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As we know the 'clever' wheeze of shared ownership that was meant to make more affordable housing available is unravelling as the loophole of service fees is being exploited to raise the overall costs of homes (once the resident has been captured).
Its worth stressing (again) that only a massive increase in social housing (either built or re-purposed) can start to alleviate the problems of the UK dysfunctional housing market!
(and ending the Right to Buy!)
@ChrisMayLA6 Not just the UK, either.
Of itself, I don't think the right to buy is a bad thing.
The problem is that the revenue from it went to the central government, rather than being used to build new social housing stock, in the area from which it was derived.
Yes, fair comment; but as it is currently structured in England it is an impediment
@ArabellaLovejoy @ChrisMayLA6 Even more than the revenue issue, I consider the biggest flaw to be not including a covenant in the title deeds requiring the housing to remain owner occupied. We've ended up with a scheme, supposedly meant to increase owner occupation, resulting in houses being sucked into buy-to-let, with, in many cases, tax revenue being used to throw housing benefit at landlords to enable people to live in housing which was previously state owned.
@plock @ChrisMayLA6
A factor I hadn't considered, thanks for adding this point.
good point....
@plock @ArabellaLovejoy @ChrisMayLA6
For what it's worth, when we bought a shared-ownership place, there were three rules that were intended to fix this:
- You cannot by the place at all if you already own any property.
- You cannot sublet without the consent of the housing association. One of our neighbours took a postdoc position overseas and rented out their house with this consent but it wouldn't be permitted if you were just trying to make money from buy-to-let.
- The housing association had right of first refusal if you sold. They could buy the property at valuation price before you could put it on the market and then make it available as shared ownership again.
The loophole was that you could staircase to 100% and then the last two conditions no longer applied, so someone wanting to buy it as buy-to-let could loan you the money to staircase to 100% then but the whole property from you and have the loan repaid immediately afterwards.
@ChrisMayLA6 I never understood how shared ownership was supposed to work.
If first time buyers can afford, say, £50k, that's what a 2-up-2-down will go for. Create a scheme that means they can afford a £100k house, and the same houses will go up in price to £100k. So the first time buyers spend the same, but only own half the house.
Every scheme based on increasing the spending power of buyers has the same basic flaw of pushing up house prices.
Yup, your last point is the key one....
@ChrisMayLA6 Councils not being able to build replacement stock for properties sold under right to buy was an(other) act of political spite by Thatcher from which this country has *never* recovered.
Agreed; long-term vandalism made to look like 'freedom'
@ChrisMayLA6 As my late mate Danny Kustow and friends played at the time - "freedom from the likes of you!"
Mixed with this issue is the notion of building generational wealth. Because the idea behind ownership was capacity to build generational wealth. Now Singapore, that most capitalist of nations provides, a remarkable amount of social housing, but apparently it’s structured in such a way that individuals can own their apts, but in the way that does not lead to pricing absurdities we see in the US and UK.
..
Yes, when ultra-capitalists say they want the UK to be Singapore-on-Thames, they never mention the social housing... I wonder why not?
I still remember fondly an exchange on mastodon where an individual from the UK was complaining about the sewage system I think, and an individual from Singapore chimed in, report that Singapore experimented with neoliberalism in the 90s, and where privatization blew up in their faces, they simply ripped it out.
My own take away: this was due to Singapore leaders, being true businessman, were interested in what worked, they were not married to an ideology
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @ChrisMayLA6 Singapore it is very interesting. It is a one-family state, and therefore not a real democracy. Yet, I think they have among the lowest taxes in the world.
So from a certain angle, their experiment with classical liberalism has been a roaring success!
Since I am libertarian, I cannot accept their authoritarian side when it comes to surveillance and punishment such as flogging, so sadly I cannot live there.
Fortunately there are countries with equally low
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @ChrisMayLA6 taxes and less surveillance and flogging that I can move to. =)
Yes Singapore is particularly singular, but also of limited relevance de to being a city state with all that that entails.... but an interesting set of policy experiments nonetheless
@ChrisMayLA6 @GhostOnTheHalfShell Maybe city states are the way of the future? Democracy was designed to ru na city state, so maybe it's a kind of "optimum size" where people feel that decisions really matter and affect them? The government could also change and adapt more quickly if it runs only a city state vs a country.
Its an interesting thought; certainly early merchant capitalism (of the sort tracked by Braudel) was city-state based.... and when we look at the mosaic of pre-national Italy, the states were nodes with hinterlands that supported them....
In the UK, one could see a devolution (which is sort of already being posited) towards areas with metropolitan centres started to move a little in that direction - all will depend on the control of fiscal powers, of course
@ChrisMayLA6 @GhostOnTheHalfShell True. I remember that from a history book series I was reading on the middle ages.
Would be fascinating, if that balance would be the optimum for quality of life, while theoretically, stopping political entities from achieving the size that starts world wars.
Then of course there is always the defense problem, as a small entity of city state size, if the neighbours are big.
@ChrisMayLA6 @GhostOnTheHalfShell Threats of nuclear, blackmail or biological warfare I think are the only destructive strategies that small city states could leverage to get any kind of safety from bigger neighbours.
On the side of peace there is of course trade. Ideally both would realize that they benefit far more from that, but all it takes is a crazy dictator to smash that beautiful thing to pieces.
The recognition of the mutual advantage of trade ebbs & flows across history as we know, but for the most part city states, due to their size need to trade or develop empires (think of the Venetian empire for instance), which the latter brings us back to the larger territorial units.... so, one might say city states can only survive in a economic network with each other, before on or other starts to accrue land & needs to both expand & defend that land....
@ChrisMayLA6 @GhostOnTheHalfShell True. Look at the greek city states and what led to their downfall. More difficult to coordinate than the invading empires. Maybe if they had more trade and were less antagonistic things would have turned out differently?
I think the game changer today when it comes to possible futures of city states in a world of nation states is the low cost and enormous destructive powers of modern asymmetrical warfare.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @ChrisMayLA6 I wish we had the same here rather than religion on both left and right. Few on the actual left will accept the fact that privatising BT and many other things worked, nobody on the right wants to talk about how a load of it fails.
Not helped by the fact half the people with opinions are too young to even remember the other side of the coin, be it the GPO telephone service, British Leyland, or having energy services that answered directly to a minister.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @ChrisMayLA6 very much electoral, business & lobbying reforms in UK to address exactly this. Collaboration, not ideology.
But to get back to the topic of building wealth, the underlying issue is the ability to accumulate wealth for retirement. That really speaks to a different topic of how individuals can draw on resources after they retire or to start a business for instance.
There are many different kinds of community financing provided by cultures from all over the world. An example would be the forms of community financing traditional cultures have, from the Americas and from Asia.
..,
I think a discussion of securing a nest egg some form of wealth who are the general population either for retirement or other projects needs a discussion.
Usury is a very treacherous means of financing a project. For instance, a currency sovereign can simply issue money for its own projects without interest rates doesn’t need to offer bonds.
Commercial financing always comes with usury
But, that is dedicated on the inability of the state to provide such later-life support.... which may well be a pragmatic response to the contemporary situation but not the only way forward
Well, that’s always going to be a tricky issue. I think the current system where accumulation of wealth from home is really become quite distorted.
You have to go into debt in your 20s and pay four times the price of the building you purchase and then somehow you have developed personal wealth in the process.
That only slightly makes sense if the cost of the building continuously rises. It’s a recipe for a bubble and housing market generally is.
yes & once you're a home owner, you're sort of invested in the inflationary aspect
That’s probably the most evil thing, manageable, too modification and financial of a basic necessity.
I think our religious institution passing through such an era we codify had to think of it as a mortal sin. But at one point, the church actually considered interest charges, usury, as asin.
The history on that is somewhat interesting, but the church at one point became dependent on lending so they created a new term interest to distinguish it from usury. 
But I think the resolution to the housing crisis is also going to have to encompass someway disentangling the wealth, security of home ownership of property from property. It’ll be hard to get rid of the incentive for housing inflation without doing so.
Indeed, and that is what its so difficult; the system (and not by accident) has been set up so a large number of voters while complaining about the impact of the housing market's dysfunction stand to lose to much from meaningful reform to vote for it
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @ChrisMayLA6 traditional community financing fascinates me although the American banking seems to have killed it in the U.S. Do you have any preferred resources you recommend for learning more about it?
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @ChrisMayLA6 interesting! Going to have to dig into this a bit deeper, I can think of so many applications…
As you say the UK's housing market is dysfunctional. But that dysfunctionality is by design, ultimately geared towards concentrating wealth the hands of elites, and it's why we're in the situation we are today.