Quote Originally Posted by Stairway 2 7 View Post
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Yep £350,000 cheap boxes instead of a good selection of family and single occupancy homes. The government can't leave it to developers they need to take control. NIMBY's are also a massive problem, for wind, nuclear and solar too
I'm not sure of the legalities of it but could one of the governments in the UK embark on a house building project then set up a nationalised mortgage company that puts up a deposit for the buyer and acts as mortgage provider but holds a share in the property that is then repaid when the house is sold? Broadly similar schemes exist in Scotland already but it's still reliant on the buyer having a sizable deposit contribution, housing stock being available from private sector partners and a mortgage being approved by a selected panel of lenders.

When it comes to housing the private sector is failing. The fault of that isn't entirely at their door of course but it's a failure nonetheless. As has been pointed out above we seem to get either expensive 2 bedroom flats that are of little use to families, those on low incomes or those looking for single occupancy or we get 3, 4 and 5 bedroom developments that price out a huge chunk of young families. I think a lot of first time buyers would be more than happy with a small but functional 2 or 3 bedroom house, maybe with a little garden to keep on an affordable development that was an updated version of the building of the schemes a few decades ago. Mix in good quality homes for social housing with those looking to buy and you could give people something to be proud of.

Such housing exists but it's largely being built for the mid market sector. There's developments of nice little houses in Craigmillar and Pennywell (and I'm sure elsewhere too) . A mix of flats and houses but there's not enough and it's still keeping people trapped in the rent trap and not really addressing the underlying issue. Scale that up and have a real drive to open up both high quality social housing and genuinely affordable housing to buy and you could start to solve the problem. Unfortunately there is too much vested interest in property and land development among politicians for that to ever happen.