Wednesday, Jun 24, 2009
1930s property: the thrifty Thirties
Oh how times have changed.: Telegraph
Janis Andrew was born in the front bedroom of her parents’ semi-detached house in Bridport Road, Dorchester, in 1939. Jack and Sybil Child had bought Elmslake in 1935, first-timers among a generation of new home owners in a recession as deep as the one we are suffering now.
“It was hard work making ends meet but we never went without,” says Janis.
Posted by flintster1994 @ 08:38 AM (719 views) Add Comment
8 Comments
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1. stillthinking said...
“They built 300,000 houses a year which is more than we could manage in a boom,” she says.
2. paul said...
Any parallels with the thirties in this regard are frankly disingenuous. At that time houses were affordable relative to incomes so there's no point pretending that the comparison is valid today. I know the article mentions this briefly, but the article also says:
“It was hard work making ends meet but we never went without”
And that was on one income, not two as young couples are forced to both work to pay for their mortgage nowadays. Again the parallel fails.
Finally, the building societies were very careful back then. Now we have the likes of Bradford & Bingley and Nationwide being as much part of the problem ramping house prices and fuelling the lending boom.
3. inbreda said...
when prices are low there is no speculation. When prices are stable the amount of profit they can make from building a property is fairly fixed and calculable. Want more profit? Build more houses.
I think builders would have been building many more properties in the boom if the speculation hadn't made it such a high priced gamble that made betting on land banks with unlimited borrowed money more profitable than actually selling anything.
4. shipbuilder said...
Inbreda, good point. Plenty of builders here in NI purposely sat on land banks for years and watched the value rocket.
5. george monsoon said...
Paul @ 2, well said!
And just to tag onto the end of all your valid points....
We no longer have a manufacturing or farming industry to help us climb out of this hole...
What we are experiencing in the world of commerce has never happened before, so comparions cannot be made at any level.
6. mr g said...
Paul@2
Quite right, there is no direct parallel with 1939 but there is one moral which is very relevant to 2009 namely, you have to work and save to buy material objects or accumulate wealth.
You will never achieve financial success or stability through the "I want it now" mentality of buying items you can't really afford, on credit.
7. An Bearin Bui said...
A carpenter/joiner with a non-working wife who's can afford to buy a 3-bed semi-detached house in a good area before starting a family? Yes, times have certainly changed. Now, the young carpenter/joiner would have to have a working wife (preferably in the public sector so her job is secure compared to his) and they'd be renting or living with parents while scrimping every penny just to scrape enough for a 100% mortgage of 5 times their income in order to 'buy' a shoebox in some crackden neighbourhood at the grand old age of 32.
8. mark wadsworth said...
@ Paul:
"At that time houses were affordable relative to incomes so there's no point pretending that the comparison is valid today.."
Of course they were affordable! The build costs, expressed as multiple of one year's income, were much the same as today, but THE LAND was cheaper. Why?
1. Planning restrictions were nowhere near as strict as they are now, and the whole mood was different - having more houses was seen as A Good Thing, unlike now where apparently building more houses is A Bad Thing (or at least according to NIMBYs and Hallowed Green Belt fetishists)
2. Because we still had Domestic Rates & Schedule A or some predecessor form of property tax, which kept capital values low.
3. And people kept much more of their disposable income - the average earner did not pay income tax! The personal allowance was (adjusted for wage inflation) about £25,000.
Y'see, this whole tax-land-values-not-incomes idea is deeply rooted in real life examples, either from abroad or from historic examples in this country.