Date published: 2006/09/21
The BBC says:
Growing numbers of people are being squeezed out of the housing market while first-time buyers find themselves very stretched, research has concluded.
Inadequate affordable housing, rising repossessions and failure to apply for housing benefit were serious concerns, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.
Its research found that a third of all working households with occupants under 40 cannot afford to buy property.
...
The amount of money that first-time buyers are having to set aside for mortgage repayments as a percentage of their monthly salary has risen to its highest level since 1990.
Who would have thought it. Why is money being wasted on this kind of trivially obvious, and therefore pointless, "research"? As the report itself points out, we are not at a unique situation, this has happened all before, at the end of one of the previous house price bubbles. Young people since the beginning of time have had a hard time affording to buy a property. The most fundamental problem in the UK housing market currently is supply of building land. There is plenty of land, but the UK ruling elite (including the sort of people that write these reports) refuse to let most of it be built upon. This by itself pushes up house prices, and is one thing sustaining the current house price bubble.
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