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new homes for social housing. (New houses for dolehoppers)
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Care to explain or, preferably, apologise for this disgraceful slur against council house tenants? Council housing does *not* equal no job, it quite often means a hard, low paid one. Have some respect.
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I can't see a private individual abandoning a house
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It does happen, particularly if it's in an area where the worth of the house drops to zero or near nothing, for instance in former mining areas and blighted inner cities (see below).
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its far cheaper in the long run because rents will always increase far more than interest rates
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My rent in 1999 was £953.33 for a two-bed flat. Last year for a bigger 2 bed flat in the same area it was £950, so it doesn't always hold true, particularly in a market where everyone's scrambling to buy. Indeed, buy to let is suffering from its own success, as people can't rent them out for enough to cover the mortgage. It's not as bad as second homes, for instance, which benefit from tax breaks (no council tax on them, for instance). It's pertinent to ask what would happen if all the buy to lets were forced to be sold - house prices would fall and rents would rise. Neither would be particularly good news for UK plc, I suspect.
Anyway, no one's had a go at Prescott yet, so can I point out that the blighting of northern terraces is his fault, since he is behind the insane 'Pathfinder' scheme to convert perfectly acceptable terraced housing (if renovated imaginatively using a bit of British flair) into rubble and developer profits (helped by the insane zero-VAT-rating on new build and 17.5% on restorations). The question of embedded energy is far from unimportant these days, either.
It's a hangover from Sixties ideas of 'Comprehensive Redevelopment', which have led to such gems as Hyde and the Glasgow Inner Ring Road. Here's an Observer article which shows just how murky it all is (btw. it's not what it appears at first sight).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...035462,00.html
Achingly hip, but here's a bunch who restore old buildings rather than knocking them down for a quick buck.
http://www.urbansplash.co.uk/us.php