More to the point, what’s the reason?
Four fifths of the bedrooms in our house are empty on most nights, but two of them are home offices, one of them is used for storage and we have a spare bedroom which is not available to let out because of visitors. It would only be a meaningful statistic if all those bedrooms were unused. The average British house is less than half the size of the average US one (about 100sqM versus 200sqM), and our housing problem is caused by government policies intended to restrict supply of land and encourage landlords. People who think leaving the EU will fix this should not hold their breath waiting.
A housing bubble has been the feelgood policy for the middle classes of all recent Labour and Conservative governments. It is now running into the buffers as houses become unaffordable, and has set the younger generation against their parents. Johnson, while mayor, encouraged the bubble in London and has now ducked out before all the pigeons come to roost simultaneously and end his political career.
The collapse will be blamed on leaving the EU. I think leaving was entirely wrong for a variety of reasons, but I do think the difference we are seeing is simply a sudden hard landing instead of a slightly softer one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if our second woman Prime Minister ends up with the same tax rates as the first one - ah the heady days of Thatcherism when the top rate of tax was only 60%.
The internationalization of real estate has driven up housing prices, uh, internationally. London may have been ground zero but NYC, LA, and other cities like Vancouver and the Boston, MA area have also seen foreign buyers bid up prices and take much of the available housing stock out of circulation for the rest of us.
My suspicion is that we are heading for another housing bust soon. When I hear real estate agent friends crow about “over 40 offers” most over ask for a unit in Medford, MA, when I see commercials on late night about courses on flipping houses, my gut begins to get a little nervous. The trigger might be the Chinese housing bubble which has to burst sometime but the anecdotal Brexit price collapse is another indication of something shaky at the foundation of the housing economy.
It’s about fucking time, if you ask me. Bit do realize that the regulation here is only about shadow flipping, which crappy as it is, is just a symptom of the larger issue and will do nothing to deflate the bubble.
Seems like you didn’t read or understand the original piece.
“if you live in Vancouver, New York, LA or Seattle, get ready for an all-out assault on your housing stock!”
It’s not like we weren’t already under assault from AirBnb speculators which has resulting in rising rents already. In Seattle, the massive over-building and hiring by Amazon is contributing to a ridiculous rise in rental prices. This hits EVERYONE in these areas.
Yeah, that’s the source of rising rents…not all of the people moving to Seattle and its booming economy…
Given that I grew up in the “Will the last person to leave Seattle, please turn off the lights?” economy, you shouldn’t complain about the city booming instead of going like Cleveland.
Yes, rents have gone up dramatically. Welcome to the fate of every current prosperous city with a desirable climate and economy.
I used to have a one bedroom on Capitol Hill for $425 a month…in 1993.
8 months of blanketed overcast with occasional spitting rain and 4 months of complete drought is desirable?
People always call it the “Rainy City” but you and I both know anyone carrying an umbrella in Seattle is a complete amateur.
Although I guess the temperature variance is quite mild. Hottest we get is maybe 87F a few days in the summer. And the coldest we get is around 28F for a week or less in the winter.
Winter average temperature is above 40. When it snows, it doesn’t stick except for maybe one week a year. No drought and lots of green. Oh, and under 100 in the summer. Yeah, many many people think Seattle is beautiful with a desirable climate. I actively miss the climate every day I live in the very brown and dry (and too sunny) Bay Area.
Also, at most, you might get a month where Seattle doesn’t rain, compared to the nine or ten months of the year in California.
Umbrellas are for tourists. Trueborn just shrug off the damp and keep hiking.
But seriously, we don’t get enough sunlight for extended periods of time. Most of the winter I’m vitamin D deficient. This is confirmed by blood tests from my real gp. No naturopathic bullshit quackery.
Dude, my GP says I’m vitamin D deficient and I live in Oakland, which has 300 sunny days a year (I shit you not). She said to take a supplement.
Oh and when people complain about Seattle housing prices and rents and then I look around here in California, I just have a long and hearty laugh. It is like it is the year 2000!
My gp said to buy a solar lamp above 10k lumens and sit in front of it for at least 30 minutes a day, since oral vitamin D supplements aren’t very bioavailable and have mixed-to negative results in adults. Apparently oral vitamin D works well in children though.
I know the sunlight I get is merely incidental though. Maybe 10 minutes a day, from smoking and driving into work. Where I spend 8 hours inside.
Also, it could be because I live in Edmonds, smack dab in the middle of the rain shadow. So we get a thick blanket of cloudes except for july through September. You’ve driven through it a million times. It’s gray, maybe spitting rain, and occasionally in drought. That’s why old people like it in Edmonds. Completely predictable. We never get extremes. It’s like a city whose climate is on prozac.
The ferry is very nice. I used to take it all the time as a teen to “go on adventures” (go to a different place and ask sketchy looking strangers if they wanted to hang out and smoke weed)
If you’re a pedestrian you only had to pay if you were going from Edmonds to Kingston. No charge coming home. So that was cheap. Also you could sneak on at Brackett’s landing for free if you pretended to be a teen detached from his family. Before they built the new terminal. You can’t walk on at the passenger side and say “my mom drove on and paid. It’s a white minivan.” anymore.
Similarly, I live in a household of four people, and three out of five bedrooms are unoccupied on most nights. I don’t feel particularly selfish having 1.25 bedrooms- should I?
Rain data from weatherdb.com:
City, average annual rainfall, record single day rainfall
Seattle 36.15" 4.29"
Edmonds 36.05" 4.22"
Honolulu 86.84" 13.85"
