Affordable housing
Being able to buy houses has long been a dream for most, but their advantage for investment has over-inflated prices.
Our societies were more geared towards home ownership by families for their own living space during the Keynesian economic climate after Word War II. Governments provided basic housing for many who could not afford even modest dwellings. Reagan and Thatcher took the Anglosphere headlong into neoliberalism, with its emphasis upon exploitation for individual wealth and withdrawal of state support for the wellbeing of citizens. Housing became an investment, and governments stopped large-scale building of low-cost housing.
Housing became the forefront of social Darwinianism, where those well off became the only ones who could afford houses, and they only wanted to build more expensive housing that provided better investment income. Housing was promoted to overseas investors, and that forced up housing prices due to increased competition. Politicians themselves became owners of multiple investment properties, so they were not going to sabotage that by forcing cheaper housing. The housing crisis is the making of the neoliberal emphasis upon selfishness as a virtue, and seeing helping others as self-defeating.
The only way this will all change is through legislation, which means voting in those who are not dependent upon high housing prices, and kicking out those who are. The problem has been exacerbated by low wage growth, especially by the same neoliberal politicians benefitting from housing shortages also unwilling to allow wages to keep up with the rampant higher cost-of-living caused by price-gouging companies. Most families have incomes well below what is needed to buy property.
That leaves many more on the rental market, but because of high housing costs, rents are getting too high for many to afford, leading to greater levels of homelessness. It is these people that governments used to actively build their own housing for, but the less affordable housing and higher rents have made it that the only way for the situation to change quickly enough is for governments to build large numbers of low-cost housing. Just forcing a minor percentage of new estates and apartment blocks to be for low-cost housing will not work quickly enough to forestall rampant homelessness.
However, unless wages and government benefits increase in line with the cost-of-living, and at a rate that compensates for the decades of wages stagnation, most will still not be able to afford to rent, let alone buy cheaper housing. This is all due to allowing an economic system that only serves the rich and greedy to be the basis of how our societies are run. It is failing us, and is systemically preventing us from being able to be in control of our our lives in meaningful ways.
We deserve better, and our societies are quite capable of providing better lives for us, including those who live in countries that have been economically repressed and exploited so a few in a few countries can live in extravagant wealth, a few more can aspire to such wealth, while the rest are systemically prevented from getting any of the benefits. We can choose a fairer society, and we can see much more clearly now who in our societies have a vested interest in stalling our ability to have better lives. We can vote in those who are truly willing to build enough housing for our needs.
Housing types
△Each type of housing has a demographic that it serves.
Public - This type of housing is mainly government provided for poor people, but has been neglected for decades, leading to low supply, becoming the main factor why there is a housing crisis and its consequent rise in homelessness.
Family home - These are the apartments and houses that are promoted as the home-ownership dream for the middle classes. Poorer people cannot afford these, and with inflated prices, many of the middle class cannot either.
Investment △- Mainly apartments bought by those with excess income for renting out to cover their mortgage payments and costs until they appreciate enough to sell at a profit.
Assets - These are houses or apartments that are not rented out, but used as a means of keeping the value of their owner's money. Usually bought off-plan by very wealthy people, these tend to cause shortages because many apartment blocks used for this can be empty for years as the owners can afford not to have to deal with renters and real estate agencies to handle them.
Opulence - Palatial residences for those who want to be ostentatious about their wealth, or rent them out to those who do. Fitted out with far too many facilities to ever be fully used, and costing a small fortune to upkeep, which is all part of the projected aura of oozing money.
Unintended downside
△When apartment blocks become predominately just assets, there is a major downside.
Larger apartment blocks generally use shared water heating systems as they are supposedly more efficient. They will use gas or electricity to heat the water. To bill individual users for the cost of heating the water, their hot water use is measured and translated into the equivalent Megajoules (gas) or kilowatt-hours (electricity). The problem is that all this assumes fairly full occupancy of the buildings.
In a multi-storey apartment block, the water is drawn up to heaters at the top of the building. This helps to make sure that everyone gets full hot water pressure. However, while the hot water pipes to every apartment will have insulation, the several storeys of pipes to get to the bottom apartments will still cool down the water until enough water has been drawn through to get the pipes to a sustainable temperature. This whole setup assumes that that there will be enough apartments drawing hot water often enough to ensure that the pipes do not cool down too much.
When significant numbers of apartments in a block are sold to asset holders who do not rent them out, there are no longer the numbers of people drawing hot water to keep the pipes hot enough except at peak usage times to those apartments that still have people in them. Some apartments that have few occupied apartments on the same hot water feed above them may rarely get enough hot water when they need it.
The feed pipes are designed to be a large enough diameter to provide full pressure for all apartments on the same feed, with the higher the block, the bigger the pipes. However, those larger pipes hold more water, and if they have been allowed to cool down due to not enough water being pulled through them, the longer it will take before the cold water in them is replaced by hot water.
Whereas several apartments drawing water at the same time or within a few minutes of each other will result in a fairly short run of cooler water just to clear out the pipes within the apartment, if only one apartment is drawing hot water, it may take minutes to clear the feed pipes fully of cold water, if at all.
As a quick calculation, with shower water flow limited to a maximum of 9 litres per minute, running the water full pelt for two minutes while waiting for it to get hot, which is not unusual at non-peak times, that is 180 litres of water wasted. That may need to be repeated several times until such time as enough people are using hot water or the pipes are warm enough not to cool down the hot water flowing through them too much.
While this is a colossal waste of water being run to see if it is hot enough for a shower or washing dishes, they are also being charged for the interim cold water as if it had actually been heated by the energy they are being charged for. For many apartments, gas is only used for hot water, with the bills being similar in cost to the bills for electricity use for everything else in the apartment for the same time period, so hot water typically takes up half of a household's utility costs but only if it is always hot.
With many only having short showers of a few minutes, but having to run the hot water for several minutes just to get them hot, they are being overcharged because they are using up much more water than they need, thus significantly increasing their bills but not actually using the energy that the water flow indicates they did. Instead, while some energy was used for their shower, the rest was used to heat up the water now in the pipes after they finished, only to go cold again due to fewer apartments with people to use it.
So, low occupancy of large apartment blocks not only increases the likelihood of those living there paying a premium price for their cold hot water, much of the water that is heated is not used while it is hot, except to become the cold water they pay for until the next lot of hot water comes through. This just adds to the cost of living and wastes a lot of water, all because governments pander to those who are so selfishly rich with more than they need that they shut out the many who need accommodation to keep their properties empty because they do not need to rent them. This is madness!
If the rich want assets to store their wealth in, during housing shortages properties should not be allowed to be used for that purpose. If governments are not wanting to build low-cost housing in enough numbers to alleviate the shortage, they must ensure that the properties that have been built are actually occupied. Such owners will not be affected by fines or penalty payments that are just minor overheads for their asset management portfolios. They must be forced to lease their properties or have the government manage them instead. Serious times need serious solutions.