Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Sorry to mention the elephant in the room but something scary is happening to house prices in the local area. I'm talking about some places rising by over 10% in the last week. Nearly 40 % in the last two years.

Speak to the estate agents, something unprecedented it's happening with the cost of home ownership, especially between wood green tube and ally pally.

It's possible this government may become known as seeing through the largest distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich ever ....

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How do you know about the one third increase at the top and flat on the rest? Are those stats available publicly somewhere?

If that is the case then it helps support the norther Ladder traffic plans - more residents = more deserving of  less through traffic.

Yes, they're from here.

Actually, I wrote about this last year here.

Those 95% (effective) mortgages are being set up with the 0.5% base interest rate. When that inevitably goes up over the next several years, the repayment costs will rocket, mass repossessions of unsaleable housing will follow. Given that's what caused the 2008 crash, let's hope those loans are not being divvied up into derivatives and crash all the banks again.

You read it here first...

Well...I'm not too sure about that actually. There is nothing to suggest that people who are being accepted for these mortgages are any more of a credit risk. To get that size of loan you still need to be on a very solid regular income - with a good credit rating to boot.

Are you suggesting that only people who already have large lump sums saved do not pose a credit risk? That's what you need for a standard deposit in London, which currently limits to higher earners (usually double-income) and those who inherit.

Plenty of friends of mine cannot buy ANYTHING even on a £50k salaries because they do not have rich parents or are single - they also would not qualify for shared ownership on that income. But there is nothing to suggest they are more likely to default than someone whose parents handed them a deposit.

Much as I have my reservations about the way the govt are doing this, I think something did need to be done to address the 'deposit problem'.

What about "help to build" or " FORCE to build" to increase the housing stock? We will have a hard fall sooner or later.

I agree I think it's another bubble, and we the tax payers are going to be the ones paying if or when it pops. They needed to get a stagnant housing market moving in any way possible. 

I saw this happen in Shoreditch years ago, every time i put an offer in to buy my apartment it had jumped by another 40k or so, a nice loft that I could have bought for 90k just kept going up and up and up, sold for £360k back in 2003! We moved to Tottenham to buy a decent sized house, without a giant mortgage, people are still blown away by what we paid, but even in Tottenham house prices are going up.

Whilst that's good for us I feel sorry for people renting, I can't believe how much rented property has gone up in our area. I've always thought it ridiculous that people cant get mortgages yet their rent is higher than if they owned a home.

Absolutely. Friend of mine pays £800pcm to rent a cramped ex-council flat not far from here. She's not really holding out hope of owning any time soon, despite being a high flying senior fundraiser. It's single people like her who are hardest hit and most under-represented I think.

However this gets addressed, there IS something very wrong there.

I'm no longer convinced it's a bubble. I used to think we were in a bubble for the last decade but I've reached the conclusion that it's not.

It's way worse, it's a fundamental shift in the increase in inequality between the haves (of capital or capital assets) and the have nots (anyone with a job and no hard assets). 

The rich will get richer until it becomes politically untenable - a long way off, if ever.

A side effect of that is that it drives up asset prices, ratcheting up the inequality.

The no bubble things is what we all thought in 1989...........Historically, there have always been house price corrections. Personally, whilst having not an ounce of expert knowledge on this, and going purely by past precedent, I suspect that we will see another correction this time, but I have no idea when.

I've been trying to get my head around this - and failing. Not least because I keep reading different experts who focus on different aspects and come up with alternatives. Each of the suggestions seems sensible in itself. But together they start to sound like Henry & Liza singing about the hole in the bucket.

So what needs fixing? Well, for some people it's the planning laws. For others, - deposits. Then it's mortgages. Or perhaps too much land banking; or local councils which need to be forced to give land to developers?

Or is it the unfairness of expecting developers to pay Section 106 Planning gain? And why ask them to pay any tax at all? (Bermuda's a lovely place I'm told.) 

How about loosening the Green Belt? Or perhaps we need more competition to end domination of the building industry by a few large firms?  Should we use tax money to subsidise small building firms? Or medium ones? Or building workers?

Didn't a big cause of our woes used be housing benefit paid to landlords? Or old people under-occupying homes? (Now, you *can* push your granny off a bus.)  Or am I muddling that up with the impact of stamp duty?

Nor have I forgotten the large numbers of homes kept empty by foreign  investors for whom London property is like a money tree with leaves of gold.  (Thanks John McMullan for the link to the New York Times.)

Of course there are loads more explanations and panaceas - all entirely plausible. As well providing a way for people to wriggle endlessly to avoid the bleedin' obvious: that the market ain't gonna deliver homes for everyone who needs them. But the State/public sector could.

Anyway, I have to stop there. The phone keeps ringing with estate agents wanting to buy our garden shed to rent to Ruritanian students.

I don't think the private market can supply rented homes to everyone. Look how much state money "private" landlords rake in via housing benefit.

The state should provide / ensure minimum levels of accommodation because its the civilised thing to do. Agreed, that doesn't mean home ownership.

But talking of state intervention, right now the state is doing everything it can to increase the value of privately owned housing, which is by no means good for everyone. Should it be doing that?

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