So women have no agency at all and every last one of them has been forced into work? Right…
1 Like
No it isn’t. There is nothing to say there shouldn’t be a supply of nice houses that only need one income. How you achieve that is another matter. It just should mean 2 incomes gets you a nicer house. Not the bare minimum.
5 Likes
There are any number of supply side things you can do to reduce the price of houses but- so long as a consistent input variable is that two incomes are generally present in a purchase- pricing will reflect that. This isn’t a right wing or a left wing thing, it’s just a thing.
You could theoretically build enough small houses to negate it (ie a supply overshoot that there are more houses than couples) but it would still be present in larger properties and I suspect it would be fairly expensive and wasteful to do too.
Housing the populace in nice comfortable efficient places to live will never be a waste in my eyes.
8 Likes
I think that a government that wanted to could build lots of family homes and sell them for a lower price. Sure, demand would be high, but if couple knew that they would only have to wait a year or two for a discounted council house, it would really suppress the price of non-council houses.
You would end up on a situation similar to Jersey, where there are locals’ houses that can only be sold to locals, which are cheap. “Immigrants” pay more.
I’m not saying it’s right or fair, but it could be done.
1 Like
In terms of renting in jersey,they have an abcd etc banding and you get cheaper rent banding on the importance of job
Not sure if this was for outsiders or locals or everyone
Even if they didn’t sell them, just providing decent quantities of old-style council housing at below market rentals would help cool the market, give wages time to increase a bit and let a lot more people get a chance to own their own home. Instead councils are forced to pay over-the-odds rents to private landlords who then bulk buy houses and keep prices artificially high.
1 Like
Or build them like the “housing association” put up next door.
1 Like
If they are as well built as the ‘affordable’ houses on our road, they’ll be re-building them in 20 years
Not sure on build quality, they are very small though. They had to sell a few of them as affordable, which they did on partial ownership 
Commie 
2 Likes
I think we’re at cross purposes. I have to assume so as the alternative is you’re all mental.
All sorts of different things should be done to reduce house prices. Absolutely top of my priorities is demolishing St Albans and rebuilding it with the density of Kowloon Walled City. Frankly the existing residents and the people that want to live there deserve no better.
All I am saying is that two income purchases are absolutely baked into housing- you can see the effects from the late sixties onwards and the effect is largely inexorable. You don’t have to tell me about it as someone who lives alone. There is no means of eliminating the bump they have on housing short of either restricting a significant chunk of the population from working or (barely less draconian), forcing mortgages to be calculated against a single salary and the best of luck with either of those.
My argument isn’t that we should do nothing- we should get levelling St Albans tomorrow- but we have to understand what the different variables to pricing are and what their effects will be. If you double the number of salaries, it’s going to affect house prices. I believe the societal gains of the former outweigh the issues of the latter- and I do so as someone who lives alone- so long as other supply mitigations not currently happening are made.
EDIT- if we did my ‘St Albans walled city’ plan and hit peak density of Kowloon, we could accommodate a useful 34,942,242 people in the 18.1km2 of St Albans and I think we can all agree that this would be;
- Beneficial on the demand for housing elsewhere
- Hilarious
7 Likes
In what respect are they badly built?
Imagine the number of curry houses you’d have to cram in.
2 Likes
I can see milkfloat charging being a challenge too but the benefits are too tangible to ignore.
1 Like
The only mode of transport shall be cuntscooter with a maximum of one per family.
7 Likes
Our housing association place is only 12 years old and riddled with damp
RIDDLED
5 Likes
Haha, I was actually going to do that for you. 
2 Likes
No drainage in the garden, leaky showers, cracks, all sorts of stuff apparently.
They’ve had to be re-rendered already (2 years or so)