The Guardian view on housing costs: a grave and growing injustice

theguardian.com:

The housing prospects facing the roughly one-third of British people who do not own their own homes continue to get worse. Hopes that the pandemic would lead to an easing of pressures, because remote working would increase flexibility for those making decisions about where to live, have been crushed. Instead, prices rose 10% between March 2020 and March 2021, and have kept on rising. June saw a year-on-year increase of 13%. Private rents are also atrecord levels, with recent figures showing the average outside London up 11.8% on a year ago. In the capital the figure is 15.8%.

Because the majority are homeowners, attitudes surrounding housing inflation are at odds with those around rising prices for energy or food. But for those renting privately or hoping to buy, it forms part of a wider affordability crisis. Particularly for younger people, the difficulty of buying a first home is a generational injustice – although this framing can obscure the fact that many of those with home-owning parents stand to benefit in the longer term. From 59% in 2003, the proportion of people in the 25-34 age bracket who are homeowners has fallen to 47%. The racial disparities are also stark, with lower rates of home ownership among ethnic minorities.

The lack of consensus over the solutions to Britain’s housing crisis reflects wider differences of view about public policy, as well as the conflict of interests between those who own property and those who don’t. Another factor is gaps in data. The government has never studied the impact on prices of foreign investment in UK property, but these purchases are widely accepted as having contributed to price inflation in some areas. Research commissioned by the mayor of London showed that 36% of new