Does not owning your own house depress you?

Are you jealous of people who own their own house, either because they are young with rich parents, or they bought the house before the housing boom? I am! I am so jealous of them!

My friend has her own house and she's only 18 doing her A levels! Her dads inheritance, but she still lives with her mum!

And then you have people who need a mortgage to be able to get a house, and spend most of their life paying it off!

And you have people who can't afford a mortgage deposit because their rent is so high and they have a lot of debts and little savings!

It's unfair! It is depressing to think about a house as its so hard to get one nowadays..

WTF?
Who owns a house at 18?
Is this a Wendy House?

It's not unfair. My grandparents bought my mum a house years ago, and when it sold bought me a flat which is being rent out until I need use of it. They worked really hard for that money and raised me on their own. No one is entitled.

Years ago? I hate those people too!

I deplore people who bought their house before the boom, and walk around like their new money rich, and tease us younger generations because they know how lucky they are to have money just fall into their lap without up having to work hard for the money.

My grandfather was a chemical engineer who worked his ass off and had no time for his family. My grandmother was a physics teacher who worked so hard to get her degree and teach. They do not live a life of luxury by any means, so your "walking around like their new money rich" argument is invalid. They saved the money and damn well earned it, why shouldn't they have the luxury of having properties in their name? I am forever grateful for the life I have, a property shouldn't determine that.

I was talking more about those Londeners whose house has turned them into millionaires overnight. And all the people who live in Kent, and the South around M25.

The thing is, at the time your grandmother and grandfather were working, houses were very easy to get. If they worked today, they would be hard pushed to find a house or houses like the ones they have. They probably would get an average house in a nice area, and a big stinking mortgage suffocating them.

People today who work equally as hard as your grandparents don't have the opportunities they had when buying a house today. This is unfair!

But everyone nowadays struggles...unfortunately that's just life
My grandparents bought their last house 10 years ago, and my flat in October.

It doesn't have to be life.

If enough people protest, we can stand against the 1% and fight for the fairness we deserve.

Revolution is coming!

At the end of the day the majority of this generation face the same obstacles so unfairness isn't really a thing. Holding it against people though is a bit bitter, no?

Don't see why I should be jealous. Most people aspire to get a 30 year mortgage which I think is pretty sad, I'd rather rent than basically lease a house

There is a lot of unfairness in the housing market.

The basic problem is that everyone needs somewhere to live, so when there's scarcity of housing it creates opportunities for those who own property to earn a lot at the expense of those that don't. Effectively it is free money - you don't have to work for it, you just own the asset and watch it increase in value and if you rent it out, the more scarcity becomes a problem, the higher rents go and the more money you earn for renting it out.

In areas of the country like London where there is such an excess of people searching for places to rent over available properties, this allows landlords to get away with renting out properties in relative disrepair with mould, damp, poor insulation which damages the health of their tenants but still they increase the rents by 10% a year etc. Letting agents are also able to get in on this due to the shortage of housing, charging hundreds of pounds in sign on fees, again just taking money off renters because they are exploiting scarcity.

This isn't adding to the economy as a whole - it's just transferring wealth from those that don't own property to those that do. It distorts incentives about investment as when the returns on owning property are high purely due to housing scarcity, that diverts people to invest in owning real estate rather than investing in productive capital that creates new technology and innovations. There are a lot of wasteful investments such as investors buying up land and sitting on it, knowing that the value will go up as scarcity increases. Or rich people buying up properties in London and leaving them empty purely as an investment that will increase in value.

The reason houses are scarce is due mostly to tight planning restrictions, the state no longer building and housing associations having a lot of regulations on them. If there was the political will to solve the housing crisis then government could reverse this but there are a lot of vested interests which lobby against it. The reality of creating affordable housing would involve stopping the easy returns on investment that accrue to those that own property and so obviously they will vigorously oppose it.

But this has meant that a lot of people, particularly the younger generation who don't have access to wealthy parents who can give them a foot up the housing ladder, are the real losers from housing scarcity: they have to pay a larger and larger portion of their salaries every year to landlords in rent which restricts their own ability to save for a deposit and leaves them trapped in poor quality housing for their whole lives and vulnerable when they are old and still face renting costs, whilst those who already owned housing can retire early knowing that they no longer face housing costs and if they own property to rent to others, can just use that as income.

Unfortunately this situation brings out a lot of greed and nastiness in people with these arguments like "nobody's entitled to a house". It's not about people expecting to be given a house.....it's about expecting a fair opportunity in the housing market - it shouldn't just be a freebie for landlords to be able to increase rents and siphon away increasing proportions of the wages of their tenants purely because they can take advantage of housing shortages.

There's also the generational divide here: the older generation were able to get planning permission to build houses, but now many of them are pushing hard to stop the younger generation from being able to get planning permission to build houses of their own, because having the younger generation trapped renting is a nice earner for them.

My grandfather was a chemical engineer who worked his ass off and had no time for his family. My grandmother was a physics teacher who worked so hard to get her degree and teach. They do not live a life of luxury by any means, so your "walking around like their new money rich" argument is invalid. They saved the money and damn well earned it, why shouldn't they have the luxury of having properties in their name? I am forever grateful for the life I have, a property shouldn't determine that.