This might be a bit of a strange question, but does anyone know about the history of house prices? Not necessarily in terms of absolute prices, but how long a man was expected to work before he could say he owned the house his family lived in? When did mortgages become common, and what was the system for home ownership before that?
I'm from the UK and, from a political perspective, I think house prices today are completely outrageous. Even if I get a good job, I'll be ~35 before I can afford a mortgage on even a small house, and I may never pay it off. Many people in lower-paid jobs will just rent their whole lives. In contrast, my parents bought our seven-bedroom house for £160,000 when they were in their mid-twenties, and in today's market it's worth £650,000. I know something happened to cause such a huge change, but I still don't fully understand what.
>>1316061
Dad worked in a factory, bought his house in '60 for $20,000, peak of the market in 2007 it was worth $1,800,000.
Back 500 years in your country a man could mark off land, build a house with his hands, marry a woman, and raise his children there.
Progress.
>>1316086
I want to go back 500 years.
>>1316061
I mean as far as my admittedly poor knowledge is, several generations would live together on farms in the past. I assume homes were more of an inherited thing. I don't know for sure though. Problem with modern times is that there aren't enough new houses being built, so the prices keep rising.
>>1316095
No you don't.
>>1316061
Jews had a thing where the son would have to build an addition for him and his bride onto the father's house, and the father had to approve the addition before the wedding could take place.
Back when family took care of family.
>>1316123
>Problem with modern times is that there aren't enough new houses being built
My preferred solution to the housing crisis would be to cut net migration to zero, or as close to it as possible. If we keep expanding the population and building new housing to accommodate the expanding population, it won't be long until all the green space in the country is gone. We're pretty crowded as it is.
>>1316152
That is true, tell that to politicians who live in their own little reality bubble though.
This would be resolved if you banned foreign non-residents from owning property
>>1316061
Ye olde 15th century peasant would have a rather nice shack for 10 pounds. Yearly income was 2-3 pounds.
So five times your annual income for a house, not that different from today is it?
>>1316160
Yeah, but all we hear is muh GDP. At this rate, the country will resemble a factory before we know it - efficient and profitable, but a pretty grim place.
>>1316165
Also a good point - I've heard that the Chinese, Arabs, and Russians are buying up property in London. Not sure how much it is, but it's bound to have some sort of impact.
I forget the exact source but there is an ancient Roman text where the author talks about how he could buy a large, comfortable country home with the money that would only get him a tiny hovel in the city of Rome.
>>1316172
>nice shack for 10 pounds. Yearly income was 2-3 pounds
[citation needed]
>>1316173
Of course it does, it means I have to pay over 650 pounds a month for a room (A ROOM) in a house shared with six other people. Its immensely damaging to our country and its young people
>>1316185
http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/peasant-houses-in-midland-england.htm
Three bay houses are on the upper end of that scale so I took 10 as a nice figure. Peasant laborers and landowning husbandman earned around 1 or 2 pence a day which makes it 1.5 or 3 pounds a year.
>>1316179
Seems like not too much has changed then.
>>1316172
Average house price is roughly £250,000 in the UK, and average household income is ~£25,000. So it's more like 10 times yearly income - and isn't tax and other costs (e.g. repaying student loans, council tax) much higher now than it would have been then? I don't know that for sure, just guessing.
>>1316187
I hear you - I'm just coming to the end of my MSc now, and looking for my first 'real' job. The ones I've applied for so far are pretty well-paid for graduate jobs (£25,000-£35,000), but even then my potential living situations look very depressing. I've been looking on SpareRoom for properties in the places where I've applied, and it's all just houseshares with young professionals aged 20-40. The only way to get out of that cycle is to find a partner and pool your incomes, but even then you'll only be looking at small houses. It seems like the only way to be able to afford a nice house is to come from a family who owns property already. Class mobility is at the lowest its been for a long long time, and I don't know why our generation isn't angrier about it.
>>1316086
>>1316095
>Back 500 years in your country a man could mark off land, build a house with his hands, marry a woman, and raise his children there
You can still do that. There are places where land is incredibly cheap, still, far from civilization. And you can certainly still build your own house there. But you won't, because you don't actually want to be far from civilization, and you don't want to work hard to build a house, and you don't want to live in the shit house you're capable of building yourself. In other words, you don't want to live like someone from 500 years ago.
Real estate prices tend to rise steadily because population tends to grow steadily, while the actual amount of land is nearly fixed. Supply and demand.
>>1316211
Thanks.
>>1316225
>Average house price is roughly £250,000 in the UK, and average household income is ~£25,000. So it's more like 10 times yearly income
Well maybe the UK housing market is just fucked. I live in the Netherlands and an average house would be around 5-7 times the median income and this has to be one of the most densely populated areas in the world with a fuckton of people simply renting houses. If you got a wife that works it will be even cheaper.
>>1316241
Could you explain that gif to me? What's the context.
>>1316226
Not in the UK there's not. I don't think there's anywhere like that in Europe actually - I think the few areas of wilderness we do have are protected as UNESCO heritage (rightly so) and it would be illegal to build there.
>>1316250
Yeah from what I understand it's much worse in the UK than in many other countries.
>>1316260
LONDON is even worse than Amsterdam, you guys dun goofed.
>>1316152
Immigration exacerbates existing problems but it isn't the root cause of something like the housing problem; also the vast majority of the UK is 'green space', the idea of us being a small, crowded island is a myth, we're densely populated but there's a hell of a lot of land that isn't built on at all.
>>1316211
Tuppence? Tuppence? Tuppence a day?
>>1316061
and prices trend upward over time in relative terms. supply and demand. great britain has ~6 times as many people as it did 200 years ago. meanwhile, your island is the same size.
mortgages loans as a regular way of buying land are basically a 19th century invention. easier credit increases sticker prices a fair amount, as you can see in sheriff's sales where buyers have to have all the money on hand and can't wait for a bank loan--the houses go for about 60-80% of what they would on the open market. lending allows somewhat more people to buy, on the other hand.
>>1316287
Sorry I am not British I don't get it.
>>1316296
Mary Poppins.
>>1316225
That's the thing, I don't know if you live in London or not, but the situation here is absolutely disgusting. People well into their 30s with suposedly good careers and well paying jobs are forced to live in this extended adolescence where they have to live in houseshares and most of their income goes towards bills and rent.
>>1316285
Are you suggesting we just turn the whole of the UK into some unending urban sprawl?
>>1316304
Heard the name before, no idea what it is.
>>1316315
So, the rest of the day I'll feel sad and old, I guess.
Perhaps you've heard of Walt Disney?
>>1316312
> Building on some green space is the same thing as building on all the green space
No, I'm not.
According to mapping work done in 2012 by the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, 2.27% of land in the country is built on, there's plenty of room to expand into; yet people seem to think that expanding means building over everything.
It doesn't.
>>1316285
How is it not the root cause? Birth rates for white British families keep decreasing, but the overall population keeps increasing - isn't it because we're having net migration the size of a city each year? And we can't build houses quickly enough to cope?
I know the stat is something like only 6-7% of the UK is built on, but that's still too much for me. I don't know how they've worked out what constitutes being 'built on', but it certainly feels like there's way more development than that, in England at least. There's still a few national parks, granted, but there's very few areas of uninterrupted nature, and I think that's a shame.
>>1316312
Not yet, though one of the jobs I applied for is in London. I have no real wish to move there, but this one pays £35k and is in a field I'm interested in, so it would be silly not to consider it for a few years. But yeah, the whole houseshare situation seems so depressing. How long are grown adults supposed to live like that?
>>1316260
>Not in the UK there's not.
So move to Australia or Canada or the U.S.
>>1316359
I'd love to move to Canada, but at the moment that would mean putting an ocean between me and all my family and friends, and going there with no transferable qualifications. Still considering it as a longer-term plan, maybe in ten years once I've built up more work experience.
>>1316336
I would say there's a good balance right about now. Would seem the more sensible approach would be not importing hundred of thousands of foreigners for a start
>>1316352
> I don't know how they've worked out what constitutes being 'built on', but it certainly feels like there's way more development than that, in England at least.
How you 'feel' about it doesn't invalidate actual data that's been collected about it.
Immigration isn't the root cause of the housing problem; there's more than enough houses to go around at the minute, the problem is that many properties sit empty and unused by idle landlords, we don't even really need to build more houses at the moment, just get all the houses we have at the minute into use.
I'd say that we should always prioritise building on brownfield sites over greenfield sites, but developing on greenfield sites shouldn't always be shied away from.
>>1316384
>the problem is that many properties sit empty and unused by idle landlords, we don't even really need to build more houses at the moment, just get all the houses we have at the minute into use.
Surely a free market would correct that - landlords lose money with empty properties. So the question is why is that situation occurring?
>>1316421
Property as an investment or as a way of laundering money
>>1316384
When I say how I 'feel', I mean my personal experiences. In my town I've seen school fields sold off to developers, green areas around the edges of town bulldozed and turned into new estates, and so on. That's why I ask about how that data is collected - would all that area count as a 'developed' urban area, or it would literally just count up every building individually? And are roads counted as development? However it's worked out, I'm pretty sure that we don't have 97% green land, or anything even remotely close to that. Northern Scotland is the only area of the UK with genuine interrupted nature, and unfortunately there are very few jobs there.
>>1316434
But... Surely an investment would be more valuable if it's actually generating income. Sounds like there must be some kind of perverse tax incentive, so they somehow make more money with an empty building...
>>1316451
Not sure how it works but I guess just the way house prices are skyrocketing in London
>>1316061
It's literally only been since the housing reforms of the late 1980s that this has been the case in the UK. Prior to then you could buy a reasonable house after like 3 years of relatively low-paid work without a mortgage.
