Monday, Jun 22, 2009
Priced Out!
MAIL: 1,000 Country Pubs and Village Shops to Close in Next Year due to Cheap Housing Crisis
More than a thousand pubs and village shops could close during the coming year due to the ongoing shortage of affordable homes in rural areas, it was warned today.
Posted by alan @ 10:35 PM (1186 views) Add Comment
20 Comments
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1. shipbuilder said...
But of course it's immigration that is destroying British culture.
2. matt_the_hat said...
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."Thomas Jefferson, (Attributed) 3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)
3. mark wadsworth said...
Woah dude!
Where did that come from?? I thought The Mail was in the vanguard of The No New Houses May Ever Be Built Anywhere Movement.
Don't say they've realised that there are a lot of people aged under 35 in this country?
4. dead spider said...
"We have invested more than £230 million in the last three years in rural affordable homes, providing nearly 7,500 homes."
That's £30,667 per home .
I'm confused .
5. drewster said...
Surprisingly, a handful of the comments on the Mail's website are spot on.
"What is killing pubs is cheap booze in supermarkets and the loss of "social life" in this country - dvd, facebook, dating websties - forget conversation and mixing with real human beings"
"[rant] ... smoking ban ... [more rant]"
6. enuii said...
Oh, and people having to flog their guts out to buy some overpriced pile of timber framed garbage built by large national companies for the lowest possible price and maximum profit. Having sucked the financial life out of their property purchasers for the foreseable future they have no spare cash or time to spend down their local thus relegating them to nights in with a cheap bottle of wine or chemically brewed lager.
7. Grumpy Middle-aged Git said...
@6 enuii
Totally agree with your sentiments but I have been puzzled for a while by your name (as a French teacher I keep thinking it should be ennui but with my uninspired moniker, I am hardly in a position to criticise). Please could you enlighten me?
8. sybil13 said...
Reading this I thought I must have been the ONLY one not living in a time warp. Hasn't it been news for several decades now that our villages are now resided in by townies as property prices went up and up and up. So what is the problem now? Ah the townies children can't afford to live in the countryside now because their parents bought overpriced country houses which drove the country people's children out. Oh dear! For 20 + years pubs and little village shops have been forced to close some tried to raise the cash on mass and staff the shops with volunteers, so what is news about people not being able to afford to live in the countryside? I thought I read recently that rural property was falling quicker than town /city properties. Don't get me wrong, I think we should have a lot more social housing but let us not forget that we ALSO need property to fall to levels that enables people to buy not just people to invest their pension fund in BTL!
9. sneaker said...
We should also get rid of the obsession with rising (or falling!) house prices.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument about why rising house prices are a really good thing.
10. doomwatch said...
The truth is, the wealthy country types who have either "invested" in or "kept" London flats over the last 13 years (I would imagine 80% of Clapham and Wandsworth is owned by "investors" who live in Surrey and Berkshire and Glocesteshire) are now bleeting that they can't buy a pint of milk in their local NIMBY village shop.
Can't have it both ways Giles and Arrabelle.
11. debtfree said...
It's called change.
Remember the milkman, telephone box, leaded petrol, metal toy cars and fish n chips wrapped in newspaper?
Not many like it, but unfortunately that's the way it is. Things come and go. Blame it on immigration, house builders, shortage of cheap housing or rubbish local shops. Doesn't matter, nothing is permanent, we are forever shifting, morphing and changing to something new that again will change.
Gosh shock horror the pubs are closing down and so is Ethel's little cob webbed convience store.
If everyone wanted to hold onto heritage and britishness, we'd all be drinking ale in beer halls, riding horses and living in mud huts.
12. letthemfall said...
The notion of cheap housing has always been nonsense. If one set of houses are not cheap, why should another set be cheap, since the high cost is in the land they stand on rather than the price of erecting them. It is just another sympton of the inequalities in this country. The Marie Antoinettes of the south use these villages as their weekend playgrounds or dormitories. Hence the decline in community and the local economy. One way to address these problems is either to ban second home ownership (probably difficult to do) or make it a lot more expensive. Till now the financial gains to the buyers have far outweighed the costs.
13. Icarus said...
So much life is sucked out of those not in the metropolitan centres of the developed world. Rural areas in the developed world suffer too.
Leaving aside the role of banks in forcing up property prices and creating a huge debt overhead, just take look at what's happened to farmers in this country.
First there has been exponential growth in global agricultural commodities trading. Farmers with imperfect information who have to plan ahead can be ruined by speculation-driven price fluctuations (the sort of thing futures were originally designed to hedge against). EU subsidies? - they've rewarded overproduction and surpluses and have fuelled agricultural commodity speculation. The subsidies end up anyway with big processors like Kraft, Cadbury, Tate & Lyle, Nestle, Dairy Crest and other makers of processed rubbish, or large farms owned by such transnationals.
Then there's the oligopoly power of supermarkets, food traders and big processors. Even relatively large farmers who concentrate on farming and do everything they can to modernise and specialise are increasingly squeezed, even if they practice factory farming which goes against good farming instincts, puts undue pressure on animals and land and turns farmers into bureaucrats and record-keepers.
Local farmers no longer sell to local dairies, who then provide milk to local outlets. The dairy has been bought out and closed by the likes of Dairy Crest, DC supplies a supermarket, which tells DC what the price is and DC in turn tells the (relatively large, modernised ) dairy farmer what his price will be. (The push for specialisation and high yield means cattle are genetically selected for milk production, to produce milk a cow needs to give birth, half the calves are male and no good for meat, so they're shot at birth.)
Call it change if you like. I call it politics and power.
14. mark wadsworth said...
@ Letthemfall
"One way to address these problems is either to ban second home ownership (probably difficult to do) or make it a lot more expensive. Till now the financial gains to the buyers have far outweighed the costs."
Yup, land value tax will sort them out.
15. icarus said...
@14 - Taxation to hold down land prices? Under the current system site values are effectively paid to banks instead of to taxing authorities, who are forced instead to put more tax on wages, consumers and businesses. Land and property taxation would hold down site values and mortgage debt and prevent location values from rising, being capitalised and paid out as interest to the banks. That would never do. We also need to re-inflate the housing bubble to enable new buyers to go deeply enough into debt to take junk mortgages off the hands of those who currently own them.
16. letthemfall said...
Icarus
This is the heart of the matter, the concentration of power and wealth. It is causing huge problems for the majority in this country and others. How will it be changed?
17. icarus said...
letthemfall - I hope that last question was rhetorical - I haven't the time before this blog scolls off.
18. letthemfall said...
More a helpless shrug really, a cry in the dark.
19. braindeed said...
Icarus and LTF, I think the crux of the matter is in fact the dissolution of civil society and neighbourly connection. The disparity (and it's growing) between the incomes of 'well off' and the less so, has reinforced peoples belief that, as they earn more they are 'worth' more.
What the comfortably off never contemplate, is that the workers who earn a pittance, tend towards a similar view and connect their low wages with low self esteem - with corresponding mental health and anti-social behaviour issues.
I would be reluctant to suggest a solution to this conundrum – it’s been getting worse for thirty years and has become a deeply entrenched notion (and this is just an opinion, of course)….but I feel that the screw tightens ever tighter.
Interestingly, the reference to immigration, is considered a PC truism…..I would suggest that the undemocratic decision to open our borders to the sheer scale of the immigration process, is in fact, a major cause of friction and economic malaise.
It’s uncomfortable to admit it, and the process is overwhelmingly irreversible, but it was a similar core of the arrogant elite who decided they did not need heed the warnings of actuaries when awarding coppers their golden pensions to bash Scargill….mind you, when the head of the Civil Service earns 5 times the Prime Minister (who in turn earns less that a lot of people running L.A COUNCILS)...you know Alice has been through the looking glass.
Global warming, peak Oil, food and water crises……the cry in the dark is becoming a howl.
20. enuii said...
Grumpy middle aged git @7, it's an easy one to answer as it is a straight forward Americanised corruption of the French word which I came across when reading something someone wrote on the internet about an American artist who supposedly died of it (enuii). As I was sort of bored and creatively frustrated myself at the time I thought it was kind of cute and as the domain name was available and only five letters long I adopted it.
There endeth the lesson.