Everyone loves a good queue. The mechanisms of queueing may as well be genetically hardwired into the civic brain, for all the rage encountered when someone wilfully disobeys the unspoken rules of the Great British Queue. So any story on queues snaking around the corner as people queue overnight for a dim chance of buying a property are catnip for the general public.
Last week, a queue of people slept overnight on the streets of Hounslow to put their name down for one of the “affordable” new build flats shooting up in the area. Photos of the campers could easily have been swapped out with shoppers keen to snap up jumpers and dresses from the Balmain x H&M range, or any queue outside the Apple store hours before the latest tweaked iPhone is released.
But while hardened shoppers are derided as consumerist cyborgs who’ve lost all sense of perspective, these snapshots of would-be home owners are touted as further proof of the complete madness of the never-ending housing crisis. There’s truth in the latter view, but the dynamics of both queues are more similar than they initially appear.
A few years ago, when a mania around housing in Walthamstow erupted, the BBC filmed people queueing for the chance to even view a home. People were pressured into putting in offers before viewing properties, or if they were lucky enough to get through the door, were ushered out quickly when the estate agent’s phone buzzed, telling them the property was under offer. In many parts of the country, whether renting or attempting to buy, the luxury of deciding whether or not a property is precisely what you were looking for has gone.
Homes, as much as a Balmain x H&M jacket, are instead viewed as limited edition investment pieces. An outlay well above what you’d usually spend is expected, and rather than putting down roots or wearing your jacket until the seams rip, accumulating capital and profit is the drive. One beaded jacket that H&M sold for £299 is under a flurry of bids reaching over £1,000 on eBay, at time of writing. Meanwhile, planning companies work out how much house prices rise per hour in different areas of the UK.
The horror expressed when these housing stories emerge is always tinged with a grim fascination. The excitement around exorbitant and rising house prices will continue until the bubble pops, and investors realise that you can’t climb a ladder forever. But the financialisation of housing is the cause of many of the country’s housing woes, and it obscures the wider issues. There are queues outside many housing offices in London, but people seeking temporary accommodation because of homelessness are less interesting as a business story.
The government is focusing on increasing home ownership through measures such as help to buy, which merely inflate house prices further, or clueless ideas such as starter homes, which remain unaffordable for average earners in most regions across the country.
The Conservatives say home ownership is the key because most people want it, but never ask why that is the case: both poor renting conditions and a shift in the attitude towards houses that sees them as assets, not homes. It’s akin to watching people flee from a blazing fire and surmising that people just love running.
But the housing market now looks like a complex game of Jenga. Queues around the block for flats are warning signs that the whole game is about to collapse. When it does, government and investors will have to face the fact that housing is a basic need, and that allowing markets to form bubbles around something completely essential means people get hurt.
Few people get hurt when a beaded Balmain jacket sells for four times its sale value. But the collateral damage of the UK’s dysfunctional housing is immense.
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