From the summary of The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's report "Housing options and solutions for young people in 2020"
Key points
• Around 1.5 million more young people aged 18–30 will be pushed towards living in the private rented sector in 2020, reflecting growing problems of accessing both home ownership and social renting.
• Without a sustained and long-term increase in new housing supply, demand-side initiatives to help aspiring home-owners risk maintaining the inflated house prices they are meant to overcome...
• More stable private rented tenancies might be achieved through smarter incentives for landlords. International evidence suggests that these could include tax breaks in return for more stable, longer term tenancies for vulnerable or lower income tenants and/or other benefits such as lower rent levels.
OK:
1. Mr Joseph Rowntree set up his foundation to look into the causes of poverty, and in his original instructions of 1904, he wrote: "The Soup Kitchen in York never has difficulty in obtaining adequate financial aid, but an enquiry into the extent and causes of poverty would enlist little support. Every Social writer knows the supreme importance of questions connected with the holding and taxation of land, but for one person who attempts to master this question there are probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils." Bit of a cluebat there, eh?
2. In the second bullet point, the report acknowledges that "demand-side intitiatives" (i.e. subsidies) will just push up rents.
3. So why do they then suggest tax-breaks for landlords? Assuming a rational landlord, the value of the tax break would have to be roughly equal to the rental income foregone. Ergo, this would end up much the same as Housing Benefit, a "demand-side initiative" which merely pushes up rents. Every £1 which a claimant ends up in the landlord's pocket and results in all non-claimants having to pay £1 more for what's left (or paying £1 more in tax, or possibly both). It's a vicious circle.
4. Now, there's an easy way to break the vicious circle: imagine that we had Housing Benefit but made it universal (so that it doesn't just result in transfers from non-claimants to claimants/landlords) so that everybody always has enough money to be able to rent at least somwhere basic, and instead of funding that universal HB out of income tax, we fund it out of a tax on land values..? It's hardly a new idea, something along these lines was enacted under Queen Elizabeth... The First.
Short but entertaining
1 hour ago
10 comments:
Does the RF employ complete idiots? Is it a qualification needed to work for them?
How many people work in the Poverty Industry and what is it worth a year?
Phys, that is the bitter f-ing irony, isn't it?
As the man said: " for one person who attempts to master this question there are probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils"
So this report was written by the thousands, not by the one :-(
"Around 1.5 million more young people aged 18–30 will be pushed towards living in the private rented sector in 2020"
I see more and more rented housing round here, yet people are so easily persuaded to oppose new housing development.
AKH, that puzzles me, if yer average owner-occupier opposes all new development, then fair play, naked self-interest and devil take the hindmost, but there are plenty of tenants who are NIMBYs.
However, there is an inverse correlation between the level of owner-occupiers and the amount of new construction (i.e. a positive correlation between the amount of tenants and new construction), which is what you'd expect, that's observable facts and figures.
and instead of funding that universal HB out of income tax, we fund it out of a tax on land values
But how to sell this idea?
JH, the question is not "how" but "to whom". The answer to that question is easy.
MW, 'to whom'? Renters; all 30-odd% and increasing. Can't be too far away from the magical 50% mark given current trend.
SBS, yes, exactly! Let's stop yapping about the "One percent" and think about the "thirty per cent".
"Around 1.5 million more young people aged 18–30 will be pushed towards living in the private rented sector in 2020"
More Homey subliminal advertising: renting is to be avoided. It is the last resort of the desperate would be home-owner, because we all want to be home-owners, don't we, so that we can invest in land that is only going to go up, up, up in value. No suggestion that some people, especially young and mobile people, might choose to rent. When I went to live in London, nearly all my contemporaries rented. I only bought because the choice of flats to rent was extremely limited thanks to the Rent Acts.
If the JRF were interested in finding places for young people to live, then they would do better trying to persuade the insurance companies that not all people on the dole are scum. If you are a landlord, you can't rent to someone on the dole, because your insurance company won't cover you. If you are an under-occupier, you can't have a jobless person as a lodge, because you will invalidate your house insurance. It's a vicious circle: because you need special insurance to rent to the unemployed, then only certain types of landlords rent to the unemployed and they tend to be the type who don't give a shit, so their tenants tend not to give a shit either, so they are more likely to do things like burn the doors and the floorboards to keep warm, punch holes in the walls when they are drunk, or burn the place down by bypassing the electricity meter and main fuse, so the insurance companies have statistics that show that unemployed people cause a lot of damage and so it goes on.
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