Despite British government rhetoric of leveling up by promising to extend the right of tenants in housing associations to purchase their own homes, renting or owning your own home in Britain largely remains a remote and distant dream. Accessibility to having a roof over your head has actually worsened over a period of forty years.
If you don't get a house you'll regret it, but if you do get a house you will also regret it! Many people dissipate their energy exerting immense physical and mental energy attempting to either pay the rent or pay off a mortgage. The mortgage remains a ball-and-chain around their neck which weighs them down in a river where they drown.
It is perhaps no accident that the word mortgage is related to the Latin word for death. Indeed, the house for which you have to pay off the mortgage may as well be called a morgue. For after finally paying off your mortgage, you are practically near death. Well at least you might be able to haunt the house if you become a ghost! There is even a current proposal in the air to make mortgages more accessible to first time buyers by granting them a fifty-year period to pay off the debt!
It is not always possible to identify whether a person is hard up or not. People often rush to conclusions concerning a person's welfare based on a person’s clothing and appearance—or on the house he dwells in. Daniel Kahneman even wrote a book called “Thinking, Fast and Slow {London: Penguin Books, 2011} in which he describes finding many errors of judgment people make. It turns out that most people are poor psychologists. For instance, they can presume that if a person is simply American he must be rich—or if he dwells in a huge mansion he can't be poor. But often the person living in a huge house spends all of his income on paying taxes and bills and has no extra money for elementary needs.
Let us consider a good example of what appears to be a perfect picture of home ownership. Let us consider Mary Hamilton, a 48-year-old woman who lives in Campeltown, Scotland, which has the lowest prices for real estate. The catch is that there are practically no jobs available in this charming rural town of 6,000 people located off the coast of the sea. Mary Hamilton laments, "I never want to buy another property again! Home ownership is overrated especially when you have no children... Anyway I am looking forward to finding a council house. It will be a bloody weight off my mind. I need some nest and security for my nerves now."
This may come as a surprise to some people. Most people assume that it is people in social (government-supported) housing who want to go on to buy their own homes rather than vice versa. Mary Hamilton complains that the council tax has doubled and that the cost of bills has shot up. She believes that renting a council house would be much cheaper and not so stressful and is therefore applying for social housing.
Unfortunately, there is a huge waiting list for getting a “council house.” The number of council houses in Britain has decreased from 6.5 million in 1979 to 2.2 million while the number of people renting in the private sector has doubled from what it was 15 years ago. The waiting list for social housing in Britain stands at 1.6 million. The average rent in the United Kingdom for a flat comes to an astounding 1000 pounds a month and continues to increase. The cost of renting flats has risen so much that it is hindering the development of the economy—by discouraging potentially highly skilled staff from taking up work in expensive areas and thereby leading to companies experiencing a shortage of labor.
Remorselessly rising rent has now developed from being a relative to an absolute fetter on production. Employers are even wracking their brains on how to provide potential employees with relatively accessible accommodation. We should not dismiss the prospect of some employers welcoming a crackdown on landlords where new legislation in the form of rent restrictions is imposed.
The root of the problem goes back forty years when a Conservative government attempted to boost their falling popularity by allowing tenants in council houses to purchase their own homes. Between 1979 and 1989, 150,000 council houses in Scotland were sold, and for the first time in a century, the majority of Scots could possess their own homes. However, less provision was made for the poorest part of the community who were either unemployed or at least had low incomes. While the more affluent tenants could buy their own homes, the poorer were forced to pay double the amount of rent. As a result of attempts to create a so called 'home owning democracy' the rate of homelessness increased at a drastic rate.
The concept of social housing to aid the poor came under aggressive assault. The idea was also to win over new homeowners to the Tory party. And it worked! According to Naomi Klein's book 'The Shock Doctrine,' 'It was a divide-and -conquer strategy, and it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, the streets of Britain's largest cities saw a visible increase in homelessness, but polls showed that more than half of the new owners did switch their party affiliation to the Tories' {‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007, New York: Picador, page 168}.
The justification for this attack on social housing was that the state encouraged a 'dependency culture' where people had become too dependent on handouts from the state and less productive, hardworking and self-reliant. State intervention was perceived as an evil that had to be utterly eradicated. This was a very extreme doctrine of monetarism propounded by Milton Friedman in books such as 'Free to Choose.’ This abstract philosophy claimed that if you left everything to free market forces everything would work well for all the consumers. However, in Britain and so many other countries it never worked.
In fact, state support of the British economy increased rather than decreased because so many people became unemployed the state had to pay them benefits and there was so much social unrest from the mass redundancies and rising poverty {riots erupted in 30 British cities in 1981 and the miner's strike of 1984-1985 meant the cost of paying for the police rose tremendously.}
The current Conservative government is even more extreme than the government under Thatcher. And that is saying something! They are even proposing to extend the right for tenants in local housing associations to buy their own homes in a flawed attempt to bolster their declining popularity.
But for most young people in Britain, renting your own home has become a remote and distant dream. Their income can't cover the rising cost of rent. As a result, some young adults are living with their parents not just into their twenties or thirties but in some cases into their forties. This has nothing to do with them being infantile or weak. Skip the amateurish psychology! They just can't afford to pay exorbitant rent. Some of them who do move out have resorted to living in caravans, sleeping in canal boats, and couch-surfing.
It is an urgent necessity in Scotland to implement the plan 'Ending Homelessness Together ' by a massive construction of social housing which allows a person to at least afford a decent roof over their head. It is actually a normal and natural thing for a person to receive help from the state, or community so they obtain a place of their own. After all, even the so called 'self sufficient' Robinson Crusoe needed his Man Friday!