[quote=“Klopptimist, post:9253, topic:2840, full:true”]
Unless I’m wrong, you have 2 kids and live with a lady? So that’s 3 bedrooms used?[/quote]
One bedroom is now an office, so we can both continue to hold down employment.
Listen, because I said this on a forum doesn’t mean it’s Labour Policy, and I certainly haven’t written a thesis on the issue.
But you raised the issue of everything being turned into Housing, which is true. There is a lot of housing going up all over the country. Every scrap of land near me is has got houses being built on it. A lot of that land is floodplain for the River Trent, and a lot of the modelling projects that water being diverted into outer villages like mine. It’s a concern.
My reflection is that part of the problem is that people are not adapting their housing expectations to life circumstance. You have single people or couples wanting four and five bedroom houses. That’s creates a shortage, and the only way to deal with it - outside Governments actually trying deal with this strategically, long term - is to create more housing.
Personally I see a crash coming. Supply is soon going to outstrip demand
No, there are plenty of them. The problem is that they all have single people and couples living in them.
Well something like a land value tax would help. We have council tax which goes up slightly with property value but there are discounts for single people regardless of the size of the property.
It’s actually the inverse of a policy that might help the situation.
So your solution to the housing issue is not a sensible use of existing housing stock, or discouraging the ownership of multiple properties, or even a land value tax. It’s the enforced restrictions on procreation in a country that’s had a declining fertility rate for decades anyway.
Where is the housing issue? Geographically and socially?
Why bother? We know where this will go.
But less people in THIS country helps everything. Government will never encourage it because they’re looking at the next 30 years’ income tax to pay for us old fuckers.
We’d better not start discouraging people having babies, because I’m going to need someone to wipe my arse for me when I’m 90 and my own kids have been very clear they are not doing it.
The housing issue is that the social trend is towards needing more housing for less people. Government has cascaded house building targets through all levels of government and most places in the UK have seen a huge rise in housebuilding. The problem is that we are so deadset on building houses, we are concreting flood plains and cutting down mature woodland to cram in more houses.
One of the causes of this (I think) is that people’s desires around housing has changed. People want big houses as young people and to remain in those big houses as retired older people. And there is also an increasing trend towards people owning second homes (personally I’d tax second homes until the fucking pips squeak), and a thriving buy to let sector.
I think a gentle discouragement of this kind of approach to property speculation and utilisation is not a bad thing, and I also think it’s quite stretch to compare it to living in a theocratic, dystopian hell state.
I don’t need the food bank, but I have 300sqft of garden space which sustains us for fresh vegetables all summer/fall and some canning into the winter.
