Milestone One:
The growth in demand for rented property was also seen last week in the findings of the English Housing Survey, published by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). It revealed that between 2005 and 2009-10 the number of people renting homes privately in England had risen by 1 million to 3.4 million - a rise of 40% in that time.
The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) said: "Private renting had grown to account for 16% of households, while 17% rented from social landlords."
Yup.
The insane Home-Owner-ist belief that house prices can only go up - and that rising house prices makes us wealthier - runs counter to the claim that Home-Owner-Ism is about 'encouraging owner-occupation' (which I think we are broadly agreed is A Good Thing).
Home-Owner-Ism is really about increasing the amount of mortgage debt sloshing around (if you have a big mortgage, you don't really own it, you're just renting from the bank) and when all else fails, it's about increasing the number of tenants, i.e. reducing the number of owner-occupiers.
Milestone Two:
More than one in eight Yorkshire homeowners have not reported crimes since online crime maps were introduced for fear of putting off prospective buyers or tenants, a survey suggests today... Ministers have hailed the scheme as a way of holding police to account, but some residents fear it will sully their local area’s reputation and devalue their homes.
Thirteen per cent of Yorkshire residents surveyed by insurer Direct Line said they had witnessed a crime since February but had decided not to report it. The survey’s nationwide results indicate an even more worrying trend. Of those respondents who had not reported a crime, 11 per cent had either been the victim of, or witnessed, a violent assault. Three-quarters of respondents said they would use an online crime map to research a new home and would be deterred by a high number of offences.
I suppose the Lib-Cons' real reason for putting the crime map online was exactly this - to discourage people from reporting crimes, as a result of which reported crime goes down, which they can hail as a success of their law'n'order policies.
What sort of a f-ed up world do we live in, where people worry more about keeping housing as expensive as possible than they worry about crime?
Spotted by dill at HPC.
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Home-Owner-Ism achieves important milestones...
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11 comments:
"What sort of a f-ed up world do we live in, where people worry more about keeping housing as expensive as possible than they worry about crime?"
The same one as we have always lived in, read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds). It has some good bits in it about bubbles and is available on line.
It's worse than that...
Here's the theory: if you report crime, criminals get arrested and put in jail. Therefore the crime rate drops and you live in a nicer area and have a more expensive house.
The observation that people don't report crime means that they think that lower crime reports is more likely to increase their house worth.
Why would that be, given the above theory? Answer: the theory is bollocks. Reporting crime doesn't lower crime rates; since getting arrested doesn't put criminals in prison.
Sounds about right to me.
Presumably these unreported crimes are not suited to an inflated insurance claim either.
See, you're getting your "homes" and "houses" all mixed up again.
Once again, the people that buy "houses" in order to rent them out or to improve and sell on are doing it to make money, it's called investing in bricks and mortar.
When I bought my "home" it was a place of shelter, it was, still is, in an area we liked and at a price we could, by taking on extra jobs (the local pub and Laundry) comfortably afford.
Are you with me so far?
The options facing us at the time:
A naval married quarter, a council house both at reasonable rentals but to my mind money down the drain, private sector renting that came with a list of dos and don'ts as long as your arm - not for me.
The latter options required that I live whjere THEY told me to live - fuck that.
So we are where we are and that's where we stay until the grim reaper sends his/her calling card.
The present day price of my "home" is of no interest to me I will never see it sold - I'll be dead.
Anon, just because you don't care about the value of your house doesn't mean there aren't thousands of people who do, people who want to move elsewhere and don't want the value of their home to fall in comparison with those elsewhere, people who wish to use the inflated value of their houses to borrow even more money and even deluded people who think that if they live in a house worth £600,000, they are wealthier than if they live in a house worth £100,000, even if it is the same house.
Oh! i didn't realise you were talking about "thousands" of people, I thought you were being serious - silly me.
Anyway as with cars that used to be "owned" by the people that bought them, home owners, because all houses are on the Land Registry have become registered "keepers" which means that cars and homes can be confiscated without recourse to the law.
It's already the done thing with cars, homes will follow soon.
Make you any happier?
B, seems like a fair summary. People are as irrational as ever.
OP, at the margin, possibly. if you know that the police will solve a fixed number of crimes (prioritised either in order of seriousness of crime or how easy they are to solve - like arresting smokers) then reporting an additional one does not increase the total number of punishments meted out - but it still improves your chances of your particular crime being 'solved' or punished.
Anon, sure, nearly seven in eight 'homeowners' still report crimes (whether tenants report fewer crimes as well is an unknown).
B, people do think they are richer if their same old house is now worth three times as much. It's completely nuts.
Anon, if houses were taxed at the same rate as cars, then it would raise enough tax to replace all others. But isn't all land ownership tantamount to 'confiscation'?
At present, the 'law' is firmly on the side of land 'owners' (and banks) to enable them to suck up wealth from non-land 'owners' (whether in cash or in kind), but this is a man made law. Superior law (logic or morality or free market economics) says that it should be the other way round - land 'owners' should be compensating non-land owners.
Ane those with cars should compensate those without.
Those with children should compensate those without.
Those that smoke should compensate those that don't.
Those who wear glasses should compensate those that don't/won't. those without teeth should put the bite on those with.
Carry on like this and you will one day disappear up your own private sewer.
Not the same thing, Anon.
Those who have a car do not prevent the rest of us from having a car.
Those who have a child do not prevent the rest of us from having a child.
Those who smoke do not prevent the rest of us from smoking.
Those who have glasses do not prevent the rest of us from having glasses.
Those who have teeth do not prevent the rest of us from having teeth.
So good luck to them. Why on earth should they have to compensate the rest of us?
But those who have a house in Putney do make it much more difficult (and expensive) for the rest of us to have a house in Putney.
So why on earth shouldn't they compensate the rest of us?
Derek, that was pure poetry, thanks.
Anon, I'll mark you down for every time you said "should". That's a lot of times.
As an aside, what the Home-Owner-Ists approve of is a system whereby those who go out to work to earn a living "should" compensate those who are either welfare claimants or landlords or bankers. I wouldn't wish to categorise you as a Homey, but...
I don't think the Lib/Cons are smart enough to have spotted that one coming, I certainly wasn't.Says something about the state of fear we live in thatpeople are more worried about their position on the housing ladder falling than about real crime. Particularly when we all know house prices do not represent real values but simply government regulatory decisions.
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