Interesting Links for 03-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• A great short film about bikes and childhood. Delightful _and_ impressive
  (tags: bicycles viaSkreidle video )
• Simon's cat vs the spider. I giggled all the way through. And now itch.
  I _wish_ that last time I had a cat, it had been this good with spiders.
  (tags: cats spiders funny video )
• Amazing car ad, full of optical illusions
  (tags: cars

Comments

[steer]

15 facts about houses

[andrewducker]

Cheers, helpful!

I do think that the UK has an issue with home ownership - we focus highly on it, where Germany doesn't. But part of that is because Germany has much better protections for renters (so far as I know).

What I'd like to see is the percentage of income that people spend on rent/mortgage, over time. I'll have a dig about and see if I can find that.

[steer]

Yes... completely agree. We've been sold this idea that we should all own which leads people to expect shit behaviour from landlords and people driving themselves crazy trying to save for home ownership.

I think I posted something about rent versus mortgage costs possibly on here some time ago in a debate about what are the financial trade offs.

[kerrypolka]

Re: #12, most of the newbuild skyscrapers in Zone 1 are for offices rather than flats (and the flats they do contain are not for the likes of us!).

[steer]

Certainly this is true. Though, they do have some living space they are mostly offices. That living space is obviously not something I'm going to be moving into. But I'm not going to be yelling "stop building ten million pound flats" -- because if they don't build ten million pound flats the people in ten million pound flats live in one million pound flats raising the price and the people in one million pound flats have to live in 500,000 pound flats raising the price etc. etc.

Some of the new build tall buildings in London are residential and if you look at the 100m buildings not the 200m buildings, many are. [Of course there are issues with getting mortgages in tall buildings...]

[kerrypolka]

I broadly agree with this, but I just wanted to raise the point as the article was talking about newbuild tall buildings for housing, and I didn't think the skyscrapers in Zone 1 were really relevant.

[steer]

Fair call... but have a look further down the list I posted. London seems fine with building up not out for residential.

[del_c]

You say Thatcher raised private home "ownership", which may be true but is beside the point. What we want is lower rents and/or more owner-*occupiers*. Not more properties privately owned.

This report from the Office of National Statistics shows no positive effect on owner-occupation by Thatcher.

[steer]

I'm somewhat confused as the link you provides indicates a positive effect on owner-occupation following thatcher (positive here to be read as a correlation not a moral judgement, I don't think it was a good thing).

"The data suggests that most of the expansion in owner occupancy since 1981 has largely been a result of movement from social housing to owner occupancy, rather than from private renting as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s."

In other words Thatcher's wholesale butchery of social housing and cheap sell off of council housing led to more people owning council houses (albeit not usually those who were originally living in them).

Or are you saying that the data shows that the owner-occupier growth was part of a trend which was happening anyway?

To be honest, I don't particularly want more owner-occupiers. I don't think there's particular virtue in owning versus renting if rental is sufficiently well legally protected.