas can become, as you can live anywhere.

My last job was just that - I did translations, whereby I received the text online and forwarded the translation online, getting paid directly into my bank account, which I could check online. It works the same for proofreading, which I've also done. I also gossip online.

The other thing could be to make it easier to commute. More fast trains with large secure car parks at stations has been the solution here where I live in SEQeensland. My suburb has seen the railway car park increase tenfold, and the number of trains increase by half, since 1993, as city workers park and ride. Train travel is relatively affordable here, and certainly cheaper than city parking.(Hasn't been privatised)

We have all got to grit our teeth and agree that new homes need to be built near us. There will always be developments that are inappropriate but we need to accept that more houses are needed in our back yard.

I have lived in an large Oxfordshire village for 15 years. There are over 600 houses in the village but in the last 15 years less than 40 new houses have been built. Nearly all these arose from windfall sites, sites that became available unexpectedly with each site adding only a handful of homes to the village. My village could absorb another 100 houses with very little difficulty, we have the infrastructure, schools, shops, transport and we are within a mile of a major dual carriageway.

To me localisation would being told we needed to have new houses in the village but control over what land they should be built on, and, my hobby horse, should have some say in their appearance. A local village has had a development built on its outskirts that, built in the nearby town would look attractive, but the urban style of these properties looks awful in a rural situation.

But, where to put the extra homes is another bone of contention.

It would be good if more large companies could be persuaded to move away from the saturated south-east. But that won't happen. People like living down south.

I totally agree, FlicketyB .

Well, I have taken my economist’s eye to the Intergenerational Foundation’s report and, frankly, it smack’s of a report written to confirm conclusions already reached by a senior member of the organisation, but without evidence.

I won’t do an extended critique but the report is full of sloppy reasoning, and unsupported assertions. For example it points out that one in five people between 50 – 59 own more than one property and uses this as evidence of generational housing imbalance in the UK, but fails to say what proportion of these houses are actually in the UK and what proportion are overseas, in France, Spain, Italy etc. I certainly know quite a number of older people with holiday homes overseas, only one with a holiday home/letting property in the UK.

The housing crisis in this country is not the result of any group of people ‘hoarding’ housing or driving property prices up. It is the result of the failure of successive governments to ensure that enough houses are built each year to house the growing population. If there were an extra million homes available to buy or let, prices and rents would fall because supply would begin to equal demand. Simples!

“Our country has been gripped by the irresistible force of “now”, …….It has led us to assume that doing the best for ourselves will always be best for others, but this is demonstrably untrue. And this individualistic vision has utterly seduced our politicians who seem convinced that democratic decision will always be inferior to the ones we make alone, forgetting almost entirely that the reason we have government in the first place is because some decisions require collective action for the general good” This is a quote from the conclusion of the book "the jilted generation", part of the publications who seem to have stated all this controversy. Must say, I agree strongly with this part. I agree with their analysis of the problems facing young people, but not their solutions!!

flicketyBI have started reading the report, and so far, I see nothing that makes our generation different from previous ones! I remember walking along with my baby, 36 years ago, looking at big houses, thinking the world is built up side down, here we are with a baby in a tiny one bedroom flat, and all the big houses are owned by older people with no kids. It has always been so, it didn't make me jalous or envious, that was just life. So younger generation, get over it, do like us, start at the bottom, work your way up, and if you can't have your dream home for a while, as long as you have a roof over your head, be thankful. One of the "gripe" from this report is that with short term tenancies, it wouldn't be right to bring up children while renting. So the solution would be long term tenancies, not shifting the old to small properties? The rest of the world seem to do ok on renting until their 40s, why not our younger people? As for our generation being asset rich, it's only on paper. Our house might have trebbled in price, but so has every other house we might buy. The only winners in all this price hike have been estate agents (% of selling price), the gvt, as more house get into stamp duty price, the gvt again, with death duties, and the gvt again, with covering the cost of care in our later years by using the money from our house's sale. So yes, it is hard for younger people, and a solution needs to be found, but not at the expense of the previous generation please. Get organised, vote, set up pressure groups for more houses to be built,and to restore social housing. It seems our children are too used to look to us for an answer to their problems. Our fault I suppose for making it to comfortable for them over the years.

Olliesgran, you are right, the ‘Jilted Generation’ simply rehashes, in English, the arguments in ‘Comment nous avons ruiné nos enfants’. Not plagiarism but surely theft of the intellectual property of Artus and Virard. But this discussion arose not from this book but the report by the Intergenerational Foundation. This can be found at

www.if.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IF_Housing_Defin_Report_19oct.pdf

I have printed it out, about 30 pages of text in all. It will be my bedtime reading – with red pen in hand. The author is given as Matt Griffith. No mention of Shiv Malik. Is he the puppet rather than the hand?

But however competent the report as an analysis of the size of housing occupied by older people, it doesn’t actual offer any solutions that will solve the real problem in the housing market. Demand for housing exceeds supply. Getting older people to sell up big properties and buy smaller properties, neither increases the housing stock nor reduces the number of households wanting to occupy it. It just churns the market and puts older people, mortgage free and with the cash from the sale of a bigger house, in competition with first time buyers. Is that what the Intergenerational Foundation wants?

I think people only look at how inexpensive houses seem to have been, but forget relative values. I think in 1971 we paid £4250 for our first house and our income was about £1800. No central heating, no washing machine, coal fire heating a back boiler, not many mod cons. As Olliesgran says it all seemed quite normal to us.

elegran, I agree that we did a lot better than our parents and grand parents. And also about the rise in expectations. We were quite happy to start at the bottom, because we had seen out parents starting like this. When I was a child, we lived in the slums of Paris, one room, for a family of 2 adults and a child, toilets on the landing, shared of course, and bath at public baths once or twice a week. It accommodated later a family of 5, after the birth of my 2 sisters. When my younger sister was 1, we moved to the subburbs, in a 2 bedroom flat, which looked absolutely enormous! My mother always worked, so no social housing for us, with 2 (low)wages coming in. I was 10 by then, so remember all this. So I didn't feel hard done by when we had to start our married life in horrid bedsits! It was quite normal, and up to us to do what we could to get out of it, as my parents had done. May be we kept our efforts too hidden from our kids?

There is a good letter in the Guardian today pointing out that there are some 240,000 second homes in the country and maybe it might be better to start off by taxing those. I know that when I lived in Dorset there were many villages with lots of second homes and they made it very hard for young people to stay there.

If you haven't read the Observer interview (more of a dialogue really) with Yvonne Roberts, here is the link:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/23/housing-shortage-old-people-homes

He really is a most arrogant, opinionated and ill-informed young man, though he can't be so very young as he has quite a track record as a journalist!

I hope we will all add our voices to the request for him to be grilled on GN.

olliesgran We had it far far better than many of our grandparents and great-grandparents. When you study your family tree and have a look at living conditions in the streets in which they were living, it is amazing that they brought up their families there successfully.

What seems to have been forgotten is the change in expectations.

Previous generations (including the bayboomers) lived with their parents until they married and set up their own home, or if they moved away they lived in digs in someone else's house. Often that belonged to a widow lady who found it too big for her and let rooms to fill it up and pay for its upkeep.

Try suggesting that now. No young man wants to be subject to an old lady's scrutiny of his comings and goings, he wants "independence", and he wants his girl-friend to move in with him, without "commitment"

Then there is the question of how many incomes are taken into account when a mortgage is granted. When we bought our first house, mine was just not considered. It was not secure enough for the lenders, they believed that I could have fallen pregnant and given up work at any time. And as for considering the income of a girl-friend, that would have been like suggesting they finance a brothel!

The lending limit was lower for every couple, so the price of an average starter home was lower. Now that a mortgage based on two incomes is normal, house prices follow what is available and rise to match.

So now you have people who expect to own their own house, and to live together, and they can borrow on two incomes - married or cohabiting, however temporary. Those who can only offer one income are at a disadvantage.

Have a look Elegran, quite a few pages are available free. The difference between the French book and Mr Malik's is that the French authors blame the politicians and their short termism (and capitalism)for the problems facing the new generation, not the baby boomers themselves. Still, of course we had it better than our parents! They lived though a war! It is foolish to expect this sort of jump in living standards between generations to go on for ever, regardless of politics. We started at the same level as our parents and improved our standard of living over the years to what it is now (at least for most people), maybe our children were given to expect to start where we are and become even more prosperous? It is unrealistic I feel.

Must take a (free) look at that. I won't contribute to Mr Malik's opulent lifestyle by buying the rest though. Hypocrite! And maybe plagiarist too, unless he writes under an assumed name - in which case why not write a different book?.

I just read some pages of Shiv Malik's book (The jilted generation)on Amazon, and his intrduction sounded very familiar to me. And no wonder! It is exactly what I read in a book called "Comment nous avons ruiné nos enfants" by Patrick Artus and Marie Paule Virard, published in France in 2006! The introductions are so similar, I wonder......Does Mr Malik speak French? And how old was he in 2006??? If you speak French, check it out. Both books are available on Amazon (fr for the french book), and you can read the first pages online. Funny me think

Yesterday's Observer had an interview with Shiv Malik. Bless the little lad he sounded so naive and wet behind the ears that I expect he still has to hold someone's hand when he crosses the road.

One of his priceless comments was: 'Those who are over 45 might not even realise that there is a housing crisis unless they have youngish adult children.'
With the average age for a first child rapidly approaching 30. I would be surprised to find many people under 50 whose children had even begun to approach being 'youngish adults'.The interviewer pointed out, I felt tartly (and justifiably), that she was 63 and had 17 year old daughter.

I won't analyse the interview any further, his comments suggested that he had never met anybody over 50 and assumed anyone over that age was so decrepit that they were incapable of looking after themselves and would be much happier in sheltered housing. Having been a business economist in a pre-retirement world, if any student or new graduate reporting to me had handed in a report as inadequately researched and shot through with as much ignorance of his subject as this one, they certainly wouldnt do it twice.

Just post your thoughts on inviting him on the thread Shiv Malik in In the `News, I guess olliesgran.

That's a good idea absentgrana. How do we add our support? His book is quite cheap on amazon, i'll read it first.

I have suggested (in the In the News thread) that we ask Mr Malik to join us for a live webchat. Do add your support – if you do support this suggestion. I think it could be quite lively.

Because he makes so much noise.

yes he is absentgrana. And he is entitled to his views, but why is he taken so seriously by the media?

Isn't Shiv Malik the chap who wrote a book about and has a bee in his bonnet about baby boomers stealing the next generation's future? If so, he's hardly the most appropriate figure to have helped found an intergenerational charity.

agree dahlia.

Having just caught up with this post, I must agree that the publicity given to this charity statement was in line with everything that has gone before. The older generations are undoubtedly being blamed and targeted by the media for all the ills of the world. Like many of you, we had a real struggle to exist for the first years of married life in the late 1960's, my husband was self-employed and so didn't qualify for any benefits, and in those days the first child wasn't eligible for child benefit, so we both went to work and paid for good child care with no help from the state at all. As a result of going without and sheer hard work, we have the comfortable home (3 bedrooms) we used to dream of in our grim bed-sit, but are being advised that we should downsize and let younger people move in. I don't see how moving from our present home (in an expensive part of the UK) and downsizing would enable a young couple to move in, as it would be outside their price range.
No, folks, it's becoming a "shoot the oldies" free for all in the press, etc. - perhaps we should become a militant force and camp out in front of St Paul's!