60% off new council houses

seahorse

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2008/0725/breaking77.htm

Am delighted to hear about this I have to say; I think it's high time people in council housing were seriously encouraged to buy their homes. (No doubt there'll be the usual whinging from the begrudgers though :rolleyes:)

johnnyskeleton

seahorse wrote: »

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2008/0725/breaking77.htm

Am delighted to hear about this I have to say; I think it's high time people in council housing were seriously encouraged to buy their homes. (No doubt there'll be the usual whinging from the begrudgers though :rolleyes:)

Such schemes have been around for ages. Every so often there is a big buy up.

I don't think it is necessarily a good idea to be an automatic right to buy your council house, because:

1) if the people who currently need social housing buy their houses, this is not an end to social housing. The government will have to get a replacement council house for the new people who need it.

2) rather than a heavily discounted council house, I think a scheme whereby certain people can apply for a scheme which subsidises a private purchase.

3) each person's circumstances will be different, so a one size fits all approach is not the best way to go about it.

stovelid

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

1) if the people who currently need social housing buy their houses, this is not an end to social housing. The government will have to get a replacement council house for the new people who need it.

My mother and father bought their council house in a similar scheme back in the 80's. They wouldn't have been able to afford to buy then (or now) so buying their house did not deprive somebody else, it allowed otherwise infinite rental tenants to stay in the same house.

Sure, it becomes private property and out of the local authority loop but to be honest, the real problem here is the stasis in local authority housing in favour of private developments. Devleopers were supposed to be social housing providers but they bought themselves out of the commitment.

People like my parents who bought their house did not do it to buy a 'starter home'; They are still there, and 'deprived' communities absolutely benefited from it.

johnnyskeleton

stovelid wrote: »

so buying their house did not deprive somebody else, it allowed otherwise infinite rental tenants to stay in the same house.

I don't quite understand this comment about infinite rental tenants, but my point is that I believe it makes more sense for county councils to retain their social housing stock rather than selling them to the tenants and then building new stock elsewhere.

While I understand that a lot of people and communities have benefitted from these buyouts (and in that sense it is a good thing), from the point of view of good governance I think it is a costly and impractical way of creating the desired effect (e.g. helping people out of social housing and into private housing).

Victor

Johnny, there has been a problem with ghettoisation, so it make sense for councils to only be involved in small numbers of units in larger developments. They need tomove away from the past situation where councils owned entire estates or neighbourhoods.

While I'm all for council tenants being given more responsibility for their own housing, I am concerned that some people will gain more from this schem than others.

Council houses sold for £20,000 (€25,000) in 1987 are now selling for €300,000 and some for quite a bit more than that (especially corner sites).

stovelid

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

I don't quite understand this comment about infinite rental tenants,

Sorry, badly phrased. If you're working, you have to pay rent to the local authority.

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

but my point is that I believe it makes more sense for county councils to retain their social housing stock rather than selling them to the tenants and then building new stock elsewhere.

While I understand that a lot of people and communities have benefitted from these buyouts (and in that sense it is a good thing), from the point of view of good governance I think it is a costly and impractical way of creating the desired effect (e.g. helping people out of social housing and into private housing).

I honestly think the aim should be to let long-term local authority tenants own their properties if they want. It plays a role in settling an area.

I should stress that , like Victor, I don't envisage ownership as being a fast track to selling the house for profit. I'm thinking more along the lines of long-term tenants who have (and will provide) a substantial social investment in the community.

jdivision

seahorse wrote: »

[url] No doubt there'll be the usual whinging from the begrudgers though :rolleyes:[/url]

Quite right too. The State has paid for the upkeep of these properties and is now selling them off at a discount, many of them to the very people who were reponsible for putting them into that state in the first place.
It's also a legal quagmire in terms of management companies etc.

johnnyskeleton

Victor wrote: »

Johnny, there has been a problem with ghettoisation, so it make sense for councils to only be involved in small numbers of units in larger developments. They need tomove away from the past situation where councils owned entire estates or neighbourhoods.

This "ghettoisation" still persists; there have been numerous new developments of apartments in Dublin City Centre which have been bought up quietly by DCC, or to take another example I believe Herberton (the new fatima mansions) has been arranged so that one entire block is set aside for corpo housing, the rest being all private.

It seems to me that a scheme which encourages people to buy privately rather than buy out their council flat would be better to prevent ghettoisation, but again this isn't my main concern, my main concern is that they are constantly selling old stock at reduced values and buying new stock at full asking price, and this seems very inefficient.

Mailman

There are people on council housing lists that would benefit from those council houses not being removed from council housing stock.
Those council houses will get returned to the pool if not sold on out of the scheme. Some council houses date from the 1930s or earlier and have served many generations of needy peole. Selling them on at a discount doesn't make sense if the Government's responsibility is to provide shelter to as many people as possible who are in need of it.

Some of the people on council housing lists with an immediate need for housing would be in B&Bs waiting for a house to come free and here houses are being sold on.

That's not the argument of a begrudger, that's the argument of someone who wants to see as many people housed as need housing.

jdivision

+1

seahorse

Mailman wrote: »

There are people on council housing lists that would benefit from those council houses not being removed from council housing stock.
Those council houses will get returned to the pool if not sold on out of the scheme. Some council houses date from the 1930s or earlier and have served many generations of needy peole. Selling them on at a discount doesn't make sense if the Government's responsibility is to provide shelter to as many people as possible who are in need of it.

Some of the people on council housing lists with an immediate need for housing would be in B&Bs waiting for a house to come free and here houses are being sold on.

That's not the argument of a begrudger, that's the argument of someone who wants to see as many people housed as need housing.

Well, to take your first point Mailman, the thing is council houses are very often lived in by several generations of the same family, so once rented they are not available to anyone else anyway. In light of this, I think it's better that they're bought for exactly the reason you maintain they shouldnt be; which is that their purchase provides funding for new builds; funding which would not be comparable to monies coming from council rents, as they are so low. I'll copy and paste a line from the Times article I posted here:

'It will also provide more money for social housing to be built, as people who would ordinarily be renting for extended periods will be providing fund to local authorities through their purchases.'

As to your comment about people in Eastern Health Board funded B&B's and other emergency accomodation, I've heard that argument before but the reality is it doesnt matter one whit to those people whether or not someone in a council house is renting or buying because either way the house is occupied and not available to them.

A huge proportion of those who are housed from the current housing lists are housed in new builds; old houses are notoriously difficult to procure, because, as I said, families hold onto them for generations. Doesnt it make more sense to maximise the funding coming from any one family by just selling them the house rather than having them rent it for very little money for generations?

Mailman

Councils are tightening up on preventing Council Houses being passed through generations but have been lax until now.

How does selling a house which exists for less than it's replacement cost aid social housing?

The people in B&Bs would be in council houses if they were vacated by people who can now afford to provide their own accomodation for themselves.

They're notoriously difficult to procure because the council keep selling them below market rate to the occupiers who then sell them on the open market.
Practical example: see Pavee Lacken movie for reasons why traveller woman and her children couldn't be housed in the local authority area.

SkepticOne

Because it only works for new housing it will have the effect of undermining the second hand market which is good or bad depending on your point of view.

seahorse

Mailman wrote: »

Councils are tightening up on preventing Council Houses being passed through generations but have been lax until now.

Well they're not really. Even if that is the aim it isn’t working, because DCC now do not allow siblings to move in with eachother and be named on the rent, but that does not apply to adult children, and adult children are the usual recipients of these houses to begin with, hence them being 'passed down' through the generations.

Mailman wrote: »

How does selling a house which exists for less than it's replacement cost aid social housing?

To a far greater degree than continuing to rent it for buttons.

Mailman wrote: »

The people in B&Bs would be in council houses if they were vacated by people who can now afford to provide their own accomodation for themselves.

But that's the thing; at market rate, they cant.

Mailman wrote: »

They're notoriously difficult to procure because the council keep selling them below market rate to the occupiers who then sell them on the open market.

I believe a more common reason is that people are continuing to rent them. A family member of mine lives in a 200 house estate in Dublin which she moved into in the early eighties. There are only a small minority of homeowners on that estate and there have only been a tiny handful of new neighbours move in since the first residents arrived. Clearly people are continuing to rent on that estate, and in the 25+ years that have passed the grandchildren of the original tenants are now living in those houses, and presumably they will be the occupiers in twenty or thirty years from now when they've grown up and their grandparents are gone. What happens in the meantime? They either continue to pay minimal rent or they pay mortgages; I think it's obvious which benefits social housing in the longer term.

Mailman

As long as you can forget that Council Housing waiting lists with names of people who are in dire genuine immediate need of shelter are extremely long the O.P.s position seems entirely reasonable.

I have nothing further to add to this topic.

seahorse

Mailman wrote: »

As long as you can forget that Council Housing waiting lists with names of people who are in dire genuine immediate need of shelter are extremely long the O.P.s position seems entirely reasonable.

I wholeheartedly agree that the lists are disgraceful Mailman, but I believe the responsibility for the length of those lists rests with the government, not with existing council tenants. There was more than enough money generated in this country over the last fifteen years to sort the problem out, but it wasn’t dealt with, and I don’t think the fiscally weaker members of society ought to be penalised for government ineptitude.

jdivision

seahorse wrote: »

But that's the thing; at market rate, they cant.

No always true. Wasn't there a case recently where a local authority discovered that a family's weekly income was about E2,000 and they were paying something like E58 a week rent. You can just tell from the cars outside some council houses that the family is doing very well for itself and that they shouldn't be subsidised by the state any longer when there is a genuine need for housing amongst other people.

SkepticOne

A lot of the discussion on this thread seems to be concerned with local authority tenants, but there's nothing in the article to suggest it is about them. It is another scheme where the State purchases new houses from builders and sells them on a lower price. Never has this been the idea behind social housing.

The article does mention social welfare recipients as beneficiaries but to be honest I don't think the majority of them will benefit.

What is being described has nothing to do with the traditional idea of council housing.

Call me an old cynic but I think this has more to do with maintaining bank liquidity at the expense of the tax payer than helping ordinary people. If there was a great shortage of houses for sale forcing prices up then it might make sense to have a subsidy scheme to help the less well off and stimulate greater supply. But in the current climate of vast glut it doesn't make sense from the point of view of helping people other than suppliers.

stovelid

jdivision wrote: »

No always true. Wasn't there a case recently where a local authority discovered that a family's weekly income was about E2,000 and they were paying something like E58 a week rent.

If you're working, I thought - in SDCC anyway - you had to pay a quarter of your monthly income to the local authority?

Can anybody confirm this?

gazzer

If you're working, I thought - in SDCC anyway - you had to pay a quarter of your monthly income to the local authority?

Can anybody confirm this?

Not sure about SDCC but I know a guy who is married with 2 kids and they live in a 3 bedrom council house in Dublin 7. He works and his wife is a stay at home mum. He earns 550 pw after tax (didnt earn this when he got the house 10 years ago) and his weekly rent is 140 pw so it would be roughly around a quarter of his income.

seahorse

jdivision wrote: »

No always true. Wasn't there a case recently where a local authority discovered that a family's weekly income was about E2,000 and they were paying something like E58 a week rent. You can just tell from the cars outside some council houses that the family is doing very well for itself and that they shouldn't be subsidised by the state any longer when there is a genuine need for housing amongst other people.

Well, first off if a family are pulling in 2.000 weekly and paying 58 euro in rent they are obviously not declaring their income to the council.

I also dont believe you can tell much about a persons finances from the car they drive, especially in this day and age when so many people maybe own their steering wheel and the rest is owned by the bank.