Baby boomers and housing

I hope he's bought his parents a very nice house.
He was earning £3 million a year when he left Deutsche Bank as managing director.
I hope he's not criticising his own parents as they were probably baby boomers. They had five sons.

www.sajidjavid.com/news/hundreds-retirees-attend-mp-sajid-javids-second-pensioners-fair

He runs pensioners fairs in his constituency. I hope they throw a few very soft avocados at him next time he sees them.
Sorry, I forgot, they are not supposed to know what they are.

My memory of living in Cornwall includes many young people who had to move away from the land because there was no housing. Some were lucky and were able to put a caravan on their parents' land, but the council didn't encourage it. I imagine there is still little available to families who might want to move to the country and pick cabbages. This is why immigrant labour has been ideal, they can come over for a few weeks, live communally and go home when the work is finished or move elsewhere to another harvest.

I'm not sure baby boomers can do much. We could move into a smaller house, but that would just leave yet another 3 bedroom house that people like DS could never hope to afford. Or of course it could be bought by a buy to let landlord who can then charge desperate people exhorbitant rents. I wish someone could get it into MPs' heads that we don't need more (un) affordable housing we need more social housing.

They can't blame the Baby Boomers (us!) for the youngsters not being able to afford houses. The fault lies with the banks and building societies years ago. When I bought my first home in the late 1960's I was only allowed to borrow 2.5 times my salary. If they had stuck to this rule house prices would not have escalated beyond general inflation.

Far from being to blame for youngsters not being able to afford houses, many of us baby boomers are actually enabling them to buy, as Suzied mentioned in her post. Neither of my daughters would have been able to buy their homes without a loan from the 'Bank of Mum and Dad', and I know many of my peers have done the same for their children. In addition, by offering free childcare, as so many do, we enable them to earn more.

Did we have it easy- well I can't remember for sure. We had everything second hand, made bean bags, made beds out of bits of wood, the pram was from a friend for a fiver and the square folding push chair another 3 quid- our dining table was from the neighbour, and I made all the kids' clothes. We found ourselves with mortgages at 19.5% at some point. No holidays, apart from camping in North Devon and once a mouldy damp cottage in Cornwall- no dining out- no wine apart from very special occasions and we 'made-do'- if we could not afford it, we didn't have it and waited.

jura, I remember exactly the same as you! Our first home was a very pretty but tiny two up two down terraced cottage with no bathroom and an outside (flushing!!) loo. Everything was second hand or hand me downs. We did get a grant for a downstairs bathroom extension which our small son was delighted with as his playgroup ladies testified!! I can remember this being some of the happiest times of our lives, the children were very small, our home though modest, was ours, we were young and full of hope. We had very little but they were happy days and we were content.

Yes I think absentee house owners and buy to let has a lot to answer for. As well as the iniquitous right to buy scheme taking loads of social housing away. I don't know where we would have lived as a child when our slums were compulsorily cleared and we were moved to a council house. Suppose it would have been to a private landlord-oh yes that's whose house we were living in, in the slum.

I have friends & family who would never have had the chance to own their own homes were it not for the right to buy scheme. It gave the opportunity of home ownership to many low income families. The fault was that the money raised should have been used to build more council homes, thereby maintaining the social housing stock.
I found MaizieD's post interesting - near where I live there are three sites currently being built on and all three pieces of land have been available for developing for quite a few (10 in one case) years - and all the houses being built are "executive" expensive detached - no affordable homes at all. I don't understand why the council let them get away with it. And these houses cost eye-watering amounts - what size mortgages must the buyers have? and what's going to happen when the interest rate rises?

And as others have said - DH & I are baby boomers and we've helped all our children to buy their own homes

Let's be clear. The reason councils did not use the money from Thatchers right to buy scheme was that the government would not allow the funds to be used to build social housing.
The government is now including tenants of Housing Association properties in the right to buy scheme. A large proportion of former Council houses are now owned by buy to let landlords. It's just plain wrong.

As we all know, young people who don't have cash from their parents have little chance of buying a home as rents are so high they can't save. Don't blame our generation but introduce some effective social policies, including stopping foreign investment in property that is then left to decline (especially in the London south east ares)

No one has a right to own their own home. What they do have and what millions of us used to have was the right to a council house ( depending on meeting certain criteria) which gave us security of tenure, a fair rent and a well maintained home. Thatcher maliciously and wickedly took that away to buy votes and the suffering that has come from this which no government is prepared to put right is truly truly dreadful

So easy to chase headlines with ill informed comments as Javid does. Not worth arguing about in my opinion.

Daft thing is he had no need to make reference to Baby Boomers!!!! He could have described the situation as he sees I it the younger generation without any reference to other generations. I think I was to change the nature of the media focus to his speech to baby boomer baddies rather than historical and present politics mistakes! Its worked!

If homes were really unaffordable the estate agents windows would be littered with starter homes that no one could afford to buy so the prices would reduce until people could buy them. In fact that isn't the case.

We need to look back to the 1960s and 70s when over half the population lived in rented accommodation, most of it provided by councils. Home ownership was 45%. It may be that that figure is a better guide to home ownership than the current high but declining level

The percentage of homeowners in the country shot up in the 1980s as a result of Mrs Thatchers policy of selling off council houses to their tenants at a fraction of their market value enabled many people to buy homes who could not otherwise have afforded to have bought a home at market prices.

As a result many young adults today with parents with modest incomes have grown up in owner occupied households and assume that on similar incomes they should also be able to afford to buy their own home, but, unlike their parents, they will have to pay full market prices, which they can no more afford than their parents could have.

The problem today is that succeeding Conservative governments have had a policy of privatising the rental market by loosening controls and tenancies and insisting that councils and housing associations operate on the same open market principles resulting in generation rent having to living shifting lives in rented properties on short tenancies and at full market prices.

What is needed is a return to a large and stable local authority or housing association sector, providing lifetime tenancies, or at least leases until retirement age when needs can be reassessed and tenants re-housed where appropriate, with rents based on household income not going market rates.

When younger people who cannot afford to purchase their own home can be sure of a stable affordable appropriate home in a public sector much of the heat will go out of the current controversy

Selling off council housing to tenants was not a bad idea, although some was sold off far more cheaply than it should have been - what was wrong was that the LAs were not allowed to use the proceeds of the sales to build more council housing.

no wine apart from very special occasions
We did have wine at weekends Jura2 - it was homemade from blackberries, elderberries, nettles, etc, gathered from the hedgerows.
And very good it was too!

Buying is not for everyone, some like renting to lack the responsibility of ownership.

Thatcher deliberately didn’t want to replace council houses because she was buying votes - therefore selling them off was absolutely corrupt and wicked and set the scene for the current situation. And many who didn’t but weren’t being irresponsible - they didn’t have the option

Mrs Thatcher was Friedmanite Free Marketer. At heart she saw no place for the state as a provider of any social services. She believed everything should be provided through the private sector and market mechanisms, very much like the USA

The purpose of her council house selling policy was to reduce the size of the social housing sector. Allowing councils to use the proceeds of sales to build more houses would have made her policy ineffective.

Stoke-on-Trent Council sold some houses for £1, provided that the new owners did them up. The Council did spend several thousand pounds on the houses, making them fit for habitation, which money was in the form of a loan to whoever purchased the house.
They are going to continue with the scheme:
www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/stoke-on-trent-council-selling-homes-1/

The housing market is broken. Not the fault of the baby boomers, but to some extent, many of our generation benefitted when council housing was sold off in the 1980s and from the easing of mortgage lending. Although it didn't feel beneficial at the time, the high inflation of the 1980s also boosted our house values.
The political thinking in the 80s was that home ownership was good for society and that homeowners would vote Conservative.
As I see it, the only solution for the shortage of housing is for councils to be allowed to build loads more council/social housing. The current policy of developers having to build a small proportion of affordable or social housing doesn't seem to work as the developers usually decide (after receiving planning permission) that they won't make a profit if they build "affordable" housing. They then (in our area at least) sit on the land and refuse to build until the council is forced to relax this affordable housing condition. Even "affordable housing" is not affordable to most would-be home purchasers anyway.
More council housing for rent would give people more options and should ease the whole housing market.

I read the article Lara and thought it added nothing to explain the issues, simply adding a few flippant comments to the debate. In my opinion, housing affordability is a global problem - some countries like Canada and Australia have had a larger increase than the UK, some have had less, like the USA. However, many developed countries seem to have areas where people earning average salaries cannot afford to rent or buy. If there was a solution that was politically or economically viable, one city or one country would have implemented it by now. If there was a single or a local driver of property prices, it would be possible to mitigate that, however, we're now in a world where property is a global commodity and I doubt you can get the toothpaste back in the tube. If I don't see the situation changing significantly in the future, irrespective of any of the suggestions on this thread.

Norah it may well be that renting is better for a lot of people when young, to avoid responsibility of maintenance etc. - but what about when they reach pension age? They're unlikely to have much in savings left, and would they be able to rent on a pension?

That is what Housing benefit is for