211–220 of 598 posts
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This sounds like a reasonable trade off which doesn’t hVe the risk of uprooting people from their primary residence.
I like it too, but it seems to incentivize sprawl. If people attempt to lease land the LVT will be passed to their tenants. To avoid paying the LVT, tenants will look for new construction.
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I think you are missing the point. All landowners are investors. They bought the property to make money. That makes them an investor. Maybe not a coporation but an investor.
Surely the Dutch are not using your proposed definition, because that would make zero sense unless they wanted to turn the Netherlands into another Chernobyl exclusion zone. That seems unreasonable, so they must be using a different one.
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Note, this targets anyone buying houses to rent out. It does not (like london considered) tax un-lived-in houses. This is just a weird bandaid. Mostly trying to blame landlords for this housing crisis when mortgage tax credits, and scarcity due to weird eco regulation shenanigans are to blame.
There aren't mortgage tax credits in the UK, and I have no idea what you mean by "eco regulation shenanigans"
The eco regulation shenanigans is about nitrogen emissions. They are limited by European regulations near protected areas. The government ignored and worked around these regulations for a long time. Then environmental parties sued, and we were so far above the limits it was essentially ruled "no more emissions". Whilst building new houses causes a decent amount of emissions. This meant that country wide, getting building permits became almost impossible.
This contributed partially to our current housing shortage.
I don't understand how this would work. How do people rent? Obviously many people can't or do not wish to own their house for any number of reasons. Who will own houses that are rented? I used to live in Amsterdam as an expat, and rented from a landlord who owned several homes in Amsterdam. Would she not be able to own and rent these homes under this scheme? The social housing system seemed to be abused when I was th…
Designations. That's how. Some houses are built and intended to be rented out to people. These houses are constructed entirely by companies (or people) for that purpose alone. Other houses are meant to be for purchase, and purchase only. If you purchase a house like this and then rent it out, that should be considered breaking the intended designation. So if you as an individual want to own multiple houses to rent ou…
In the long term, the ethically right answer seems pretty clearly to me to be a land value tax [0]. But due to encouragement of home ownership [1], that's not going to democratically tenable in a lot of countries for 20+ years. Unfortunate situation. [0] In 1879, a man asked "How come all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George,…
The easier thing is just make is easier to build more housing, denser if needed, to fulfill demand.
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Vacant properties in London are a red herring. Last time I checked official number they accounted for 1% of the housing stock, bearing in mind that a number of properties are always being refurbished at any given time. In general it does not make sense to keep a property empty unless perhaps it is an extreme luxury one. South Kensington is one of the most expensive area of London and not representative at all. Whatev…
The median price for a property in London is £600K, the average is over £1M today. That means that normal people cannot afford to buy anything in London even with HTB which is a terrible policy the people who can afford to use it are already in the top percentiles. A £600K property as a first time buyer requires you to have about £100K to get on a property ladder. 10% deposit for a 90% LTV mortgage is £60K, stamp dut…
What a load of rubbish. HTB really helped us when buying by giving 5 years of interest free
We bought a 240k house with a 12k deposit and 48k htb. Moving costs etc meant we had to find about £17k, which we borrowed.
Assuming you do that now, HTB means paying £647 a month on the mortgage and £330 a month on repaying the deposit. Total of £977pcm.
After 5 years we sold for 240k with £48k htb and £160k mortgage, leaving us with 32k in equity. We could have remortgaged and repaid the htb at that point for a total outlay of £911pcm (with about £500 in fees)
With two earners on a middle 28k a year that's falls into well into the "affordable" bucket.
Even in London, a 600k house with htb will mean a £30k deposit (a problem) and a £330k mortgage. Two people on 41k each can borrow up to £368k with nationwide which gives an idea about affordability (you'll have to knock some off for things like service charges which are ubiquitious in new houses)
And 41k a year with a coalition loan means you have £30,310.51 per year after student loan, not before. If you still have a labour loan from pre-2012 you'll be paying an extra £600 a year.
All that's assuming a 600k loan. Reality is that help to buy homes aren't that expensive. This is a decent sized 2 bed flat for £375k.
https://www.helptobuyagent2.org.uk//property-search/property...
Personally I think you'd be crazy to live in London when there are far more reasonable places to live just half an hour out of a one 1 station and far far less cost, but it London is affordable for people with two London incomes.
If you're single on minimum wage and wanting to live in central London? Well tough. Move somewhere else. Plenty of choice for houses in Crewe and Stoke, and plenty of minimum wage jobs.
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The real problem is how much the bank earns off the interest it charges you throughout your life while it had to do what?... create new money from nothing into the money supply with special permissions given to it by the government. This is why housing is so expensive to begin with. This bullshit needs to stop.
Banks don’t get to create money. Quantitive Easing isn’t something banks can call up on demand and it isn’t banks getting loads of free money. Instead they sell certain slightly risky assets to the government at a slightly higher price than they would be worth without QE. This small price difference is the free money but the bigger difference is that the banks have more liquid cash to use for e.g. making loans. I thi…
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Another Cornishman here (Par). The financial destitution and how much harder they have to work for the same things I do in the South East is unsustainable. Cornwall has Luther to the right politically and that’s because there’s been some useful scapegoats. Now those scapegoats have been slain and things are getting worse not better I hope we’ll see policies that are focused on root cause issues instead of ideology (l…
Unfortunately, the British press and all the wealthy people with second homes still have Brexit as a scapegoat for why cafes and shops in tourist destinations can't find staff. Never mind the fact that AirBNB and second homes have pushed up house prices and rents to the point that it's impossible to live there on the kind of pay those jobs have, according to the media it's all the fault of Brexit driving away the for…
Forgive me since I’m American, but wasn’t getting rid of foreigners taking jobs one of the selling points of Brexit?
Amen to this. Two case studies from the UK I've been thinking about recently: 1) Visiting London and spending time in South Kensington - walking back to hotel at night, only about 30% of houses had any lights on. Suggestion is the others are effectively uninhabited, and a search on RightMove shows properties sell for £20-£30m for a 4/5 bed. This isn't normal Londoners, it's outside investment. 2) Cornwall, where I li…
Has it ever been possible to buy a house on minimum wage?