Watch BOOMERS, exclusively on Nebula, today: go.nebula.tv/boomers?ref=tomnicholas Everyone on the production team (and there's a lot of them!) has worked so hard on BOOMERS. It's packed with incisive interviews and investigation into intergenerational inequality, housing, pensions, and much more. All told through a globe-trotting journey to uncover the lives and legacy of the Baby Boomer generation. It also features my mum! Thanks so much to everyone who's already signed up to Nebula in anticipation. I can't wait for you all to see it and to hear what you think!
My father told me about when he finished school at age 15 and worked as a running boy in Stockholm in 1949. Landlords were so desperate to find tenants that they let people "test-live" their apartment one month for free. Yeah! "- Creditworthiness? I'm a 15 year old running boy." "- Deal!" And those were smack in the city center, the same apartments that now cost $600,000 to buy (can't rent anything in the entire city anymore). Btw, when he was fired as a running boy, which seems to have happened frequently, he said that he just walked across the street, saw a note in the window of another shop looking for running boys, and was hired. Life seems to have been much simpler back then. With human to human relations, and using reason. Instead of this monstrous corrupt anonymous bureaucracy "regulating" everything as an imposing middleman between us all everywhere all of the time. So that no one is allowed to simply solve the problem at hand anymore.
So basically, "About 70 years ago, people had problems that they worked together to solve. Then in the 80's they realized they could make A LOT more money if they undid those solutions for the next three generations of people...who hadn't lived through all that stuff before, and therefore had no idea what was being done to them until it was much too late." Copy and paste this for most societal problems we have right now; and freely share it between the UK and USA.
Don't forget, "Brainwash them into thinking there's no other way for the economy to work while they get scammed by private companies owning basic public services."
Not entirely true, in the 1950s the anti-labour/socialist education came into being. As the children were indoctrinated through their schools & Hollywood. As their grandparents began to retire & pass away, neo-liberalism crept in. The implosion of the Iron Curtain 30 years later gave the neo-liberals all the ammunition they needed to bend the Boomers & GenX into submission. I lived through the entire charade & became one of its critical opponents. I hope younger generations will never make the same mistakes but human experience is fickle because myths are what civilisation is built on from the dogma of religion to the dogma of democracy. We live in a post modern world where capitalism & democracy are synonymous terminologies but they are contradictory. In the words of Orwell, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
I love that thatcher on housing is essentially: "cheap council housing is too much government dependency, so we will replace it with an expensive government-subsidized mortgage program" so smart bestie
It was tactical, she knew that in the future it would be easier to get rid of the mortgages than it would be to get rid of the housing. And she was right.
What really concerns me is a huge number of people simply deny this is an issue and just say "you're all lazy" and "if you don't like it just buy a house". Like being sympathetic is an impossible thing now. My girlfriend has worked for the NHS for nearly 20 years, she has excellent qualifications and by any standards is hugely successful, knowledge and valuable to society. When we were house hunting together, every property we found had a waiting list of at least 20 people and the prices were outrageously out of our price range, even with her excellent job. Can anyone seriously, with a straight face, tell me that a GP of 20 years should be unable to afford her own home? And that a waiting list of 20 families per property is in any way acceptable??
To answer you, no, of course not. I dont understand how we have such a huge proportion of the population who are struggling so much yet theres a significant lack of effort being put in to solving the problem. We have a government for a reason, and they're seriously lacking here. If anyone is lazy, its the government, not you/your girlfriend.
What really angers me, is that it's the right-leaning Tories that caused the issue, and they have the gall to blame the problem on immigration. People will vote Reform because this has not been explained to them propoerly or they're too ignorant to listen.
@@colinofay7237 We voted against Corbyn. Failing voting for him, we did not choose to install him by any means despite that. We have the government we have for a reason.
@@czarkusa2018I'm broadly on your side but are you seriously suggesting we should have had a people's revolution to install Jeremy Corbyn as our glorious leader?
Liberal Capitalism is not going to solve our problems for good niether is Fascism or reactionary politics going to help as it barely has the the problem pinned down or lacks in principle
In a Word... Greed! Some of us don't like to take their fair share... And would rather take the whole damm cake! Along with the table AND the chairs! And leave nothing behind for the rest of us! And then when we complain we get labelled as anti-Capitalists! Not that I mind being called that! 😊 Greed is a VERY powerful motivator for some! And the damage it can cause is simply incalculable! Given the highly restrictive resources... That we ALL have to share!
@@amymak93 Here in Canada Mulroney was our version of Thatcher/Reagan, at around the same time. I wonder how many other countries had a similar leader or shift in/around the 80s?
You missed the most critical reason Thatcher, (and others) wanted working class ownership of houses. It is impossible for a worker to strike for more than a few months if he has a mortgague;- the house will be reposessed. On the other hand local councils could not throw their tennents out, nor could for example coalmine owners, or many other professions, who also provided housing. Indeed most local councils in mining or heavy industrial areas, were very sympathetic to chalenges to Tory power which was decimating their communities. Thus it was a massively effective way of removing the unions', and Labour Local Authorities' power.
@@MP_PapHew that type of short term thinking is why people become generationaly poor. A never ending poor of working all your life and never having anything to show for it, nothing to improve your own position or that of your family. We see that today already, with welfare families. A endless loop for many welfare children, they grow up just to live off of welfare to then go on to have children who will do they same. Always being at the mercy of handouts. No thank you
This video just once again reiterates a point for me. One for which my father, just doesn't understand. He goes on about how Reagan and thatcher etc were great for the economy. All the while not understanding what they effectively did. My analogy is essentially they sold the seed grain. Essentially they took assets of the public state, one with had broader intangible benefits, and sold them off. In doing so it looked "great" for their economies. They cut rates and lowered taxes (sort of) so everyone was like omg everything is roaring. The issue is, what they produced was a net weaker result. Less competitive companies. More of expensive housing. Systems rife for exploitation. Government isn't the answer for everything. I don't think the government should be in the business of making smart phones for example. The issue is, some aspects benefit the broader society and make that society more competitive globally. More expensive housing means higher wages needed. If those wages are going to landlords that is an unproductive use of capital relative to goods or services. Expensive education means a lower productivity workforce as education is fundamentally a method for labor saving creation. Lastly, having Healthcare seek profits means lower employment mobility and reduced entrepreneurial drive. All and all, the thatcher, and Reagan and mulroney in my case, FUCKED, us.
I saw it put a bit differently. Thatcher+Reagan instituted certain economic measures/solutions that WERE necessary at the time, but needed to be temporary, because in the long term these solutions become a problem decades later. If they had been temporary, as they very well should have been, the problems of today could have easily been avoided. To add to that, its not like this was the first (or second) time that economic measures/solutions became harmful later on
Perfectly said…. I wish there was a way out of it but the British people seem resilient to common sense and instead favour easy immediate financial gains over economic stability and swooning over immigration as the root cause of issues rather than looking at its own history.
This is so true. Im 55, gen x. In the late 80s i bought my own flat, rental properties were non existent, and getting a 100% mortgage was cheaper than renting. In the early 90s however there was a banking crisis, and mortgage interest rates went from 2.5% to 16% in under 2 years. My flat was repossessed leaving me and my 2 small boys homeless. I was given a council flat, and as my family grew transferred to a house. I have been in my current post war built council house for almost 24 years. I am very lucky to be on an old style tenancy agreement my kids however unless they can buy, do not have that choice. They have to rent from private landlords at extortionate prices. Its shameful.
@GillMosley-wo9mf they have this land for growing food because they were built with experience of WW2 and WW1 in mind. Food self-sufficiency was a HUGE deal back then, and still is, though people perceive food self-sufficiency as less important now.
im 44, the inbetweeners.. the banks passed off their liabilities for all of us wearing hoodies, that they didnt see as a good investment. We just refused to fit in. Like so many generations before us, each a disappointment to those who raised us
@@Libertaro-i2uyep we're lucky to have a big garden but the quality of the house is so bad my dad got permission to do work on the house while renting because it's not a safe livable environment I was breathing in black mold for years
I haven't watched the video yet and have no idea what you'll be saying in it, but I'm going to assume the the "Almost" in the title means that Thatcher (and by extent, Reagan) fucked everything up.
she only had a 4 minute segment in a 43 minute video... she increased homeownership by giving discount (33%) and no deposit on property that was owned by the government (council homes)...... but stopped new council homes from being built because she took the money and used it for tax cuts for the wealthy and paying down debt
Summed it up. Thatcher didn’t want poor people to be lazy leaning on councils. But the rich can be lazy leaning on the inefficient economic system they profit off. 😢
@@johnmccrossan9376I wish I could give a direct url, but youtube blocks those. Just type into google "truthorfiction" and then the quote, and it should return the truthorfiction site breakdown on its resurgence of popularity, as well as when he said it and why. I'll try to send the url in the next message.
@@johnmccrossan9376 Truthorfiction has an article about it if you want to look it up. I tried to cite it exactly, but those replies look like they've been deleted.
I bought a house in 2021. The insurance and property taxes have doubled since then, and now costs more than I ever paid in rent in my life. I feel that I would be better off living in a studio apartment in a warehouse again and investing the money in anything else.
i advise you to invest in stocks to balance out your real estate, Even the worst recessions offer wonderful buying opportunities in the markets if you're cautious. Volatility can also result in excellent short-term buy and sell opportunities. This is not financial advice, but buy now
You are right! I've diversified my 450K portfolio across various market with the aid of an investment coach, I have been able to generate a little bit above $830k in net profit across high dividend yield stocks, ETF and bonds.
Where may one locate an experienced FA? I like the notion of employing their services, but it's terrible that recent stock market tragedies have started to happen more frequently.
Conservatism (whether it be American or British) holds with the simple idea that unbridled free market forces hurt nobody... Well, nobody worth mentioning, anyway.
That's not conservatism, it's libertarianism. Conservatism is massively damaging to the UK, but not through the free market forces it allows, more those that it forbids. It is the reason, for example, we are one of the few developed countries yet to form a legal structure for private e scooter ownership.
I cannot think of an unbridled economy. These days economies are run by the state and legislated to within an inch of their lives. Conservatives just allow society more freedom than do socialists, since they prefer a more evolutionary approach. .
@@FlatDerrick I don't disagree but I also have never heard anyone ask for a legal structure for private e scooter ownership. On the list of problems this country has that's not even top 10,000.
@@HarryBillinghurstForget I mentioned e-scooters then if it isn't relevant to your own bubble. Substitute in nightclubs, bars, alcohol, cannabis or the myriad of other taxable trading opportunities that Brits are denied thanks to 'Think of the Children' style ideology.
tbf conservatism was originally about power of the monarchy and the aristocracy and preserving the traditional hierarchy left over from feudalism. however in the last half century "the conservatives" have been completely co-opted by right-wing libertarianism which is a completely different ideology centred around free-market capitalism, which could end up being even worse than feudalism as it doesn't even have common land, or a social pressure for "noblesse oblige".
This video is honestly amazing but it's very hard to watch. Hearing about a government looking after its people and prioritising housing is making me tear up when i think about how hard it is right now.
Its not even just that . To think how better off the uk would of been if thatcher hadnt privitizied everything ontop of ruining every generation after the boomers from getting affordable housing is GUT RETCHING . Its fucking devastating
It makes me think how evil, immoral and unethical Thatcher was to reverse all of the good work. I cant believe the UK could built literally millions of homes in just a few years and now we have [a deliberate] housing shortage
This was also the same government that introduced the NHS and British Rail, British Steel, British Coal etc. They brought the infrastructure that's critical to support a nation under the control of the nation and provided services to all that allowed them to... well... live. It benefited everyone, even the rich. It's harder to exploit workers when they're coughing up blood so having an accessible health service helps.
@@notmenotme614 Not just Thatcher, but Tories in general. They hate the idea of helping the masses, their entire MO is help the already monied minority who own almost everything, so they can more easily own everything else.
Our economy struggling with uncertainties, housing issues, foreclosures, global fluctuations, and pandemic aftermath, causing instability. Rising inflation, sluggish growth, and trade disruptions need urgent attention from all sectors to restore stability and stimulate growth
In particular, amid inflation, investors should exercise caution when it comes to their exposure and new purchases. It is only feasible to get such high yields during a recession with the guidance of a qualified specialist or reliable counsel.
True, initially I wasn't quite impressed with my gains, opposed to my previous performances, I was doing so badly, figured I needed to diversify into better assets, I touched base with a portfolio-advisor and that same year, I pulled a net gain of 550k...that's like 7times more than I average on my own.
Julianne Iwersen Niemann is the licensed fiduciary I use. Just research the name. You’d find necessary details to work with a correspondence to set up an appointment...
Maybe the real treasure was the tax cuts we made along the way. 22:52 "A shift essentially away from people having a decent home as a need and a right, towards people being able to use homes as an asset, as something to get wealth." I think this is a big part of the issue. For homes to be affordable, the price has to go down. For homes to be a wealth generator, the price has to go up. Isn't it fundamentally contradictory for homes to be both affordable and be an appreciating asset?
If home prices rose and wages both rose at the rate of inflation, homeownership could be a way to basically save money that wouldn't lose value to inflation without pricing people out of first-time home buying. When a country's major political parties all want home values/prices to rise _faster_ than inflation while also suppressing wage growth, though...
@@georgesdelatour There's no increasing competition in the job market in most countries where house prices grow faster than wages, so reality disagrees with you.
@@M_M_ODonnell If home prices rose exactly the same as wages and inflation, then homes wouldn't be wealth generators, their value would be stable, so they wouldn't be wealth generators and every generation would have exactly the same hardships getting a home. So you're not talking about the same scenario as @Anthony-tw9bw is. On the other hand, if house prices were dropping, then every generation would be richer and richer since they could more and more easily afford a home. So basically if you want your population's wealth to stay the way it is, then you need house wealth to match wages and inflation. If you want your population's wealth to drop, then you want houses to become more expensive (corrected for wage inflation) over time. If on the other hand you want your population's wealth to grow, then you want housing to become cheaper. You know, like televisions. They're constantly improving and the basic models keep getting cheaper and cheaper until they're obsolete. Same should happen to housing. So there would still be space for people to spend stupid money on housing, but the average quality would constantly be growing for everyone.
You don't need decent housing to survive. Shelter is a basic survival need, but this could just as easily be met in a tent or shack as it can in a palatial mansion. Also, what's wrong with people making a living by owning and maintaining rental properties? Not only does a landlord provide their tenants with housing, he or she also provides certain maintenance services. People who are renters have fewer responsibilities than homeowners, for example, if a major appliance or fixture goes kaput, it is the responsibility of the landlord to make replacements or repairs or pay someone else to do it. Renters also tend to be freed from yardwork, painting, etc.
I've lived in the UK for 5 years now and I can't do it anymore. I spend 55% of my take-home income on housing (rent, council tax, and bills) and the only way I can afford to live here at all is to have a flatmate. I will never own my own home if I stay in the UK. I will never be able to afford a car or a dog, and forget about children. There is mold in every bathroom I have had on this island and I am so concerned for what that means for my health. Housing really is atrocious. I could put up with all the other cons of being an immigrant in the UK if the housing was good - or at least fine - but it's really not. I can not wait to move back to my home country, even though it means having to live with my parents for a year or two before I can get a mortgage.
Try America if possible, not much better but I’m 24 and able to have good housing in a beautiful area and a son. Pursuing education as well, and have a hopeful future. Best of luck to you
This was what prompted me to move into the sticks in Scotland. Housing prices are still stupidly high, but actually theoretically affordable. Rent is still legally capped (even if not very strictly anymore), which has helped massively.
City council owed housing (mostly apartments) is really big in Sweden. They are run as for profit business but all the share are owned by the city and the board are politically appointed. Not super cheep, but they actually build affordable stuff and not only high end.
I lived in Växjö and the housing market is as bad as the UK. Just don't want Sweden's PR to outstrip Sweden's increasing decline re: equality and it's societal safety net.
We’ve had exactly the same problems as the uk since the 80s. Almännyttan has been systematically sold off and the lack of funding is making councils mostly unable to build. Hyresrättsföreningen doesn’t prevent much when market rents are looming and rents are rising by 5-9 percent every single year. Renters pay on average 27% of their income on rent in sweden, and for young people or people in cities it is even more
@@evcarr3008I agree sweden is bad but unless you’ve lived in the uk you will not understand. I’ve lived in Stockholm, gothenburg, the us and now the uk and here is by far the worst. My friends have mold in their apartments, rents are at 13 000kr without bills with roommates or more for tiny single beds. Their houses have poor insulation and are generally dirty. It’s wild.
It's not about cruelty, it's about funding aristocrats who live off rent money. Rents must never decline. Even in Glasgow, a city emptying out, rents remained high
Owners were leaving renters did not. So demand increased for rentals as owners removed their rentals from the markets. Resulting in too many renters chasing fewer rentals. Supply and demand. Rents increse as a result. To bring down rental prices, we need MORE rentals to meet the demand of the renters. It is that simple. By vilifying landlords, forcing then to sell will only increse rental prices due to there being fewer of them
@paleoleft of course it is cruel, but they aren't doing this to be cruel for fun. They do this because they're aristocrats who don't want to work. They probably wouldn't last very long if they tried.
Been saying it for years in Canada... when we stopped building social housing we started to see the private sector stagnate.. and when something is not a choice, i.e. a need.. private sector will often only ever do the bare minimum and you need the state to either take up the slack or literally compete with the private sector so it does not get complacent.
Yeees, and exactly why I seriously hope we don't use a ton of gov money, pushed to private developers, to build more homes (that the private developers will continue to own and set their own market prices) as then we'll be back in 10 or 15 years wondering why it cost so much and why they're falling apart. I'm done paying ridiculous rent to a landlord who can then go use all this cash flow to build/buy more properties, lately "luxury developments" (which really just means, we've ensured the bare minimum standards are met for 30% more rent!- but you've got a dog walk area at least!) before the average Canadian can save up enough- it's a brutal imbalance. I won't let my experiences renting in Canada as a young Canadian be ignored. We need proper change, and I worry that none of our future leaders will actually make a difference. Conservative, Liberal, NDP- I don't feel like any parties are truly aiming to help middle class or lower, only helping corporations make more on our backs. Edit: Regardless of any of my comments made; I agree, we 1000% need more government built/ owned housing.
For solving this problem in Canada, we also have the added challenge of needing political good will on both the federal and provincial levels (since housing is the province of, well, provinces).
Very important you mentioned the revolution in Russia being a motivator for the initial housing plans; whilst we didn't get a revolution here the rich were definitely scared of one. Once that fear passed they got to do whatever they wanted with privatisation projects like what Thatcher got away with
Britain was always good at that: reforming and compromising to cut off revolutionary stressors at the pass. It's honestly a pretty good explanation for why they still have a monarchy, since one of the few times they had a king who tried to rule despotically, they chopped his head off like Louis XVI.
Watching vids on the early 20th century, It's fascinating to see how each country presents its content of this period only in terms of its own locality. All of these schemes were carried out globally by one tiny minority, the super rich. We're living through exactly the same scam today and few of us ever think of it in terms of the open collusion they don't even bother to hide this time around
What surprises me when visiting the UK is how poor many neighborhoods look. Here in the Netherlands even the poorer areas are looked after, have a lot of green spaces, proper side walks and cycling infrastructure. To be fair, if I travel to Belgium I have a similar experience. But not as bad as in the UK. Obviously the UK has a lot of beautiful cities with nice architecture mostly concentrated in the centre. But having visited people in the suburbs of London and seen many other suburban areas all over the UK, including Scotland, it all feels very poor to me.
For centuries the UK has been ruled by the kind of people that would sooner burn money in front of a homeless person than give them the money. That's why it looks so poor - our rulers would genuinely pay extra to make society worse. Our schools and hospitals are far more expensive, but are also literally falling apart right now.
@amhuman5138 I like towns like York, Cambridge and my favorite Edinburgh. So their are nice city centres but to be fair also many ugly ones. But I agree the Netherlands also wins big here, with almost every center of town looking great. Except for the really new ones like Lelystad and Almere, who were built the last 50 years..
@@sanderdeboer6034 They're a few exceptions, although I do want to add one to your list: Bath. Because of a certain event about 80 years ago a lot of our stuff got destroyed, and it just so happened to be the worst era of architecture, so way too much of our nation is disgusting brutalist slabs.
Thing is, when you feel poor and trodden on, you don't look after your area either. So there's a lot of graffiti, broken public utilities, falling apart public transport and just general grime and littering. People can't feel proud when they feel disadvantaged. It's not everyone, obviously, but poverty breeds more poverty and dissatisfaction.
Back in the day, when I purchased my first home to live-in; that was Miami in the early 1990s, first mortgages with rates of 8 to 9% and 9% to 10% were typical. People will have to accept the possibility that we won't ever return to 3%. If sellers must sell, home prices will have to decline, and lower evaluations will follow. Pretty sure I'm not alone in my chain of thoughts.
If anything, it'll get worse. Very soon, affordable housing will no longer be affordable. So anything anyone want to do, I will advise they do it now because the prices today will look like dips tomorrow. Until the Fed clamps down even further, I think we're going to see hysteria due to rampant inflation. You can't halfway rip the band-aid off.
consider moving your money from the housing market to financial markets or gold due to high mortgage rates and tough guidelines. Home prices may need to drop significantly before things stabilize. Seeking advice from a financial advisor who understands the market could be helpful in making the right decisions.
There are a handful of experts in the field. I've experimented with a few over the past years, but I've stuck with ‘’ Carol Vivian Constable” for about five years now, and her performance has been consistently impressive. She’s quite known in her field, look-her up.
I find it hard to blame buy-to-occupy residents. I’m looking hard at policy that encourages the collecting of dozens of properties, treating them like shares and not a human necessity. It’s one of the most horrendous things any government can do to its population and had lead to untold social problems they think they can solve by building more prisons but, I don’t know, isn’t keeping people out of prisons more worthwhile an endeavour?
@@Libertaro-i2uyou're so right, since when has been alive been important too? Why bother living decently let's go back to stone tools and the woods. You show the way I think your effort will really be motivating for us people that still hesitate between liking living correctly and just dying on the street.
I'm an urban planning student currently writing a paper on social housing in Canada compared to in Europe, and this video is the story of so many countries. You go from quality social housing for all, to neoliberals destroying it and telling you to buy a home instead, and now no one can afford a home, private rentals, and there's no social housing. It all goes back to neoliberalism.
@@danke1150 it's like 2 million and your the 2 biggest country in the world. Go blame Walmart that's been using it's pull with America to force Canada to keep the pipes open and the cheap exploitable labor flowing in. Don't be a little coward, stand up to the companies!
The washing machine comment is especially funny considering most people I know in New England are forced to lug their clothing to laundromats in below freezing winters because not only are washer and dryer not included in most housing, but there aren't even hookups for such machines even if you decide to try and bring your own
I think one of the key problems is that house price growth is considered sacrosanct in the UK and homeowners (which are still the majority of voters) are primed to vehemently oppose anything that'll bring down their precious house price even in the slightest. Even home improvements are often thought in terms of how positively/ negatively they'll affect the house price rather than whether they'll make living ok your own home more pleasant and comfortable. And until homeowners are the majority of the population and we tackle this sentiment, there will be no meaningful steps to resolve the housing crisis. I've personally just bought my first flat and I just don't understand why I'm meant to obsess about my house price and in its name block any opportunity for my neighbours to have quality affordable housing in my area. If more housing means my house price falls so be it, if it brings me into negative equity, so be it, I'll stay put for a couple of years, but that's all minor issues compared to rampant homelessness in the area and the increase of crime and antisocial behaviour that inevitably comes with it.
I got two words for you: "Planning permission". The planning office was sold to the public as a means of ensuring people are provided with essential infrastructure. These days it's used mostly as a means of restricting the housing supply so as to keep prices artificially high.
One of the biggest wins from the most recent budget that seems to be mostly unreported was ensuring right to buy proceeds go to local councils. With some small tweaks to make sure funding is available to actually build places that small change might make it viable for councils to start building again. Another potentially huge idea could be giving powers to councils to be able to buy land which has planning approved but no construction for years due to private builders sitting on assets to drip feed supply via eminent domain. We're in a national emergency. Those resources (land) need to be put to use. It could also be a huge jobs program. Get younger people into construction and gove them skills for life.
As far as I am aware it is practically illegal for local authorities to finance the construction of social housing themselves. This was passed around the time on Right-to-Buy, and it's why they can only team up with housing associations and community-interest-companies now when it comes to building new stock.
@RichTapestry that may well have been the case at the time. Yet another evil inflicted on us by Thatcher. It looks like even the Tories under Johnson were giving councils a bit more leeway with how they fund new developments. Allowing them to borrow to build. With all the cash from right to buy sales going back to local councils it might even be profitable for councils to start building again. A big remaining issue I believe is getting land. I think they have to pay the cost priced as if the land had already been developed. Freeing up councils to be able to acquire land at reasonable rates is probably a sensible next step. Hopefully some of the bolder councils will take the ball and run with it now.
There should also be provisions for councils to be able to buy housing that's been empty for x number of years at slightly below or at the local average or something. There are thousands of properties that sit empty, many with no apparent owners. In which case they should be able to just seize them. If nothing else it can help get rid of potentially dangerous structures that haven't been maintained and have a chance of collapsing or other such issues.
35:14 as a town planner this paper was utter nonsense, right now there are 1.1 million properties with planning permission not being built. Also the number of houses being applied for is not even 300,000 and the number given permission was over 85%, just keep in mind more will be given permission and not be built, than will be rejected.
Introduce a punishing tax on empty lots and properties. They're not "developers", they're speculators banking on land value going up. We don't need to support this behaviour.
And if they were all built in 6 months - it would not cover 2 year's worth of inward migration. No one in the comments, or indeed the video, mentions this.
@heraliogomezchatsandsnac-ts8ki 1. If one person lived in one house, which they don't the average is 2.4 per household and higher among migrants. 2. Who do you thinks building the houses... 3. I guess you don't want any babies born then as that's going to be a larger cohort than the immigration figures will be this year 2025 that is. Go on say that. They can't even build houses. 4. One of the largest cohorts of migrants is students, who in first year live halls many in 2nd and 3rd do as well, but the rest go into homes that are 6 - 8 people per house, so definitely not taking up to much housing.
@@heraliogomezchatsandsnac-ts8ki because your comment is bollocks. Migration is not having the impact that fear mongers claim. As a nation we have a chronic shortage of workers, we NEED migration. There can be temporary difficulties when too many migrants move to a specific locale, but it does begin to settle fairly quickly. The areas where it doesn't already had major issues that migration- in the long term- will help to mitigate.
@sykes1024 she said firing all miners in the country would grow the economy. This is so mind-bogglingly st upid, not just in hindsight where multiple regions of the UK have not recovered to this day. Yes mining was on the downward trend but that means retraining and investment in new technology in those areas for the jobs is what is needed.
@@Parakeet-pk6dl Mainly because the economy increased a lot under Thatcher so everything was gravy in the 80s but what I don't think people realised was that she was selling off the future for short-term gains and because we were doing well, the country got complacent to the point where we're perfectly fine with private companies owning natural monopolies and fucking us with it for hefty profits and bonuses.
@@mikester4896 the economy didn't grow very fast it was slower than the decade before and had higher inflation. There was high unemployment and mutiple regions of the country still have not recovered economically to this day. Right to buy and the fight between the SDP and Labour is what get her in power as she never won more than the SDP and Labour combined.
"Private sector building has never expanded to soak up excess demand", well why would they? If you control the supply, you can keep prices artificially high.
One could as the same of computing, why build a faster and cheaper computer? Ultimately because that’s how one stays in the market. Land is the key difference from electronics here and land value tax is what solves the slum issue.
@@JollyGiant19That is the case when you dont control the supply. Land tax would help the case but when the modern state is controlled by narcissistic psychopaths in the business sector, it would have enough loopholes to only fuck over those who only own their own house.
This is the biggest nonsense I've seen in this video and even believing this is so short sighted. To not even ask questions about the possible reasons that people in the private sector have to do that. And just assume the worst. Has anyone thought about land prices? And more importantly building rules and regulations? The loopholes they have to go through to get something approved by the council?
Unless this labour government actually starts building new council housing I could see a revolution start if a prolonged period of unemployment happens.
well what they didn´t mention in the video is that the UK had severe problems thanks to the sceam it was very expensive and squeezed the nation dry .... it would have been better to just increase rent but thatchers plan was simply more popular
The graph at 14:48 tells an interesting story. I immediately noticed that the percentage of owner-occupied homes is going up at the same time as private rent is going down. Here in Canada, whenever the government proposes a housing-affordability policy, the Conservative Party says that the policy doesn’t help middle class people buy their first home. I’m wondering why council houses means more people buying houses.
Because housing becomes cheaper. The more supply you have, the cheaper housing becomes overall. When conservatives promote "home ownership" they are really promoting pumping more buyers' money into the market so that the price of houses goes up, inflating the wealth of existing homeowners.
It's mainly the right to buy scheme that has increased the number of home owners in the UK, but increasing the supply through building more council houses will bring rent and house prices down. This makes it more affordable for people to buy property.
Because rental yields go down and being a landlord isn't as good as an investment, this stabilises and may even reduce house prices as some drop out, this also allows first time buys to save more with better rents to income ratios, and so makes becoming an owner occupier easier.
Part of good quality homes that I think is often completely overlooked today is a decently sized garden. Can't let the kids play out in the streets incase they get kidnapped or hit by a car, can't let them run around in the house or garden because there's no space. Then wonder why kids spend their days holed up in their rooms playing with iPads or computers, and why they're sicker and fatter than kids who grew up outside.
Tackling the risk of kidnapping and there being too many cars is another issue to tackle in of itself. Can't just build big gardens but avoid the root issue.
My mum worked managing council houses for decades including the death blow push to a ‘community housing association’. She would have agreed with this video wholeheartedly. ‘Right to Buy’ killed council housing with 90% of the people buying their property selling within a few years when they couldn’t afford the upkeep and ending back on the increasing long queue for community housing .
one thing ive learned most from watching a myriad of videos; capitalism cannot solve problems, because to solve a problem would mean elimination of a revenue stream.
Like any other system, Capitalism has it's advantages and disadvantages! And right now, unless you happen to be rich... The disadvantages definitely outweigh the advantages! So if we can all accept that... The question now becomes, what do we do about it? Again, if you're rich then such concerns like these are of course completely irrelevant to you!
I can hear my neighbours talking quietly through the wall in my new build. The TV keeps me awake every night. Might as well live with them. Boils in the summer, freezes in the Winter. Might as well live in a tent. New Builds suck.
On top of the lack of general quality they also have tiny ass windows so you get sweet FA natural light, because they're too cheap to invest in better insulation to meet the energy requirements. They're just depressing in so many ways.
Always interesting to get these insights into the history of these sorts of issues in other countries, and comparing it to the history that I know better in my home country of Sweden. usually there is a very big overlap. In this case the Swedish government in the 60s decided to build 1 million new homes (in a country of 8 million people!), and by the mid 70s the housing crisis was entirely solved. Then in the 90s following an economic crash and the new neoliberal trends, the government decided that they no longer had any obligation of ensuring that there was enough housing available. And thus, all government spending on housing was cut, and we gradually got a bigger and bigger housing shortage. Yey. Sweden is quite unique in that we don't have any social housing, everything (before the latest neoliberal reforms at least) is "rent controlled" through collective bargaining agreements, and rental housing is available to everyone on equal terms through "housing queues". As long as the government built enough housing to keep the market supplied, this worked very well, rents only rose with inflation and increases in standards, and the queues were kept short. But as soon as government spending stopped things started getting worse, and I think that's the trend in every country, no matter the social housing system or whatever.
9:19 the war started in 1939, not 1938 20:30 “United Kingdom”, “Great Britain and Northern Ireland” or “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” would be correct, but “United Kingdom and Northern Ireland” isn’t; NI is outside Great Britain but is still part of the UK.
What Reagan and Thatcher essentially did was like a desert tribe selling most of their water, padding themselves on the back for making so much money, and then the tribe dies of thirst. They demolished the government for parts and sold it wholesale.
On the topic of someone being able to make their rented property their home, I can't even decorate. My contract stipulates I can't put up posters, flags, or anything of the sort at risk of losing my deposit. This was the only property that gave us a viewing, or even acknowledged our request - out of 20. I feel like I'm living in someone elses house and I had no choice in the matter. For a glimpse at their pettiness, the bathroom light is automatic, and has a switch to turn it off and on. Because the light is automatic, the letting agency decided to cut off the cord for the light switch. Why? They won't tell us. Can you give us the light switch back? "No" they say. "It's automatic, why would you need a switch?". Shit is on constantly. It could be worse. I don't have black mould, I have heating that works (despite the lack of double glazing or wall insulation), I'm not going to be evicted. But this is the bare bare fucking minimum. It's not that I can't get on the housing ladder. It's not that I'm paying more than my parents mortgage. It's that landlords, and especially letting agents, seem to be completely vindictive for absolutely no reason. My previous landlord still hasn't returned my previous deposit of £750 (a lot of money for me right now!) because they don't have to yet. We don't just need more housing, we need housing without the callous indifference to the people who live in it.
Yep. Former colony New Zealand is having exactly the same problem (and also equally shares the identical trajectory of medical care as Canada and the UK are dealing with, too) with housing, on all points. My mother works for a property manager for private rentals, while I'm on disability; it makes any convo about housing incredibly frustrating. The struggles I face are the direct result of privatisation and govt cuts, and she seems unable to understand that her perfectly reasonable points about why landlords work that way are, in fact, exactly the problem I'm trying to elucidate and not a counterpoint at all. Of course, these are also the parents that claim they did everything within their power to support us... while owning a rental... in the exact town-with-better-services we needed... that they refused to rent to us... even though their very own start was itself exactly in a house owned by her parents (the sheer weight of irony legit makes me want to scream any time I think about it too much).
I wish we'd do something like this again. The idea of owning property seems so far beyond possible now, and the kind of quality council housing my grandparents lived in simply is no longer publicly owned. It's depressing.
@@katiemorison7969 Agree with the sentiment but I don't see the material base of political consciousness this needs. Dismantled by neoliberalism. A small hope remains though.
At 59 seconds, 913 sq. meters to 268 sq. meters has to be a mistake. That's got to be square feet. A 913 square meter home would be huge, at 9827 square feet. Even a 268 sq. meters would be a pretty good sized house at 2884 sq. feet. I live in public housing in the U.S. My apartment is about 600 sq. feet. It's not huge, but I have a reasonable sized bedroom, a small kitchen, and a reasonable sized living room . That would be about 56 square meters. It kind of reminds me of the problems with rent controlled apartments. I'm on disability, and I get a rent subsidized apartment. It's privately owned (could just as easily be publicly owned, there might even be advantages to it). Basically though, the government pays most of the rent. I end up paying 25% of my income towards that (minus deductions for utilities) which at this point puts my portion at $199/mo. I pay my own heat/hot water/phone/internet. The landlord gets about another $800/mo. from the government. They might get a little bit more if they didn't do Section 8 (their fair market apartments run $1100 to $1600/mo. They got a subsidy to build and a subsidy to switch us from electric heat to natural gas (which sucked for us, since we got a subsidy for utilities anyway, so the cost savings all went to them). Still, because they get close to fair market rent there is an incentive to build out more Section 8 housing. Rent control, on the other hand, means the landlords get a lot less money for an apartment, so they try everything to get tenants out. Much cheaper for the government though. It's a shame they didn't offer the homes at actual cost. The NIMBY thing is a big problem over here in the U.S. too. Our complex actually managed to get built because originally it was only for seniors. They opened it up to people on disability later, and then allowed other low income people to rent.
The start reminds me of Angel Meadow in Manchester the worst slum at the height of the industrial revolution. It had twice the density of the most dense place on the planet today and half of it was a Graveyard. Housing was normally a single room for an entire family or even mutiple families. The worst was the basement, they had no furniture and would sleep on straw on the floor. The basement flats would have raw sewage flow through them in heavy rain. I remember reading in the census that one person's address was "on the stairs" they slept on the staircase of a house. Life expectancy in England before the industrial revolution was 46, at the height of the industrial revolution it was 47 in Manchester it was 23. As I said half the slum was an unmaintained Graveyard, as the childrens families had no money they would use human skulls as footballs to play with. During economic recessions the top soil of the Graveyard rich in nutrients from the decomposing bodies would be sold to farmers and bones would be crushed up and sold to the Tannaries. There were a couple of tanneries in the area which is the smelliest industry as it involves human and animal waste product in the process, coupled with the gas works the place would stink. With all the textile factories and the railway the smog would have been a nesr constant and everything covered in smoke. Fredrick Engels visited factories owned by his father in the area and the horrors he saw there made him a communist he described it as hell upon earth. In the end the government placed flagstones across the entire Graveyard to stop the top soil from being taken. On the pennine moors are the Hungar Walls, these were built during times of famine such as during the Potatoe Blight, they would build long dry stone walls in exchange for food, often these walls had no purpose but were done so it felt like the food was earned. The slum was eventually demolished and now all that is there is expensive offices, flats and a park.
20:30 Quick note: it's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the UK and does not need to be listed separately.
Hello from Los Angeles where homelessness is at crises level. Surveys show about 60,000 unhoused people in our city. At the same time we have we have some of the most expensive housing in world. A lot of it has to do with mandatory low density building and onerous building approval processes as well as a nationwide drug addiction problem. That is an over simplification of course. About a decade back voters passed a massive bond to build public housing which has been leveraged with private capital. The cost of these units well exceeded those in the private sector. $500,000 to $800,000 a unit in low rise apartment buildings Its mindbuggling expensive. What is being built are fairly attractive structures but nothing to fancy. They target a variety of constituents. I wondered how such a scheme of goverment ownership might work. I see the Brits have been doing something a kin to this for quite some time. I wish someone would do a well thought out mini doc like this on what is happening in my city. Its all really confusing and i dont understand the relationship between the public and private sector or why they have become so expensive. Well done video essay you made here.🎉
Indeed. A lot of those regulations make it impossible to have 'multi-family' households. When the Council can force you to evict a friend, because you don't have enough garages...! That wasn't a joke either, I had to remove a kitchenet because I had 2 garages and not 4. That kitchenet made the house into a 'multi-family unit,' and I needed 2 more garages by regulation.... Or I could remove the Kitchenet and thus prevent the multi-family complaint by city hall!
@@lostbutfreesoul I've seen places (and may be moving to one) where parking requirements for building or renovating to accommodate more people are reduced or eliminated if within a few blocks of public transit, which seems like an important detail. (This also depends on availability of public transit, which can't be taken for granted here in the privatization-obsessed and car-worshipping US.)
It's similarly disgusting in London too. There are more empty properties than there are homeless people, mostly owned by rich landlords who bought up vast numbers of properties just to sit on them and drip feed them on to the market. A huge number of them are also owned by Russian oligarchs which is partly why the last UK government were so hilariously half assed at sanctioning them when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Tory party swims in Russian money.
As a (German) historian, I never understood why Clement Attlee is not seen as one of the greatest PMs of the 20th century (especially in regard of the status of "awful person who got one important thing right" Winston Churchill).
I've always said that Churchill lucked into being a good guy. If he hadn't been around at the same time as Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, he likely would be regarded today as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th Century, considering his treatment of Ireland, India, and other colonies.
History revisionism to ensure that we are brainwashed into thinking this system is the only way the country can work. Thatcher, the Conservatives, right-wing media and 'think tanks' have done a number on us and Labour who've shifted along towards the centre. Corbyn was the closest we got to bringing the lefties back with Labour but he was back-stabbed by members of his own party and obviously the media went full into overdrive to destroy his campaign.
@@meganegan5992eh, India wouldn’t have happened the way it did without World War 2. Churchill chose his own people over conquered people which had consequences
Council houses are now trapped in a broken system that’s bleeding the economy dry. With 60-70% of wages swallowed up by rent, locals are left with little to spend, putting small businesses on the brink of collapse. The scales are wildly unbalanced, and it’s the community that’s paying the price....
Yeah, my town, USA, in Longmont, CO has done about the same thing. Here it's a city council that insituted building restrictions and urban renewal to eliminate housing for lower income. Now extreme rent burdened housing and rising homelessness. Though homelessness has been solved by making it illegal to sleep in the ruff or in vehicles. The police are kept busy.
The fact that the wealthy & ruling classes stopped doing something that was done for decades to prevent revolution is something that should deeply concern you. I recommend working out regularly for unrelated reasons.
i feel like if we fixed the housing crisis it would help the economy significantly as consumers will simply have more money instead of landlords who are hording money
Plus I'd wager the number of people on long term benefits (and hence not contributing to the economy) due to depression, anxiety, stress, alcoholism, drug use, gambling addiction etc. would fall through the floor without the constant threat of sudden rent rises or eviction due to house sales turning your life upside down and wiping out every penny of savings.
Glad i found someone else with the same thoughts. Imagine for someone their rent went from 1000 to 500 thats an extra 6 grand a year they get to spend.
@AlMc-i5p Too true. The ways the two dominant parties here diverge can be literally a matter of life and death for some people, but both are fully united when it comes to corporate capitalism being the only system we can be allowed to imagine.
not really the 2 biggest things she is criticized for this issue and the destruction of the mining industry have a way longer story ... people forget that both of thous industrys ran deep red numbers and the staat kept them artistically alive with massive amounts of subsidies and the staat outright couldn´t affort it anymore when the oil crises hit which resulted in the rise of Thatcher and her policys
how I wish this fantasy of "the free market can solve this problem" was ever true....like for anything. Housing, healthcare, education, time and again we hear that the free market has a better solution and it simply does not.
@@DeoMachina Zero people die of starvation today in capitalist countries; Unless for their own reasons they choose not to eat And world food programs funded by capitalist countries means more people die of obesity than hunger globally. You're welcome
Thanks Tom. It's honestly depressing how the political will to get mass council housing built is [likely] only going to come once the generation who bought the previous stock have exited. I wish people weren't so selfish and could see how supporting public housing initiatives could improve the economy. It doesn't make sense for exorbitant rents to be funneled to increasingly wealthy landlords, while the country suffers from lack of investment in local infrastructure, and the young get their incomes effectively cut in half.
Sadly, our post-Communist transformation was managed by people emulating Thatcher (and Reagan) so we ended up in the same heap of shit. Czechia used to have a substantial council/public housing stock before it was almost entirely privatized, new public housing is pretty much non-existent and housing here is now the least affordable in Europe. Prague alone owned and rented out 200.000 flats in 1990, now it's down to just 30.000.
well only if you leave out alot of things britain had severe problems all thous subsidys policys bankrupted the nation and caused alot of inflation she simply sayed "well this, this and that is runing deep red numbers, so lets get rid of it"
The more I learn about history, the more I'm convinced that peace is nothing but the proper balance between working class unity and ruling class fear of that unity.
2 месяца назад+14
1997 - House prices on average 3.6 times annual salaries 2022 - House prices on average 9.1 times annual salaries
So after 40 years of mostly democrat/ labor administrations, the blame falls on conservatives. Not Clinton's 08 subprime loan crisis not the money printing of Obama's quanitive easing..... No it's Regan and Thatcher 😂 the mental gymnastics. F in 🤤
Beautifully done Tom, It is interesting as in Canada we have had co-operative housing as well where everyone is a member and has a voice. That has also unfortunately gone pretty much down the drain behind the dollar sign. It would actually take a community to set an example and do this to show it is still possible. Thank you
free market would regulate itself if it wouldn´t be so overregulated everybody is free to build but thanks to insane amount of regulation building is so expensive that it totally screws up the supply side of the housing market + mass immigration causes an drastic increase on the demand side
They rarely do though, why is my flat mouldy, and reeks of cig Smoke? Ah, because the previous renter created tropical, humid conditions for his Venus fly traps in his flat and smoked inside. Does this "Person" have to repair the damage he caused? No! Is he the reason smoke trails are in the floor and in the bathroom? Yes! Has her ever cleaned the flat? No! Could he be evicted for that? No, that would be "unhumane".
@@steamvyrus6249 i cannot fathom how you can live in a house or flat for several years and leave it completly moldy, basically never clean, destroy the wooden floor with a humid climate, leave the Windows in complete neglection, smoke inside so much that the ash is engraved in the floor, ... How can you live like that, how can you leave something like that in comlete neglection. I mean the shower had heavy calciferous traces up to one meter high and the water is soft. I am a chaotic Person, but come on... Maybe Audrey II was planted there, the conditions were perfect. But you are right, that was too harsh.
The barrier I see to a return to council houses are the Tories. They can immediately reintroduce selling council houses if they get into office again. So, no council can afford to build as in a few years they may lose that investment (as the funds bypass them & go to central government). So, how do you fix that & stop a return to selling council houses? Any law can be changed, so laws cannot do it? I have no answer to this? But we desperately need it!
It’s funny watching this to realise my argumentative Grandad, was right about what happened with housing in the 80’s, but ignorantly wrong about why it happened. He genuinely believes that people exploited the right to buy system, but refuses to recognise that was the entire point of how Right to Buy was set up. Turns out electing people who don’t think the state can do anything to run the State doesn’t end with a well run State. 😅
The unaddressed issue is, why are firms building housing able to keep prices high. With cars, TVs, and in other sectors, firms compete, and this pushes down prices. Why is this no happening with housing?
That is why developers are not building enough. If they did and prices fell due to more housing on the market, they would have to work more and spend more for the same profit margin. So they don't.
"for many in our parents generation home ownership was a fairly achievable aspiration" the property market in the UK is the pinnacle example of pulling the ladder up behind you
What the TINA neoliberals never acknowledge is that unfettered markets always fail. As more markets fail, we get more crises. Only well regulated markets, with provision for the poorest outside the market, actually work. Adam Smith actually said exactly this.
well Adam smith is not the only economist and i would rather go with the proposals of Friedrich Hayek .... and doen´t forget that the UK was in severe economic and fiscal problems thanks to its massive subsedies in housing and mining
I love to see the consistent improvement in production value. You've become one of my favourite video-essaists and I can't wait to watch your Nebula documentaries, when I finally get to subscribe.
Thank you so much for this! I find it incredibly frustrating that 99% of Americans, even ones that identify as "left", can only imagine solutions to the housing crisis that basically boil down to deregulation and letting the invisible hand of the free market solve things. As if we don't have so, so many examples throughout society of why that's not enough of a solution! Makes me feel like I'm going crazy. TLDR: Americans (YIMBYs especially) need to realize "the reality is that the quality of the houses we build and the terms on which they're offered to either buyers or tenants matters hugely too."
In the first ad break I got an ad for the extremely fancy new build-to-rent 'co-living space' in my neighbourhood. Studio apts with murphy beds and communal kitchens, starting from €2000 per month. The private rental market is wild.
as a younger swede i didn't know the exact details of the right to buy council housing and figured "yeah if you lived there for a long time you should be allowed to your home!" didn't know it was 3 years and no minimum age of the building utter insanity. it should be something like lived there 10 years and the building is 30 years old. poor people need to get on the housing latter. the council needs to shed older properties as growing public housing until it is all housing is a bad idea. the fact UK people were this personally greedy is utter insanity to me.
I am not a swede but live in Sweden and honestly it seems odd to me how the 1 million homes project in Sweden failed yet the council housing in the UK worked. I guess the British did it slightly better than Sweden
The people at the top of the wealth ladder in the UK have always been obscene. There families here passing millions down generation after generation and paying no inheritance tax because they have worked out ways round it.
The most interesting and telling part of this to me by far was that creating council housing increased home ownership MORE than it increased people living in council housing. I also didn't know about the buy outs, and though I would have guessed it would inevitably raise prices and decrease ownership, the degree to which directly supporting owner occupation dramatically cut owner occupation is shocking. One of those unintuitive economics things. I would have guessed it would hurt lower income people, but the typical framing is that it benefited the "middle class" to the detriment of lower income people. Just goes to show that programs that benefit low income people often create the "middle class", especially when those programs are universal as opposed to being needs-based and means tested.
Im glad I moved out to Germany it was tough and I had to spend a lot of months unemployed but I managed to secure a flat for a fraction of the price of a room in london, definetly a win.
The fact that the Russian Revolution scared the British government into giving everyone homes is a great reminder that revolutions work and that we should definitely keep doing them.
Millions of Russians died and starved to death due to it. If anyone spoke out against their "one of us" mentality they were exicuted. If you didn't share all you earned you were.... Exicuted. Particularly if you wete farmers. So farmers simply stop producing as much, just enough for them selves, for if they made any more it was confiscated. So there was no incentive to produce more. Which created mass famine Not exactly somthing to praise now is it.
@@MinkieWinkle I hardly think all-encompassing self-interest to the detriment of society at large is something more worth of praise. Almost like, as with most things, there is an ideal balance somewhere between the two extremes. Problem is nowadays you get called a communist if you even suggest that housing shouldn't be an asset.
The stupidity of the Thatcher years and subsequent failures to at least keep up on building houses is staggering. Leave it to the private sector. They, in their profit mindset, will solve everything, without cutting costs or quality. Trust me bro! I found myself shouting to the video on how stupid these people were.
well what this video left out is that the staat subsidized construction aswell as the mining subsidies outright bankrupted Britain when the oil crises hit ther was no way to fund it anymore
The biggest problem with housing is how to get the good profit from the apartments and houses but still keep homelessness count and rate low because renting apartments and houses is not charity and the apartments and houses incur costs and fees that rise over the years. As a solution to this in Finland, we have paid general housing allowances to the disadvantaged and low-income earners and built publicly owned rental apartments and houses (whose rents have unfortunately failed to remain low and affordable). And, as a good example and reminder of the importance of those general housing allowances, happened very recently when the general housing allowances were cut and tightened in Finland, homelessness has now tripled during the last year and the growth of the number has accelerated towards winter. And now we don't know what we should do with all those new homeless people in Finland and especially when dormitories and shelters for the homeless have had to be closed for budget and savings reasons.
people blaim thatcher on so many things but just forget that the things she did where highly logical britain was at the brink of bankruptcy when she took over the subsidies especially in construction and the mining industry where very exspensive and when the oil crises hit ther was no way to keep them up
How many steps did you take during all the shots for this video? Would be fun to look at all the different videos you have and average out the amount of steps per minute of video.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Watch BOOMERS, exclusively on Nebula, today: go.nebula.tv/boomers?ref=tomnicholas
Everyone on the production team (and there's a lot of them!) has worked so hard on BOOMERS. It's packed with incisive interviews and investigation into intergenerational inequality, housing, pensions, and much more. All told through a globe-trotting journey to uncover the lives and legacy of the Baby Boomer generation.
It also features my mum!
Thanks so much to everyone who's already signed up to Nebula in anticipation. I can't wait for you all to see it and to hear what you think!
My father told me about when he finished school at age 15 and worked as a running boy in Stockholm in 1949. Landlords were so desperate to find tenants that they let people "test-live" their apartment one month for free. Yeah!
"- Creditworthiness? I'm a 15 year old running boy."
"- Deal!"
And those were smack in the city center, the same apartments that now cost $600,000 to buy (can't rent anything in the entire city anymore).
Btw, when he was fired as a running boy, which seems to have happened frequently, he said that he just walked across the street, saw a note in the window of another shop looking for running boys, and was hired.
Life seems to have been much simpler back then. With human to human relations, and using reason. Instead of this monstrous corrupt anonymous bureaucracy "regulating" everything as an imposing middleman between us all everywhere all of the time. So that no one is allowed to simply solve the problem at hand anymore.
Aww, I was excited about boomers. But alas, the link doesnt go to anything yet.
There's a typo in your link to Boomers, missing dot between nebula and TV
Why isn't this on Nebula? You need some money from ads? There is like the most ads I have ever seen in a RUclips video
@@rssreader7352 it's up now.
So basically, "About 70 years ago, people had problems that they worked together to solve. Then in the 80's they realized they could make A LOT more money if they undid those solutions for the next three generations of people...who hadn't lived through all that stuff before, and therefore had no idea what was being done to them until it was much too late."
Copy and paste this for most societal problems we have right now; and freely share it between the UK and USA.
Perfect summary of the modern economic landscape lol
The real trickle down economics.
Don't forget, "Brainwash them into thinking there's no other way for the economy to work while they get scammed by private companies owning basic public services."
Not entirely true, in the 1950s the anti-labour/socialist education came into being. As the children were indoctrinated through their schools & Hollywood. As their grandparents began to retire & pass away, neo-liberalism crept in. The implosion of the Iron Curtain 30 years later gave the neo-liberals all the ammunition they needed to bend the Boomers & GenX into submission.
I lived through the entire charade & became one of its critical opponents. I hope younger generations will never make the same mistakes but human experience is fickle because myths are what civilisation is built on from the dogma of religion to the dogma of democracy. We live in a post modern world where capitalism & democracy are synonymous terminologies but they are contradictory. In the words of Orwell, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
Reagan and Reagan in drag
I love that thatcher on housing is essentially: "cheap council housing is too much government dependency, so we will replace it with an expensive government-subsidized mortgage program" so smart bestie
It was tactical, she knew that in the future it would be easier to get rid of the mortgages than it would be to get rid of the housing. And she was right.
She allowed many working class people, who had paid rent for years , to buy the home they spent so much on.
@@notyourordinarygran ...who then pulled the ladder up behind them and are still smug to this day about their "hard work".
@@notyourordinarygran boomers
So her rich friends could get a piece of the pie
What really concerns me is a huge number of people simply deny this is an issue and just say "you're all lazy" and "if you don't like it just buy a house". Like being sympathetic is an impossible thing now.
My girlfriend has worked for the NHS for nearly 20 years, she has excellent qualifications and by any standards is hugely successful, knowledge and valuable to society. When we were house hunting together, every property we found had a waiting list of at least 20 people and the prices were outrageously out of our price range, even with her excellent job.
Can anyone seriously, with a straight face, tell me that a GP of 20 years should be unable to afford her own home? And that a waiting list of 20 families per property is in any way acceptable??
To answer you, no, of course not.
I dont understand how we have such a huge proportion of the population who are struggling so much yet theres a significant lack of effort being put in to solving the problem.
We have a government for a reason, and they're seriously lacking here.
If anyone is lazy, its the government, not you/your girlfriend.
What really angers me, is that it's the right-leaning Tories that caused the issue, and they have the gall to blame the problem on immigration. People will vote Reform because this has not been explained to them propoerly or they're too ignorant to listen.
@@colinofay7237 We voted against Corbyn. Failing voting for him, we did not choose to install him by any means despite that. We have the government we have for a reason.
@@czarkusa2018I'm broadly on your side but are you seriously suggesting we should have had a people's revolution to install Jeremy Corbyn as our glorious leader?
@@XenFPV he is, that said revolutions are rarely productive.
Problem with Thatcherism is eventually you run out of state assets to sell off to fund it…
Wild that owning physical property can be greatly beneficial to generating future income, oh wait
I'm quoting this forever
There's the myth that she actually reduced the size of the state. She didn't.
It is really funny (but also depressing) how Thatcher is basically patient zero for most of the UK's problems. The Forrest Gump of British misery.
Her and Reagan were truly kindred spirits. A huge percentage of the horrible policies in place in the US can be traced back to his administration.
Liberal Capitalism is not going to solve our problems for good niether is Fascism or reactionary politics going to help as it barely has the the problem pinned down or lacks in principle
In a Word... Greed! Some of us don't like to take their fair share... And would rather take the whole damm cake! Along with the table AND the chairs! And leave nothing behind for the rest of us! And then when we complain we get labelled as anti-Capitalists! Not that I mind being called that! 😊
Greed is a VERY powerful motivator for some! And the damage it can cause is simply incalculable! Given the highly restrictive resources... That we ALL have to share!
@@amymak93 Here in Canada Mulroney was our version of Thatcher/Reagan, at around the same time. I wonder how many other countries had a similar leader or shift in/around the 80s?
@@amymak93 I came here to say this. Peas in a pod, those two were. Chuck Roger Douglas from New Zealand and Paul Keating from Australia in there too.
You missed the most critical reason Thatcher, (and others) wanted working class ownership of houses. It is impossible for a worker to strike for more than a few months if he has a mortgague;- the house will be reposessed. On the other hand local councils could not throw their tennents out, nor could for example coalmine owners, or many other professions, who also provided housing. Indeed most local councils in mining or heavy industrial areas, were very sympathetic to chalenges to Tory power which was decimating their communities. Thus it was a massively effective way of removing the unions', and Labour Local Authorities' power.
Brilliant comment. Rare these days to come across people who connect many dots at once.
She wanted people to stand on their own two feet and not beholden to a life time of payments and never owning anything.
@@MinkieWinkle I would much rather never own a house if it meant that today I would not have to spend 60% of my income just to not be on the streets.
@@MP_PapHew that type of short term thinking is why people become generationaly poor.
A never ending poor of working all your life and never having anything to show for it, nothing to improve your own position or that of your family.
We see that today already, with welfare families. A endless loop for many welfare children, they grow up just to live off of welfare to then go on to have children who will do they same. Always being at the mercy of handouts.
No thank you
@@MinkieWinkle and as we stand now, she utterly failed in that.
This video just once again reiterates a point for me. One for which my father, just doesn't understand. He goes on about how Reagan and thatcher etc were great for the economy. All the while not understanding what they effectively did. My analogy is essentially they sold the seed grain. Essentially they took assets of the public state, one with had broader intangible benefits, and sold them off. In doing so it looked "great" for their economies. They cut rates and lowered taxes (sort of) so everyone was like omg everything is roaring. The issue is, what they produced was a net weaker result. Less competitive companies. More of expensive housing. Systems rife for exploitation. Government isn't the answer for everything. I don't think the government should be in the business of making smart phones for example. The issue is, some aspects benefit the broader society and make that society more competitive globally. More expensive housing means higher wages needed. If those wages are going to landlords that is an unproductive use of capital relative to goods or services. Expensive education means a lower productivity workforce as education is fundamentally a method for labor saving creation. Lastly, having Healthcare seek profits means lower employment mobility and reduced entrepreneurial drive. All and all, the thatcher, and Reagan and mulroney in my case, FUCKED, us.
It's classic junkienomoics.
I saw it put a bit differently. Thatcher+Reagan instituted certain economic measures/solutions that WERE necessary at the time, but needed to be temporary, because in the long term these solutions become a problem decades later. If they had been temporary, as they very well should have been, the problems of today could have easily been avoided. To add to that, its not like this was the first (or second) time that economic measures/solutions became harmful later on
Sounds like classic CEO behaviour. Short-term cuts to boost to profit and image, then duck out before the long-term consequences show themselves.
Honestly couldn't have said it better myself
Perfectly said…. I wish there was a way out of it but the British people seem resilient to common sense and instead favour easy immediate financial gains over economic stability and swooning over immigration as the root cause of issues rather than looking at its own history.
This is so true. Im 55, gen x. In the late 80s i bought my own flat, rental properties were non existent, and getting a 100% mortgage was cheaper than renting. In the early 90s however there was a banking crisis, and mortgage interest rates went from 2.5% to 16% in under 2 years. My flat was repossessed leaving me and my 2 small boys homeless. I was given a council flat, and as my family grew transferred to a house. I have been in my current post war built council house for almost 24 years. I am very lucky to be on an old style tenancy agreement my kids however unless they can buy, do not have that choice. They have to rent from private landlords at extortionate prices. Its shameful.
The old council houses were beautiful with a good bit of land for growing food or flowers, a lot of them where semi detatched around here.
@GillMosley-wo9mf they have this land for growing food because they were built with experience of WW2 and WW1 in mind. Food self-sufficiency was a HUGE deal back then, and still is, though people perceive food self-sufficiency as less important now.
im 44, the inbetweeners.. the banks passed off their liabilities for all of us wearing hoodies, that they didnt see as a good investment. We just refused to fit in. Like so many generations before us, each a disappointment to those who raised us
@@GillMosley-wo9mf That's probably also why the British call their yards "gardens".
@@Libertaro-i2uyep we're lucky to have a big garden but the quality of the house is so bad my dad got permission to do work on the house while renting because it's not a safe livable environment I was breathing in black mold for years
I haven't watched the video yet and have no idea what you'll be saying in it, but I'm going to assume the the "Almost" in the title means that Thatcher (and by extent, Reagan) fucked everything up.
she only had a 4 minute segment in a 43 minute video... she increased homeownership by giving discount (33%) and no deposit on property that was owned by the government (council homes)...... but stopped new council homes from being built because she took the money and used it for tax cuts for the wealthy and paying down debt
Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead 🎶
pretty much on point
Generically a safe assumption for most things. :)
If there's a policy problem in the West, it's usually one of those two
"We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor." - MLK Jr.
Summed it up. Thatcher didn’t want poor people to be lazy leaning on councils. But the rich can be lazy leaning on the inefficient economic system they profit off. 😢
If the workers aren't desperate, they might want more than the bare minimum.
Where did he say this?
@@johnmccrossan9376I wish I could give a direct url, but youtube blocks those. Just type into google "truthorfiction" and then the quote, and it should return the truthorfiction site breakdown on its resurgence of popularity, as well as when he said it and why. I'll try to send the url in the next message.
@@johnmccrossan9376 Truthorfiction has an article about it if you want to look it up. I tried to cite it exactly, but those replies look like they've been deleted.
If I get a cent everytime a RUclips video about problem in UK that started by Thatcher uploaded, I would be able to pay my rent.
I bought a house in 2021. The insurance and property taxes have doubled since then, and now costs more than I ever paid in rent in my life. I feel that I would be better off living in a studio apartment in a warehouse again and investing the money in anything else.
i advise you to invest in stocks to balance out your real estate, Even the worst recessions offer wonderful buying opportunities in the markets if you're cautious. Volatility can also result in excellent short-term buy and sell opportunities. This is not financial advice, but buy now
You are right! I've diversified my 450K portfolio across various market with the aid of an investment coach, I have been able to generate a little bit above $830k in net profit across high dividend yield stocks, ETF and bonds.
Where may one locate an experienced FA? I like the notion of employing their services, but it's terrible that recent stock market tragedies have started to happen more frequently.
Thank you for this. I'm need for proper quidance, found her webpage and dropped her message already.
I'm struggling to see these accounts as real people lol
Conservatism (whether it be American or British) holds with the simple idea that unbridled free market forces hurt nobody...
Well, nobody worth mentioning, anyway.
That's not conservatism, it's libertarianism. Conservatism is massively damaging to the UK, but not through the free market forces it allows, more those that it forbids. It is the reason, for example, we are one of the few developed countries yet to form a legal structure for private e scooter ownership.
I cannot think of an unbridled economy. These days economies are run by the state and legislated to within an inch of their lives. Conservatives just allow society more freedom than do socialists, since they prefer a more evolutionary approach. .
@@FlatDerrick I don't disagree but I also have never heard anyone ask for a legal structure for private e scooter ownership. On the list of problems this country has that's not even top 10,000.
@@HarryBillinghurstForget I mentioned e-scooters then if it isn't relevant to your own bubble. Substitute in nightclubs, bars, alcohol, cannabis or the myriad of other taxable trading opportunities that Brits are denied thanks to 'Think of the Children' style ideology.
tbf conservatism was originally about power of the monarchy and the aristocracy and preserving the traditional hierarchy left over from feudalism. however in the last half century "the conservatives" have been completely co-opted by right-wing libertarianism which is a completely different ideology centred around free-market capitalism, which could end up being even worse than feudalism as it doesn't even have common land, or a social pressure for "noblesse oblige".
This video is honestly amazing but it's very hard to watch. Hearing about a government looking after its people and prioritising housing is making me tear up when i think about how hard it is right now.
Its not even just that . To think how better off the uk would of been if thatcher hadnt privitizied everything ontop of ruining every generation after the boomers from getting affordable housing is GUT RETCHING . Its fucking devastating
It makes me think how evil, immoral and unethical Thatcher was to reverse all of the good work. I cant believe the UK could built literally millions of homes in just a few years and now we have [a deliberate] housing shortage
This was also the same government that introduced the NHS and British Rail, British Steel, British Coal etc. They brought the infrastructure that's critical to support a nation under the control of the nation and provided services to all that allowed them to... well... live. It benefited everyone, even the rich. It's harder to exploit workers when they're coughing up blood so having an accessible health service helps.
@@notmenotme614 Not just Thatcher, but Tories in general. They hate the idea of helping the masses, their entire MO is help the already monied minority who own almost everything, so they can more easily own everything else.
Our economy struggling with uncertainties, housing issues, foreclosures, global fluctuations, and pandemic aftermath, causing instability. Rising inflation, sluggish growth, and trade disruptions need urgent attention from all sectors to restore stability and stimulate growth
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True, initially I wasn't quite impressed with my gains, opposed to my previous performances, I was doing so badly, figured I needed to diversify into better assets, I touched base with a portfolio-advisor and that same year, I pulled a net gain of 550k...that's like 7times more than I average on my own.
This aligns perfectly with my desire to organise my finances prior to retirement. Could you provide me with access to your advisor??
Julianne Iwersen Niemann is the licensed fiduciary I use. Just research the name. You’d find necessary details to work with a correspondence to set up an appointment...
She appears to be well-educated and well-read. I ran an online search on her name and came across her website; thank you for sharing.
Maybe the real treasure was the tax cuts we made along the way.
22:52 "A shift essentially away from people having a decent home as a need and a right, towards people being able to use homes as an asset, as something to get wealth." I think this is a big part of the issue. For homes to be affordable, the price has to go down. For homes to be a wealth generator, the price has to go up. Isn't it fundamentally contradictory for homes to be both affordable and be an appreciating asset?
If home prices rose and wages both rose at the rate of inflation, homeownership could be a way to basically save money that wouldn't lose value to inflation without pricing people out of first-time home buying. When a country's major political parties all want home values/prices to rise _faster_ than inflation while also suppressing wage growth, though...
It's almost as if there's some mystery factor which increases competition in the job market while also increasing demand for housing.
@@georgesdelatour There's no increasing competition in the job market in most countries where house prices grow faster than wages, so reality disagrees with you.
@@M_M_ODonnell If home prices rose exactly the same as wages and inflation, then homes wouldn't be wealth generators, their value would be stable, so they wouldn't be wealth generators and every generation would have exactly the same hardships getting a home. So you're not talking about the same scenario as @Anthony-tw9bw is. On the other hand, if house prices were dropping, then every generation would be richer and richer since they could more and more easily afford a home. So basically if you want your population's wealth to stay the way it is, then you need house wealth to match wages and inflation. If you want your population's wealth to drop, then you want houses to become more expensive (corrected for wage inflation) over time. If on the other hand you want your population's wealth to grow, then you want housing to become cheaper. You know, like televisions. They're constantly improving and the basic models keep getting cheaper and cheaper until they're obsolete. Same should happen to housing. So there would still be space for people to spend stupid money on housing, but the average quality would constantly be growing for everyone.
You don't need decent housing to survive. Shelter is a basic survival need, but this could just as easily be met in a tent or shack as it can in a palatial mansion. Also, what's wrong with people making a living by owning and maintaining rental properties? Not only does a landlord provide their tenants with housing, he or she also provides certain maintenance services. People who are renters have fewer responsibilities than homeowners, for example, if a major appliance or fixture goes kaput, it is the responsibility of the landlord to make replacements or repairs or pay someone else to do it. Renters also tend to be freed from yardwork, painting, etc.
I've lived in the UK for 5 years now and I can't do it anymore. I spend 55% of my take-home income on housing (rent, council tax, and bills) and the only way I can afford to live here at all is to have a flatmate. I will never own my own home if I stay in the UK. I will never be able to afford a car or a dog, and forget about children. There is mold in every bathroom I have had on this island and I am so concerned for what that means for my health. Housing really is atrocious. I could put up with all the other cons of being an immigrant in the UK if the housing was good - or at least fine - but it's really not. I can not wait to move back to my home country, even though it means having to live with my parents for a year or two before I can get a mortgage.
Our situation is similar in India.
Try America if possible, not much better but I’m 24 and able to have good housing in a beautiful area and a son. Pursuing education as well, and have a hopeful future. Best of luck to you
@hotmess9640 hahah thanks yeah both Americas are entirely out of the question 🤣 thanks though
This was what prompted me to move into the sticks in Scotland. Housing prices are still stupidly high, but actually theoretically affordable. Rent is still legally capped (even if not very strictly anymore), which has helped massively.
@@Trampolina2000Cuba lol
City council owed housing (mostly apartments) is really big in Sweden. They are run as for profit business but all the share are owned by the city and the board are politically appointed. Not super cheep, but they actually build affordable stuff and not only high end.
I lived in Växjö and the housing market is as bad as the UK. Just don't want Sweden's PR to outstrip Sweden's increasing decline re: equality and it's societal safety net.
We’ve had exactly the same problems as the uk since the 80s. Almännyttan has been systematically sold off and the lack of funding is making councils mostly unable to build. Hyresrättsföreningen doesn’t prevent much when market rents are looming and rents are rising by 5-9 percent every single year. Renters pay on average 27% of their income on rent in sweden, and for young people or people in cities it is even more
@@evcarr3008I agree sweden is bad but unless you’ve lived in the uk you will not understand. I’ve lived in Stockholm, gothenburg, the us and now the uk and here is by far the worst. My friends have mold in their apartments, rents are at 13 000kr without bills with roommates or more for tiny single beds. Their houses have poor insulation and are generally dirty. It’s wild.
Hej 👋@@GoogelyeyesSaysHej
One of the Main POINTs of the selloff was to destroy the social safety net that they represented!
The Cruelty Was And Still Is Part Of The Point.
You went from 0 to John Mulaney real quick.
It's not about cruelty, it's about funding aristocrats who live off rent money. Rents must never decline. Even in Glasgow, a city emptying out, rents remained high
@@JohnDoe-gc1pmprioritising landlords quality of life over the working class is inherently cruel
Owners were leaving renters did not.
So demand increased for rentals as owners removed their rentals from the markets.
Resulting in too many renters chasing fewer rentals. Supply and demand. Rents increse as a result.
To bring down rental prices, we need MORE rentals to meet the demand of the renters.
It is that simple. By vilifying landlords, forcing then to sell will only increse rental prices due to there being fewer of them
@paleoleft of course it is cruel, but they aren't doing this to be cruel for fun. They do this because they're aristocrats who don't want to work. They probably wouldn't last very long if they tried.
Been saying it for years in Canada... when we stopped building social housing we started to see the private sector stagnate.. and when something is not a choice, i.e. a need.. private sector will often only ever do the bare minimum and you need the state to either take up the slack or literally compete with the private sector so it does not get complacent.
Yeees, and exactly why I seriously hope we don't use a ton of gov money, pushed to private developers, to build more homes (that the private developers will continue to own and set their own market prices) as then we'll be back in 10 or 15 years wondering why it cost so much and why they're falling apart. I'm done paying ridiculous rent to a landlord who can then go use all this cash flow to build/buy more properties, lately "luxury developments" (which really just means, we've ensured the bare minimum standards are met for 30% more rent!- but you've got a dog walk area at least!) before the average Canadian can save up enough- it's a brutal imbalance. I won't let my experiences renting in Canada as a young Canadian be ignored. We need proper change, and I worry that none of our future leaders will actually make a difference. Conservative, Liberal, NDP- I don't feel like any parties are truly aiming to help middle class or lower, only helping corporations make more on our backs.
Edit:
Regardless of any of my comments made; I agree, we 1000% need more government built/ owned housing.
For solving this problem in Canada, we also have the added challenge of needing political good will on both the federal and provincial levels (since housing is the province of, well, provinces).
Very important you mentioned the revolution in Russia being a motivator for the initial housing plans; whilst we didn't get a revolution here the rich were definitely scared of one. Once that fear passed they got to do whatever they wanted with privatisation projects like what Thatcher got away with
Britain was always good at that: reforming and compromising to cut off revolutionary stressors at the pass. It's honestly a pretty good explanation for why they still have a monarchy, since one of the few times they had a king who tried to rule despotically, they chopped his head off like Louis XVI.
Watching vids on the early 20th century, It's fascinating to see how each country presents its content of this period only in terms of its own locality.
All of these schemes were carried out globally by one tiny minority, the super rich. We're living through exactly the same scam today and few of us ever think of it in terms of the open collusion they don't even bother to hide this time around
What surprises me when visiting the UK is how poor many neighborhoods look. Here in the Netherlands even the poorer areas are looked after, have a lot of green spaces, proper side walks and cycling infrastructure.
To be fair, if I travel to Belgium I have a similar experience. But not as bad as in the UK.
Obviously the UK has a lot of beautiful cities with nice architecture mostly concentrated in the centre.
But having visited people in the suburbs of London and seen many other suburban areas all over the UK, including Scotland, it all feels very poor to me.
For centuries the UK has been ruled by the kind of people that would sooner burn money in front of a homeless person than give them the money.
That's why it looks so poor - our rulers would genuinely pay extra to make society worse. Our schools and hospitals are far more expensive, but are also literally falling apart right now.
What nice architecture? City centres look disgusting too. Only nice buildings in this country are in the countryside.
@amhuman5138 I like towns like York, Cambridge and my favorite Edinburgh.
So their are nice city centres but to be fair also many ugly ones.
But I agree the Netherlands also wins big here, with almost every center of town looking great. Except for the really new ones like Lelystad and Almere, who were built the last 50 years..
@@sanderdeboer6034 They're a few exceptions, although I do want to add one to your list: Bath.
Because of a certain event about 80 years ago a lot of our stuff got destroyed, and it just so happened to be the worst era of architecture, so way too much of our nation is disgusting brutalist slabs.
Thing is, when you feel poor and trodden on, you don't look after your area either. So there's a lot of graffiti, broken public utilities, falling apart public transport and just general grime and littering. People can't feel proud when they feel disadvantaged. It's not everyone, obviously, but poverty breeds more poverty and dissatisfaction.
I love how informative your videos are. I do not love how I leave every single one FUCKING FURIOUS. Well done.
Back in the day, when I purchased my first home to live-in; that was Miami in the early 1990s, first mortgages with rates of 8 to 9% and 9% to 10% were typical. People will have to accept the possibility that we won't ever return to 3%. If sellers must sell, home prices will have to decline, and lower evaluations will follow. Pretty sure I'm not alone in my chain of thoughts.
If anything, it'll get worse. Very soon, affordable housing will no longer be affordable. So anything anyone want to do, I will advise they do it now because the prices today will look like dips tomorrow. Until the Fed clamps down even further, I think we're going to see hysteria due to rampant inflation. You can't halfway rip the band-aid off.
consider moving your money from the housing market to financial markets or gold due to high mortgage rates and tough guidelines. Home prices may need to drop significantly before things stabilize. Seeking advice from a financial advisor who understands the market could be helpful in making the right decisions.
There are a handful of experts in the field. I've experimented with a few over the past years, but I've stuck with ‘’ Carol Vivian Constable” for about five years now, and her performance has been consistently impressive. She’s quite known in her field, look-her up.
I've noticed the increase in production quality, but today I feel the need to assist. Those full page image print outs, that ain't cheap.
Jokes aside, I love your work, many thanks and I'll be watching BOOMERS soon.
I find it hard to blame buy-to-occupy residents. I’m looking hard at policy that encourages the collecting of dozens of properties, treating them like shares and not a human necessity. It’s one of the most horrendous things any government can do to its population and had lead to untold social problems they think they can solve by building more prisons but, I don’t know, isn’t keeping people out of prisons more worthwhile an endeavour?
Since when has decent housing been a necessity?
@@Libertaro-i2uyou're so right, since when has been alive been important too? Why bother living decently let's go back to stone tools and the woods. You show the way I think your effort will really be motivating for us people that still hesitate between liking living correctly and just dying on the street.
I'm an urban planning student currently writing a paper on social housing in Canada compared to in Europe, and this video is the story of so many countries. You go from quality social housing for all, to neoliberals destroying it and telling you to buy a home instead, and now no one can afford a home, private rentals, and there's no social housing. It all goes back to neoliberalism.
It's because Canada was flooded by a billion Indians actually.
where can I read your paper
@@danke1150 Definitely didnt help but the 20th century had a much higher population growth and didnt have this issue to nearly the same degree.
Well capitalism but neoliberal austerity is what's gonna end up giving us WWIII
@@danke1150 it's like 2 million and your the 2 biggest country in the world. Go blame Walmart that's been using it's pull with America to force Canada to keep the pipes open and the cheap exploitable labor flowing in. Don't be a little coward, stand up to the companies!
The washing machine comment is especially funny considering most people I know in New England are forced to lug their clothing to laundromats in below freezing winters because not only are washer and dryer not included in most housing, but there aren't even hookups for such machines even if you decide to try and bring your own
I think one of the key problems is that house price growth is considered sacrosanct in the UK and homeowners (which are still the majority of voters) are primed to vehemently oppose anything that'll bring down their precious house price even in the slightest. Even home improvements are often thought in terms of how positively/ negatively they'll affect the house price rather than whether they'll make living ok your own home more pleasant and comfortable. And until homeowners are the majority of the population and we tackle this sentiment, there will be no meaningful steps to resolve the housing crisis.
I've personally just bought my first flat and I just don't understand why I'm meant to obsess about my house price and in its name block any opportunity for my neighbours to have quality affordable housing in my area. If more housing means my house price falls so be it, if it brings me into negative equity, so be it, I'll stay put for a couple of years, but that's all minor issues compared to rampant homelessness in the area and the increase of crime and antisocial behaviour that inevitably comes with it.
I got two words for you: "Planning permission".
The planning office was sold to the public as a means of ensuring people are provided with essential infrastructure. These days it's used mostly as a means of restricting the housing supply so as to keep prices artificially high.
One of the biggest wins from the most recent budget that seems to be mostly unreported was ensuring right to buy proceeds go to local councils. With some small tweaks to make sure funding is available to actually build places that small change might make it viable for councils to start building again.
Another potentially huge idea could be giving powers to councils to be able to buy land which has planning approved but no construction for years due to private builders sitting on assets to drip feed supply via eminent domain. We're in a national emergency. Those resources (land) need to be put to use.
It could also be a huge jobs program. Get younger people into construction and gove them skills for life.
As far as I am aware it is practically illegal for local authorities to finance the construction of social housing themselves. This was passed around the time on Right-to-Buy, and it's why they can only team up with housing associations and community-interest-companies now when it comes to building new stock.
@RichTapestry that may well have been the case at the time. Yet another evil inflicted on us by Thatcher. It looks like even the Tories under Johnson were giving councils a bit more leeway with how they fund new developments. Allowing them to borrow to build. With all the cash from right to buy sales going back to local councils it might even be profitable for councils to start building again.
A big remaining issue I believe is getting land. I think they have to pay the cost priced as if the land had already been developed. Freeing up councils to be able to acquire land at reasonable rates is probably a sensible next step.
Hopefully some of the bolder councils will take the ball and run with it now.
@@RichTapestryWhy can't (or won't) they just repeal this legislation or put another law on top of this one to make it possible to do so again.
There should also be provisions for councils to be able to buy housing that's been empty for x number of years at slightly below or at the local average or something. There are thousands of properties that sit empty, many with no apparent owners. In which case they should be able to just seize them. If nothing else it can help get rid of potentially dangerous structures that haven't been maintained and have a chance of collapsing or other such issues.
35:14 as a town planner this paper was utter nonsense, right now there are 1.1 million properties with planning permission not being built. Also the number of houses being applied for is not even 300,000 and the number given permission was over 85%, just keep in mind more will be given permission and not be built, than will be rejected.
That's all think tanks are for, well funded warriors of the status quo.
Introduce a punishing tax on empty lots and properties. They're not "developers", they're speculators banking on land value going up. We don't need to support this behaviour.
And if they were all built in 6 months - it would not cover 2 year's worth of inward migration. No one in the comments, or indeed the video, mentions this.
@heraliogomezchatsandsnac-ts8ki 1. If one person lived in one house, which they don't the average is 2.4 per household and higher among migrants. 2. Who do you thinks building the houses... 3. I guess you don't want any babies born then as that's going to be a larger cohort than the immigration figures will be this year 2025 that is. Go on say that. They can't even build houses. 4. One of the largest cohorts of migrants is students, who in first year live halls many in 2nd and 3rd do as well, but the rest go into homes that are 6 - 8 people per house, so definitely not taking up to much housing.
@@heraliogomezchatsandsnac-ts8ki because your comment is bollocks. Migration is not having the impact that fear mongers claim. As a nation we have a chronic shortage of workers, we NEED migration. There can be temporary difficulties when too many migrants move to a specific locale, but it does begin to settle fairly quickly. The areas where it doesn't already had major issues that migration- in the long term- will help to mitigate.
It's amazing how much thatcher ruined and how bafflingly economically and politically illiterate
Or she was extremely politically literate if you consider her goals to be to enrich the private sector rather than helping the people.
@sykes1024 she said firing all miners in the country would grow the economy. This is so mind-bogglingly st upid, not just in hindsight where multiple regions of the UK have not recovered to this day. Yes mining was on the downward trend but that means retraining and investment in new technology in those areas for the jobs is what is needed.
And still: people voted her in power… crazy
@@Parakeet-pk6dl Mainly because the economy increased a lot under Thatcher so everything was gravy in the 80s but what I don't think people realised was that she was selling off the future for short-term gains and because we were doing well, the country got complacent to the point where we're perfectly fine with private companies owning natural monopolies and fucking us with it for hefty profits and bonuses.
@@mikester4896 the economy didn't grow very fast it was slower than the decade before and had higher inflation. There was high unemployment and mutiple regions of the country still have not recovered economically to this day. Right to buy and the fight between the SDP and Labour is what get her in power as she never won more than the SDP and Labour combined.
"Private sector building has never expanded to soak up excess demand", well why would they? If you control the supply, you can keep prices artificially high.
One could as the same of computing, why build a faster and cheaper computer?
Ultimately because that’s how one stays in the market.
Land is the key difference from electronics here and land value tax is what solves the slum issue.
@@JollyGiant19That is the case when you dont control the supply. Land tax would help the case but when the modern state is controlled by narcissistic psychopaths in the business sector, it would have enough loopholes to only fuck over those who only own their own house.
Indeed. If they meet the demand that means money left on the table in the next quarter.
This is the biggest nonsense I've seen in this video and even believing this is so short sighted. To not even ask questions about the possible reasons that people in the private sector have to do that. And just assume the worst. Has anyone thought about land prices? And more importantly building rules and regulations? The loopholes they have to go through to get something approved by the council?
So the UK problem is a shortage in revolutions abroad
Unless this labour government actually starts building new council housing I could see a revolution start if a prolonged period of unemployment happens.
@@thepeoplespal5There's not enough guns for that. They'd need some military units to defect or to have serious support from organised crime
well what they didn´t mention in the video is that the UK had severe problems thanks to the sceam
it was very expensive and squeezed the nation dry
....
it would have been better to just increase rent but thatchers plan was simply more popular
The graph at 14:48 tells an interesting story. I immediately noticed that the percentage of owner-occupied homes is going up at the same time as private rent is going down. Here in Canada, whenever the government proposes a housing-affordability policy, the Conservative Party says that the policy doesn’t help middle class people buy their first home. I’m wondering why council houses means more people buying houses.
Because housing becomes cheaper. The more supply you have, the cheaper housing becomes overall. When conservatives promote "home ownership" they are really promoting pumping more buyers' money into the market so that the price of houses goes up, inflating the wealth of existing homeowners.
It's mainly the right to buy scheme that has increased the number of home owners in the UK, but increasing the supply through building more council houses will bring rent and house prices down. This makes it more affordable for people to buy property.
@@tomuhawk96 yes, great in the short term, detrimental long term
Because rental yields go down and being a landlord isn't as good as an investment, this stabilises and may even reduce house prices as some drop out, this also allows first time buys to save more with better rents to income ratios, and so makes becoming an owner occupier easier.
It appears that ownership was already over 60% before Thatcher introduced right to buy, @tomuhawk96
Part of good quality homes that I think is often completely overlooked today is a decently sized garden. Can't let the kids play out in the streets incase they get kidnapped or hit by a car, can't let them run around in the house or garden because there's no space. Then wonder why kids spend their days holed up in their rooms playing with iPads or computers, and why they're sicker and fatter than kids who grew up outside.
Tackling the risk of kidnapping and there being too many cars is another issue to tackle in of itself. Can't just build big gardens but avoid the root issue.
My mum worked managing council houses for decades including the death blow push to a ‘community housing association’. She would have agreed with this video wholeheartedly. ‘Right to Buy’ killed council housing with 90% of the people buying their property selling within a few years when they couldn’t afford the upkeep and ending back on the increasing long queue for community housing .
one thing ive learned most from watching a myriad of videos; capitalism cannot solve problems, because to solve a problem would mean elimination of a revenue stream.
Yep. It’s the police investigating itself conundrum - they are inherently disincentivized from solving the issue because they are the issue.
Capitalism is a tool, which can be guided by government to act to public benefit with the right incentives
@alehaim
Yeah until the government gets bought out by those with capital and then we live in an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy
Like any other system, Capitalism has it's advantages and disadvantages! And right now, unless you happen to be rich... The disadvantages definitely outweigh the advantages!
So if we can all accept that... The question now becomes, what do we do about it? Again, if you're rich then such concerns like these are of course completely irrelevant to you!
@@AlexHider Who watches the Watchmen?
I can hear my neighbours talking quietly through the wall in my new build. The TV keeps me awake every night. Might as well live with them. Boils in the summer, freezes in the Winter. Might as well live in a tent. New Builds suck.
On top of the lack of general quality they also have tiny ass windows so you get sweet FA natural light, because they're too cheap to invest in better insulation to meet the energy requirements. They're just depressing in so many ways.
Always interesting to get these insights into the history of these sorts of issues in other countries, and comparing it to the history that I know better in my home country of Sweden. usually there is a very big overlap. In this case the Swedish government in the 60s decided to build 1 million new homes (in a country of 8 million people!), and by the mid 70s the housing crisis was entirely solved. Then in the 90s following an economic crash and the new neoliberal trends, the government decided that they no longer had any obligation of ensuring that there was enough housing available. And thus, all government spending on housing was cut, and we gradually got a bigger and bigger housing shortage. Yey.
Sweden is quite unique in that we don't have any social housing, everything (before the latest neoliberal reforms at least) is "rent controlled" through collective bargaining agreements, and rental housing is available to everyone on equal terms through "housing queues". As long as the government built enough housing to keep the market supplied, this worked very well, rents only rose with inflation and increases in standards, and the queues were kept short. But as soon as government spending stopped things started getting worse, and I think that's the trend in every country, no matter the social housing system or whatever.
9:19 the war started in 1939, not 1938
20:30 “United Kingdom”, “Great Britain and Northern Ireland” or “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” would be correct, but “United Kingdom and Northern Ireland” isn’t; NI is outside Great Britain but is still part of the UK.
in 1938 everybody knew that the war is about to start and britain started to prepair for it
What Reagan and Thatcher essentially did was like a desert tribe selling most of their water, padding themselves on the back for making so much money, and then the tribe dies of thirst.
They demolished the government for parts and sold it wholesale.
I'm really glad that Vienna never sold off it's social housing stock, nor has the strong renters protection been given up
On the topic of someone being able to make their rented property their home, I can't even decorate. My contract stipulates I can't put up posters, flags, or anything of the sort at risk of losing my deposit. This was the only property that gave us a viewing, or even acknowledged our request - out of 20. I feel like I'm living in someone elses house and I had no choice in the matter.
For a glimpse at their pettiness, the bathroom light is automatic, and has a switch to turn it off and on. Because the light is automatic, the letting agency decided to cut off the cord for the light switch. Why? They won't tell us. Can you give us the light switch back? "No" they say. "It's automatic, why would you need a switch?". Shit is on constantly.
It could be worse. I don't have black mould, I have heating that works (despite the lack of double glazing or wall insulation), I'm not going to be evicted. But this is the bare bare fucking minimum. It's not that I can't get on the housing ladder. It's not that I'm paying more than my parents mortgage. It's that landlords, and especially letting agents, seem to be completely vindictive for absolutely no reason. My previous landlord still hasn't returned my previous deposit of £750 (a lot of money for me right now!) because they don't have to yet. We don't just need more housing, we need housing without the callous indifference to the people who live in it.
Too many scumbag landlords. Not all are though.
Yep. Former colony New Zealand is having exactly the same problem (and also equally shares the identical trajectory of medical care as Canada and the UK are dealing with, too) with housing, on all points. My mother works for a property manager for private rentals, while I'm on disability; it makes any convo about housing incredibly frustrating. The struggles I face are the direct result of privatisation and govt cuts, and she seems unable to understand that her perfectly reasonable points about why landlords work that way are, in fact, exactly the problem I'm trying to elucidate and not a counterpoint at all.
Of course, these are also the parents that claim they did everything within their power to support us... while owning a rental... in the exact town-with-better-services we needed... that they refused to rent to us... even though their very own start was itself exactly in a house owned by her parents (the sheer weight of irony legit makes me want to scream any time I think about it too much).
I wish we'd do something like this again.
The idea of owning property seems so far beyond possible now, and the kind of quality council housing my grandparents lived in simply is no longer publicly owned. It's depressing.
Demand it.
@@katiemorison7969 Agree with the sentiment but I don't see the material base of political consciousness this needs. Dismantled by neoliberalism. A small hope remains though.
At 59 seconds, 913 sq. meters to 268 sq. meters has to be a mistake. That's got to be square feet. A 913 square meter home would be huge, at 9827 square feet. Even a 268 sq. meters would be a pretty good sized house at 2884 sq. feet. I live in public housing in the U.S. My apartment is about 600 sq. feet. It's not huge, but I have a reasonable sized bedroom, a small kitchen, and a reasonable sized living room . That would be about 56 square meters.
It kind of reminds me of the problems with rent controlled apartments. I'm on disability, and I get a rent subsidized apartment. It's privately owned (could just as easily be publicly owned, there might even be advantages to it). Basically though, the government pays most of the rent. I end up paying 25% of my income towards that (minus deductions for utilities) which at this point puts my portion at $199/mo. I pay my own heat/hot water/phone/internet. The landlord gets about another $800/mo. from the government. They might get a little bit more if they didn't do Section 8 (their fair market apartments run $1100 to $1600/mo. They got a subsidy to build and a subsidy to switch us from electric heat to natural gas (which sucked for us, since we got a subsidy for utilities anyway, so the cost savings all went to them). Still, because they get close to fair market rent there is an incentive to build out more Section 8 housing. Rent control, on the other hand, means the landlords get a lot less money for an apartment, so they try everything to get tenants out. Much cheaper for the government though.
It's a shame they didn't offer the homes at actual cost. The NIMBY thing is a big problem over here in the U.S. too. Our complex actually managed to get built because originally it was only for seniors. They opened it up to people on disability later, and then allowed other low income people to rent.
Yeah it would be sq ft. Most 3 bed homes in the uk are sub 1200 sq ft if your lucky lol.
is it housing size or land area?
The start reminds me of Angel Meadow in Manchester the worst slum at the height of the industrial revolution. It had twice the density of the most dense place on the planet today and half of it was a Graveyard. Housing was normally a single room for an entire family or even mutiple families. The worst was the basement, they had no furniture and would sleep on straw on the floor. The basement flats would have raw sewage flow through them in heavy rain. I remember reading in the census that one person's address was "on the stairs" they slept on the staircase of a house. Life expectancy in England before the industrial revolution was 46, at the height of the industrial revolution it was 47 in Manchester it was 23. As I said half the slum was an unmaintained Graveyard, as the childrens families had no money they would use human skulls as footballs to play with. During economic recessions the top soil of the Graveyard rich in nutrients from the decomposing bodies would be sold to farmers and bones would be crushed up and sold to the Tannaries. There were a couple of tanneries in the area which is the smelliest industry as it involves human and animal waste product in the process, coupled with the gas works the place would stink. With all the textile factories and the railway the smog would have been a nesr constant and everything covered in smoke. Fredrick Engels visited factories owned by his father in the area and the horrors he saw there made him a communist he described it as hell upon earth. In the end the government placed flagstones across the entire Graveyard to stop the top soil from being taken. On the pennine moors are the Hungar Walls, these were built during times of famine such as during the Potatoe Blight, they would build long dry stone walls in exchange for food, often these walls had no purpose but were done so it felt like the food was earned. The slum was eventually demolished and now all that is there is expensive offices, flats and a park.
Thanks for interesting info!
Sounds just like east London
Pods are the wave of the future when it comes to housing. Think about it, all you need for housing is a place to sleep, shower and change clothes.
20:30 Quick note: it's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the UK and does not need to be listed separately.
👆🤓
Shortage of materials, 1 million houses in 7 years, and modern governments can just about manage 40k in 5 years.
in the grim darkness of the near future, there is only HMO's
Hello from Los Angeles where homelessness is at crises level. Surveys show about 60,000 unhoused people in our city. At the same time we have we have some of the most expensive housing in world. A lot of it has to do with mandatory low density building and onerous building approval processes as well as a nationwide drug addiction problem. That is an over simplification of course. About a decade back voters passed a massive bond to build public housing which has been leveraged with private capital. The cost of these units well exceeded those in the private sector. $500,000 to $800,000 a unit in low rise apartment buildings Its mindbuggling expensive. What is being built are fairly attractive structures but nothing to fancy. They target a variety of constituents. I wondered how such a scheme of goverment ownership might work. I see the Brits have been doing something a kin to this for quite some time. I wish someone would do a well thought out mini doc like this on what is happening in my city. Its all really confusing and i dont understand the relationship between the public and private sector or why they have become so expensive. Well done video essay you made here.🎉
Indeed.
A lot of those regulations make it impossible to have 'multi-family' households.
When the Council can force you to evict a friend, because you don't have enough garages...!
That wasn't a joke either, I had to remove a kitchenet because I had 2 garages and not 4.
That kitchenet made the house into a 'multi-family unit,' and I needed 2 more garages by regulation....
Or I could remove the Kitchenet and thus prevent the multi-family complaint by city hall!
Maybe open borders also has something to do with it. What prevents you from having 100,000,000 homeless?
@@lostbutfreesoul I've seen places (and may be moving to one) where parking requirements for building or renovating to accommodate more people are reduced or eliminated if within a few blocks of public transit, which seems like an important detail. (This also depends on availability of public transit, which can't be taken for granted here in the privatization-obsessed and car-worshipping US.)
It's similarly disgusting in London too. There are more empty properties than there are homeless people, mostly owned by rich landlords who bought up vast numbers of properties just to sit on them and drip feed them on to the market. A huge number of them are also owned by Russian oligarchs which is partly why the last UK government were so hilariously half assed at sanctioning them when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Tory party swims in Russian money.
@@bjorntorlarsson Lack of housing is a failure of the state, wherever in the world you go. Not foreigners.
As a (German) historian, I never understood why Clement Attlee is not seen as one of the greatest PMs of the 20th century (especially in regard of the status of "awful person who got one important thing right" Winston Churchill).
I've always said that Churchill lucked into being a good guy. If he hadn't been around at the same time as Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, he likely would be regarded today as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th Century, considering his treatment of Ireland, India, and other colonies.
History revisionism to ensure that we are brainwashed into thinking this system is the only way the country can work. Thatcher, the Conservatives, right-wing media and 'think tanks' have done a number on us and Labour who've shifted along towards the centre.
Corbyn was the closest we got to bringing the lefties back with Labour but he was back-stabbed by members of his own party and obviously the media went full into overdrive to destroy his campaign.
TWO. Churchilll reportedly _hated_ landlords too! LOL.
@meganegan5992 good guy :)
@@meganegan5992eh, India wouldn’t have happened the way it did without World War 2. Churchill chose his own people over conquered people which had consequences
Council houses are now trapped in a broken system that’s bleeding the economy dry. With 60-70% of wages swallowed up by rent, locals are left with little to spend, putting small businesses on the brink of collapse. The scales are wildly unbalanced, and it’s the community that’s paying the price....
Yeah, my town, USA, in Longmont, CO has done about the same thing. Here it's a city council that insituted building restrictions and urban renewal to eliminate housing for lower income. Now extreme rent burdened housing and rising homelessness. Though homelessness has been solved by making it illegal to sleep in the ruff or in vehicles. The police are kept busy.
The USA has the added bonus of private prisons. Gotta create those prisoners somehow!
The fact that the wealthy & ruling classes stopped doing something that was done for decades to prevent revolution is something that should deeply concern you.
I recommend working out regularly for unrelated reasons.
You also need to be able to aim and solder wires
Just remember that history is always slower than our estimates. It might be our kids or grandkids who need those skills.
It always comes back to Thatcher, and private landlords...
But hey, private landlords perform the kinds of maintenance on their properties that tenants don't have to.
i feel like if we fixed the housing crisis it would help the economy significantly as consumers will simply have more money instead of landlords who are hording money
Plus I'd wager the number of people on long term benefits (and hence not contributing to the economy) due to depression, anxiety, stress, alcoholism, drug use, gambling addiction etc. would fall through the floor without the constant threat of sudden rent rises or eviction due to house sales turning your life upside down and wiping out every penny of savings.
Glad i found someone else with the same thoughts. Imagine for someone their rent went from 1000 to 500 thats an extra 6 grand a year they get to spend.
Just like Reagan in the States, it seems like Thatcher started half the problems that the UK faces today. Great vid.
Thatcher seems to have the posthumous reputation she deserves, though -- in the US even Democrats speak kindly of Reagan.
Only half??
@AlMc-i5p Too true. The ways the two dominant parties here diverge can be literally a matter of life and death for some people, but both are fully united when it comes to corporate capitalism being the only system we can be allowed to imagine.
not really the 2 biggest things she is criticized for
this issue
and the destruction of the mining industry
have a way longer story
...
people forget that both of thous industrys ran deep red numbers
and the staat kept them artistically alive with massive amounts of subsidies
and the staat outright couldn´t affort it anymore when the oil crises hit
which resulted in the rise of Thatcher and her policys
My favourite tour of Plymouth residential areas currently available on the internet
how I wish this fantasy of "the free market can solve this problem" was ever true....like for anything. Housing, healthcare, education, time and again we hear that the free market has a better solution and it simply does not.
Let's just ignore how 50 million people couldn't even afford to eat in Maoist China 🤦
@@Arthur_King_of_the_Britons How many people starved in capitalism again?
@@DeoMachina Zero people die of starvation today in capitalist countries; Unless for their own reasons they choose not to eat
And world food programs funded by capitalist countries means more people die of obesity than hunger globally. You're welcome
@@Arthur_King_of_the_Britons Uhh, so we're just going to pretend that all those capitalist famines didn't happen?
As someone who moved away a decade ago, I'm enjoying all the shots of Plymouth in the background
if the free market is so great, why does it crash every 15-20 years and have to bailed out by taxpayers?
Thanks Tom. It's honestly depressing how the political will to get mass council housing built is [likely] only going to come once the generation who bought the previous stock have exited. I wish people weren't so selfish and could see how supporting public housing initiatives could improve the economy. It doesn't make sense for exorbitant rents to be funneled to increasingly wealthy landlords, while the country suffers from lack of investment in local infrastructure, and the young get their incomes effectively cut in half.
Those people who purchased the council houses, trashed them, 0 maintenance and now they want 200.000 pounds for them
Sadly, our post-Communist transformation was managed by people emulating Thatcher (and Reagan) so we ended up in the same heap of shit. Czechia used to have a substantial council/public housing stock before it was almost entirely privatized, new public housing is pretty much non-existent and housing here is now the least affordable in Europe. Prague alone owned and rented out 200.000 flats in 1990, now it's down to just 30.000.
’m starting to see a pattern with every video on UK politics:
“Between 1945-1979 things were good, but that all changed with Margaret Thatcher”
well only if you leave out alot of things
britain had severe problems all thous subsidys policys bankrupted the nation and caused alot of inflation
she simply sayed "well this, this and that is runing deep red numbers, so lets get rid of it"
The more I learn about history, the more I'm convinced that peace is nothing but the proper balance between working class unity and ruling class fear of that unity.
1997 - House prices on average 3.6 times annual salaries
2022 - House prices on average 9.1 times annual salaries
Under John Major, net immigration ran at around 50,000. Within a year, Tony Blair quintupled it to 250,000 per year. Since then It's gone up and up.
population 1997 - 58 million
2022 - 68 million.
a 17% increase in population will drive up prices into a scarce economy.
That was a great video. Concise and informative. Thank you.
I hate Thatcher so much and I'm not even British.
So after 40 years of mostly democrat/ labor administrations, the blame falls on conservatives. Not Clinton's 08 subprime loan crisis not the money printing of Obama's quanitive easing..... No it's Regan and Thatcher 😂 the mental gymnastics. F in 🤤
Beautifully done Tom, It is interesting as in Canada we have had co-operative housing as well where everyone is a member and has a voice. That has also unfortunately gone pretty much down the drain behind the dollar sign. It would actually take a community to set an example and do this to show it is still possible. Thank you
Who would have thought that the free market wouldn't regulate itself
free market would regulate itself if it wouldn´t be so overregulated
everybody is free to build
but thanks to insane amount of regulation building is so expensive that it totally screws up the supply side of the housing market
+ mass immigration causes an drastic increase on the demand side
Having worked as a delivery driver in Plymouth, seeing all of these little streets again brought me great joy
If houses are an investment, then tenants should get paid for living there and keeping watch of landlords' "investments".
They rarely do though, why is my flat mouldy, and reeks of cig Smoke? Ah, because the previous renter created tropical, humid conditions for his Venus fly traps in his flat and smoked inside. Does this "Person" have to repair the damage he caused? No! Is he the reason smoke trails are in the floor and in the bathroom? Yes! Has her ever cleaned the flat? No! Could he be evicted for that? No, that would be "unhumane".
@@user-co7fo uh why is person in quotes??? that's vile, implying someone isn't a person. you should be ashamed
@@steamvyrus6249 i cannot fathom how you can live in a house or flat for several years and leave it completly moldy, basically never clean, destroy the wooden floor with a humid climate, leave the Windows in complete neglection, smoke inside so much that the ash is engraved in the floor, ... How can you live like that, how can you leave something like that in comlete neglection. I mean the shower had heavy calciferous traces up to one meter high and the water is soft. I am a chaotic Person, but come on...
Maybe Audrey II was planted there, the conditions were perfect.
But you are right, that was too harsh.
The barrier I see to a return to council houses are the Tories. They can immediately reintroduce selling council houses if they get into office again. So, no council can afford to build as in a few years they may lose that investment (as the funds bypass them & go to central government). So, how do you fix that & stop a return to selling council houses? Any law can be changed, so laws cannot do it? I have no answer to this? But we desperately need it!
It’s funny watching this to realise my argumentative Grandad, was right about what happened with housing in the 80’s, but ignorantly wrong about why it happened. He genuinely believes that people exploited the right to buy system, but refuses to recognise that was the entire point of how Right to Buy was set up.
Turns out electing people who don’t think the state can do anything to run the State doesn’t end with a well run State. 😅
Absolute whiplash seeing my childhood street on a bus stop sign for B-roll footage
Especially seeing as my family benefitted from the right to purchase council housing
The unaddressed issue is, why are firms building housing able to keep prices high. With cars, TVs, and in other sectors, firms compete, and this pushes down prices. Why is this no happening with housing?
Scarcity. Building is getting cheaper, but due to scarcity, people are willing to pay more.
Turns out demand doesnt drop when you increase the price on something that people need to reliably survive.
That is why developers are not building enough. If they did and prices fell due to more housing on the market, they would have to work more and spend more for the same profit margin. So they don't.
"for many in our parents generation home ownership was a fairly achievable aspiration" the property market in the UK is the pinnacle example of pulling the ladder up behind you
What the TINA neoliberals never acknowledge is that unfettered markets always fail. As more markets fail, we get more crises. Only well regulated markets, with provision for the poorest outside the market, actually work. Adam Smith actually said exactly this.
everyone taking part expects that they'll survive the collapse and be able to buy everything on the cheap...
well Adam smith is not the only economist
and i would rather go with the proposals of Friedrich Hayek
....
and doen´t forget that the UK was in severe economic and fiscal problems thanks to its massive subsedies in housing and mining
I love to see the consistent improvement in production value. You've become one of my favourite video-essaists and I can't wait to watch your Nebula documentaries, when I finally get to subscribe.
Thank you so much for this! I find it incredibly frustrating that 99% of Americans, even ones that identify as "left", can only imagine solutions to the housing crisis that basically boil down to deregulation and letting the invisible hand of the free market solve things. As if we don't have so, so many examples throughout society of why that's not enough of a solution! Makes me feel like I'm going crazy.
TLDR: Americans (YIMBYs especially) need to realize "the reality is that the quality of the houses we build and the terms on which they're offered to either buyers or tenants matters hugely too."
That's why people are conditioned in schools, media to be afraid of communism.
In the first ad break I got an ad for the extremely fancy new build-to-rent 'co-living space' in my neighbourhood. Studio apts with murphy beds and communal kitchens, starting from €2000 per month. The private rental market is wild.
as a younger swede i didn't know the exact details of the right to buy council housing and figured "yeah if you lived there for a long time you should be allowed to your home!" didn't know it was 3 years and no minimum age of the building utter insanity. it should be something like lived there 10 years and the building is 30 years old. poor people need to get on the housing latter. the council needs to shed older properties as growing public housing until it is all housing is a bad idea.
the fact UK people were this personally greedy is utter insanity to me.
I am not a swede but live in Sweden and honestly it seems odd to me how the 1 million homes project in Sweden failed yet the council housing in the UK worked. I guess the British did it slightly better than Sweden
The people at the top of the wealth ladder in the UK have always been obscene. There families here passing millions down generation after generation and paying no inheritance tax because they have worked out ways round it.
The most interesting and telling part of this to me by far was that creating council housing increased home ownership MORE than it increased people living in council housing. I also didn't know about the buy outs, and though I would have guessed it would inevitably raise prices and decrease ownership, the degree to which directly supporting owner occupation dramatically cut owner occupation is shocking. One of those unintuitive economics things. I would have guessed it would hurt lower income people, but the typical framing is that it benefited the "middle class" to the detriment of lower income people. Just goes to show that programs that benefit low income people often create the "middle class", especially when those programs are universal as opposed to being needs-based and means tested.
Another excellent video Tom, thank you. Can you show it to the politicians that ruin our lives.
Im glad I moved out to Germany it was tough and I had to spend a lot of months unemployed but I managed to secure a flat for a fraction of the price of a room in london, definetly a win.
The fact that the Russian Revolution scared the British government into giving everyone homes is a great reminder that revolutions work and that we should definitely keep doing them.
Millions of Russians died and starved to death due to it.
If anyone spoke out against their "one of us" mentality they were exicuted.
If you didn't share all you earned you were.... Exicuted. Particularly if you wete farmers. So farmers simply stop producing as much, just enough for them selves, for if they made any more it was confiscated. So there was no incentive to produce more.
Which created mass famine
Not exactly somthing to praise now is it.
@@MinkieWinkle I hardly think all-encompassing self-interest to the detriment of society at large is something more worth of praise. Almost like, as with most things, there is an ideal balance somewhere between the two extremes. Problem is nowadays you get called a communist if you even suggest that housing shouldn't be an asset.
I heard an article that the defence forces are having troubles recruiting and retaining personnel. There is a historical rhythm there.
So true Tom. The greed of the wealthy feeds on the poor, while giving the illusion of freeing people.
Big up all the Plymouth streets in the video!
Maybe stop importing 1,000,000 people every year for a start.
Really enjoyable, informative episode. Thanks Tom 🙂👍
The stupidity of the Thatcher years and subsequent failures to at least keep up on building houses is staggering. Leave it to the private sector. They, in their profit mindset, will solve everything, without cutting costs or quality. Trust me bro!
I found myself shouting to the video on how stupid these people were.
well what this video left out is that the staat subsidized construction aswell as the mining subsidies
outright bankrupted Britain
when the oil crises hit ther was no way to fund it anymore
The biggest problem with housing is how to get the good profit from the apartments and houses but still keep homelessness count and rate low because renting apartments and houses is not charity and the apartments and houses incur costs and fees that rise over the years.
As a solution to this in Finland, we have paid general housing allowances to the disadvantaged and low-income earners and built publicly owned rental apartments and houses (whose rents have unfortunately failed to remain low and affordable).
And, as a good example and reminder of the importance of those general housing allowances, happened very recently when the general housing allowances were cut and tightened in Finland, homelessness has now tripled during the last year and the growth of the number has accelerated towards winter.
And now we don't know what we should do with all those new homeless people in Finland and especially when dormitories and shelters for the homeless have had to be closed for budget and savings reasons.
Seriously, F Thatcher. WW2, Thatcher, Brexit, the 3 worst things to happen to Britain in 100 years.
people blaim thatcher on so many things but just forget that the things she did where highly logical
britain was at the brink of bankruptcy when she took over
the subsidies especially in construction and the mining industry where very exspensive
and when the oil crises hit ther was no way to keep them up
How many steps did you take during all the shots for this video? Would be fun to look at all the different videos you have and average out the amount of steps per minute of video.
Now do Canada...........(we're actively curb stomping the concept of affordable shelter).