The fact that the housing market is overinflated and broken dawns on some British officials
by David Atkins
The world is slowly waking up to what it has wrought in the housing market. Here’s the latest from Britain:
Rising house prices will see the British middle classes disappear within 30 years, leaving behind a tiny elite and a huge proletariat, a Government adviser has warned.
David Boyle, a fellow of the New Economics Foundation think tank, said that for many young people today owning their own home was a pipe dream.
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, he envisaged a Britain made up of a “tiny elite and a huge sprawling proletariat” who have no chance of “clawing their way out of a hand-to-mouth existence”, The Telegraph reported.
Mr Boyle, who sits on the Liberal Democrats’ federal policy committee, predicted that the average house price by 2045 would stand at £1.2 million, meaning that only the fortunate few would be able to purchase property.
And he said that the traditional middle classes would have to work multiple jobs – with scarcely any leisure time – just to be able to pay rent.
“The really scary thing is if in the next 30 years house prices rise as much as they have done in the last 30 years then the average house in Britain will cost £1.2 million,” he said.
“We cheered the rise of property prices not realising that it would destroy, if not our own lives, but the lives of our children.
“The place where this is heading is a strange society with a tiny elite and a long struggling, straggling line which is the rest of us, a new proletariat, who will be in hock to Landlord PLC.
“We won’t own our own homes, we won’t be able to afford it.
Right now this guy is just another voice crying out in the wilderness. But there are more and more of them every day.
It’s almost as if quintupling the cost of housing and feeding the Wall Street machine to continue overinflating assets might be a bad idea for future generations. Apparently that didn’t actually occur to very many people until recently.
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