Surprisingly astute comment in The Daily Mail..

... under an article about selling off council housing at undervalue:

... & this is the reason why housing benefit has rocketed over the last decade, people who haven't being able to find cheap social housing end up in the private housing sector & pay MORE expensive rents, for smaller properties.

WHEN the person is earning a salary this problem means LESS growth in the economy, because extra money is being spent on accommodation & not in the shops etc*, but when we have a downturn not only have you got that issue, but government have to take on the burden of the increased housing costs, THAT THEY HELP TO CREATE!

Selling even more social housing off at a discount shows a complete disconnect to the problem. If all the people who live in private accommodation were living in affordable social housing, workers would have more money in their pockets to spend & If people became unemployed, housing benefit wouldn't rise out of control as it has.

John Smith, West Midlands, 1/3/2013, 11:34

* The Home-Owner-Ist counter-argument is that that person's landlord then spends the money in the shops. This merrily overlooks the fact that the landlord is not producing or providing anything - one way in which Home-Owner-Ism damages the economy is the fact that so many people are producing nothing but consuming more than everybody else, and so a load of other people are wasting their time trying to tap into that stream of rental income (we can't all be landlords).

The amount of wealth transferred from producers to non-producers each year by Home-Owner-Ism is approx. the same as the amount transferred by the welfare/pensions system. It's just than only a few hundred thousand people benefit from the former but over ten million people benefit from the latter.