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I emigrated from England mostly because housing was just utterly unaffordable compared to wages, even in tech jobs. I think older people might not be aware of

I emigrated from England mostly because housing was just utterly unaffordable compared to wages, even in tech jobs. I think older people might not be aware of how bad it is, as you are quite insulated from it if you are paying back a mortgage from a 10-20 years ago rather than renting at market rates. If you have a good job you can get by, but with a significantly lower quality of life than a comparable job would have on much of the Continent, let alone in America. That said, my experience is mostly limited to London and the South-East where I grew up, so perhaps it's better elsewhere but most of the jobs are in London, and anywhere even within commuting distance is ridiculously expensive. Getting a house like my parents or grandparents had would be impossible, and they weren't rich. The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do.

philipallstar 2y ago
> Getting a house like my parents or grandparents had would be impossible, and they weren't rich. The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. > The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do. The former factor is just a massive wealth transfer exercise to people who had a house in the 1980s, and is just what we have now - no building can help it any more. The latter is somewhat out-buildable, but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year, and if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  > The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. I feel like you have at least missed two other very significant factors: low interest rates and increased borrowing limits for mortgages driving up the amount people are able to afford and the fact that councils almost completely stopped building houses since the 70s/80s.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    Also increased longevity. Where we once had three generations alive now it is four. Where I live is full of aging single people clinging on to their family homes.
  - philipallstar 2y ago
    I agree with you, but I don't think they're absolute fundamental drivers. Low interest rates will drive prices up, but not to the point we have now where nice-sized family houses are divided into multiple small residences and it's still not enough. I haven't tried it, but I suspect if you game-theoried it out with a stable population and low interest rates there would be up-bidding, but everyone would still end up with a house. With a relatively stable population you don't particularly need many new houses to be built (and not by councils in particular).
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  > The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. No, the one main factor is lack of new housing, mainly due to the green belt. On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. Unless you want some sort of dystopian mass sterilisation policy, or simple a mass slaughter of young people, the only solution is to build more houses. Government policy is unfortunately concentrated on giving first time buyers access to bigger mortgages, but of course this is just going to drive up prices. In a free market, that would incentivise house builders to build more houses, but with no land to build them on there's no way for that to happen.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Reproduction is below replacement across the entire developed world. (Edit: Israel has 2.9 TFR but that's an exceptional case, and Saudi has 2.3 but that's more of an emerging market)
  - philipallstar 2y ago
    > On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration This is from ONS[0]: > Natural change has previously been the main driver of UK population growth. However, since the 1990s, the influence of net migration has increased, becoming the main source of growth. The UK is not a devoping country. It would have a very stable population, or even a fractionally declining population, without net migration. And house prices for young people would look very different. [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020#Net+migration https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
    - quietbritishjim 2y ago
      Hmm, I'll admit I'm wrong. Thanks for the source. I do think there's a cause and effect reversal though: if housing supply was plentiful enough to allow young people to move out as early as boomers could, there would quite likely be much higher natural population growth. (i,e. it's hard for people in their twenties to have relationships when both sides are living at home)
- schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  After the war, entirely new towns were built and cities massively developed and expanded. We've done it before and we could do it again. The problem is that it has opposition from the Right who wish to preserve small villages or simply increase property values and opposition from the Left who see economic growth as a dirty word and development as gentrification and environmentally destructive. But if we want a better future for our children and grandchildren, it must be done.
  - modo_mario 2y ago
    Alternatively and far more likely and simply one curbs migration. Allowing housing prices to not be buffered up by the promise of eternal population growth and conversely creating less downward pressure on local birth rates.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year "Will not" != "can't". While I agree it's unlikely that the UK government will, such a building policy absolutely can be made to happen. > if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them. Depends on the policy. UK used to have local councils building and owning property specifically to be cheap enough for working people to afford. This has different incentives than getting the same number of units built by private investors.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  > two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads It should also be noted that two-person incomes are much more tax efficient than single because the tax bands are per-person rather than per-couple. So two people each on median pay (37k) would take home 60k between them. A single earner would have to be on almost 90k to take home the same amount, which would make them a top 5% earner.
  - philipallstar 2y ago
    Yes, it's inbelievably harder to do things as a single person or a single-earner family than it used to be. There's just no hope for the majority of earners. No hope at all.
gbuk2013 2y ago
As someone living in SE London and having traveled to many places around the world, I’m not sure I can agree with the “significantly lower quality of life” part, although of course YMMV as to what you are looking for. London has its share of problems like anywhere else, and I would say things are in some ways not as good as they were (could just be me getting old) but it is still on balance a very privileged place to live in terms of access to work, facilities, entertainment, food options etc. I have not seen many places that can compare, let alone be better for my needs.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  The various amenities have no value to QoL if you can't afford to use them.
  - Angostura 2y ago
    There are a fair few free amenities in London - museums, art galleries, concerts sometimes. The parks and gardens are good too.
    - pearlsontheroad 2y ago
      I thought it was funny how in London museums mostly have free entrance but you have to pay to visit some churches (St Paul's & Westminster Abbey).
  - gbuk2013 2y ago
    The hard fact is that enough people can, if only judging by how over-subscribed many of these amenities are. Whether or not this is sustainable remains to be seen - I certainly have bones to pick with the IMHO unwise government policy decisions that are pricing essential service workers out of the area - London can not function on bankers, lawyers and techies alone.
- schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  I mean, it depends on what your life is like too, as priorities are different. As I have a young child, and perhaps more children in the future, having good restaurants isn't as important as being able to afford a 3 or 4 bedroom house. And this is pretty unaffordable not just in London (which probably isn't the best place to raise children anyway) but across the entire South East. I agree that it has excellent work opportunities though, which is partly the problem - the best jobs in the UK are all concentrated there.
cjs_ac 2y ago
I emigrated to South-East England from Australia for the same reasons. Whether the grass is greener depends on who's looking, I suppose.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  With enough irrigation and fertiliser, your own grass can be as green as you like.
- schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  As a great philosopher once said: "The grass is always greener, where the dogs are shitting."
benjiro 2y ago
Took my parents 20 years to pay back their home, with a 6.5% mortgage, barely 15min from the center of the capital. My generation, they need a down payment of 50k Euro, just for the banks to even talk to them. And to borrow for a decent house, within 50km of a job location, people need to deal with 30, 35+ year loans. The problem as i see it: * The older generation live longer and longer, and this combines with a generational change where people want to live by themselves (and not with the kids). This creates a issues where homes are off the market, for 80 a 90 years. Reducing supply. * Ground prices have gone up because zoning laws made tons of buildable land, zoned differently. Speaking from experience as a large part of land that our family owned was altered into agricultural 50 years ago. Only for the government to disowned it (and pay out) as agricultural for their own building projects. * What used to be a easy to build home, has now tons of regulations regarding isolation norms, what you can build, how it can be build, this increases the construction costs. * Immigration / foreign capital. This is often also overlooked. Maybe this is only a local (my birth country) issue, but we had a strange situation of people from different countries immigrating here, and buying homes in the smack middle of the capital. How? Because the foreign banks of those immigrants considered owning the property as a investment, resulting in them easily giving loans. Much more easily then the local banks gave loans. This created a situation where entire areas turned into immigration zones, pushing out the locals, and reducing supply. * Second part of the foreign capital is that large investment companies or oligarchs just buy up tons of homes, apartments etc. So we get insane tower projects with 100's of apartments that no local can affords but sold to foreign capital as "investment". What in turn drives up the prices all around the areas', creating a massive bubble effect that expands to all around the areas. * Then we have the issue that if somebody wants to sell a home, they are going to charge the max they can. And with a more limited supply then demand, it keep driving up prices. To the point that we see absolute ruins being ask insane prices for. Because the owners think "we own XXXXX in value". No, you own a ruin that costs you nothing beyond the land tax, but forget about them dropping prices. The ironic part is, despite a lack in supply, its easy to find empty homes because of this investment/holding on issue. Owning a property is cheap, so cheap that companies see it as landbanks, and the people who own one, are going to keep a occupied until their 80 or 90s. Combine that with a increased population in all countries in the world (beyond maybe russia etc), and the country flight (people moving to cities because the jobs are there). The ironic part is, a lot of the home prices is because people need a home, to be within reason of a job location. They are the people earning money and spending it on a home. When you look more country side, you find TONS of cheap homes but no work. THAT is the main issue in my mind. We allow too much companies to be placed in central spots, this means everybody want to live there for the work but that drives up ground/home prices (and infrastructure costs as roads get congested). The places where its cheaper, lack the investment from companies/population growth, so price are stable or drop. We do not run out of land, we have tons, but so many villages in so many countries died out, because jobs are not there. Nobody invested in those smaller villages and put all the good infrastructure in those top10 cities, resulting in them ballooning even more and ... Now combine that with the other factors... Ironically, the work from home/pandemic movement helped for a short time but it created such a rush, that we had not normal price increases but ballooning effects. Too much people buying country homes in a short time, again, sellers market. In a more normal society, we have work spread around. More cities, lower work density concentrated on specific spots. But that requires government involvement (good luck with that) and LONG term planning. Not a few years, no, 20, 30+ year plans. But the work from home movement is already under pressure from so many companies, despite the clear benefits for employers and employees. Because how can you be a manager when you can not oversee people in person... There is something phycological in people with power position about them having fine control over their employees. Anyway, its a mess everywhere, not just the UK. We are still renting here in our 50's. The only people benefiting is the people who owned the rental properties as their capital goes up and up (rental income + property value increases). But as a middleclass, it really starts to hurt them. And no right wing "we solve it with simple solutions or its the immigrants fault" type of stuff is going to solve that. But people are desperate and yea, then we have a increase in ultra left and ultra right parties. Worst part is that a lot of politicians are personally invested into keeping higher property prices, and have no incentive to deal with the issue, as it hurt themselves.
flir 2y ago
> The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do. There's decades of underbuilding to make up for, and the current government's house building targets are modest. I don't think we're going to see price inflation slow in this Parliament, or the next.
ohgr 2y ago
It's not that bad in London. Mid-range tech salary is £70-80k and you can get a decent 2 bedroom apartment for £380k somewhere nice. Even easier if there are two of you. I'm a bit higher than that but there's nowhere else in the UK or Europe I can have as much disposable income as I do now. I know because I tried.

philipallstar 2y ago

> Getting a house like my parents or grandparents had would be impossible, and they weren't rich. The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. > The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do. The former factor is just a massive wealth transfer exercise to people who had a house in the 1980s, and is just what we have now - no building can help it any more. The latter is somewhat out-buildable, but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year, and if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them.

nicoburns 2y ago
> The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. I feel like you have at least missed two other very significant factors: low interest rates and increased borrowing limits for mortgages driving up the amount people are able to afford and the fact that councils almost completely stopped building houses since the 70s/80s.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  Also increased longevity. Where we once had three generations alive now it is four. Where I live is full of aging single people clinging on to their family homes.
- philipallstar 2y ago
  I agree with you, but I don't think they're absolute fundamental drivers. Low interest rates will drive prices up, but not to the point we have now where nice-sized family houses are divided into multiple small residences and it's still not enough. I haven't tried it, but I suspect if you game-theoried it out with a stable population and low interest rates there would be up-bidding, but everyone would still end up with a house. With a relatively stable population you don't particularly need many new houses to be built (and not by councils in particular).
quietbritishjim 2y ago
> The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. No, the one main factor is lack of new housing, mainly due to the green belt. On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. Unless you want some sort of dystopian mass sterilisation policy, or simple a mass slaughter of young people, the only solution is to build more houses. Government policy is unfortunately concentrated on giving first time buyers access to bigger mortgages, but of course this is just going to drive up prices. In a free market, that would incentivise house builders to build more houses, but with no land to build them on there's no way for that to happen.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Reproduction is below replacement across the entire developed world. (Edit: Israel has 2.9 TFR but that's an exceptional case, and Saudi has 2.3 but that's more of an emerging market)
- philipallstar 2y ago
  > On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration This is from ONS[0]: > Natural change has previously been the main driver of UK population growth. However, since the 1990s, the influence of net migration has increased, becoming the main source of growth. The UK is not a devoping country. It would have a very stable population, or even a fractionally declining population, without net migration. And house prices for young people would look very different. [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020#Net+migration https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    Hmm, I'll admit I'm wrong. Thanks for the source. I do think there's a cause and effect reversal though: if housing supply was plentiful enough to allow young people to move out as early as boomers could, there would quite likely be much higher natural population growth. (i,e. it's hard for people in their twenties to have relationships when both sides are living at home)
schnitzelstoat 2y ago
After the war, entirely new towns were built and cities massively developed and expanded. We've done it before and we could do it again. The problem is that it has opposition from the Right who wish to preserve small villages or simply increase property values and opposition from the Left who see economic growth as a dirty word and development as gentrification and environmentally destructive. But if we want a better future for our children and grandchildren, it must be done.
- modo_mario 2y ago
  Alternatively and far more likely and simply one curbs migration. Allowing housing prices to not be buffered up by the promise of eternal population growth and conversely creating less downward pressure on local birth rates.
ben_w 2y ago
> but our building is not going to hit housing 700k people/year levels. We can't build a city the size of Nottingham every year "Will not" != "can't". While I agree it's unlikely that the UK government will, such a building policy absolutely can be made to happen. > if we did, that would be to maintain the current prices, not to decrease them. Depends on the policy. UK used to have local councils building and owning property specifically to be cheap enough for working people to afford. This has different incentives than getting the same number of units built by private investors.
globular-toast 2y ago
> two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads It should also be noted that two-person incomes are much more tax efficient than single because the tax bands are per-person rather than per-couple. So two people each on median pay (37k) would take home 60k between them. A single earner would have to be on almost 90k to take home the same amount, which would make them a top 5% earner.
- philipallstar 2y ago
  Yes, it's inbelievably harder to do things as a single person or a single-earner family than it used to be. There's just no hope for the majority of earners. No hope at all.

gbuk2013 2y ago

As someone living in SE London and having traveled to many places around the world, I’m not sure I can agree with the “significantly lower quality of life” part, although of course YMMV as to what you are looking for. London has its share of problems like anywhere else, and I would say things are in some ways not as good as they were (could just be me getting old) but it is still on balance a very privileged place to live in terms of access to work, facilities, entertainment, food options etc. I have not seen many places that can compare, let alone be better for my needs.

HPsquared 2y ago
The various amenities have no value to QoL if you can't afford to use them.
- Angostura 2y ago
  There are a fair few free amenities in London - museums, art galleries, concerts sometimes. The parks and gardens are good too.
  - pearlsontheroad 2y ago
    I thought it was funny how in London museums mostly have free entrance but you have to pay to visit some churches (St Paul's & Westminster Abbey).
- gbuk2013 2y ago
  The hard fact is that enough people can, if only judging by how over-subscribed many of these amenities are. Whether or not this is sustainable remains to be seen - I certainly have bones to pick with the IMHO unwise government policy decisions that are pricing essential service workers out of the area - London can not function on bankers, lawyers and techies alone.
schnitzelstoat 2y ago
I mean, it depends on what your life is like too, as priorities are different. As I have a young child, and perhaps more children in the future, having good restaurants isn't as important as being able to afford a 3 or 4 bedroom house. And this is pretty unaffordable not just in London (which probably isn't the best place to raise children anyway) but across the entire South East. I agree that it has excellent work opportunities though, which is partly the problem - the best jobs in the UK are all concentrated there.

cjs_ac 2y ago

I emigrated to South-East England from Australia for the same reasons. Whether the grass is greener depends on who's looking, I suppose.

HPsquared 2y ago
With enough irrigation and fertiliser, your own grass can be as green as you like.
schnitzelstoat 2y ago
As a great philosopher once said: "The grass is always greener, where the dogs are shitting."

benjiro 2y ago

Took my parents 20 years to pay back their home, with a 6.5% mortgage, barely 15min from the center of the capital. My generation, they need a down payment of 50k Euro, just for the banks to even talk to them. And to borrow for a decent house, within 50km of a job location, people need to deal with 30, 35+ year loans. The problem as i see it: * The older generation live longer and longer, and this combines with a generational change where people want to live by themselves (and not with the kids). This creates a issues where homes are off the market, for 80 a 90 years. Reducing supply. * Ground prices have gone up because zoning laws made tons of buildable land, zoned differently. Speaking from experience as a large part of land that our family owned was altered into agricultural 50 years ago. Only for the government to disowned it (and pay out) as agricultural for their own building projects. * What used to be a easy to build home, has now tons of regulations regarding isolation norms, what you can build, how it can be build, this increases the construction costs. * Immigration / foreign capital. This is often also overlooked. Maybe this is only a local (my birth country) issue, but we had a strange situation of people from different countries immigrating here, and buying homes in the smack middle of the capital. How? Because the foreign banks of those immigrants considered owning the property as a investment, resulting in them easily giving loans. Much more easily then the local banks gave loans. This created a situation where entire areas turned into immigration zones, pushing out the locals, and reducing supply. * Second part of the foreign capital is that large investment companies or oligarchs just buy up tons of homes, apartments etc. So we get insane tower projects with 100's of apartments that no local can affords but sold to foreign capital as "investment". What in turn drives up the prices all around the areas', creating a massive bubble effect that expands to all around the areas. * Then we have the issue that if somebody wants to sell a home, they are going to charge the max they can. And with a more limited supply then demand, it keep driving up prices. To the point that we see absolute ruins being ask insane prices for. Because the owners think "we own XXXXX in value". No, you own a ruin that costs you nothing beyond the land tax, but forget about them dropping prices. The ironic part is, despite a lack in supply, its easy to find empty homes because of this investment/holding on issue. Owning a property is cheap, so cheap that companies see it as landbanks, and the people who own one, are going to keep a occupied until their 80 or 90s. Combine that with a increased population in all countries in the world (beyond maybe russia etc), and the country flight (people moving to cities because the jobs are there). The ironic part is, a lot of the home prices is because people need a home, to be within reason of a job location. They are the people earning money and spending it on a home. When you look more country side, you find TONS of cheap homes but no work. THAT is the main issue in my mind. We allow too much companies to be placed in central spots, this means everybody want to live there for the work but that drives up ground/home prices (and infrastructure costs as roads get congested). The places where its cheaper, lack the investment from companies/population growth, so price are stable or drop. We do not run out of land, we have tons, but so many villages in so many countries died out, because jobs are not there. Nobody invested in those smaller villages and put all the good infrastructure in those top10 cities, resulting in them ballooning even more and ... Now combine that with the other factors... Ironically, the work from home/pandemic movement helped for a short time but it created such a rush, that we had not normal price increases but ballooning effects. Too much people buying country homes in a short time, again, sellers market. In a more normal society, we have work spread around. More cities, lower work density concentrated on specific spots. But that requires government involvement (good luck with that) and LONG term planning. Not a few years, no, 20, 30+ year plans. But the work from home movement is already under pressure from so many companies, despite the clear benefits for employers and employees. Because how can you be a manager when you can not oversee people in person... There is something phycological in people with power position about them having fine control over their employees. Anyway, its a mess everywhere, not just the UK. We are still renting here in our 50's. The only people benefiting is the people who owned the rental properties as their capital goes up and up (rental income + property value increases). But as a middleclass, it really starts to hurt them. And no right wing "we solve it with simple solutions or its the immigrants fault" type of stuff is going to solve that. But people are desperate and yea, then we have a increase in ultra left and ultra right parties. Worst part is that a lot of politicians are personally invested into keeping higher property prices, and have no incentive to deal with the issue, as it hurt themselves.

flir 2y ago

> The new government has said they want to sort out the NIMBY stuff and get Britain building again, let's hope they do. There's decades of underbuilding to make up for, and the current government's house building targets are modest. I don't think we're going to see price inflation slow in this Parliament, or the next.

ohgr 2y ago

It's not that bad in London. Mid-range tech salary is £70-80k and you can get a decent 2 bedroom apartment for £380k somewhere nice. Even easier if there are two of you. I'm a bit higher than that but there's nowhere else in the UK or Europe I can have as much disposable income as I do now. I know because I tried.