Today is #housingday, an initiative to celebrate the positive impact social housing has on thousands of people across the United Kingdom. People who live and work in social housing will be sharing good news stories about the difference that having a decent, affordable and secure place to live has on their lives.
It is the right time to be doing this. A recent report by the property firm Savills found that, over the next five years, 70,000 new households per year will be unable to afford to rent or buy homes at a market rate unless they get some form of assistance from the government.
Despite the government’s rhetoric about promoting home-ownership, the last few years have seen a steady decline in the proportion of households who own their own home. The situation is particularly stark for younger people. People under 40 who might have reasonably expected to be able to buy their own home 20 years ago are increasingly resigned to never doing so. This is true of households with decently paying jobs and especially common in London and the south-east. The situation has got so bad that a form of malaise has descended on many in this group. If you speak to someone who finds themselves in work and yet unable to buy a home about their prospects for home-ownership, the conversation often takes a darkly comic turn. For many, living in a home which they own is as fanciful and remote a prospect as playing in the Premier League.
There are clear political implications to this despondency. Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI, recently argued that one of the main reasons that housing is not a more significant political issue is that the people who are frozen out of owning their own home do not consider this to be a political issue. They are resigned to the idea of renting from private landlords for the foreseeable future and do not believe that political parties offer any prospect of change.
That is why initiatives such as #housingday are so important and why I would invite you to take part. If we can build a sense of hope for a more positive future in this group, then we can start to translate those emotions into calls for practical political action. Without that groundswell of opinion behind them, it will be very hard for politicians to overcome the resistance that greets many housing policies and to facilitate the construction of the new homes that we need.
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Thomas Neumark blogs at Dream Housing and tweets @TomNeumark
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