The UK Housing Crisis: Are You Profiting From It?

Very happy to see my opinion article on the UK housing crisis up on Generation Rent.  It is about the divisive nature of housing in the UK, and is itself fairly divisive.  It starts…

Now that the election is over, and Eurovision is a distant memory, London turns back to its favourite moan: the housing crisis.  I frequently share this moan with my mixed group of friends: some renters, some homeowners, some letting out the odd room or flat.  This conversation always seems to have an ‘in it together’ atmosphere, as we berate the property speculators, the oligarchs with vacant mansions, and most of all our government, which clearly sees its role as sustaining the rise in house prices (Help to Buy, pension reforms, reductions in stamp duty and so on).

But we ignore the elephant in the over-valued and under-sized room.  This is an elephant which you’d see, if you looked hard enough, lurking in the corner of almost every Independent or Guardian article decrying the housing crisis. The elephant in the room is simply this: we find ourselves on opposing sides of this ‘crisis’ and for some of us this ‘crisis’ is something we profit from and sustain…. [keep reading]