There was a fine article in The Times a couple of days ago, which covered Housing Benefit, Right to Buy and social housing in one fell swoop. Well worth a read, I couldn't have summed it up better myself.
The fun bit is all the prejudices that people, mainly Home-Owner-ists, trot out in the comments. To give a couple of examples:
paul elliott wrote: And don't forget if [a private] landlord has a mortgage then he can claim tax relief on the interest effectively making his mortgage interest free.
Nope. He gets tax relief on the mortgage interest (to the extent his rental income exceeds his mortgage interest). So at best he will get his after-tax interest cost down by 20% or 40%.
Lin of London wrote: When is the underlying problem going to be admitted? The UK is overpopulated. We need to use our land to feed ourselves, not build millions of new houses. Stop immigration, return illegals and all foreign criminals and then assess the housing situation.
The UK is not overpopulated. We could be self-sufficient in food if push came to shove. Residential areas cover barely five per cent of the UK by surface area. Whether we build new homes or use existing homes more efficiently depends largely on whether there is more resistance to liberalising planning laws or to shifting from taxing incomes to taxing property values. Ah .. right, both. So f*** future generations. I agree on immigration, but this is a minor and separate issue.
george scoresby wrote: This is such a historically ignorant analysis of "right to buy." Millions of Britons, in a relationship of serfdom to their local authority housing masters, escaped this dependency, and took on the maintenance of their properties themselves, thereby reducing local authority housing management costs. The policy also increased social mobility so the country could grow.
Why serfdom? I happen to rent privately, am I a serf to my landlord as well? In economic terms, yes, and probably more so than a social tenant who is paying a far lower rent. This f***wit claims that the lucky right-to-buyers reduced local authority housing management costs - that was the whole point of the article - right-to-buy increased local authority housing costs and hence the cost to the taxpayer (that's you and me, by the way). Right-to-buy may have 'increased social mobility' for the lucky few who bought their council house at undervalue, sat out the biggest property price boom ever and either sold it or are now renting it back to the council for five or ten times what they were paying in rent two decades ago, but that seems like an expensive way of achieving social mobility to me.
There are dozens of Home-Owner-Ist nuggets to wade through, more anon.
Wednesday 6 January 2010
A bit like Comment Is Free, but more delusional
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12 comments:
"The UK is not overpopulated."
The UK as a whole? No, it isn't.
But cities and suburbs (the places people like to live) are becoming increasingly more crowded, with the strain on resources and services that that brings.
JM: "But cities and suburbs (the places people like to live) are becoming increasingly more crowded, with the strain on resources and services that that brings."
Nope. What matters is the ratio of "resources and services"-to-people, not whether a fixed number of people and "resources and services" are spread out over a larger or smaller geographic area.
And if cities really were that terribly crowded, then nobody would want to live there, would they?
"The UK is not overpopulated."
Ok, but we certanly don't need to be inviting the rest of the world to join us.
I agree, immigration ought to be stopped. British tax payers have been more than generous now it is time to stop it.
"The UK is not overpopulated."
True but isn't that a bit like an overweight man saying I am not obese so I don't need to worry about my weight yet?
Or Gordon's views on Government debt.
"We could be self-sufficient in food if push came to shove."
Is this true if we were to have a diet that isn't as boring and unpleasant as my weekly 'organic vegetable box' becomes between October and February (a very expensive way of producing compost as most of it goes straight on it).
Strange how so many Conservatives still hark back to the days of 'right to buy', even though it has undermined the very principles of social housing on an epic scale.
Ross Clark (author of the original piece )is always worth looking out for, but not for long as he is astonishingly productive and a new piece soon comes along. He is very hot on empty houses (and housing in general) and is an amusing libertarian (words that do not always go together).Also he is not
ideeologically restricted to saying the market will take care of everything :empty homes for instance ( where he ponders ways local authories can take them over ).Best though is his article Armageddon looms... which calls for a whacking great Thames barrier right across from Southend to Sheerness.Good because he says what I've been saying ,always a key consideration IMO.
This Homeownerist thing you speak of these days - does that mean that no one is allowed to own a home?
"But cities and suburbs (the places people like to live) are becoming increasingly more crowded, with the strain on resources and services that that brings." (JuliaM)
Actually, high-density cities are the most efficient way of organising society. You get the critical mass of population within a small area that will justify the provision of facilities of all kinds that would not be justified with a smaller population. To make it work, you need decent public transport and an end to the assumption that you have a right to drive your motorcar everywhere. And you need proper affordable housing provision. Cities in other countries have done it. It is largely a matter of political will.
M, of course our diets would be a a lot more tedious if we had to be self-sufficient, plus we'd need to have two or three times as many people working in agriculture. The alternative is to go for a modern, technological economy to pay for the imports of fancy, out-of-season stuff.
LFAT, right-to-buy represents outstandingly shit value for the taxpayer. But a vast swathe of voters still think it is a good idea.
DBC, Ross sounds like my my kind of thinker.
JH, I thoroughly approve of people being able to afford to own a house (which is why I support replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT & allowing more houses to be built), as a failsafe, I support more social housing for those who will never be able to afford to buy. It's the Home-Owner-Ists who oppose any of these three key policies - the Home-Owner-ists oppose a wider spread of homeownership.
PZT, indeedy. But the key to this is that some people like living in towns (so build more housing in towns to cater for them), some people like living in suburbs (i.e. me, so build more housing in suburbs to cater for them) and some like living in the countryside (so build more housing in the countryside to cater for them).
I have a deep suspicion that resistance to liberalising the planning laws is overrated. I actually think it could be popular.
AC, 83% of us are NIMBYs, fact. The point that the Home-Owner-Ists are pricing their own children out of the market seems to escape them.
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