Rehousing out of the borough…..yes, please!
Ever one for a radical and creative idea I spotted this gem in the Telegraph:-
This is about an Italian village of 12 houses up for the staggeringly cheap price of £250,000.
What enterprising London council is going to snap that one up to house the homeless?
You might moan about being relocated to Luton or Hull but the Abruzzi region of the Apennines?
I’ll be making my homelessness application tomorrow thanks very much, more than happy to be re-housed out of the borough.
The article tells us that these ‘Ghost hamlets’ numbering about 20,000 across the country are being brought back to life by holiday makers with an eye on the logical step-up from a caravan on Canvey Island.
A stone cottage with a patio going for roughly 20,000 euros and a possible holiday rental tag of £400 per night.
Shelter’s latest report states true facts
Mind you, I doubt housing benefit would cover rent if they were used for the homeless, having read the latest report from Shelter:-
That housing benefit no longer even covers the bottom 25% of the market. Rates having been frozen whilst rents haven’t.
Ignoring Shelter’s projections for where this is all taking us, something I am always uncomfortable with, being possessed of a fatalistic streak when it comes to whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, I can, however, concur with reports of Shelter advisers that people are finding it increasingly difficult to deal with delays in benefits processing and upfront costs of moving.
The latter being the most common complaint I hear from tenants living in slums with rapscallion landlords when I ask them why they don’t simply move out.
Banning of agents charging fees to tenants
This is a story you can’t read without looking at growing concerns that agents may soon be forbidden from charging fees to tenants, ably reported in Landlord Today:-
Their own projections are that investing in property may cease to be financially viable as a result.
Simon Gerrrard of Martyn Gerard quoted as saying:
“headline grabbing knee-jerk reaction” from a new government “trying to do anything to gain public support”.
Like teaming up with the DUP to gain a majority then, summed up in a hilarious line by Frankie Boyle on the recent “New World Order” encapsulating the Northern Irish bunch’s values:
“Right. Item 2 on the agenda. The vexed question of juggling on the Sabbath”
I digress…..
The article says, as heavily predicted just about everywhere, that in order to recoup costs imposed on landlords by agents in their desperate attempts to remain solvent the real losers will be tenants who get their rents increased further.
For which you only have to go back to the Shelter piece to see where this is all going, although ARLA is quoted as predicting that 4,000 jobs might go as a result in the lettings sector.
so….
If Shelter predict a rise in homelessness as rents increase further, rather bizarrely the opposite seems to be true in the Canadian city of Yellowknife where a vote taken by the city council to spend $113 million to end homelessness could push up the rents.
The idea being that if they spend the allocated money to build places for the homeless to live in then there will be a shortage of other rental property thus driving up rents in what is apparently already one of the most expensive Canadian city for rents.
I’m no economist. I can’t even work out my bank statement but isn’t all this homelessness v. rents malarkey completely mad when left to market forces?
It’s like a constant see-saw that never stops going up and down.
Maybe we should stop trying to balance things out perpetually and just ditch the see-saw. Or even the swing park itself.
Does madness prevail?
I once read a definition of madness which is “Constantly doing the same thing over and over again whilst all the time expecting a different result”.
While Fergus Wilson continues to face controversy over who he will and won’t rent to it transpires that a Greenwich landlord, as yet unnamed might be headed the same way
when he instructed his agent, named as Sharaf Ahmed to place an advert in a window saying:
“Children, pets, DSS, Gay/Lesbian, benefit seeker are strictly prohibited/not allowed”
Maybe the landlord needs to hook up with the DUP, or just put in to appear on a new TV show that is coming up where instead of people like me appearing about as regularly as Peter bloody Andre to expose property conditions this time the landlords themselves are going to be living in their own properties.
The fella reported here running what is called the usual “Rat infested home” is a multi-millionaire who made his fortune from dividing up family homes into rooms and letting them out.
No surprises there and all about as common as……well me in a property programme or Russel Moffat who works for Newham council. It’s usually either me or him in such documentaries.
I don’t at the time of writing know who else is going to be volunteering for the coming festival of delight that I’m sure I shall enjoy hugely but if the programme-makers are reading this can you get Fergus Wilson in there and film him making a curry?
What made me smile this week
Watching Chic at Glastonbury. I had the good fortune to see them at a festival a couple of years back. I love watching old musos kill the stage with effortlessness.
Jerry Barnes, one of funk’s great unknown bass guitarists.
However….
What made me smile in a disturbed way was watching Barry Gibb, on just before Chic trotting out ballad after ballad that hadn’t seen the light of day since 1976 to a field of largely bemused people wearing cardboard masks of his face whilst simultaneously wondering who they guy was and struggling to remember any lyrics apart from the Saturday Night Fever stuff.
Chic are still in there and up to date, working with Pharrell and Daft Punk but the highlight of Gibb’s set was watching the security guys dancing to Staying Alive.
How not to do it nestling alongside how to do it on the same stage.
See ya in a fortnight.
If Shelter predict a rise in homelessness as rents increase further …
then they are being misleading. The homes will still exist and will be rented out or sold and occupied by the owner. Rents will not rise higher than the level at which there are enough people able and willing to pay (market forces at work). That may price out tenants on benefits but the same number of people will be housed.
If the population increases faster than the supply of housing then homelessness will increase, and so will rents, but the increase in rents is not causing the homelessness. Actually the increase in rents would tend to reduce the homelessness by making it more profitable to build more houses for rent (or would if market forces were allowed to work more freely, but they are severely constrained by the planning system).
Hi Peter, Thanks for the comment. Always happy to enter into an informed debate rather than deal with trolls, even if I dont agree or even understand the argument as is the case here.
I do think there is a connection between rents and homelessness. If people cant afford rents in the PRS and they are eligible for homelessness assistance then where else can they go?, presuming family and friends arent an option.
I get your long term argument about making it more profitable to build housing for rent but thats a long term solution. It doesnt address the here and now. I did some work for Croydon recently where they dealt with over 6,000 homelessness case last year and when I worked at Lewisham we had 500 cases a week on average through the door, most applications precipitated by a stark increase (look at the figures), on repossessions under s21.
The bottom line is that when people cant afford rents they largely go to the homelessness unit for help. I dont see your argument that uncontrolled PRS rents arent affecting homelessness figures, although I admit it isnt the only driver.
Its isnt a complex economic or philosophical argument. Even a financial klutz like me can get it. If you cant afford the rent then you cant afford to live in the property, period and the homelessness unit picks up the slack, which means we all, as tax payer, foot the bill for rents that people cant afford.
The planning system is a different argument and one I probably agree with you on in many respects
You argument explains why individuals become homeless but not the effect on the overall homelessness figure. That requires a slightly more complex explanation, though one that most landlords understand as it determines what rents they can charge.
Suppose I had ten houses to let (I don’t) and they are all occupied – that’s ten families housed. Supposed I put up the rents and still managed to let them all. Still ten families housed. No increase in total homelessness, though there may have been a changed in who is homeless from poorer families to richer ones. Suppose I put up the rents and didn’t manage to let them all, that might increase homelessness, except that I would respond by lowering the rents until they were all let. So there would still be no increase in overall homelessness.
Rents only go up and stay up if there are people willing and able to pay the higher rents. That is not good for those who can not afford them, but the number of houses and the number of families housed does not change.
So where are the new richer tenants to replace the previous ones coming from? Well the ONS have just published statistics showing that the UK population is increasing faster than any time since the baby boom following WW2. More people + same number of houses = more homelessness. More demand for housing + little extra supply = higher price for housing.
Look at Germany, the population and rents were pretty stable for years, but the recent influx of migrants has been followed by rents and house prices increasing rapidly.
If market forces were allowed to operate freely in house building then the amount of housing would soon increase, but they aren’t. Mostly for well intentioned and often perfectly good reasons. Still they are working in the centre of Manchester where a lot of new high density housing is being built. Mostly in the form of serviced apartments aimed at the fairly rich, but that will move them out of lower quality housing which will become available for the somewhat poorer.
“a stark increase (look at the figures), on repossessions under s21.”
Do you mean when you used to work at Lewisham a few years ago? You might be a bit out of date.
S21 claims and all stages of landlord possession claims have decreased in recent years.
(Historically there has been a shift from landlords using the s8 procedure to the s21 procedure due to a failure in the system although the reasons behind them remain the same -usually not paying rent.)
Official figures here;
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/613513/mortgage-and-landlord-possession-statistics-jan-mar_-2017.pdf
“All stages of landlord possession actions have decreased.
Landlord possession claims, orders for possession, warrants of possession and repossessions by county court bailiffs were down, continuing the long-term downward trend seen since April to June 2014.”
Accelerated possession (s21) claims Q1
2015 – 9471
2016 – 8882
2017 – 7716