Mortgages. A lot of borrowers in my home town can only afford houses in the oldest estate now. It was built 60 or 70 years ago. G rated, 2 or 3 bed semi-detached homes with tiny, cold rooms. They have skinny little gardens but the houses are very poor by today's standards. They probably weren't great even when they were built. A lot of welfare and working families grew up there. A nice little community back in the day, but poor houses.
Most of the welfare kids who grew up there got housed in a new estate across town. Brand new, roomier A rated homes. Fair play to them.
The parents are passing away now and the old houses are coming up for sale. The council don't want them because they don't deem them fit to house people and upgrading them would be too expensive. With the housing market gone the way it is it's all a lot of mortgage holders can afford. And they're buying them!
These weren't mortgage houses when they were new 60 years ago. These are cheaply built council houses. If you had a mortgage 60 years ago you had no interest in them, you were buying or building a bigger home on a private site.
But now you have the welfare families in new, roomy A rated homes on one side of the town and the working, mortgage committing borrowers buying the tiny old council houses on the other. And not cheaply.
Have we all gone f*#king mad? Surely everyone should be entitled to a decent home, especially if you've saved for a few years and are happy to commit to 20 or 30 years of a mortgage/work. Some young mortgage holders can't even afford those old council houses. And I'm told the new retrofitting scheme will increase the price of these houses even further, ruling more people out.
How bad can it get?
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