My dad always gives off about young people complaining about house prices- “in our day mortgage interest rate was 15%”
Yeah dad, but the big house you got for £40k would cost £400k now 
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Your dad was probably on 10 bob per week at the time though 
I think there are just more “have nots” these days, due to the widening gap between wages and property prices.
But then owning a second property was probably unheard of back during our parents’ working years, whereas every second cunt these days owns an investment property, regardless of whether they are boomers or 35 year olds.
At least that’s what it feels like.
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I don’t know anyone 35 or under with a second property. Most are struggling to pay for their first. Some have use of their boomer parent’s holiday home though
More the point, they own it on credit which is paid for by the renter. It’s not as if they have some spare capital that they have invested into new housing. The one who rents can’t get credit because they have to pay the exorbitant rent.
The knock on effect is the building industry is set up to service the buy-to-rent market, not people actually needing homes.
This possibly accounts for why modern new-builds often have such weird specifications: for example, I remember coming across a house that had more bathrooms than bedrooms: tiny “double” bedrooms but everything on suite in what should be a family home, not a bed and breakfast.
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That screams more Short-Let rather than Buy-To-Rent. BTR would be renting it out as a full property. But if each room is created with an ensuite, that would indicate to me that the plan is renting each room individually on Airbnb or the likes.
It’s what it looks like to me as well. In towns with large student populations there was always an industry in buying poor quality old housing, shove some second hand furniture in every room, barring the kitchen and bathroom, and letting each room separately on an annual basis. It required very little investment and the total rent would strip the amount that the property could be rent for as a whole.
I think this has now moved on because the people looking for this kind of shared, bed-sit arrangement are actually working people who lack the initial capital to get their own place.
It’s just that is now the market that the building industry is set up for.
Again, Student Housing is something that is to a degree slightly different, as whilst each room might be rentied out seperately, they would be rented for a long-ish period - either for the semester or for the year.
Short-Lets are designed for a couple of nights or 1 week and flip it as often as possible with exorbenant night fees, which often end up being the same cost for 1 week as a monthly rental price. I’m not familiar with property prices and values in other parts of UK, but in London, particularly central, a 2 bed flat for 5 nights would easily be £2K or more. For £2K p/m you could rent in a large number of areas in London, but 2 week long bookings and you have your monthly mortgage covered and then 2 more would be cream on the top.
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The 15% figure I think only happened for a very brief moment when Thatcher formed her first government to combat inflation (80-82?) and again very briefly when the UK crashed out of the ERM at the start of the 90’s, so although rates were higher (lows of about 7.5% across that decade), they were not at that sort of extreme for a prolonged period. Mortgage interest on your home mortgage was also tax deductible (Miras).
Anyone in stable employment who can show they have paid rent for a decent period of time should be eligible for a mortgage for a similar amount of money per week /month /year.
The problem isn’t with repayment affordability. It’s the astronomical cost of housing these days.
There was a time when an average wage could afford an average property; those days are long gone.
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Watched the documentary about the miners strike last night, very insightful as it’s not something I paid a great deal of notice to at the time.
was it the 1 on channel 4?
episode 2 was an eye opener.
No.
BBC 2 Sunday night
What was their take on it?
It was more factual than an actual take by the BBC.
Lots of recollections from miners and police.
The police didn’t come out of it well, especially (surprise surprise) South Yorkshire police.
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I’ll have to see if I can find it. I met a few miners at the time when they were collecting strike funds on Church Street. They were decent guys but it sort of struck me at the time that they were being used in a political battle rather than what they wanted to achieve, which was a secure future for their families and communities.
It possibly seeded a few ideas in my own head about how society operates. These were decent hard-working skilled guys but the job was killing them. Everyone had a chest complaint despite the fact that few smoked (although they possibly couldn’t afford fags at the time). There were obviously ways in which the government could have helped them that didn’t involve sending them down a filthy hole in the ground, but then I don’t think that was ever on the agenda.
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The ability to secure a future for your family is a political struggle at the best of times, and certainly was for the miners in 1984.
What the Miners were fighting was a Government that believed in a survival of the fittest approach to community and industry, and saw nothing wrong with putting the (then) nationalised domestic coal industry in competition with cheap foreign imported coal, and closing (with no plan for the affected communities) pits that could not compete.
There were problems on both sides of the strike. Scargil was a naive leader who left himself vulnerable to accusations of despotism by refusing to hold a national ballot, which he would probably have won (he was paranoid that polls showing this were being manipulated by the Government)
But Thatcher was off the scale. She instructed MI5 to conduct a campaign against the miners. There were fabricated links to Libya, money was dropped into the miners leaders accounts. A sustained barrage of smear tactics was used against the miners. Most relevant to this place, she gave South Yorkshire Police the remit to act as a strike breaking private militia, above the law and able to dispense violence without fear of reprisal. Five years later that culture of lawlessness and self preservation would manifest again around the Hillsborough disaster.
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I get the impression that this caused a problem for many Conservative politicians at the time. I think the Nissan UK manufacturing plant near Sunderland was seen as a model for what could be achieved. Many of the workers there had been employed in the declining shipping industry and their skills were easily transferable. The same was also true of the miners and they could have easily moved into newer industries. However the Thatcherite core always operated on the belief that the market is always right.
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It was clearly an intentional ploy to break the power of trades unions in the UK, and, as such, it was successful.
The miners had brought down the Heath government, and the Tories were after revenge. Thatcherism required a neutering of organised labour and so the conflict was inevitable. Scargill was a narcissist and an anti democratic hardliner, which played into the government’s hands. The whole thing was a disaster for the communities and for working people in the country whose rights have been continually eroded ever since.
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