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Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
Well I don't want to see my investment in my home diminish why should it? But surely the solution isn't going to be to build over more and more land with expensive smaller and smaller houses (e.g. 5 bed houses, no garden and rooms too small for existing furniture).
And Covid-19 is going to cause something interesting if more people now want to move out of population centres putting more demand on smaller towns/cities and rural communities. Will vacated properties in population centres be saleable, affordable even? These are places that often are desired by singles/couples being close to work and entertainment but is that so attractive now?
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There's no reason why you would want the value of your home to fall. You've been told it's an investment your entire adult life and you, and many tens of thousands of others, have planned your finances and maybe your retirement on that basis.
This however is the very nature of the problem. A family home is supposed to be a place to bring up a family, not a way of beating an unpredictable stock market or low bank savings rates. To turn family homes into a store of value it has been necessary to do to them exactly what you have to do to any commodity whose value you wish to increase - restrict supply.
The equation really is this simple. If there are enough nice homes for people to buy and live in, then the housing crisis will end, and young people will be able to move out of their parents' homes and buy their own place before they've passed their 30th birthday saving a fortune for a deposit.
Also, however, if there are enough such homes, the relative scarcity of your home will decrease and its value will stop going up faster than inflation. It may stop going up altogether. It may even fall.
So the question is, which is more important to you ... your own home value or the housing prospects of a generation of young adults who can't presently afford to buy at all? That's the issue that the political parties we vote for wrestle with, and for the last 30 years none of them, when in power, has taken any steps that would increase supply sufficiently, because it would have a notable economic effect on that part of the population that votes in the greatest numbers. In the study of demographics, that part of the population is commonly identified as the baby boomer generation.
@Seph, if you want to get faux offended by the term 'baby boomer', try writing to all the university geography departments that use it routinely in their population studies, see how far you get.
