Housing

In many ways I feel sorry for my younger friends, the country really is in a mess and doing them no favours; but I also don't understand this 'need' we have in the UK to own property (and yes I know I own my house).

The Office for National Statistics has shown that the average single person on a wage a little more than mine will have to save for 43 years in order to buy a house!  What's the point?

Is buying a house that important?  In the US and on the continent many more people rent, it's what happens and society seems no worse for it.

Here owning a house has been built up to be the most important thing, a life achievement, but why?  Houses are expensive to buy, expensive maintain, hard to leave if you job moves or changes and a source of stress.

I love my house, and wouldn't want to be without it, but I was lucky (and unlucky!) enough to have a large deposit, and even in the current market I don't have negative equity - but, I have to pay out for repairs (new boiler etc), and if I want to move for work or go travelling the house becomes I liability.

I understand that people want to get on the property ladder, but at what cost?  Years of scrimping and saving to buy a property that will just eat more money and they'll probably never actually pay off the mortgage, but as they get older (and so does the house) they'll have to pay someone to do the maintainance.

For me the sad thing is the lack of choice people have, and the lack of affordable rental properties; greedy landlords and badly built properties.

The government need to be making sure more affordable housing is built (and well built), and that empty properties are renovated (a tax break for renovation?), instead the current housing minister is living in some kind of parallel universe when he says 'housing is at its most affordable since 2003 with the highest number of first-time buyers since 2007' - and this is with the current average price of a first time buyer house in London at £321,000!!!