Housing

The worst-hit councils are now spending millions of pounds a year – in some cases between a fifth and half of their total available financial resources – to try to cope with an unprecedented and rapid explosion in homelessness caused by rising rents and a shrinking supply of affordable properties.

The scale of the crisis means smaller councils, often in affluent shire counties, are struggling to supply enough emergency homes to meet their legal duty to support homeless families. Homelessness rates in some districts have more than doubled year on year.

Successive governments that failed to build social housing whilst selling off social housing stock are partly to blame for this.

So, too, are the actions of some unscrupulous landlords.

But the real problem can be laid fairly and squarely at the door of the Bank of England. They forced interest rates up without any evidence that doing so would reduce inflation. So far, the contrary is likely to be the case. And now they are using quantitative tightening to keep those rates artificially high - and well above those that markets might otherwise settle on given the state of the economy.

The result is not just a cost of living crisis.

Nor is it just a massive decline in the financial well-being of millions in this country.

It is also an alarming hike in rents, which are, however, insufficient to cover the costs of some highly-geared (over-borrowed) landlords who are selling their properties as quickly as they can, so increasing the scale of homelessness and disruption, whilst also removing property from the rental housing stock, at least temporarily. It's a perfect storm for the councils involved, and it can only get worse since it is the policy of the Bank of England to maintain high interest rates as inflation declines, which can only make rents increasingly unaffordable whilst forcing more landlords out of business.

I have lived, my whole adult life, through the project known as the property-owning democracy. It was based on the idea that property would make you a better, happier and richer person and responded to the simple, reasonable and powerful desire of very many people to own their home. The property-owning democracy would set you free. For Margaret Thatcher, for whom it was a defining and prodigiously successful concept, it was a “crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation”.

So she sold off council houses to their tenants and deregulated and liberalised mortgage markets. From 1980 to 1990 rates of home ownership rose from 55% to 67% of households. At the same time prices rose, almost trebling during her 11-year term. In general Thatcher’s government prided itself on fighting inflation, inflicting heavy costs on employment in an attempt to bring the annual rate down. But with property it was different. Inflation, when it came to homes, was to be celebrated. It was seen as a sign of economic virility, and it made those who had bought feel good. Succeeding governments followed her lead in encouraging both ownership and rising prices. Values more than trebled in the Blair era.

Eventually the inflationary part of the project defeated the ideal of widening enfranchisement. Newcomers to the market just couldn’t afford it, and from the mid-00s rates of ownership started to fall. At the same time the stock of council housing declined. The symptoms of what is now called the “housing crisis” became plainer and plainer – fewer and fewer young people buying, more living with their parents or in rented homes whose prices continue to rise. Private rents are now at their highest level ever, up 20% in some regions over the previous 12 months.

In January 2020 the median home price was $266,300, according to the National Association of Realtors. It's now $406,700 as of July – a 52% increase.

The White House hopes the initiative will alleviate both these problems, creating more housing and revitalizing the commercial real estate sector.

"This presents an area of opportunity to both increase housing supply while revitalizing main streets. It's a win-win," Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, told ABC News.

Conversions are faster than new construction, 20% cheaper, and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, the White House added.

As governments across Australia urgently seek solutions to the housing crisis, a number of councillors, housing groups and urban planners have raised concerns we might be sacrificing living standards and at risk of creating new urban slums.

The Fairbnb Co-op, which began in Europe in 2014, soft-launched a Canadian platform on Wednesday. It doesn’t have any listings yet, but once a critical number of hosts have signed up, the platform will officially launch in South Georgian Bay, Ont.

In many ways, FairBnb serves an identical function to its namesake. But it will be different from Airbnb in two important ways.

First, hosts must prove that the property is their principal residence, cutting out the estimated 50 per cent of hosts on Airbnb who manage multiple listings. And 50 per cent of the platform’s service fees go into developing community land trusts (CLTs), which are non-profit corporations that own land and use it to benefit their communities.

Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb's impact on residential communities.

We work towards a vision where communities are empowered with data and information to understand, decide and control the role of renting residential homes to tourists.

A surge in people being forced to live in bed and breakfasts and other temporary homes in England is costing the taxpayer £1.7bn a year, “shameful” council data analysed by the Local Government Association has revealed.

The worsening shortage of social housing and increasingly unaffordable private rents are among reasons councils are now paying for 104,000 households to live in temporary accommodation – more than at any time in the past 25 years.

[…] 

The LGA, the councils’ umbrella group, is demanding the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, use his coming autumn budget statement to increase housing benefit to make more private rented homes affordable to people on welfare, and to reform housing rules to allow councils to build more social housing.

“Council budgets are being squeezed and the chronic shortage of suitable housing across the country means that councils are increasingly having to turn to alternative options for accommodation at a significant cost,” said Darren Rodwell, the leader of the London borough of Barking and Dagenham and the LGA’s housing spokesperson. “Councils need to be given the powers and resources to build enough social homes for their residents so they can create a more prosperous place to live, with healthier and happier communities.”

At least eight MPs who spoke during a Parliamentary debate on renters’ rights yesterday were landlords, openDemocracy analysis has found.

Tenants’ groups told us they were concerned about a lack of transparency during the second reading of the Renters (Reform) Bill, with one MP forgetting to declare an interest until after the fact, while those with rental income below £10,000 a year were under no obligation to declare anything.

The city has unveiled a $36-billion plan to build 65,000 rental homes in Toronto over the next seven years, a target that would require a massive unconfirmed investment from the federal and provincial governments.

[…]

“We are reversing the destructive thinking over the past two decades … that only the private sector can build housing,” Chow said. “The path in front of us is ambitious. It is urgently needed.”