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A full 76% of housing wealth owned by those aged 50+. I knew there was a generational economic conflict of sorts, but I never imagined it was this bad. These a
by jf- 8y ago
A full 76% of housing wealth owned by those aged 50+. I knew there was a generational economic conflict of sorts, but I never imagined it was this bad.
These are our landlords. Making the older generation a class of rentiers who maintain their standard of living off the backs of the young. Want to buy? Too bad. How about you pay rent at the equivalent rate of a mortgage instead?
- esotericn 8y agoSeems perfectly reasonable to me. Below that, you have 20-50 year olds. Above that, you have 50-80 year olds. Let's pretend 80+ doesn't exist for the sake of argument. Perfect random distribution would be 50%. But it's not random. A 50 year old obviously has more wealth than a 20 year old (unless the 20 year old's parents die early and they inherit a wad; which is unlikely given that most don't inherit much, and their parents don't die when they're young).
- jf- 8y agoReasonable is not the term I would use. I've read elsewhere that the rate of home ownership in the UK for 30-somethings is half that of 15 years ago, which is half that again of 30 years ago. Extrapolate that to this distribution and it must have been vastly different for previous generations. Housing has become increasingly unaffordable and those that got in early reap the rewards. I actually looked for figures like those given by the economist on a whim previously, but couldn't find any readily available data. It's nice to see them now. Too bad there's no comparison to what that distribution would have looked like in the past. I can't find exactly the article I'm thinking of above, but these two have a similar gist: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/27/home-ownership-figures-are-exaggerated-says-thinktank-resolution-foundation https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/27/home-ownersh... https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/nov/17/generation-rent-young-adults-housing-ladder-2025 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/nov/17/generation-ren...
- qwerty456127 8y ago> Making the older generation a class of rentiers who maintain their standard of living off the backs of the young. Isn't this the natural way of things? People work and raise children ("living off their backs"), become too old for modern jobs and start living off the backs of the young. Hasn't it always worked this way?
- jf- 8y agoNo. That's a voluntary arrangement where families support their elderly relatives, or where society consents to support the elderly via taxation and redistribution. This is a situation where the older generation have an economic near-monopoly on housing and use that to extract rent where the renters have little alternative. I don't see these as being the same.
- twodave 8y agoRent should be higher than the equivalent rate of the mortgage, for a lot of obvious reasons.
- jf- 8y agoAll the worse.
- twodave 8y agoIf you want to pay less, I’m sure you could negotiate handling all repairs and maintenance on the property in exchange for the difference.
- ionised 8y agoAssuming that landlords even bother to handle those things properly or safely. My experience is they don't. They want the money, but not the responsibility.
- monocasa 8y agoNot really. For a long time rent was universally cheaper because the landlords obviously keep the asset.