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Showing posts from 2017

THE GOVERNMENT IS IN A HOLE OVER HOUSING. TIME TO STOP DIGGING.

As the fallout from the terrible fire at a tower block in North Kensington continues, it may still be months before we know the precise details of what went wrong. The broader context, however, is already clear. That context is the housing market, which has taken a universal human need and turned it into a financial investment that ever fewer people can afford. This picture is clearly painted in a new report that shows how older people have stacked up £2.3 trillion in the past two decades through gains in a housing market from which most young people are excluded. It reminds us that buying a home, unlike a conventional purchase, transforms a person's relationship with the money system. From wanting prices to be low, to make a home affordable, they now want them to be as high as possible, both to maximise the value of their asset and and to reduce the proportion of it that they owe to their lender. That, at least, is the working assumption of which the politics of housing i