On 22/01/2021 04:08 pm, Fredxx wrote:

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
Â*Â*Â* Fredxx wrote:

Exactly the same principle as you subsidise the poor through universal
credit, etc. Just shifted around.

So you accept selling off houses to those who could afford them removed
some of those subsidies and helped keep rates down.

And prevented them being used in the future by the very people they were
built for.

The houses were still there and available for all. There is housing
benefit for those that can't afford the rent.
Council and HA housing is still available for the most vulnerable.
For those that can rent themselves the market is more diversee, with
more properties being available for let than ever before.

Up to a point.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a vast majority of households
rented their homes (90% or more) and there were hardly any council
properties. That started to change by 1920. Nowadays, around two-thirds
of homes are owner-occupied with the rest split between market renting
and subsidised renting (the availability of housing benefit being a
separate issue).

All those grid pattern streets you see in any British town or city were
built speculatively by private enterprise for rent. They were built to
the standards then seen as desirable and though much of the stock was
ageing by 1900, current expected standards had changed and recognisable
modern facilities were by then the norm for new-build houses, whether
for rent or purchase. Even older houses weren't always substandard. When
I was a small boy, the family lived in a large (rented) Georgian house
in what is now referred to as the "Knowledge Quarter" of Liverpool. The
house had a garden (of sorts), two kitchens and two bathrooms. It was
eventually demolished simply because the re-purposed use of the land (as
part of a professorial car-park within the science faculty of the city's
ever-expanding university) was somehow seen as preferable. Otherwise,
people could still be living in that house today, when it would be
around 200 years old.

One of the stumbling blocks for improvement (and to some extent, repair)
of the older and substandard stock was that rents were not always
sufficient to finance them. This was addressed to some extent by the
availability of local authority grants to help with the installation of
bathrooms, better kitchens, inside toilets, etc. But a frequent response
from local authorities on application was something along the lines:
"Nowt doin'. We'll be CP-ing and demolishing that street in 19xx".

Part buy schemes are also now more widely available.

I'm never sure about their target market.