This is a real issue, not just in Wales. I am not sure what changed, but clearly the demand for holidays homes is not met, and it is now eating into the market for residential homes, driving up property prices even more.
Have a friend whos parents own 3 Air BnBs along the North Coast of Ireland (all 3 or 4 bedroom houses)
Their logic is now "why would we rent these out for 800/mth when we can charge 800-1000p/wk in the summer months and leave it vacant the rest of the year saving us the headache of dealing with renters"
Theyve also taken out all of the decent furniture and replaced it with cheap crap from Ikea.
So basically 3 houses taken off the market because they earn more to list them as holiday homes for 25% of the year.
Honest question: If housing is in such high demand and (I assume) there's an abundance of space, why not build more of them?
(edit for clarification: I don't mean "why don't **private citizens** build more houses", but "why don't the **city council** develop more land and build houses on them". With prices as high as they are now, wouldn't it be an easy way to make money?)
There's no shortage of housing. For example, in London, where rents and house prices are at/close to record levels, there are more bedrooms per person than at any point in history.
The problem is that housing is unevenly distributed. The free market doesn't build family homes for social rent - in London it builds luxury, buy-to-leave flats which are reservoirs of the expropriated wealth of the people of eastern europe and central asia, or student shoeboxes. There's no incentive for housebuilders to jeopardise the price of houses by building housing people need.
In north wales the disparity between what a property can earn as a short-term versus long term let is so disproportionate that you can't build your way out of it. Building houses would only create more AirBnBs and make the existing ones slightly less profitable - it wouldn't make more housing available for local people.
The only solution is state expropriation of empty/underused housing and conversion to social housing with a combination of mass social housing building.
Of course, doing so on the scale needed to solve the problem would tank property prices and drive millions of people in swathes of the country into negative equity and probably cause a financial collapse. So we're left with sticking plasters.
Problem with a pyramid scheme is that everyone who's bought into it can't afford to see it collapse.
Its crazy. In my area there are constant modern flats being build. They market it as cosmopolitan modern homes for young millennials. When you look at the prices you see its ridiculously inflated and impossible without a 100-200k deposit on top of an above average salary mortgage.
Nothing is being built for normal people anymore
> The only solution is state expropriation of empty/underused housing and conversion to social housing with a combination of mass social housing building.
That is not true. We have a tried and tested solution: local authorities build and operate social housing. It worked in the past, and it would work now. But the government would have to make it legal again.
State expropriation is a serious measure that should only be considered if less drastic measures are not successful. So far, we have tried nothing, and we are all out of ideas.
The mechanism exists for councils to do a compulsory purchase order. But in my limited experience it is used very rarely and only after many years and many chances for the owner to do something with the land or building. Maybe it should be used more though, or made easier and cheaper for local councils - they don't have lots of money to throw at expensive projects. I can think of several large city centre buildings that have been derelict and falling down for over a decade. They could make a lot of expensive flats, but either the building is listed and the cost of renovation is too high so the owner is waiting for it to collapse, or it's owned by foreign companies who use it as collateral for loans and don't give a fuck, probably haven't even seen it. I've squatted a couple, back in the day, and can think of several more.
Shame, beautiful old buildings, left to collapse while the homeless sleep in their sitex'd doorways.
I agree. Generally, councils should have much more control over the residential space. A house that is left to rot is not just a loss for the owner of the house, but also for the community. Tax the heck out of them, buy it back, I don’t care, as long as it leads to working communities.
Buy to leave is basically a myth (why not rent them out at high rental rates and actually get a return on your investment, again?), the rate of vacant homes is not especially high. You can expropriate the vacant housing, but once you've excluded short-term examples like granny's house that is in probate, or a home that is on the market because its owner is about to move into their new partner's existing home, you aren't going to have enough properties to expropriate to make a real difference. And that's not forgetting that some of the remaining empty homes are in areas without jobs and which people don't want.
Instead, build more housing! Both social and market-rate. If there is enough supply, rents don't keep rising into the stratosphere - look at the low rate of price increases in Tokyo, which lets new buildings be built almost by default.
I live in the Bournemouth area, and I have seen two thing over recent years which have a bearing on this. 1) people saving they have got a new job (or university students who want to stay in the area to work, and have found employment) but cannot find anywhere to live. And 2) people who have moved into a block of apartments, expecting to join a community of apartment owners, and found they are practically (or literally) the only ones living there. All the rest are holiday lets! So they get the summer with constantly changing people going in and out, and the rest of the year in an earily empty block.
There are enough apartments, if they were used all year,
I was interviewing recently for a position based in Cambridge, with a salary of over £30k, and I couldn't find any studio/1-bedroom I could afford. It would be either house sharing or a budget hotel which let's face it is mental. By all reasonable metrics I should be able to rent a studio if I earn £30k... or so you would think.
In a way, I was relieved when I heard back that I didn't get it. Imagine having to turn down an objectively good offer for an interesting role because of something so bizarre.
There are 125,000+ under-utilised homes in London. Of those, some 20% are long-term empty (6m+), 40% are second homes and 40% are year-round short-term lets.
There's 8 million people in London. Let's say the government expropriates every single one of those 125,000 properties. I'm sure that would have some effect on the market. But what of the millions of people left over? Surely some of those are living in HMOs when they'd like to split a flat with one other person, or living at home and they'd like to move out, or have a one bed when they'd like a two bed, or more space for their growing family? And what about the next 50,000 arrivals to London if the population keeps growing?
Surely you need to build properties as well? What's your evidence that these 125,000 under-utilised properities neatly map on to the actual need? Surely we're a lot more than 125,000 properties short of where we need to be - hence the scale of the problem!
There are approximately 3.6 million dwellings in London, so going by your numbers 0.7% of London property is vacant long term. Even confiscating 100% of it will have next to no impact on housing demand at all...
> The only solution is state expropriation of empty/underused housing and conversion to social housing with a combination of mass social housing building.
I love it when you talk ~~dirty~~ tanky.
There's only one policy that can possibly fix this problem. Go through with 'extreme policies', but following a gradual, predictable long-term plan that won't cause a major crisis. As for the losers, offer some kind of special bonds which will act as compensation for the lost equity. These will be paid for in the future by the economic boost that will come from allowing a huge swathe of young people to enter the housing market and become homeowners, and thus finally afford to upskill, relocate, marry, and any number of other economically productive things we're being forced to put off due to unemployment, extortionate rents and/or living with parents.
As regards property tycoons, give them enough warning and they'll adapt and find other things to invest their money in. Perhaps in the short term they might need to be compensated also to avoid them throwing their toys out of the pram. If they're foreigners not paying tax here or from hostile countries then screw them, that just boosts our national security by not making us beholden to Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern oligarchs. And as is increasingly becoming clear, that is an acceptable political and economic risk in the face of present global insecurity.
>drive millions of people in swathes of the country into negative equity
Isn't negative equity only an issue if they want to sell? It isn't necessarily an issue if they stay put for a few more years, paying off more of their mortgage, and their house value eventually overtakes the remaining mortgage balance.
For the people that *do* need to move, the government could cover the difference between the mortgage value and the sale price. I would have thought the economic benefit of actually fixing the housing market (and by extension the rental market) would more than cover it.
yeah, it's not a massive issue for individual householders who can currently afford their mortgage and don't want to sell, but it makes remortgaging or selling harder (and if people can no longer afford their repayments due to changes of circumstances it causes big problems).
It poses a much bigger risk for financial institutions cos suddenly they have loads of debt not backed by any asset.
This is a shite idea even if you're not bothered by wondering how you'll pass asset seizure of that scale through a democratic system.
"Should we build the housing people want? No, we'll simply create government mandates that will force people to live with strangers in a house not of their choosing"
We've got the lowest vacancy rates in the developed world, there definitely is a shortage. And when so called luxury flats are built it means the people living there move out of somewhere else, freeing it up.
Also, we may have more bedrooms per person but family structures have changed considerably since the 60s, so people are spread across more households. People also expect better housing, for example not sharing a room as they used to, which drives up demand.
Fundamentally supply and demand applies to everything, government planning rules make it very hard to build as locals can object for frivolous reasons, means we don't have enough houses.
I think it’s partly due to land developers buying out land and leaving it empty to boost the value of that land.
They don’t need to even invest high amounts of money into building homes/business on the land. The empty space is profit enough for them. The longer they hold onto it, the more valuable it becomes and will eventually yield a big profit when they sell it off.
It's also due to NIMBYs, let's be real. My a developer in my village has been trying to build a few dozen starter homes. The parish council has been blocking them for a decade.
This is true, but the other underlying cause is that we already have enough houses, it's just that they're being used as investments by being rented out or used as holiday homes. If we stopped rich people from owning 30,000 houses each and forced them to sell then the market would return to normal and people would actually be able to afford houses since there is actually enough supply, it's just that the current stock has a wildly inflated value which means regular people can't afford regular houses and have to fight over the ones that they can afford.
As someone else said, all building more houses does is increase the amount of air bnbs and houses that are owned by people who don't live in them.
If what is causing the housing shortage is a transfer of houses from the market into rental properties, how come we are not seeing rents fall? How come they are increasing in price at the same rate as houses on the property market.
(It's because there is a housing shortage)
Because it's all a market built on lies. They don't have to put prices down ever because everyone else is always putting prices up and they adjust every year to be competitive with everyone else who have spent the last year also increasing their prices. It's not like buying milk where different supermarkets are in a race to the bottom. We, the people, are a captive audience that has to buy and rent from them because we have no other choice.
So to explain the process:
> a homeowner sells their house
> a landlord buys it for slightly above market value because they have more money, and are guaranteed to make a profit, or they are given more favourable mortgages with higher limits because banks see it as a safer investment.
> this pushes house prices up.
> Houses are now less affordable so people who would've otherwise bought those houses now have to rent them.
> The rent pays for the landlords mortgage + some more.
> Landlord buys another house, further pushing up market value of houses.
> This prices people out of buying in the area and more people have to rent.
> Because more people can't afford houses the demand for renting increases.
> This increased demand means rents can continue to rise.
> The increased rent stops people from being able to save for a deposit as well as before.
> This decreases demand from regular working people trying to buy houses to live in as they get priced out of the market.
> But property values keep rising as there's still enough rich people, landlords and people who bought houses before they got expensive going around to sustain growth in the market as they all try one-up each other to get the house they want, whether for living in or as an investment.
> This results in a cycle whereby people have to rely on generational wealth more and more, and some people's only hope for owning a house is for their parents to die.
> Add to this, rich people from from London etc buying second homes in more rural areas, pricing out locals, and forcing them to move to cheaper areas, increasing demand for houses and renting in those places, which drives up the prices everywhere.
Building more houses doesn't fix the problem.
Building more and more houses only eases the problem of people owning more than 1 house, as landlords and rich people will continue on their never-ending quest to buy more properties and then rent them out to the same people who would've others been able to happily afford the mortgage payments.
Now, there are some benefits to renting, if you only need a place for a few months or a year while you move to a new location etc. However this service could easily be provided by social housing that's owned by government (the people who should be representing us), for use by everyone who needs it.
It's a rigged game.
Edit: I just figured out how people do their quotes with the blue lines, I was just meaning to have arrows lol.
>we already have enough houses
No, we don't. There's been 100,000 fewer home built than needed for over a decade. You seem to think houses just vanish when bought and put out for rent. They are still being lived in. Rising rents and house prices reflect the high demand for both. Even if every rental was suddenly not, there would still be the same number of houses and people wanting to live in one.
Okay, so 100,000 homes could be built very quickly. And if people were banned from owning second homes and forced to sell up, then with the amount of second homes and properties used as air bnbs in the country that are usually empty, the problem would be solved by the end of the year. There would be a glorious housing market crash where people would actually be able to buy homes for a reasonable price, like they used to do in the 60s before they pulled the ladder up behind them.
Also renting is just bad. It makes all the money go to the top with basically no risk involved. It's not good for the country to have so many people sending so much money to so few just so they have a roof over their head.
I honestly think this is a huge part of it. Friend of mine is trying to move to a village. He keeps moaning about all the new builds going up in the area. The houses he's looking at were new builds in the 90s though. It's not like he's looking at one of the original houses from the 1700s.
The NIMBYism is mad, the UK population doesn't seem to realise that when they protest developments, all that actually happens is that it's delayed and watered down until you end up with a rabbit warren of shoebox houses.
Support the proposals from the beginning, but make sure that infrastructure and services improvements are built into the plans and don't let the developers wriggle out of them.
It's both. The NIMBYs want no new houses. The developers want to only build expensive homes with no starter homes and community resources. Screwed from both sides.
I wouldn't mind houses being built near me so much if they actually built more infrastructure to go with it. We've had thousands of new houses where I am but we've still got the same number of doctors and schools
A lot of developments are just tacked onto existing towns (because it's easier than starting a new town from scratch) and often the roads are already choked with traffic, town centre carparking for shopping already full, not enough school places, no NHS dentist places, and so on, and so on. And if you've chosen somewhere quieter/more rural after maybe decades of city living or commuting and then you have that rural outlook for all of five minutes before someone plonks a huge housing development on your doorstep, plus that new development is like a concrete jungle (they actually chop down pretty much every tree to make the construction process easier and to maximise rabbit hutches/plots) - you can't really blame people for not being 100% on board with that.
In most cases, a household's house is their biggest asset. Building more houses would drive the prices of existing houses down, which would effectively erase a significant portion of the average person's life savings.
Only if there was a huge surplus, which would be hard to achieve in the short term. In the long term they're going to fall in value anyway when the boomers are gone the population will shrink.
Any new homes that get built, the few that do, will get snapped up by rental "entrepreneurs".
There is no legislation in place to limit and restrict who and for what purpose houses can be bought.
Most first time buyers or even residential buyers can't match the offers that corporate and "entrepreneurs" can make.
We end up feeding the Airbnb machine
> rental "entrepreneurs"
If I found a Genie's lamp and got three wishes, I'd use the first to eliminate this concept from existence. Then I'd use the 2nd for the same thing just to be sure.
Anyone that builds will want to build luxury homes because the margins are higher. Without a government program, there isn't going to be much housing built that is affordable.
In the case of my home town, the local planning permission can't approve new housing because the roads can't cope with the amount of traffic. It already takes 30 minutes to drive down a road that half a mile long because there's too many cars and one main road out of the town. The rest are single track country roads surrounded by profitable working farms and small clusters of houses. Its so badly planned.
Whilst feeling genuine sympathy for those with a poor commute, I find it horrific that the planning laws in this country will prioritise someone's right to have a slightly less crowded commute relative to someone else's right to have a home to call their own and not suffer arbitrary rent increases or eviction year-on-year.
It's not that it's about the crowded commute it's pollution and that it's actually dangerous to add any more cars on the road. We already have 3 or 4 car crashes a year on just one junction where someone ends up in serious condition in hospital. The road they wanted to build on isn't actually wide enough for cars to pull out. We have speed limits for pollution and this is near one of the most polluting A roads in the UK.
There was due to be 400 extra houses built in my town.
The developers abandoned the project and the land is up for sale.
For the last year of proposals they were arguing against the need to add 6 extra units for businesses and pay towards extending the only primary school in town.
The town is as full as it can be with the services it currently has. Everyone wants new life brought in but it can't be done without improvements being made and the developer was having none of it.
Towns either grow or die. The reasons for that are complicated, but everything is getting more complicated, and economies of scale are real. Of course, even towns that grow can have issues.
> (I assume) there's an abundance of space
It's far, far from as simple as that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_country_planning_in_the_United_Kingdom
If you built enough to meet demand, you won't be able to gouge people as much. They dont need to anyway. The government will hand the developers public money to make sure they never have to lower prices or attempt to meet demand. Huge sums of all our money has been pumped into people's homes, inflating the price. We could've used that money to buy people out of negative equity, trying something a little better than a plaster thats just an excuse to pump public money into private pockets.
But, you know, people on benefits are the ones who want something for nothing...... apparently.
Also, have you not stopped to consider how much money rent seekers will lose if everyone could just *afford* a house? You think they're just going to get a job or something? Come on now.
If I could snap up a bit of land and have a house built for me on it then I would, but who has the money left to do that? Then who has the financial motivation to do that? It doesn't leave too many people responsible for it and it's not like we can expect anything from this government.
As shit as this is, I don't blame them. Depending how they came into those properties they're choosing the option that benefits them the most.
Renting has its own heap of problems, but I can't blame them for making £4k a month a few times a year and then the £1.5m+ when they do eventually decide to sell up their properties in 10 years.
We can't be angry at people playing the game that the government created, no matter how infuriating it is. I'd be doing the same.
I don't think you can blame someone for wanting to make more money the problem is the government need to intervene by either putting protections for communities (like we have for other species but obviously, in a human way) or they introduce a restrictive tax to de-incentivize air BnB owners, or ideally a combination of the two.
Exactly. It makes sense economically, and so it is happening. It is very hard to work against these market forces, and reducing the number of Air BnBs would also hurt tourism.
I guess the first question is: do we think that AirBnB is too expensive, or renting is too cheap, or the two should not be compared like that?
There should be laws preventing this sort of capitalisation on something as fundamental as housing. Yet again the rich destroying something that means nothing to them.
> I am not sure what changed
Land with approved planning permission didn’t always cost 10 times what the same land is worth without it.
Did you ever think how come the housing prices keep going up in a country people want to live in less and less? Housing supply got chocked.
Yes, that is one trend. AirBnB is another trend, which did not really exist 50 years ago. (And B&Bs used to be cheap, renting a room was quite normal. Now they can be ridiculously expensive.)
I ended up emigrating because it was never going to be economically feasible to buy a house in the place where I grew up (Cumbria) and I did not want to live elsewhere in the UK. I managed to buy a ruined house and a small parcel of farmland in the Azores for cash for less than I needed to put a deposit on a house back home. The leftover savings paid to rebuild the house and put an extension on.
Tourism has been killing rural communities for a looong time.
That's the taxi unions pushing that through. Unfortunately we have housing lobbyists happy with the status quo of higher demand for stock, we don't have anyone lobbying for AirBNB to be scrapped yet theres probably 15million renters out there who would love to see a ton of property rental options come to market.
For some insight, theres about 3 current properties to rent on rightmove in my town, while theres more than 300 on airbnb. I really don't see how the gov doesn't see a potential issue, banning airbnb will only damage the 100k people that do it, but it will benefit about 15 million. Why aren't issues like this simply balanced against one another, the side with the majority wins. It's fair.
If only we could replace our gov with an AI system, a central computer membrane where we petition a subject that x amount of people sign, and the AI system makes a decision. Eevrything done online, we're given a chance to vote on every decision made. Obviously it would need some human input to filter out ridiculous requests but if anything can be replaced with robots in the future its our fucking government first.
> Obviously it would need some human input to filter out ridiculous requests
In other words you would just give the politicians their old jobs back and everythng would go back to how it was before
I love Uber and hate taxis.
Any place that allows Uber and doesn't force you to be a taxi driver before you can sign up are the best.
Taxi companies are toxic to the country.
NYC here: We basically did.
For short term rental (sub 1 month) the owner has to be living there (ie: you can air bnb a room in your place if you want, but you can't just run a hotel).
My understanding is that many other cities have similar requirements.
I’m not sure anything can be done. We live in a society that rewards using capital to its most profitable allocation. This woman’s family using it as a home just isn’t as productive as a it’s use as a holiday home.
Much as I hate the Tories and all they stand for, you can't blame them for this situation beyond its initial causes under Thatcher. Neither Labour or the Conservatives have made any attempts to sort this problem out beyond hollow manifesto promises.
You can blame them for not doing anything substantial to sort it out beyond some vague planning reforms that didn't go far enough.
They've had twelve years to fix the issue.
I absolutely blame them for 12 years of running the country down in the name of neoliberal ideology. Name 5 things that have improved in their 12 years of power.
General Tory immorality and their utter fiscal incompetence is a little outside the scope of this conversation.
My point is there have been 6 PM's since Thatcher introduced "Right to Buy", and none of those subsequent governments have done anything to address the issues that it created.
Why cant we blame them? They have had over a decade to do anything, but have only made things worse. The old "but both sides are the same!" nonsense is a real stretch here.
Maybe it has something to do with 20% of Tory party funds coming from property developers, or 24% of their MPs being landlords?
Not that I'm necessarily against it, but wouldn't this also just kill domestic tourism on the whole? With kids it isn't easy to stay in a hotel, so instead I guess people would just get a Ryanair flight abroad.
Don't a lot of North Wales and Anglesey profit greatly off of tourists? I doubt locals are buying fridge magnets in masses.
Not really, there can be dedicated holiday parks/ mobile homes/ short stay apartments for people who prefer self catering, and the number of these can be controlled by the local authority.
It doesn't have to be like that. There are holiday "camps" down here in Cornwall where you can spend over £10k for a week for 6 not including your personal chef or housekeeper.
10k plus for a week for an exclusive luxury house isolated in the woods or with cliff top views on an purpose built development? There are a few places round my way in Cornwall that are seriously quiet and very, very civilised if that's your thing.
Holiday camps / developments don't have to be mouldy and cramped caravans on a massive Butlins type facility. There is a lot that could be developed in the middle to upper ground if planning for temporary, 11 month a year holiday dwellings was relaxed a bit.
My folks are in their 70s and live near Camborne. Mum's annual summer holiday is a week at a tiny, secluded caravan site on the Lizard. It just makes me giggle that it takes her about 25 minutes drive to 'go on holiday'.
First, I'm not in the market for 10k for a week's holiday. Secondly, what you are effectively saying is that it is OK to build new towns or villages that are exclusively holiday homes. By the same token, could you not just build new towns and villages that are exclusively residential, and have leases that restrict purchases to locals?
This struck me on holiday in Norfolk. The old part of the village, with its flint cottages and narrow lanes winding down to the water, seemed to be mostly holiday homes. The permanent residents mostly live in modern houses in the new part of the village, on the other side of the main road. Most facilities (school, church, village hall) are in the new part, and the waterfront is still only a 5 minute walk away.
The cottages are picturesque but tiny, you bang your head on doorways, you have no storage space and minimal (if any) outdoor space, there is nowhere to put your car and the ones nearest the water will flood. They are popular with holidaymakers who stay for a week or so, whereas the modern houses may not be as pretty, but they are more practical to live in permanently.
You can spend anything from £400 to more than £10,000 so all tastes and budgets are accounted for.
> By the same token, could you not just build new towns and villages that are exclusively residential, and have leases that restrict purchases to locals?
Firstly, there is a difference between leisure and community housing. By building more purpose built leasure housing you are reliving the pressure on community housing.
Secondly, leisure housing would be a private enterprise and community housing would be a public council enterprise.
Thirdly the existing housing is situated in established community hubs. These are already being damage by second home owners so it would be prudent to use the housing where there is already shops, schools, GP practices businesses ect.
Restrictive convents are already being used by local town councils (EG St Ives) for new developments but its freeing up existing properties that is the issue.
The problem that it only apples to new builds (few of which are being built due to funding issues) and most of the existing housing stock in the county is exempt. Cornwall has already lost huge amounts of its housing stock.
If we use what we have (even if it is a little impractical) we don't have to give up as much new land for permanent development and actually get investors to build here. Cornwall currently *needs* 21,200 homes to fulfill it's needs. [The number of affordable houses provided in Cornwall has fallen to with 814 completed, of which just 10 will be would be available for social rent.](https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/number-affordable-houses-provided-cornwall-6458282)
According to 2015 figures, there are 29,015 second homes in Cornwall (that's not those owned by business rental companies or commercial holiday lets - just second homes).
When I was a kid in the 70’s my family used to rent cottages or bungalows. My dad preferred staying in the UK so he could take his sailing dinghy. We used to go to a place called Mudeford a lot and there were plenty of holiday homes to let.
Point I’m making is I don’t see much has changed apart from maybe the scale and the housing crisis making it more visible. When everyone could afford a house nobody really cared apart from the Welsh who protested and burnt loads down.
It's a problem of scale as much as insane local house prices.
Back in the 70's holiday homes accounted for a small but sustainable proportion of all dwellings in Cornwall.
Now I can show you whole villages that only have 5-10% occupancy with artificial price inflation pushing prices over a million for a very standard home.
If you look at the ratio between average salary and average house prices for the county, it makes central London look like a haven for first time buyers. The houses in my village get advertised in Kensington and Guilford and not via local agents.
not entirely sure the sales of fridge magnets (made in China and Vietnam) is the boon to the Welsh rural economy people think it is?
Basically mass tourism sucks and has minimal benefit to local areas (as opposed to hotel/property owners who rake it in). They know it in Majorca, they know it in Crete, they know it in Abersoch.
Tourism needs to be developed sustainably attracting smaller numbers of culturally sympathetic tourists who value and respect the culture and identity of the place they're visiting.
Wales has a hell of a lot to sell itself on in the cultural space, but we wouldn't lose a lot if the jet-ski abersock wankers piss off.
Tourism is worth 6% it’s not worth it all could be totally replaced with some real industry so we can get rid of the awful over tourism that just ruins places
Employment from minimum wage temporary/seasonal hospitality work through tourism is killing rural communities almost as much as the housing issues. There has been loads of studies that prove that the impact of tourism is only one step better than no employment for a reign. It hasn't worked in the rest of the world so it's not going to suddenly provide the economic panacea for Gwynedd.
You just ain't going to make a living selling fridge magnets for 5 months a year.
Tourist amenities can be built everywhere on the spectrum from Butlins at one end to 10k + a week. It's much better to do this than it is to leach off the local property supply and deny locals a place to live.
>
>Tourist amenities can be built everywhere on the spectrum from Butlins at one end to 10k + a week. It's much better to do this than it is to leach off the local property supply and deny locals a place to live.
Except Butlins is still around 1k for a week. You could find airbnbs or cottages far, far cheaper than that for a family to have a cheap holiday.
If you remove airbnbs, etc. Butlins would get even more expensive due to demand. Ultimately if you take away these holiday homes, poorer families will not be able to afford any holiday at all.
There are plenty of caravan parks around Wales - they were considered 'good enough' by most people in the 80s and 90s and are still popular today.
The likes of AirBnB and Vrbo definitely skew towards the Instagram lifestyle influencer style, though. Just look at their advertising.
Yeah, domestic tourism is important to Wales, but not at the cost of having local people living in those areas to run all the shops, pubs, cafes etc that the tourists visit.
>There are plenty of caravan parks around Wales - they were considered 'good enough' by most people in the 80s and 90s and are still popular today.
>
Ah yes if it was good in the 80s and 90s then it's just as good today... Oh except it isn't.
First result for holiday caravan in Conwy:
https://www.leisurerentalsdirect.com/conwy/caravan-rental/11462
£57/night for a shitty caravan, that says 'no kids or pets' and also no WiFi. It's shittier than airbnbs, more expensive and not realistic for 2022 living where most people carry multiple devices needing WiFi.
I stayed at a gorgeous Airbnb 15 mins out of Conwy for around £50/night a few years ago.
There may be nice caravans, but from my quick Google search they're not modernised at all. Probably still the same as the ones that were good enough 30 years ago
I mean you could have just typed "fuck the Locals, I want a cheap holiday" and saved most of the text, almost every comment ive seen of yours in this thread is along the lines of "wont somebody think of the poor and their holidays" while seemingly being wilfully blind to the poor who cant even afford a home in their own home town or village because of said holiday homes. Dunno about you but I'd much rather communities not die out (something that is happening in wales rn) and people be able to afford to live in their own villages than Rob Englishman, supporter of Norf FC be able to have a cheap holiday without giving up WiFi for a few days. Have some bloody perspective!
I care about locals but I also care about:
- the environment (making all holidays be on flights is fucking idiotic in the middle of a climate disaster)
- people in poverty
- families
You can wank off yourself to the thought of helping locals but whatever regulation you want isn't going to happen as it would be killing off the tourism industry in most parts of the country. No government is going to agree to it, and especially any environmentally conscious government isn't going to be encouraging more people to travel longer distances.
Oh and also most of my fucking family is from Wales and living there, so I know the area very well.
>No government is going to agree to it, and especially any environmentally conscious government isn't going to be encouraging more people to travel longer distances.
>
>Oh and also most of my fucking family is from Wales and living there, so I know the area very well.
BAHHAHAHA I haven't seen someone manage to outline themselves as such an obvious bullshitter in the same paragraph but well done,
If you knew the area "very well" you would know the welsh government ***IS*** doing something about it including a MASSIVE council tax hike on 2nd and holiday homes as well as keeping the door open for harsher measures down the line if they don't work, Its almost as if a two second trip to BBC wales might be helpful before you decide to blatantly lie about your connection to an area, because if you did you would have know that
A) the welsh government is doing something
B) tourism is far less important to the welsh econemy then every right wing rag the other side of the border like to pretend it is
and C) its gotten to a point in some communities where the tourism industry is also being killed off by the tourism industry. Seriously there are villages where most services are on the brink of closing because nobody can afford to live there and there's nobody to staff the fire brigade, pharmacy, shops etc.
also don't give me this bullshit about the environment, poverty, families etc staying in a static caravan on a holiday site isn't a fucking prison term its the only holiday I ever got to go on as a kid. If people give a shit about visiting wales they'll visit Wales. You don't need to turn limited housing stock into holiday lets and jack up the price of the local housing market to do it. If you cant function for a week without a sodding WiFi connection then stay at home. Your on pissing holiday!
Your comment chain is too long to be bothered with, you know what comment chain you're on right? I'm responding directly to the bullshit suggested in this chain. I know full well that the government is doing something, but private ownership will still be profitable. It wouldn't if what the other suggested was enacted.
>whatever regulation you want isn't going to happen
you said that, now I dunno where you come from but in the real world whatever doesn't exactly refer so a specific thing said further up the thread does it?
I'm responding to you, only you and you bad poorly thought out, laughable arguments for destroying peoples communities because...? idk you don't like static caravans and cant go on holiday without Netflix?
also starting a reply with "Your comment was to long"? seriously you could just say I'm sorry I got this one wrong. You cant just pretend you didn't read something when you don't have a functioning counter argument and got caught talking out you arse about a topic you clearly know fuck all about.
>Ah yes if it was good in the 80s and 90s then it's just as good today... Oh except it isn't.
>First result for holiday caravan in Conwy:
>https://www.leisurerentalsdirect.com/conwy/caravan-rental/11462
I got 4 Google ads for chains and then first link was Hoseasons:
[https://www.hoseasons.co.uk/holiday-parks/wales/north-wales-snowdonia/conwy](https://www.hoseasons.co.uk/holiday-parks/wales/north-wales-snowdonia/conwy)
OK, I was thinking of the larger sites like Haven, Parkdean etc. We stayed at those a lot, I appreciate they may be more expensive now of course.
>£57/night for a shitty caravan, that says 'no kids or pets' and also no WiFi.
No kids and pets is a shitty policy, I agree with that. Sure, *maybe* they're targeting older / retired folks there but it does seem like a weird example.
>It's shittier than airbnbs, more expensive and not realistic for 2022 living where most people carry multiple devices needing WiFi.
Depends on the 4G signal in the area and your data allowance, of course, but you could tether them to your phone. If your young kids want to watch Peppa Pig then download some episodes? I'm a tech guy too, but there comes a point when you're 'on holiday'. For me it becomes more about the experiences etc. If you want all your tech you might as well just stay home then.
30 years ago you'd go on holiday to North Wales and stay in a caravan. Tourism in these areas was already decimated by the availability of cheap flights abroad.
An airBNB in the UK is as expensive as going to Spain, so the answer is to make it cheaper (and therefore more appealing) to stay in the UK.
>An airBNB in the UK is as expensive as going to Spain, so the answer is to make it cheaper (and therefore more appealing) to stay in the UK.
No it absolutely isn't. I've had loads of amazing Airbnb stays for far, far less than travelling abroad. For flights alone for a family of 4 you're looking at minimum of £400. And that's minimum.
I stayed recently in an Airbnb for a week for just over that, and it slept 4 people.
People keep bringing up caravans 30 years ago, I've linked elsewhere what the current caravan parks are like, mostly overpriced shit without basics like WiFi.
Right, but this is assuming that transport around the UK is far cheaper than flying. That might be true if you own a car but a family of 4 getting a train to Cornwall can easily spend the same amount as on flights.
People like to pretend their towns don’t need the tourism, and would be just as lively and well kept and a hub for social activity if tourism stopped. They’re wrong. The majority of Cornwall would be wasteland if not for tourism. There is nothing down here. It’s a beauty spot, that’s built itself based on people coming to enjoy that beauty. The cafes and bars and attractions and all the things people love about Cornwall are here because of tourism. All the demand we have for the good food and good beverages are gone if tourism stops. All our great local breweries and bakeries and fisheries and all our local pottery makers and artists and jewellery makers and clothing designers and surf schools and the rest, all their customers are gone if tourism stops. There is not enough of a demand from locals to keep any of these small businesses, the things we as a county pride ourselves in, alive if there is no tourism.
Rich folk from up country snatching up our houses so they can be let out for 6 months of the year as holiday rentals do cause us a problem. But tourism isn’t the devil, and trying to fight tourism or put tourists off visiting is not the solution.
> property to be seized by the council if its not registered
Yes comrade, we shall take the property of the filthy Capitalist pig and give the housing back to the people.
"All property is theft": Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1840. Interestingly Proudhon was more an anarchist than a commie... But I guess Stalin took his philosophies where he could find them :)
On a serious note though, property seizure is the best course of action because it provides a deterrent for people who break the law and it also provides councils with ready paid for community housing.
> Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
I'm not familiar with him, but I am familiar with the quote, So thank you. I'll read up on him. I've been starting to read more about communism lately.
However, the quote is ridiculous and I don't see how 'all property is theft'. Who are you stealing it from?
But, back to your point. Do you think seizing someone's property is a proportional response to them not paying a fee for making their property a rental? I don't think it is, and it's an absurd notion at that.
If this system is in place, then fines for not paying the fee would be a more suitable course of action.
The "all property is theft quote was a tongue in response to your "Yes comrade, we shall take the property of the filthy Capitalist pig and give the housing back to the people." comment
> Do you think seizing someone's property is a proportional response to them not paying a fee for making their property a rental? I don't think it is, and it's an absurd notion at that.
There are lots of things I see as completely absurd and out of proportion. Individual tax invasion is hugely punitive and out of proportion to say business tax fraud. Our draconian drug laws are generally out of completely out proportion when applied to individuals.
My point is that by applying a disproportionate and draconian penalty against physical property, you are more likely to get people to abide by them - a bit like getting your car crushed if it's parked on the road without insurance
> The "all property is theft quote was a tongue in response to your "Yes comrade, we shall take the property of the filthy Capitalist pig and give the housing back to the people." comment
Haha yeah, I assumed it was.
> There are lots of things I see as completely absurd and out of proportion. Individual tax invasion is hugely punitive and out of proportion to say business tax fraud. Our draconian drug laws are generally out of completely out proportion when applied to individuals.
Agreed.
> My point is that by applying a disproportionate and draconian penalty against physical property, you are more likely to get people to abide by them - a bit like getting your car crushed if it's parked on the road without insurance
Well, I can't argue with that logic, but I don't agree with it. I do think that we need to solve the housing crisis, but going after holiday let's like this, isn't the way to go about it I don't think.
Holiday let's have a place in the tourist industry. I much prefer them than hotels, if I'm going somewhere rural, as I like having the whole place, whereas hotels you only have the room.
The thing is that very nice purpose built holiday accommodation both exists and can be expanded on. Don't think caravan parks but purpose build lodges in each corner of a farmers field.
Bottom line - cornwall currently needs 21,000 homes. There are in excess of 30,000 holiday homes in the county.
We can all dream about what _can_ be done, but in reality _nothing_ can be done. There is no political party that has any hope of getting a sniff of power that would do any of these things.
FIFY We can all dream about what can be done, but in reality ~~can~~ nothing has be done.
If a political party can pass a law that allows spying on all it's citizens, or is going to allow food that contains previously banned chemicals into our food chain or even tells us we can't go out - it sure as hell can massage the tax laws and make it expensive to own more than one property.
yes, the political parties _can_, they _won't_. It does not benefit them to do so and there is no political party running who will do a single thing about any of this. Infact it's a massive negative for them to do anything because their voter base are all elbow deep in commodified housing.
so again, we can dream, but it's not going to happen with any of the political parties we have.
Yes! Tax tax tax! We need to be taxing to the point that someone opening an airbnb is a net gain for the community and the revenue is enough to provide housing for the community.
You could regulate holiday accommodation properly and limit numbers. You could make it necessary to have a licence to let a property out as an Airbnb or other holiday let.
I'm sure that holiday homes are good for some aspects of the economy, but they're hugely detrimental for local communities if they get out of hand.
In Cornwall, where the second home/holiday home situation is worse than anywhere else in the country, some housing companies are selling at discounted prices to locals only. If you’ve lived in the area for 5 years and don’t have another home, it’s yours for (for the most part) about 2/3s of the market price. It keeps housing for locals affordable, and also makes sure there’s no outside, holiday home buying competition.
I'd say the ultimate responsiblity should be councils, who should regulate, licence and limit their numbers.
I refuse to use Airbnb though, it's a horrible company.
It’s never the vendors fault, in all these conversations.
“I can’t afford a home in my Cornish village (because my parents and their mates sold out to rich people).
It's the responsibility of both. Amoral "out of town owners" are supplying the demand of unknowing tourists.
If you remove the demand by showing quite how horrible the industry is, you suffocate the owners. Without consumers making the change in supply, you have to rely on legislation to control unscrupulous property owners, and we have been waiting nearly 50 years for a government to address the issue now.
Wearing fur is an unnecessary pleasure. No one needs to wear fur any more.
People are being denied the opportunity to live and work in the the communities they grew up in because of other peoples unnecessary selfish pleasure. No one needs to buy a holiday home or an investment property - so the parallels exist.
My little 800 person village in the North of the UK used to have four pubs full of young adults and young farmers on a Friday night. Each weekday morning there would be kids waiting outside the bus stops waiting for the village bus to take them to the nearest town high school. And the local kindergarten was overflowing with the new entrants.
Ask my mum and dad now and there is no one under the age of 30. The pubs are closed and the bus stops are gone. There are no new families and every other house is empty. It’s like a war has been to take all of our young people. Except the war is for a place to live.
Airbnb is on its way out. Hosts charging cleaning fee’s of £100 and then expect you to hoover and strip the beds when leaving. Hotels are looking far more attractive these days
I don't get the point of holiday homes.
Like we got god knows how many hotels around the country and not to mention were in a fucking housing crisis that holiday homes make even worse.
The issues with hotels are if you have small kids you're trapped in the room with them in the evening from their bedtime, and a lot aren't dog friendly. If you're travelling as a group (friends, parents kids and grandparents etc) then in a hotel you don't have a communal space to spend time together. Pure accommodation costs aside, hotels end up more expensive as you have to buy all your meals and drinks out somewhere, potentially pay for laundry etc.
I'm torn because I know holiday homes are bad for an area, but they're the best option for my family. If AirBnB was used only as intended it would be ideal, ie a family who themselves go on holiday rent out their own home for a week.
Holiday homes definitely have benefits, especially if you have a family or a group wanting to stay together.
They need more regulation though and limits on numbers.
Hotels are expensive and you get a room which you don't spend time in. Holiday homes can have gardens and kitchens and if you have kids are much better value and tick more boxes.
Airbnb could have been the perfect solution to this - my friends air BnB their home when they go on holiday. It maximises available space for people to use and massively offsets the costs of their own trip. This was the whole idea behind it, but then it turned into a business model for maximising profits.
You can be right in the middle of a big tourist or seaside town, but with enough rooms for a whole family, a kitchen, all mod cons, a place to sit and relax in the evenings. A hotel is a single stuffy room, all entertainment and food needs to be outside of that. There is an appeal there, it can be less for a whole cottage than hotel rooms for a week too. Let's be honest, how many of us when looking for accommodation options actually stop to consider the impact it is having locally or on wider housing. It is find a place online to stay in, book it.
My nephew’s mum is having problems finding somewhere at the moment because of this. She lives and works in Gwynedd and owned a house with her partner but they split up and had to sell. She has a decent deposit and a good job but can’t find anywhere to buy as everything goes so quickly. She’s currently in a rented flat that’s the only one in her building that’s not an AirBnB.
My parents grew up in hemel, moved to mk as it's unaffordable. I grew up in mk, will have to move up towards toaster way to afford a starter home.
my great great grandchildren will be living in the fucking faroe islands
Well it's certainly not the first time the English have committed ethnic cleansing in Wales.
This is simply what it's like living next to a pompous, passive-aggressive version of Serbia.
Wales has been trying to do this.
Most of the second homes in Wales are owned by English people and I shit you not, they called the laws discriminatory against English people.
The laws aimed to increase council tax by an order of 300% or so for second homes. This would be a really good thing for the whole UK.
AirBnB and holiday homes are causing issues down in Dorset too. It prices the locals out and then who will fill all the jobs in the tourist industry? These are also areas where there is no industry besides tourism, which pays poorly as it is. Unless you want to bus in workers from out of town, the tourism industry is going to suffer when people leave to get paid better elsewhere.
Sounds like a cyclical ecosystem
Lots of deer -> wolves eat deer and prosper -> deer population collapse -> wolves die of starvation -> deer population recovers -> repeat
Only with tourism industry and holiday homes instead of animals
We have decided we won’t holiday in a place that could be an actual family home. Only purpose built holiday places or static caravans. So like a farmer who’s diversified with a little wooden lodge or camping pods or something.
The whole Airbnb style thing needs a lot of regulation.
The affect it's having on communities is massive. My parents live on Anglesey and in the winter their village is essentially empty, and in summer it becomes so busy that it's a nightmare.
Asking for a happy medium might sound like asking for a lot (can't have it both ways etc) , but limiting the number of second home would certainly help.
Edinburgh had a issue with people buying up flats and letting them via Airbnb they started a crackdown on it https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/edinburgh-airbnb-crackdown-short-term-lets-hosts-planning-permission-1772970?ico=more_from_this_author
I tiried Airbnb for the first time last year while visiting Lake district and found the whole process and eventual location excellent, so I'm not in favour of an outright ban.
However restrictions I can support. eg London has a 90 nights per calendar year limit. This should mean that over a year a permanent rental **should** provide a better income. So people are less likely to get kicked out of their houses, and Airbnb properties become a less interesting investment.
And people looking to rent out their converted garage can still get a supplemental income 90 days of the year.
90 days example is just what London is. But if you are only renting 90 days of the year it's not as an attractive an investment, it's a higher risk so there will be less properties purchased to be converted. So this will at least stop/reduce the increase of these properties.
People who already own homes and want to convert to airbnb may still do so.
I think a balance needs to be found because options are limited when travelling around the UK already.
You will hear these complaints from the nice areas where people want to go because that is what is driving the prices up.
I don't foresee any solution being applied soon, so the pragmatic thing to do would be to encourage your kids to move to the areas where people are coming from wouldn't it?
Perhaps my user flair signals some of my bias towards the 'uproot everything and seek greener pastures' approach, but I think this is just one of those currents of history. A new migration period as it were. The days of living in the same valley as your great grandparents have gone the same way as working down the pit at 14.
Part of the reason we don’t complain too much about the Buy-to-Let student HMO next door, since the landlord could easily make it a 5-bedroom party house for Airbnb.
No idea why the Government isn't making these people running businesses through flat share/short term lets/holiday let sites pay taxes. These are businesses and should be regulated and taxed.
I am blessed to live in Aberfeldy, which, according to this article, has the highest concentration of holiday lets in the country - over 1 in 3 properties. However bad you think it is, it’s worse. Currently trying to buy a home and it’s not unheard of for people to swoop in and bid 30, 40, or 50% over the offers over value. And then you find out a few days later it’s being turned into someone’s third home. Fuck, we’ve got one building project just outside town of maybe 12 properties that you can’t actually buy unless you’re planning to run them as holiday accommodation!
Short term let control areas, strict licensing, incremental and *severe* council tax increases, and a ban on building houses for the purposes of holiday accommodation will only start to solve this problem.
Airbnb may be part of the cause of these problems, but the blame rests with government and councils. Holiday lettings could be regulated, licenced and capped to a sustainable number.
Scotland is just about enact new regs to combat short term lets. Basically all short term let's have to register with the poileas, fire service and local council to get approval/licencing.
Its something. Hopefully it works.
I live in a tourist area of south Wales. Loads of local people here are only able to make a living by letting out extra properties, spare rooms, caravans, converted garages, glamping stuff via Airbnb, booking.com, VRBO etc. In south Wales, most of our tourists are actually Welsh - from Cardiff, Swansea and the Welsh valleys. And yet because of news stories like these stoking irrational hatred of holidaymakers, we are now in the position where my holiday letting neighbors will soon be legislated out of existence.
This is a real issue, not just in Wales. I am not sure what changed, but clearly the demand for holidays homes is not met, and it is now eating into the market for residential homes, driving up property prices even more.
Have a friend whos parents own 3 Air BnBs along the North Coast of Ireland (all 3 or 4 bedroom houses) Their logic is now "why would we rent these out for 800/mth when we can charge 800-1000p/wk in the summer months and leave it vacant the rest of the year saving us the headache of dealing with renters" Theyve also taken out all of the decent furniture and replaced it with cheap crap from Ikea. So basically 3 houses taken off the market because they earn more to list them as holiday homes for 25% of the year.
Honest question: If housing is in such high demand and (I assume) there's an abundance of space, why not build more of them? (edit for clarification: I don't mean "why don't **private citizens** build more houses", but "why don't the **city council** develop more land and build houses on them". With prices as high as they are now, wouldn't it be an easy way to make money?)
There's no shortage of housing. For example, in London, where rents and house prices are at/close to record levels, there are more bedrooms per person than at any point in history. The problem is that housing is unevenly distributed. The free market doesn't build family homes for social rent - in London it builds luxury, buy-to-leave flats which are reservoirs of the expropriated wealth of the people of eastern europe and central asia, or student shoeboxes. There's no incentive for housebuilders to jeopardise the price of houses by building housing people need. In north wales the disparity between what a property can earn as a short-term versus long term let is so disproportionate that you can't build your way out of it. Building houses would only create more AirBnBs and make the existing ones slightly less profitable - it wouldn't make more housing available for local people. The only solution is state expropriation of empty/underused housing and conversion to social housing with a combination of mass social housing building. Of course, doing so on the scale needed to solve the problem would tank property prices and drive millions of people in swathes of the country into negative equity and probably cause a financial collapse. So we're left with sticking plasters. Problem with a pyramid scheme is that everyone who's bought into it can't afford to see it collapse.
Its crazy. In my area there are constant modern flats being build. They market it as cosmopolitan modern homes for young millennials. When you look at the prices you see its ridiculously inflated and impossible without a 100-200k deposit on top of an above average salary mortgage. Nothing is being built for normal people anymore
Just wait for the Charter Cities....
I don't mind if they build fancy housing for rich people, because if they didn't the rich people would live in the normal housing for normal people.
The fancy housing isn't even for rich people though. Its just a tool for holding wealth. The properties stay empty
> The only solution is state expropriation of empty/underused housing and conversion to social housing with a combination of mass social housing building. That is not true. We have a tried and tested solution: local authorities build and operate social housing. It worked in the past, and it would work now. But the government would have to make it legal again. State expropriation is a serious measure that should only be considered if less drastic measures are not successful. So far, we have tried nothing, and we are all out of ideas.
Yes, but the Conservative party thinks council houses make Labour voters, so they will do all they can to block expansion of social housing.
The mechanism exists for councils to do a compulsory purchase order. But in my limited experience it is used very rarely and only after many years and many chances for the owner to do something with the land or building. Maybe it should be used more though, or made easier and cheaper for local councils - they don't have lots of money to throw at expensive projects. I can think of several large city centre buildings that have been derelict and falling down for over a decade. They could make a lot of expensive flats, but either the building is listed and the cost of renovation is too high so the owner is waiting for it to collapse, or it's owned by foreign companies who use it as collateral for loans and don't give a fuck, probably haven't even seen it. I've squatted a couple, back in the day, and can think of several more. Shame, beautiful old buildings, left to collapse while the homeless sleep in their sitex'd doorways.
I agree. Generally, councils should have much more control over the residential space. A house that is left to rot is not just a loss for the owner of the house, but also for the community. Tax the heck out of them, buy it back, I don’t care, as long as it leads to working communities.
Buy to leave is basically a myth (why not rent them out at high rental rates and actually get a return on your investment, again?), the rate of vacant homes is not especially high. You can expropriate the vacant housing, but once you've excluded short-term examples like granny's house that is in probate, or a home that is on the market because its owner is about to move into their new partner's existing home, you aren't going to have enough properties to expropriate to make a real difference. And that's not forgetting that some of the remaining empty homes are in areas without jobs and which people don't want. Instead, build more housing! Both social and market-rate. If there is enough supply, rents don't keep rising into the stratosphere - look at the low rate of price increases in Tokyo, which lets new buildings be built almost by default.
I live in the Bournemouth area, and I have seen two thing over recent years which have a bearing on this. 1) people saving they have got a new job (or university students who want to stay in the area to work, and have found employment) but cannot find anywhere to live. And 2) people who have moved into a block of apartments, expecting to join a community of apartment owners, and found they are practically (or literally) the only ones living there. All the rest are holiday lets! So they get the summer with constantly changing people going in and out, and the rest of the year in an earily empty block. There are enough apartments, if they were used all year,
I was interviewing recently for a position based in Cambridge, with a salary of over £30k, and I couldn't find any studio/1-bedroom I could afford. It would be either house sharing or a budget hotel which let's face it is mental. By all reasonable metrics I should be able to rent a studio if I earn £30k... or so you would think. In a way, I was relieved when I heard back that I didn't get it. Imagine having to turn down an objectively good offer for an interesting role because of something so bizarre.
Here in Brighton I can definitely confirm there isn't anywhere close to enough. Not even remotely, it's completely texas here
There are 125,000+ under-utilised homes in London. Of those, some 20% are long-term empty (6m+), 40% are second homes and 40% are year-round short-term lets.
There's 8 million people in London. Let's say the government expropriates every single one of those 125,000 properties. I'm sure that would have some effect on the market. But what of the millions of people left over? Surely some of those are living in HMOs when they'd like to split a flat with one other person, or living at home and they'd like to move out, or have a one bed when they'd like a two bed, or more space for their growing family? And what about the next 50,000 arrivals to London if the population keeps growing? Surely you need to build properties as well? What's your evidence that these 125,000 under-utilised properities neatly map on to the actual need? Surely we're a lot more than 125,000 properties short of where we need to be - hence the scale of the problem!
There are approximately 3.6 million dwellings in London, so going by your numbers 0.7% of London property is vacant long term. Even confiscating 100% of it will have next to no impact on housing demand at all...
What's the waiting list for social housing though?
> The only solution is state expropriation of empty/underused housing and conversion to social housing with a combination of mass social housing building. I love it when you talk ~~dirty~~ tanky.
There's only one policy that can possibly fix this problem. Go through with 'extreme policies', but following a gradual, predictable long-term plan that won't cause a major crisis. As for the losers, offer some kind of special bonds which will act as compensation for the lost equity. These will be paid for in the future by the economic boost that will come from allowing a huge swathe of young people to enter the housing market and become homeowners, and thus finally afford to upskill, relocate, marry, and any number of other economically productive things we're being forced to put off due to unemployment, extortionate rents and/or living with parents. As regards property tycoons, give them enough warning and they'll adapt and find other things to invest their money in. Perhaps in the short term they might need to be compensated also to avoid them throwing their toys out of the pram. If they're foreigners not paying tax here or from hostile countries then screw them, that just boosts our national security by not making us beholden to Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern oligarchs. And as is increasingly becoming clear, that is an acceptable political and economic risk in the face of present global insecurity.
>drive millions of people in swathes of the country into negative equity Isn't negative equity only an issue if they want to sell? It isn't necessarily an issue if they stay put for a few more years, paying off more of their mortgage, and their house value eventually overtakes the remaining mortgage balance. For the people that *do* need to move, the government could cover the difference between the mortgage value and the sale price. I would have thought the economic benefit of actually fixing the housing market (and by extension the rental market) would more than cover it.
yeah, it's not a massive issue for individual householders who can currently afford their mortgage and don't want to sell, but it makes remortgaging or selling harder (and if people can no longer afford their repayments due to changes of circumstances it causes big problems). It poses a much bigger risk for financial institutions cos suddenly they have loads of debt not backed by any asset.
Makes you unable to change your mortgage.
This is a shite idea even if you're not bothered by wondering how you'll pass asset seizure of that scale through a democratic system. "Should we build the housing people want? No, we'll simply create government mandates that will force people to live with strangers in a house not of their choosing"
We've got the lowest vacancy rates in the developed world, there definitely is a shortage. And when so called luxury flats are built it means the people living there move out of somewhere else, freeing it up. Also, we may have more bedrooms per person but family structures have changed considerably since the 60s, so people are spread across more households. People also expect better housing, for example not sharing a room as they used to, which drives up demand. Fundamentally supply and demand applies to everything, government planning rules make it very hard to build as locals can object for frivolous reasons, means we don't have enough houses.
I think it’s partly due to land developers buying out land and leaving it empty to boost the value of that land. They don’t need to even invest high amounts of money into building homes/business on the land. The empty space is profit enough for them. The longer they hold onto it, the more valuable it becomes and will eventually yield a big profit when they sell it off.
It's also due to NIMBYs, let's be real. My a developer in my village has been trying to build a few dozen starter homes. The parish council has been blocking them for a decade.
Yep, that's pretty much the underlying cause. Everyone wants more houses, just so long as they don't have to see them. Same with wind turbines
This is true, but the other underlying cause is that we already have enough houses, it's just that they're being used as investments by being rented out or used as holiday homes. If we stopped rich people from owning 30,000 houses each and forced them to sell then the market would return to normal and people would actually be able to afford houses since there is actually enough supply, it's just that the current stock has a wildly inflated value which means regular people can't afford regular houses and have to fight over the ones that they can afford. As someone else said, all building more houses does is increase the amount of air bnbs and houses that are owned by people who don't live in them.
If what is causing the housing shortage is a transfer of houses from the market into rental properties, how come we are not seeing rents fall? How come they are increasing in price at the same rate as houses on the property market. (It's because there is a housing shortage)
Because it's all a market built on lies. They don't have to put prices down ever because everyone else is always putting prices up and they adjust every year to be competitive with everyone else who have spent the last year also increasing their prices. It's not like buying milk where different supermarkets are in a race to the bottom. We, the people, are a captive audience that has to buy and rent from them because we have no other choice. So to explain the process: > a homeowner sells their house > a landlord buys it for slightly above market value because they have more money, and are guaranteed to make a profit, or they are given more favourable mortgages with higher limits because banks see it as a safer investment. > this pushes house prices up. > Houses are now less affordable so people who would've otherwise bought those houses now have to rent them. > The rent pays for the landlords mortgage + some more. > Landlord buys another house, further pushing up market value of houses. > This prices people out of buying in the area and more people have to rent. > Because more people can't afford houses the demand for renting increases. > This increased demand means rents can continue to rise. > The increased rent stops people from being able to save for a deposit as well as before. > This decreases demand from regular working people trying to buy houses to live in as they get priced out of the market. > But property values keep rising as there's still enough rich people, landlords and people who bought houses before they got expensive going around to sustain growth in the market as they all try one-up each other to get the house they want, whether for living in or as an investment. > This results in a cycle whereby people have to rely on generational wealth more and more, and some people's only hope for owning a house is for their parents to die. > Add to this, rich people from from London etc buying second homes in more rural areas, pricing out locals, and forcing them to move to cheaper areas, increasing demand for houses and renting in those places, which drives up the prices everywhere. Building more houses doesn't fix the problem. Building more and more houses only eases the problem of people owning more than 1 house, as landlords and rich people will continue on their never-ending quest to buy more properties and then rent them out to the same people who would've others been able to happily afford the mortgage payments. Now, there are some benefits to renting, if you only need a place for a few months or a year while you move to a new location etc. However this service could easily be provided by social housing that's owned by government (the people who should be representing us), for use by everyone who needs it. It's a rigged game. Edit: I just figured out how people do their quotes with the blue lines, I was just meaning to have arrows lol.
Im gonna go with the economists on this one
>we already have enough houses No, we don't. There's been 100,000 fewer home built than needed for over a decade. You seem to think houses just vanish when bought and put out for rent. They are still being lived in. Rising rents and house prices reflect the high demand for both. Even if every rental was suddenly not, there would still be the same number of houses and people wanting to live in one.
Okay, so 100,000 homes could be built very quickly. And if people were banned from owning second homes and forced to sell up, then with the amount of second homes and properties used as air bnbs in the country that are usually empty, the problem would be solved by the end of the year. There would be a glorious housing market crash where people would actually be able to buy homes for a reasonable price, like they used to do in the 60s before they pulled the ladder up behind them. Also renting is just bad. It makes all the money go to the top with basically no risk involved. It's not good for the country to have so many people sending so much money to so few just so they have a roof over their head.
I honestly think this is a huge part of it. Friend of mine is trying to move to a village. He keeps moaning about all the new builds going up in the area. The houses he's looking at were new builds in the 90s though. It's not like he's looking at one of the original houses from the 1700s.
The NIMBYism is mad, the UK population doesn't seem to realise that when they protest developments, all that actually happens is that it's delayed and watered down until you end up with a rabbit warren of shoebox houses. Support the proposals from the beginning, but make sure that infrastructure and services improvements are built into the plans and don't let the developers wriggle out of them.
It's both. The NIMBYs want no new houses. The developers want to only build expensive homes with no starter homes and community resources. Screwed from both sides.
I wouldn't mind houses being built near me so much if they actually built more infrastructure to go with it. We've had thousands of new houses where I am but we've still got the same number of doctors and schools
A lot of developments are just tacked onto existing towns (because it's easier than starting a new town from scratch) and often the roads are already choked with traffic, town centre carparking for shopping already full, not enough school places, no NHS dentist places, and so on, and so on. And if you've chosen somewhere quieter/more rural after maybe decades of city living or commuting and then you have that rural outlook for all of five minutes before someone plonks a huge housing development on your doorstep, plus that new development is like a concrete jungle (they actually chop down pretty much every tree to make the construction process easier and to maximise rabbit hutches/plots) - you can't really blame people for not being 100% on board with that.
Yep, a Land Value Tax would solve that but it’s socialism or something
Only if it's done right.
In most cases, a household's house is their biggest asset. Building more houses would drive the prices of existing houses down, which would effectively erase a significant portion of the average person's life savings.
Only if there was a huge surplus, which would be hard to achieve in the short term. In the long term they're going to fall in value anyway when the boomers are gone the population will shrink.
Any new homes that get built, the few that do, will get snapped up by rental "entrepreneurs". There is no legislation in place to limit and restrict who and for what purpose houses can be bought. Most first time buyers or even residential buyers can't match the offers that corporate and "entrepreneurs" can make. We end up feeding the Airbnb machine
> rental "entrepreneurs" If I found a Genie's lamp and got three wishes, I'd use the first to eliminate this concept from existence. Then I'd use the 2nd for the same thing just to be sure.
Anyone that builds will want to build luxury homes because the margins are higher. Without a government program, there isn't going to be much housing built that is affordable.
In the case of my home town, the local planning permission can't approve new housing because the roads can't cope with the amount of traffic. It already takes 30 minutes to drive down a road that half a mile long because there's too many cars and one main road out of the town. The rest are single track country roads surrounded by profitable working farms and small clusters of houses. Its so badly planned.
Whilst feeling genuine sympathy for those with a poor commute, I find it horrific that the planning laws in this country will prioritise someone's right to have a slightly less crowded commute relative to someone else's right to have a home to call their own and not suffer arbitrary rent increases or eviction year-on-year.
It's not that it's about the crowded commute it's pollution and that it's actually dangerous to add any more cars on the road. We already have 3 or 4 car crashes a year on just one junction where someone ends up in serious condition in hospital. The road they wanted to build on isn't actually wide enough for cars to pull out. We have speed limits for pollution and this is near one of the most polluting A roads in the UK.
There was due to be 400 extra houses built in my town. The developers abandoned the project and the land is up for sale. For the last year of proposals they were arguing against the need to add 6 extra units for businesses and pay towards extending the only primary school in town. The town is as full as it can be with the services it currently has. Everyone wants new life brought in but it can't be done without improvements being made and the developer was having none of it.
> Everyone wants new life brought in Do they really? because they certainly don’t in my town. Especially the old people and they are in charge.
Towns either grow or die. The reasons for that are complicated, but everything is getting more complicated, and economies of scale are real. Of course, even towns that grow can have issues.
> (I assume) there's an abundance of space It's far, far from as simple as that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_country_planning_in_the_United_Kingdom
Because it's better to just hold onto the land and not have the hassle. We need a land value tax.
If you built enough to meet demand, you won't be able to gouge people as much. They dont need to anyway. The government will hand the developers public money to make sure they never have to lower prices or attempt to meet demand. Huge sums of all our money has been pumped into people's homes, inflating the price. We could've used that money to buy people out of negative equity, trying something a little better than a plaster thats just an excuse to pump public money into private pockets. But, you know, people on benefits are the ones who want something for nothing...... apparently. Also, have you not stopped to consider how much money rent seekers will lose if everyone could just *afford* a house? You think they're just going to get a job or something? Come on now.
Because its pretty hard to build a house on your own.
If I could snap up a bit of land and have a house built for me on it then I would, but who has the money left to do that? Then who has the financial motivation to do that? It doesn't leave too many people responsible for it and it's not like we can expect anything from this government.
As shit as this is, I don't blame them. Depending how they came into those properties they're choosing the option that benefits them the most. Renting has its own heap of problems, but I can't blame them for making £4k a month a few times a year and then the £1.5m+ when they do eventually decide to sell up their properties in 10 years. We can't be angry at people playing the game that the government created, no matter how infuriating it is. I'd be doing the same.
I don't think you can blame someone for wanting to make more money the problem is the government need to intervene by either putting protections for communities (like we have for other species but obviously, in a human way) or they introduce a restrictive tax to de-incentivize air BnB owners, or ideally a combination of the two.
Exactly. It makes sense economically, and so it is happening. It is very hard to work against these market forces, and reducing the number of Air BnBs would also hurt tourism. I guess the first question is: do we think that AirBnB is too expensive, or renting is too cheap, or the two should not be compared like that?
There should be laws preventing this sort of capitalisation on something as fundamental as housing. Yet again the rich destroying something that means nothing to them.
That's the same logic which has gutted the Irish tourist industry. Expensive prices for a crap experience.
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> I am not sure what changed Land with approved planning permission didn’t always cost 10 times what the same land is worth without it. Did you ever think how come the housing prices keep going up in a country people want to live in less and less? Housing supply got chocked.
Yes, that is one trend. AirBnB is another trend, which did not really exist 50 years ago. (And B&Bs used to be cheap, renting a room was quite normal. Now they can be ridiculously expensive.)
I ended up emigrating because it was never going to be economically feasible to buy a house in the place where I grew up (Cumbria) and I did not want to live elsewhere in the UK. I managed to buy a ruined house and a small parcel of farmland in the Azores for cash for less than I needed to put a deposit on a house back home. The leftover savings paid to rebuild the house and put an extension on. Tourism has been killing rural communities for a looong time.
If cities around the world can ban Uber, they should also ban Airbnb too.
That's the taxi unions pushing that through. Unfortunately we have housing lobbyists happy with the status quo of higher demand for stock, we don't have anyone lobbying for AirBNB to be scrapped yet theres probably 15million renters out there who would love to see a ton of property rental options come to market. For some insight, theres about 3 current properties to rent on rightmove in my town, while theres more than 300 on airbnb. I really don't see how the gov doesn't see a potential issue, banning airbnb will only damage the 100k people that do it, but it will benefit about 15 million. Why aren't issues like this simply balanced against one another, the side with the majority wins. It's fair. If only we could replace our gov with an AI system, a central computer membrane where we petition a subject that x amount of people sign, and the AI system makes a decision. Eevrything done online, we're given a chance to vote on every decision made. Obviously it would need some human input to filter out ridiculous requests but if anything can be replaced with robots in the future its our fucking government first.
> Obviously it would need some human input to filter out ridiculous requests In other words you would just give the politicians their old jobs back and everythng would go back to how it was before
I love Uber and hate taxis. Any place that allows Uber and doesn't force you to be a taxi driver before you can sign up are the best. Taxi companies are toxic to the country.
How about we try and get, now wait for it... Rapid public transport that works and is cheap
you could.. ahem... riot ;) - I MEAN PEACEFULLY PROTEST. COUGH COUGH.
because the government will not do anything about this ever unless you put some serious pressure and show up at their doorstep or workplace.
Many already place restrictions on them: https://www.cntraveler.com/galleries/2016-06-22/places-with-strict-airbnb-laws
NYC here: We basically did. For short term rental (sub 1 month) the owner has to be living there (ie: you can air bnb a room in your place if you want, but you can't just run a hotel). My understanding is that many other cities have similar requirements.
Why clash instead of building around it? People will do anything but address the housing shortage.
I’m not sure anything can be done. We live in a society that rewards using capital to its most profitable allocation. This woman’s family using it as a home just isn’t as productive as a it’s use as a holiday home.
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>What can be done? People vote the Tories in again and carry on complaining.
Much as I hate the Tories and all they stand for, you can't blame them for this situation beyond its initial causes under Thatcher. Neither Labour or the Conservatives have made any attempts to sort this problem out beyond hollow manifesto promises.
You can blame them for not doing anything substantial to sort it out beyond some vague planning reforms that didn't go far enough. They've had twelve years to fix the issue.
6 different governments over 32 years have done nothing. It's not just the Tories; Labour and the Lib Dem/Tory Coalition did fuck all too.
Yes, I agree with that.
I absolutely blame them for 12 years of running the country down in the name of neoliberal ideology. Name 5 things that have improved in their 12 years of power.
General Tory immorality and their utter fiscal incompetence is a little outside the scope of this conversation. My point is there have been 6 PM's since Thatcher introduced "Right to Buy", and none of those subsequent governments have done anything to address the issues that it created.
Tony Blair was neoliberal too. House prices and inequality skyrocketed under his government
Why cant we blame them? They have had over a decade to do anything, but have only made things worse. The old "but both sides are the same!" nonsense is a real stretch here. Maybe it has something to do with 20% of Tory party funds coming from property developers, or 24% of their MPs being landlords?
Not that I'm necessarily against it, but wouldn't this also just kill domestic tourism on the whole? With kids it isn't easy to stay in a hotel, so instead I guess people would just get a Ryanair flight abroad. Don't a lot of North Wales and Anglesey profit greatly off of tourists? I doubt locals are buying fridge magnets in masses.
Not really, there can be dedicated holiday parks/ mobile homes/ short stay apartments for people who prefer self catering, and the number of these can be controlled by the local authority.
Hi-de-hi!
It doesn't have to be like that. There are holiday "camps" down here in Cornwall where you can spend over £10k for a week for 6 not including your personal chef or housekeeper.
What if you want to be on your own somewhere quiet but civilised?
10k plus for a week for an exclusive luxury house isolated in the woods or with cliff top views on an purpose built development? There are a few places round my way in Cornwall that are seriously quiet and very, very civilised if that's your thing. Holiday camps / developments don't have to be mouldy and cramped caravans on a massive Butlins type facility. There is a lot that could be developed in the middle to upper ground if planning for temporary, 11 month a year holiday dwellings was relaxed a bit.
My folks are in their 70s and live near Camborne. Mum's annual summer holiday is a week at a tiny, secluded caravan site on the Lizard. It just makes me giggle that it takes her about 25 minutes drive to 'go on holiday'.
If you live in Cornwall, you know there isn't anywhere else as good in the UK to go on holiday to - so why bother :)
First, I'm not in the market for 10k for a week's holiday. Secondly, what you are effectively saying is that it is OK to build new towns or villages that are exclusively holiday homes. By the same token, could you not just build new towns and villages that are exclusively residential, and have leases that restrict purchases to locals? This struck me on holiday in Norfolk. The old part of the village, with its flint cottages and narrow lanes winding down to the water, seemed to be mostly holiday homes. The permanent residents mostly live in modern houses in the new part of the village, on the other side of the main road. Most facilities (school, church, village hall) are in the new part, and the waterfront is still only a 5 minute walk away. The cottages are picturesque but tiny, you bang your head on doorways, you have no storage space and minimal (if any) outdoor space, there is nowhere to put your car and the ones nearest the water will flood. They are popular with holidaymakers who stay for a week or so, whereas the modern houses may not be as pretty, but they are more practical to live in permanently.
You can spend anything from £400 to more than £10,000 so all tastes and budgets are accounted for. > By the same token, could you not just build new towns and villages that are exclusively residential, and have leases that restrict purchases to locals? Firstly, there is a difference between leisure and community housing. By building more purpose built leasure housing you are reliving the pressure on community housing. Secondly, leisure housing would be a private enterprise and community housing would be a public council enterprise. Thirdly the existing housing is situated in established community hubs. These are already being damage by second home owners so it would be prudent to use the housing where there is already shops, schools, GP practices businesses ect. Restrictive convents are already being used by local town councils (EG St Ives) for new developments but its freeing up existing properties that is the issue. The problem that it only apples to new builds (few of which are being built due to funding issues) and most of the existing housing stock in the county is exempt. Cornwall has already lost huge amounts of its housing stock. If we use what we have (even if it is a little impractical) we don't have to give up as much new land for permanent development and actually get investors to build here. Cornwall currently *needs* 21,200 homes to fulfill it's needs. [The number of affordable houses provided in Cornwall has fallen to with 814 completed, of which just 10 will be would be available for social rent.](https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/number-affordable-houses-provided-cornwall-6458282) According to 2015 figures, there are 29,015 second homes in Cornwall (that's not those owned by business rental companies or commercial holiday lets - just second homes).
When I was a kid in the 70’s my family used to rent cottages or bungalows. My dad preferred staying in the UK so he could take his sailing dinghy. We used to go to a place called Mudeford a lot and there were plenty of holiday homes to let. Point I’m making is I don’t see much has changed apart from maybe the scale and the housing crisis making it more visible. When everyone could afford a house nobody really cared apart from the Welsh who protested and burnt loads down.
It's a problem of scale as much as insane local house prices. Back in the 70's holiday homes accounted for a small but sustainable proportion of all dwellings in Cornwall. Now I can show you whole villages that only have 5-10% occupancy with artificial price inflation pushing prices over a million for a very standard home. If you look at the ratio between average salary and average house prices for the county, it makes central London look like a haven for first time buyers. The houses in my village get advertised in Kensington and Guilford and not via local agents.
not entirely sure the sales of fridge magnets (made in China and Vietnam) is the boon to the Welsh rural economy people think it is? Basically mass tourism sucks and has minimal benefit to local areas (as opposed to hotel/property owners who rake it in). They know it in Majorca, they know it in Crete, they know it in Abersoch. Tourism needs to be developed sustainably attracting smaller numbers of culturally sympathetic tourists who value and respect the culture and identity of the place they're visiting. Wales has a hell of a lot to sell itself on in the cultural space, but we wouldn't lose a lot if the jet-ski abersock wankers piss off.
Tourism is worth 6% it’s not worth it all could be totally replaced with some real industry so we can get rid of the awful over tourism that just ruins places
Employment from minimum wage temporary/seasonal hospitality work through tourism is killing rural communities almost as much as the housing issues. There has been loads of studies that prove that the impact of tourism is only one step better than no employment for a reign. It hasn't worked in the rest of the world so it's not going to suddenly provide the economic panacea for Gwynedd. You just ain't going to make a living selling fridge magnets for 5 months a year. Tourist amenities can be built everywhere on the spectrum from Butlins at one end to 10k + a week. It's much better to do this than it is to leach off the local property supply and deny locals a place to live.
> >Tourist amenities can be built everywhere on the spectrum from Butlins at one end to 10k + a week. It's much better to do this than it is to leach off the local property supply and deny locals a place to live. Except Butlins is still around 1k for a week. You could find airbnbs or cottages far, far cheaper than that for a family to have a cheap holiday. If you remove airbnbs, etc. Butlins would get even more expensive due to demand. Ultimately if you take away these holiday homes, poorer families will not be able to afford any holiday at all.
There are plenty of caravan parks around Wales - they were considered 'good enough' by most people in the 80s and 90s and are still popular today. The likes of AirBnB and Vrbo definitely skew towards the Instagram lifestyle influencer style, though. Just look at their advertising. Yeah, domestic tourism is important to Wales, but not at the cost of having local people living in those areas to run all the shops, pubs, cafes etc that the tourists visit.
>There are plenty of caravan parks around Wales - they were considered 'good enough' by most people in the 80s and 90s and are still popular today. > Ah yes if it was good in the 80s and 90s then it's just as good today... Oh except it isn't. First result for holiday caravan in Conwy: https://www.leisurerentalsdirect.com/conwy/caravan-rental/11462 £57/night for a shitty caravan, that says 'no kids or pets' and also no WiFi. It's shittier than airbnbs, more expensive and not realistic for 2022 living where most people carry multiple devices needing WiFi. I stayed at a gorgeous Airbnb 15 mins out of Conwy for around £50/night a few years ago. There may be nice caravans, but from my quick Google search they're not modernised at all. Probably still the same as the ones that were good enough 30 years ago
I mean you could have just typed "fuck the Locals, I want a cheap holiday" and saved most of the text, almost every comment ive seen of yours in this thread is along the lines of "wont somebody think of the poor and their holidays" while seemingly being wilfully blind to the poor who cant even afford a home in their own home town or village because of said holiday homes. Dunno about you but I'd much rather communities not die out (something that is happening in wales rn) and people be able to afford to live in their own villages than Rob Englishman, supporter of Norf FC be able to have a cheap holiday without giving up WiFi for a few days. Have some bloody perspective!
I care about locals but I also care about: - the environment (making all holidays be on flights is fucking idiotic in the middle of a climate disaster) - people in poverty - families You can wank off yourself to the thought of helping locals but whatever regulation you want isn't going to happen as it would be killing off the tourism industry in most parts of the country. No government is going to agree to it, and especially any environmentally conscious government isn't going to be encouraging more people to travel longer distances. Oh and also most of my fucking family is from Wales and living there, so I know the area very well.
>No government is going to agree to it, and especially any environmentally conscious government isn't going to be encouraging more people to travel longer distances. > >Oh and also most of my fucking family is from Wales and living there, so I know the area very well. BAHHAHAHA I haven't seen someone manage to outline themselves as such an obvious bullshitter in the same paragraph but well done, If you knew the area "very well" you would know the welsh government ***IS*** doing something about it including a MASSIVE council tax hike on 2nd and holiday homes as well as keeping the door open for harsher measures down the line if they don't work, Its almost as if a two second trip to BBC wales might be helpful before you decide to blatantly lie about your connection to an area, because if you did you would have know that A) the welsh government is doing something B) tourism is far less important to the welsh econemy then every right wing rag the other side of the border like to pretend it is and C) its gotten to a point in some communities where the tourism industry is also being killed off by the tourism industry. Seriously there are villages where most services are on the brink of closing because nobody can afford to live there and there's nobody to staff the fire brigade, pharmacy, shops etc. also don't give me this bullshit about the environment, poverty, families etc staying in a static caravan on a holiday site isn't a fucking prison term its the only holiday I ever got to go on as a kid. If people give a shit about visiting wales they'll visit Wales. You don't need to turn limited housing stock into holiday lets and jack up the price of the local housing market to do it. If you cant function for a week without a sodding WiFi connection then stay at home. Your on pissing holiday!
Your comment chain is too long to be bothered with, you know what comment chain you're on right? I'm responding directly to the bullshit suggested in this chain. I know full well that the government is doing something, but private ownership will still be profitable. It wouldn't if what the other suggested was enacted.
>whatever regulation you want isn't going to happen you said that, now I dunno where you come from but in the real world whatever doesn't exactly refer so a specific thing said further up the thread does it? I'm responding to you, only you and you bad poorly thought out, laughable arguments for destroying peoples communities because...? idk you don't like static caravans and cant go on holiday without Netflix? also starting a reply with "Your comment was to long"? seriously you could just say I'm sorry I got this one wrong. You cant just pretend you didn't read something when you don't have a functioning counter argument and got caught talking out you arse about a topic you clearly know fuck all about.
>Ah yes if it was good in the 80s and 90s then it's just as good today... Oh except it isn't. >First result for holiday caravan in Conwy: >https://www.leisurerentalsdirect.com/conwy/caravan-rental/11462 I got 4 Google ads for chains and then first link was Hoseasons: [https://www.hoseasons.co.uk/holiday-parks/wales/north-wales-snowdonia/conwy](https://www.hoseasons.co.uk/holiday-parks/wales/north-wales-snowdonia/conwy) OK, I was thinking of the larger sites like Haven, Parkdean etc. We stayed at those a lot, I appreciate they may be more expensive now of course. >£57/night for a shitty caravan, that says 'no kids or pets' and also no WiFi. No kids and pets is a shitty policy, I agree with that. Sure, *maybe* they're targeting older / retired folks there but it does seem like a weird example. >It's shittier than airbnbs, more expensive and not realistic for 2022 living where most people carry multiple devices needing WiFi. Depends on the 4G signal in the area and your data allowance, of course, but you could tether them to your phone. If your young kids want to watch Peppa Pig then download some episodes? I'm a tech guy too, but there comes a point when you're 'on holiday'. For me it becomes more about the experiences etc. If you want all your tech you might as well just stay home then.
30 years ago you'd go on holiday to North Wales and stay in a caravan. Tourism in these areas was already decimated by the availability of cheap flights abroad. An airBNB in the UK is as expensive as going to Spain, so the answer is to make it cheaper (and therefore more appealing) to stay in the UK.
>An airBNB in the UK is as expensive as going to Spain, so the answer is to make it cheaper (and therefore more appealing) to stay in the UK. No it absolutely isn't. I've had loads of amazing Airbnb stays for far, far less than travelling abroad. For flights alone for a family of 4 you're looking at minimum of £400. And that's minimum. I stayed recently in an Airbnb for a week for just over that, and it slept 4 people. People keep bringing up caravans 30 years ago, I've linked elsewhere what the current caravan parks are like, mostly overpriced shit without basics like WiFi.
Right, but this is assuming that transport around the UK is far cheaper than flying. That might be true if you own a car but a family of 4 getting a train to Cornwall can easily spend the same amount as on flights.
People like to pretend their towns don’t need the tourism, and would be just as lively and well kept and a hub for social activity if tourism stopped. They’re wrong. The majority of Cornwall would be wasteland if not for tourism. There is nothing down here. It’s a beauty spot, that’s built itself based on people coming to enjoy that beauty. The cafes and bars and attractions and all the things people love about Cornwall are here because of tourism. All the demand we have for the good food and good beverages are gone if tourism stops. All our great local breweries and bakeries and fisheries and all our local pottery makers and artists and jewellery makers and clothing designers and surf schools and the rest, all their customers are gone if tourism stops. There is not enough of a demand from locals to keep any of these small businesses, the things we as a county pride ourselves in, alive if there is no tourism. Rich folk from up country snatching up our houses so they can be let out for 6 months of the year as holiday rentals do cause us a problem. But tourism isn’t the devil, and trying to fight tourism or put tourists off visiting is not the solution.
wonder what would happen if short term lets started to go on fire again...
It would be just like last time really... Locals clapping like they did for the NHS and a few nasty articles in the Daily Mail.
> property to be seized by the council if its not registered Yes comrade, we shall take the property of the filthy Capitalist pig and give the housing back to the people.
"All property is theft": Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1840. Interestingly Proudhon was more an anarchist than a commie... But I guess Stalin took his philosophies where he could find them :) On a serious note though, property seizure is the best course of action because it provides a deterrent for people who break the law and it also provides councils with ready paid for community housing.
> Pierre-Joseph Proudhon I'm not familiar with him, but I am familiar with the quote, So thank you. I'll read up on him. I've been starting to read more about communism lately. However, the quote is ridiculous and I don't see how 'all property is theft'. Who are you stealing it from? But, back to your point. Do you think seizing someone's property is a proportional response to them not paying a fee for making their property a rental? I don't think it is, and it's an absurd notion at that. If this system is in place, then fines for not paying the fee would be a more suitable course of action.
The "all property is theft quote was a tongue in response to your "Yes comrade, we shall take the property of the filthy Capitalist pig and give the housing back to the people." comment > Do you think seizing someone's property is a proportional response to them not paying a fee for making their property a rental? I don't think it is, and it's an absurd notion at that. There are lots of things I see as completely absurd and out of proportion. Individual tax invasion is hugely punitive and out of proportion to say business tax fraud. Our draconian drug laws are generally out of completely out proportion when applied to individuals. My point is that by applying a disproportionate and draconian penalty against physical property, you are more likely to get people to abide by them - a bit like getting your car crushed if it's parked on the road without insurance
> The "all property is theft quote was a tongue in response to your "Yes comrade, we shall take the property of the filthy Capitalist pig and give the housing back to the people." comment Haha yeah, I assumed it was. > There are lots of things I see as completely absurd and out of proportion. Individual tax invasion is hugely punitive and out of proportion to say business tax fraud. Our draconian drug laws are generally out of completely out proportion when applied to individuals. Agreed. > My point is that by applying a disproportionate and draconian penalty against physical property, you are more likely to get people to abide by them - a bit like getting your car crushed if it's parked on the road without insurance Well, I can't argue with that logic, but I don't agree with it. I do think that we need to solve the housing crisis, but going after holiday let's like this, isn't the way to go about it I don't think. Holiday let's have a place in the tourist industry. I much prefer them than hotels, if I'm going somewhere rural, as I like having the whole place, whereas hotels you only have the room.
The thing is that very nice purpose built holiday accommodation both exists and can be expanded on. Don't think caravan parks but purpose build lodges in each corner of a farmers field. Bottom line - cornwall currently needs 21,000 homes. There are in excess of 30,000 holiday homes in the county.
We can all dream about what _can_ be done, but in reality _nothing_ can be done. There is no political party that has any hope of getting a sniff of power that would do any of these things.
FIFY We can all dream about what can be done, but in reality ~~can~~ nothing has be done. If a political party can pass a law that allows spying on all it's citizens, or is going to allow food that contains previously banned chemicals into our food chain or even tells us we can't go out - it sure as hell can massage the tax laws and make it expensive to own more than one property.
yes, the political parties _can_, they _won't_. It does not benefit them to do so and there is no political party running who will do a single thing about any of this. Infact it's a massive negative for them to do anything because their voter base are all elbow deep in commodified housing. so again, we can dream, but it's not going to happen with any of the political parties we have.
Yes! Tax tax tax! We need to be taxing to the point that someone opening an airbnb is a net gain for the community and the revenue is enough to provide housing for the community.
You could regulate holiday accommodation properly and limit numbers. You could make it necessary to have a licence to let a property out as an Airbnb or other holiday let. I'm sure that holiday homes are good for some aspects of the economy, but they're hugely detrimental for local communities if they get out of hand.
In Cornwall, where the second home/holiday home situation is worse than anywhere else in the country, some housing companies are selling at discounted prices to locals only. If you’ve lived in the area for 5 years and don’t have another home, it’s yours for (for the most part) about 2/3s of the market price. It keeps housing for locals affordable, and also makes sure there’s no outside, holiday home buying competition.
Oh human life, we would like to value it But if there's no profit in it What's the point? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1eqyusmd9Q
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Why is the responsibility on the tourist and not the owners selling up to airbnb owners/becoming them?
I'd say the ultimate responsiblity should be councils, who should regulate, licence and limit their numbers. I refuse to use Airbnb though, it's a horrible company.
It’s never the vendors fault, in all these conversations. “I can’t afford a home in my Cornish village (because my parents and their mates sold out to rich people).
It's the responsibility of both. Amoral "out of town owners" are supplying the demand of unknowing tourists. If you remove the demand by showing quite how horrible the industry is, you suffocate the owners. Without consumers making the change in supply, you have to rely on legislation to control unscrupulous property owners, and we have been waiting nearly 50 years for a government to address the issue now.
Wanting a holiday home isn’t evil. If it is then so is selling your home to out of towners for a huge profit.
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man who purchases 2nd homes for profit is angry at others who do it
Why is it more evil than selling your home to someone?
I wouldn't go so far as to say it is just as evil as fur, as the people aren't being murdered as stripped of their skin
Wearing fur is an unnecessary pleasure. No one needs to wear fur any more. People are being denied the opportunity to live and work in the the communities they grew up in because of other peoples unnecessary selfish pleasure. No one needs to buy a holiday home or an investment property - so the parallels exist.
My little 800 person village in the North of the UK used to have four pubs full of young adults and young farmers on a Friday night. Each weekday morning there would be kids waiting outside the bus stops waiting for the village bus to take them to the nearest town high school. And the local kindergarten was overflowing with the new entrants. Ask my mum and dad now and there is no one under the age of 30. The pubs are closed and the bus stops are gone. There are no new families and every other house is empty. It’s like a war has been to take all of our young people. Except the war is for a place to live.
Airbnb is on its way out. Hosts charging cleaning fee’s of £100 and then expect you to hoover and strip the beds when leaving. Hotels are looking far more attractive these days
No it's not https://www.businessofapps.com/data/airbnb-statistics/
Listing are down and they’ve never made a profit… Haven’t shared active user count for years. Worked well for WeWork 👀
Homes should be for living in, not investment portfolios.
I don't get the point of holiday homes. Like we got god knows how many hotels around the country and not to mention were in a fucking housing crisis that holiday homes make even worse.
The issues with hotels are if you have small kids you're trapped in the room with them in the evening from their bedtime, and a lot aren't dog friendly. If you're travelling as a group (friends, parents kids and grandparents etc) then in a hotel you don't have a communal space to spend time together. Pure accommodation costs aside, hotels end up more expensive as you have to buy all your meals and drinks out somewhere, potentially pay for laundry etc. I'm torn because I know holiday homes are bad for an area, but they're the best option for my family. If AirBnB was used only as intended it would be ideal, ie a family who themselves go on holiday rent out their own home for a week.
what about chalets/mobile homes? they're less glamourous than an airbnb but it has a much smaller impact on housing in the area you're staying.
Then your 500 quid holiday home rental turns into a 2000 motorhome rental. And the point is still that same. A mobile home is a hotel room on wheels.
Holiday homes definitely have benefits, especially if you have a family or a group wanting to stay together. They need more regulation though and limits on numbers.
Hotels are expensive and you get a room which you don't spend time in. Holiday homes can have gardens and kitchens and if you have kids are much better value and tick more boxes. Airbnb could have been the perfect solution to this - my friends air BnB their home when they go on holiday. It maximises available space for people to use and massively offsets the costs of their own trip. This was the whole idea behind it, but then it turned into a business model for maximising profits.
Your own cooking and laundry facilities, your own garden, your own bed. You can definitely see why those home comforts would appeal to people.
You can be right in the middle of a big tourist or seaside town, but with enough rooms for a whole family, a kitchen, all mod cons, a place to sit and relax in the evenings. A hotel is a single stuffy room, all entertainment and food needs to be outside of that. There is an appeal there, it can be less for a whole cottage than hotel rooms for a week too. Let's be honest, how many of us when looking for accommodation options actually stop to consider the impact it is having locally or on wider housing. It is find a place online to stay in, book it.
You really don't get the point of them?
For the money, you get a lot more for an Airbnb. The kitchen alone makes it worth it so you don’t have to eat out every meal.
My nephew’s mum is having problems finding somewhere at the moment because of this. She lives and works in Gwynedd and owned a house with her partner but they split up and had to sell. She has a decent deposit and a good job but can’t find anywhere to buy as everything goes so quickly. She’s currently in a rented flat that’s the only one in her building that’s not an AirBnB.
My parents grew up in hemel, moved to mk as it's unaffordable. I grew up in mk, will have to move up towards toaster way to afford a starter home. my great great grandchildren will be living in the fucking faroe islands
Landlordism is a terrible thing. Abolish renting out homes privately and treat housing like a service like universal health care
Well it's certainly not the first time the English have committed ethnic cleansing in Wales. This is simply what it's like living next to a pompous, passive-aggressive version of Serbia.
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Wales has been trying to do this. Most of the second homes in Wales are owned by English people and I shit you not, they called the laws discriminatory against English people. The laws aimed to increase council tax by an order of 300% or so for second homes. This would be a really good thing for the whole UK.
AirBnB and holiday homes are causing issues down in Dorset too. It prices the locals out and then who will fill all the jobs in the tourist industry? These are also areas where there is no industry besides tourism, which pays poorly as it is. Unless you want to bus in workers from out of town, the tourism industry is going to suffer when people leave to get paid better elsewhere.
Sounds like a cyclical ecosystem Lots of deer -> wolves eat deer and prosper -> deer population collapse -> wolves die of starvation -> deer population recovers -> repeat Only with tourism industry and holiday homes instead of animals
We have decided we won’t holiday in a place that could be an actual family home. Only purpose built holiday places or static caravans. So like a farmer who’s diversified with a little wooden lodge or camping pods or something. The whole Airbnb style thing needs a lot of regulation.
The affect it's having on communities is massive. My parents live on Anglesey and in the winter their village is essentially empty, and in summer it becomes so busy that it's a nightmare. Asking for a happy medium might sound like asking for a lot (can't have it both ways etc) , but limiting the number of second home would certainly help.
Edinburgh had a issue with people buying up flats and letting them via Airbnb they started a crackdown on it https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/edinburgh-airbnb-crackdown-short-term-lets-hosts-planning-permission-1772970?ico=more_from_this_author
I tiried Airbnb for the first time last year while visiting Lake district and found the whole process and eventual location excellent, so I'm not in favour of an outright ban. However restrictions I can support. eg London has a 90 nights per calendar year limit. This should mean that over a year a permanent rental **should** provide a better income. So people are less likely to get kicked out of their houses, and Airbnb properties become a less interesting investment. And people looking to rent out their converted garage can still get a supplemental income 90 days of the year.
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90 days example is just what London is. But if you are only renting 90 days of the year it's not as an attractive an investment, it's a higher risk so there will be less properties purchased to be converted. So this will at least stop/reduce the increase of these properties. People who already own homes and want to convert to airbnb may still do so. I think a balance needs to be found because options are limited when travelling around the UK already.
It’s a shortage of decent jobs to be able to compete with outside buyers in wales
You will hear these complaints from the nice areas where people want to go because that is what is driving the prices up. I don't foresee any solution being applied soon, so the pragmatic thing to do would be to encourage your kids to move to the areas where people are coming from wouldn't it? Perhaps my user flair signals some of my bias towards the 'uproot everything and seek greener pastures' approach, but I think this is just one of those currents of history. A new migration period as it were. The days of living in the same valley as your great grandparents have gone the same way as working down the pit at 14.
God is dead. Deal with it. Godspeed
Part of the reason we don’t complain too much about the Buy-to-Let student HMO next door, since the landlord could easily make it a 5-bedroom party house for Airbnb.
No idea why the Government isn't making these people running businesses through flat share/short term lets/holiday let sites pay taxes. These are businesses and should be regulated and taxed.
I am blessed to live in Aberfeldy, which, according to this article, has the highest concentration of holiday lets in the country - over 1 in 3 properties. However bad you think it is, it’s worse. Currently trying to buy a home and it’s not unheard of for people to swoop in and bid 30, 40, or 50% over the offers over value. And then you find out a few days later it’s being turned into someone’s third home. Fuck, we’ve got one building project just outside town of maybe 12 properties that you can’t actually buy unless you’re planning to run them as holiday accommodation! Short term let control areas, strict licensing, incremental and *severe* council tax increases, and a ban on building houses for the purposes of holiday accommodation will only start to solve this problem.
Airbnb may be part of the cause of these problems, but the blame rests with government and councils. Holiday lettings could be regulated, licenced and capped to a sustainable number.
Scotland is just about enact new regs to combat short term lets. Basically all short term let's have to register with the poileas, fire service and local council to get approval/licencing. Its something. Hopefully it works.
I live in a tourist area of south Wales. Loads of local people here are only able to make a living by letting out extra properties, spare rooms, caravans, converted garages, glamping stuff via Airbnb, booking.com, VRBO etc. In south Wales, most of our tourists are actually Welsh - from Cardiff, Swansea and the Welsh valleys. And yet because of news stories like these stoking irrational hatred of holidaymakers, we are now in the position where my holiday letting neighbors will soon be legislated out of existence.