Interesting Links for 4-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Inseparable twin friars die hours apart, age 92
  (tags: twins death)
• Megan Fox was dumped from Transformers for not wanting to be sexually objectified for 16-year-olds.
  (tags: sexuality feminism movies michaelbay)
• Tenants who earn more than £100,000 could lose their council houses. WTF are they doing in council houses in the first place???
  (tags: housing welfare uk)
• Transcript of the Woman’s Hour broadcast on Women and SF
  (tags: women scifi writing publishing)
• Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)
  (tags: wikipedia gender women)
• Lib Dems making serious mistakes with use of language: How to get the language right to recover
  (tags: libdem language politics)

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

On the high-earning council tenant thing ...

You'll note there are only 6000 people likely to be affected by this move, out of some millions of council tenants. You'll also note that council tenancies are perpetual, once you've got them: this is an edge condition, specifically people who got council tenancies when hard up and then made it. Also note that £100K income/year is an interesting figure -- it's enough to get you a £250K mortgage, which doesn't go very far if you're in London, where I'm willing to bet most of these people live.

I think a better option would be to require high-income tenants (who have sustained a high income for more than three consecutive years -- not just high income but stable high income, otherwise it'll mop up a bunch of people who've collected damages after disabling accidents, or had a parent die that year) to buy the council property in question, under an extension of Thatcher's "right to buy" scheme. Then reinvest the money raised thereby in building new council homes.

Otherwise, this is just transparent Tory bullshit to prop up the low end of the family housing market in London.

[andrewducker]

I've never seen a 2.5x multiplyer for mortgages. Halifax (to pick one randomly) are offering mortgages of up to 480k on an income of £100k. Which would lead to monthly repayments of just under £3k, which on an income (after tax) of over £5.4k seems high but not a killer.

What we're talking about here is subsidies going to people in the top 3% of incomes.

I agree that people shouldn't be penalised for an unusual year of income, but I also think that support should be for the poorest, not the richest.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

How do you propose to predict which poor people are going to end up as high earners?

Additionally, offering mortgages of 4.8 x annual income is why the banks got themselves in the shit, and if they're still doing it, they should pay back the bailouts immediately. With interest. At a punitive rate

[andrewducker]

I don't intend to predict anything.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

There's actually a more serious issue. What is proposed is to send a message to the poor that, should they dare to be so uppity as to become successful, they will be forced out of their homes and away from their friends and neighbours.

Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't try anything or we send you away.

[andrewducker]

If they become successful then they become able to buy their own home. Subsidies should go to the people that need them, not those that used to.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Also, any child who is good at school should be forcibly moved to a better school.

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

"Services for the poor are poor services". Council housing and social housing should not be ghettos: they should include a genuine cross-section of the whole community, including, yes, successful people with high-earning jobs. Instead of forcing people out, taper off rent subsidy for those with high earnings (averaged over some reasonable rolling number of years) so that eventually they subsidise the rest.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Nice in theory but when there is a chronic shortage of council housing for families who desperately need it then yes, it does just have to be for the poor. That doesn't mean they have to be ghettos though (and, in London at least, they aren't).

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The chronic shortage of council housing is the result of decades of cynical Tory policies (tacitly continued by New Labour) aimed at damaging the social housing sector in order to pump money into the banking sector by inflating the housing market.

Pushing people lucky enough to get high-earning jobs out of council housing just reinforces the Tory message: those who're successful use the private sector, those who are losers use social housing.

Far better to taper off the subsidy for high-earning council tenants and use the proceeds to build more council houses.

(Ahem. I suspect the housing industry might not be too keen on that ...)

[andrewducker]

Well, they're talking about removing the subsidy entirely, and then raising housing benefit to allow people on benefits to stay where they are.

Which strikes me as a better method all round. That way those that can afford it don't gain from social housing, and those that can't aren't made any worse.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, we all know why there is a council housing crisis but I'm afraid your solution sounds pretty naive. The benefit a council would receive in cash terms in removing subsidy from a high-earning tenant in no way compares to the benefit to them of immediately having an additional property for their housing register (if they evicted the tenant). The amount of cash generated is simply not going to be comparable to the amount need to built sufficient levels of new stock. So yes, they do need to built more council houses but they also need to make the best use of their existing stock and that means only providing council houses to those who actually need them.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Surely it's more 'When you no longer need this support, please relinquish it so someone else whose need is greater can have it'.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

The word "please" is inappropriate when you are forcing someone to leave their home! There is no persuasion in the proposal.

Most success stories from council estates do move on and buy somewhere big and, this is important, flashy to live. It is the way of things (I speak as someone from that background who escaped by a different traditional method). Those who don't probably have a personal reason for sticking around - i.e. the actual people, whom they like above any amount of comfort and space.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

The thing is though, most private tenants don't have the luxury of being able to call a place 'home' and rely on keeping it until they're carried out in a box. Likewise, many people in private houses have to downsize in later life, but council tenants rarely do.

Of course it's difficult when you've set expectations that someone can be in a house for life, but there are loads of families who are living in inappropriate accomodation because they can't access suitable affordable housing. Given the stock shortages, I think trying to move people who don't need the house due to income or are living in an oversized property is the lesser evil.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> There is no persuasion in the proposal.

That's not some libertarian bullshit is it? If so I'm out of here...

[feorag.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the fuck you are talking about, to be honest.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Oh no, rich people might have to move away from their friends and neighbours!

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Given your attitude, surely it would save a lot of effort if we were to simply kill anyone from a poor background who manages to get off benefits or who earns more than minimum wage?

This would provide a valuable source of nutrition for their less lucky friends and neighbours, which is a much more useful thing for them to do than providing a role model would be.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Alternative view: the forcible expulsion of successful role models from poor communities, so that those who are left have no way of visualizing in concrete terms how to better themselves.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

I'm imagining standing in front of 6000 homeless people, explaining to them that this is why I have decided not to free up council housing for them by moving the highest earning tenants out into the private sector.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

What we've got is a situation where the UK as a whole needs 250,000 new residences -- of whatever kind -- per year to accommodate the growth in household numbers, and we're only building 100,000 new dwellings.

Furthermore, scarcity drives private sector prices up which has a toxic effect throughout our economy -- it artificially inflates the profitability of banking and the financial sector, it hurts the poor and the young who can't get somewhere decent to live, and it misleads the middle classes into thinking that their home equity is a useful form of saving/investment for their old age.

There is demand. It is systematically not being met, because demand keeps the market buoyant and without it the housing sector will crash again because it got far more overheated in the 1990s and 2000s than anyone is willing to admit.

Frankly, we need another housing crash -- coupled with a home building spree in both the public and private sector, until homes permanently drop in price by about 70%.

Try getting any politician to admit that, though ...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Huh; a 2.5 multiplier was the max you could get when I started on the mortgage ladder in 1988.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

And we wonder how the banks got themselves into so much trouble recently?

[andrewducker]

2.5x was high when interest rates were at 10%. When they're at 5% it's rather low.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

The problems in the 1980s ("Lawson's blip") were caused because the banks were lending out 3.5 x annual income on mortgages when interest rates were low. On a loan that size, it doesn't take much of a rise in the base rate to make a massive difference to the repayments. There was a rise in interest rates, and people couldn't make the payments. There were repossessions, and house prices fell as a result.

This latest cock-up seems to be exactly the same thing.

[andrewducker]

Except that interest rates haven't gone up this time around - they've dropped and stayed dropped. I do agree that betting that they'll stay as low as they currently are forever would be silly, but with the economy how it is I can't see them rising dramatically for a good few years.

This time around it seemed to come from lending to people with no proof of income, and lending in some case more than the property was worth, assuming house prices would always go up. With everyone now needing 20-25% deposits that doesn't seem likely to be a problem until they get stupid again (about 10 years from previous experience).

What the UK mostly seemed to experience was a liquidity crunch causes by the US boom collapsing in on itself, leaving over-extended banks with nothing to support them.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Interest rates were relatively high when we bought this place 3-4 years ago and dropped when the banks tanked the economy. It's one of the many factors we took into account when deciding whether or not we could actually afford to live here.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I got one for about 6% ten years ago, about 5% 5 years ago, and it looks like they're about 5% now. The base rate has dropped a lot, but mortgages seem to have remained relatively stable. I'm damned if I can find a decent historical graph though.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't bet against it happening in the future. Lawson's blip was the reason my mother went back to work when I was 6 weeks old. Their self-built 3 bed bungalow in a cheap part of the country became a very big millstone for a while & I was very careful to buy within my means as a result (just as well, given the amount of issues we found with the place, but that's a whole 'nother rant).

Of course they've come up trumps by toughing it out and ultimately my Dad landing a good job in the oil industry leading to a very comfortable retirement, but I still recall being the girl in the "posh" house whose parents drove a Lada and whose Dad cycled 8 miles each way to work as a lab technician in a local factory because that was all that was available locally.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

I actually think that's rather a lot. My mortgage is slightly more than twice joint income now (it wasn't when I got it) and it's only now I don't worry so much because I know I could pay it from my own salary if - $DEITY forbid - my partner lost his job. I wouldn't have taken it out at the time if I hadn't been able to predict with reasonable certaintly that my salary would increase substantially from where I started.

Could we pay a 4.8x joint salary mortgage? Yes, I suppose we could, but aside from the fact that I couldn't pitch up at my workplace dressed out of Primark and enjoy being able to drop 50 quid without thinking terribly much about it, I suspect the stress of maintaining said mortgage in the current employment market would remarkably reduce my enjoyment of a des res in New Town or The Grange.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

It's quite simply outrageous that the median earner is paying a subsidy to someone much richer than themselves for a benefit they aren't entitled to.

The obvious suggestion to me would be to increase council rents to market rate then subsidise them back down to present levels but means test such that you receive no subsidy at about the median income.

At the risk of coming across with a severe case of agreeing with the Daily Mail, I am actually personally offended that Bob Crow earns £133k/year, his sole contribution to my life is to make it worse by breaking the tube and as he's a council house tenant his rent is subsidised by approximately £7800/year from the market rates in his area.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Good luck trying to not be sexually objectified by 16 years olds.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)

So basically... they're wusses?

[andrewducker]

Not wanting to deal with people being dicks doesn't make you a wuss...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

1 is wussiness.
2 is complex.
3 is wussiness.
4 is wussiness -- conflict happens, deal with it.
5 is wussiness. Edits get reverted and clobbered and rewritten mercilessly, and you can't be precious about your words.
6 yeah. That's pretty shocking. But see 4.
7 yeah, again, grim. See 4.
8 needs fixing.
9 wussiness.

Some people are dicks. You can stand up to them. For whatever complex reasons, women tend not to, but that in itself is a problem. I've had a post on this at the back of my mind for a few weeks, as Caractacus has started to encounter boys being over-assertive and bullish at playgroup, and I'm coming to the realization that I don't want her to learn to back down and shy away and think of herself as a victim. There will always be dicks and bullies but they have to be stood up to.

[andrewducker]

I disagree. Making an informed decision that dealing with dicks is more effort than updating Wikipedia is worth isn't wussiness, it's a time/effort+stress calculation.

The fact that this aggression puts off women indicates to me that Wikipedia needs to do something about its culture. Because they aren't going to change cost/benefit ratio for women overnight, but they can change their culture.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

I always kinda liked Megan Fox. :)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

high-earning council tenants -- ooh, so how much, exactly, is a means-testing regime for council tenants going to cost in order to evict the 6000? Most of whom probably either (a) have a right-to-buy and will immediately exercise it, are (b) high-earning left-wingers who have remained in their council house to show solidarity with the working man, or (c) have had one extraordinarily high earning year.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

a) is a pretty devastating reason why this is a bad idea but b) and c)? Come on. Showing solidarity and being a role model is nice but doesn't compare to putting a roof over someone's head and if you have the potential for extraordinary one-off years of that level then that means you have options other than council housing (and you'd make damn sure you stayed under the 100k ceiling anyway).