Afternoon:
9°c
Employment is falling, inflation rising, the pound collapsing, business confidence evaporating, the unions striking and banks busting.
It's so bad that the average price of a house in London has plummeted to £300,000! Think about that and you realise that £300,000 is still way beyond the means of vast numbers of Londoners.
You would still need an income — or joint income — of around £100,000 before you could think of taking out a sensible mortgage on an ordinary London home.
And when you do, you will find that, whatever the stories of falling prices, the cost of housing has not come down. Mortgage rates are far higher than a year ago. Deposits are larger and rents are up, too.
We have a property industry in crisis at the same time as housing remains hugely expensive. Where's the credit-crunch dividend? Where's the cheap property for all those shut out in the boom years?
Contacts in Whitehall were telling me in the summer that Gordon Brown was going to sort out the mess by waiting for the market to hit the floor and then buying up stock. As it is, with his measures announced yesterday, he has been panicked into telling councils and housing associations to help families facing repossession now, when prices have fallen by just 10 per cent.
He's loading the taxpayer with negative equity because the International Monetary Fund and most other reputable economists predict that prices will fall by 30 per cent — maybe more.
Meanwhile, his stamp-duty holiday on homes costing £175,000 or less will help some Londoners but not that many, because flats costing £175,000 or less in London remain rarer than a sunny summer's day.
He could have done so much more. Although much attention has concentrated on the troubles of banking, the state of the major building firms is almost as serious. If they go under, it will take years before new ones emerge that are able to build the new homes the South-East needs if we are to avoid yet more bubble markets.
The industry might have been saved. The young couples priced out of the market and the 1.6 million stuck on council-house waiting lists might have been helped, and we might have become a saner country where people didn't imagine they could make their fortune in property speculation.
Adam Sampson, of housing charity Shelter, told me Brown needed to “ride out the storm, keep the housing industry going and begin building homes for the future”.
Brown can't, because he wasted so much money in the good years that he left next to nothing in reserve for when hard times came.
This is why young readers in good jobs still can't afford a decent home. And, if there's anyone left who cares, it is also why Brown will lead Labour to a landslide defeat.
Reader views (2)
Can't afford a home.. So can't be bothered to work. I mean that's what everybody's doing it for, to have somewhere to call home in this hell.
- Ray Stratton, Perth, Australia, 19/02/2010 03:47
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...but of course the Tories have no meaningful policy either, so when they defeat Labour at the General Election any problems identified will remain. Not only are mortgages more expensive, but crucially they are far more difficult to get anyway. And really, do we want to see government charging in and creating an even bigger mess, using tax-payer money to give ad hoc support to favoured constituents, without the merit of economic efficiency. They really weren't the good old days when most of us lived in council flats paying half a crown a week and the only people who could afford to buy had had to save for 30 years at the same building society and go cap in hand to the manager. The idea of major building firms going bust and there not being anyone to fill in the gap when times get better is simply a non-starter. They're not building gothic crenellated homes using ancient skills that will be lost. I've lost count of the number of times friends in construction have stared with giddy misery over the abyss in each recession and cried 'the game's up'. It never is. It just evolves. And here's a tip if you are a building firm and G Brown and co come riding to your rescue - my advice is punch them in the eye and run.
- Damian Hockney, London, UK, 19/02/2010 02:47
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