The annoying thing about growing up in London is that it's impossible to rent a 1 bed or a studio for a decent price, even crap studios go for about £12k a year, £15k with bills. So you're left sharing with 50 people in a flat share.
And then buying a flat you're looking at like £400k for a 2 bed. My plan was to move out to the suburbs when I hit 30+ but now those feckers have become super expensive too. It's at the point where I'm happy to overpay on rent just because elsewise I'd have to somehow come up with a small fortune to live away from everyone I know.
There's a lot of ideas that are thrown around when it comes to keeping house prices more manageable, and a lot of them makes sense. But the first and foremost thing that needs to be done is for it to be acknowledged that housing is not simply an investment but a public utility that should be accessible for the majority, and then from that politicians should make it a central aim to limit house price growth to a certain %. With all the tools they have in their arsenal it wouldn't even be a particularly difficult task either, but as has been pointed out the majority of MPs are home owners and fairly old, with many owning multiple properties, so they have an incentive to keep seeing gains in house prices. And that's before coming to all the stuff like all the property developers donating money to the Tory party to gain influence on policy.
Stuff like building more houses, raising stamp duty is a a misdirection though, and a result of the property industry's influence - building more houses won't actually make much of a difference to house prices, you'll just have more houses selling for high prices. And the next QE round when the economy lets out a small fart will just send the prices soaring again. It needs to be to directly aim to limit % growth as a political policy, and not just leave it to the free market to decide. Hell I'd even be for making it a policy to reduce prices, but that won't happen due to negative mortgage equity, but as someone still in my 20s I'd be happy to see very little gains on a house purchase over the next 30 years if it means more of the average population can afford to buy. There's like a million different benefits to society - more equality, greater productivity of capital, more happiness. What can't happen though is the last 30 years to continue - when I was born the flat my parents would later buy in London was worth around £80k, now less than 30 years later it's worth £400k.. You'd think it'd have to plateau eventually but there's a lot of free wealth in the economy currently that needs a place to go and a lot of it finds itself into housing.
