2. Can I Live? Transcript

[RENAY] Hey, you’re back!  Welcome to another episode of That’s When You Get a Dog, the podcast BOWFOW, by old women for old women.  

I want to thank you for listening and if you like what you hear, why not go and subscribe on your favourite podcast app and leave us a review, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocketcast and Castbox all the casts.  

But enough of all that I know why you’re here you want your Ronnie fact.  For the new listeners, Ronnie is my 3 and a half year old dog and each episode I will give you a little fact about him.  This week, the Ronnie fact is he pretty much a vegetarian, his favourite foods are avocado, blueberries and pomegranate.  Yes I have a bougie dog.

Despite the Ronnie fact’s this is not a show about dogs.  Each episode over the series we will look at a key area that plays a big part in a woman’s life.  So let’s drop our new anchor.

Can I Live… in a house I own?

That’s right, we’re talking about homeownership and whether it’s still possible nowadays if you’re not a millionaire.

Back before the financial crash of 07/08, it wasn’t so hard to buy property in fact the housing markets were booming worldwide.  You had many options.  Along with high street lenders there were independent lenders popping up left right and centre.  You could forget about 20% minimum deposits as you could get a mortgage for 100% of the house or flat you wanted to buy.  In some cases you could even borrow 110, 120% of the value.  Crazy right.  

So what exactly is a mortgage, according to google, a mortgage is a legal agreement by which a bank, building society, etc. lends money at interest in exchange for taking title of the debtor's property, with the condition that the conveyance of title becomes void upon the payment of the debt.  Basically it’s a loan for the value of the place you want to buy and you make repayments monthly with interest the bank, the lender.  

So imagine, there was a time you could get a mortgage for not only the value of your house but you could borrow more money, to decorate it, or go on holiday or basically whatever you wanted.  These are the 100%+ mortgages I mentioned.

Anyway, those glory days are over and one of the things that led to the crash and now people find themselves renting for longer, living at home or with roommates for longer and home ownership now seems like a distant unachievable dream like, maybe one day I’ll take those flying lessons.

[SOPHIE] We have a development in Crouch End where I live which was an old town hall that has been bought by a developer called the Middle Eastern consortium and they have done a development of 190 new flats. And originally when it is development they put it in the council they hate it. They said that they didn't need to put any affordable housing in.  Now I believe, not the law but the regulation and the the sort of processes that in London particularly if you build something new 25 percent of it has to be affordable housing and that was sort of what I think the mayor brought in to try and solve this problem. The problem with that is that apparently if a developer says that building the houses will cost more than he can sell them at an affordable price and he doesn't have to do it because technically he will not make a profit or not breakeven. So that's what the developers have gone in and said, the council Haringey Council have okayed that.  People petitioned it, I petitioned it,I write to my MP and it's been reviewed and now they've agreed to of the 190 flats 11 of them will be affordable housing.

[RENAY] That’s the voice of Sophie, music executive and co-host of On The Shelf podcast, from London.  Affordable housing is something we’ll get into later.  I asked Sophie why she wants to buy a home.

[SOPHIE] I want to buy a house because it's something that's been instilled in me from my parents.  Home ownership is a good way of investing and it's a security thing for your future.  As much as I don't mind renting I don't feel necessarily protected when I rent. I've got friends who live in Europe and other places where they will rent all their lives because the government protects them and they have long leases and I feel like here in London particularly the rental market is quite fickle and even though I love where I live now at any point I could be thrown out and not have anywhere to live.

[RENAY] That’s true, I’ve had a couple rotten landlords, and you really don’t feel secure.   

[SOPHIE] I've been looking for somewhere to buy for about two years. I'm on a few of the shared ownership lists if things do come up but I'm interested in I do inquire. It's been tough, you just look at things that come through and you see the prices and you just think as a single woman. It's just total madness.

[RENAY] Okay so what is shared ownership?  Shared ownership is part of the UK government's affordable housing schemes and on their helptobuy.gov.uk website

If you can’t quite afford the mortgage on 100% of a home, Shared Ownership offers you the chance to buy a share of your home (between 25% and 75% of the home’s value) and pay rent on the remaining share. Later on, you could buy bigger shares when you can afford to.

Okay sounds good so far.  To be eligible for shared ownership

• your household earns £80,000 a year or less outside London, or earns £90,000 a year or less in London

• you are a first-time buyer, you used to own a home but can’t afford to buy one now or are an existing shared owner looking to move.

Ah so now we’ve got to the problem, they look at household income not individual income.  So if you’re trying to buy alone because you don’t have a partner or friend to buy with, unless you’re earning the big bucks, you’re kind of screwed.

[SOPHIE] It's different for a single person buying and that's not just somebody who isn't in a relationship it's just somebody who wants to own their own property. It's difficult because shared ownership it's about household income not personal income. So obviously if you have a partner and you're buying together all your income is doubled and I obviously don't earn as much as two people so that's why it becomes quite difficult.

I've been saving my deposit for a couple of years now. I haven't saved a vast amount to be honest.  I was told the minimum amount really for a property in London is a 40 to 60 grand deposit. I am nowhere near that. I'm probably on like the 10 grand scale now. So It is very disheartening It just feels unattainable in a crazy way and if I think of the last five people I know who got on the property ladder in their 30s their parents all gave them lump sums. I don't see anything wrong with that but it's a difficult one.

[RENAY] So what do you do if your parents can’t give you a wedge of cash to help you get on the property ladder?  Here would be a great opportunity to speak to an MP or councillor to get their insights considering housing was a big part of all parties manifestos.

Well, I live in Hackney and my MP is Dianne Abbott, I reached out to her months ago when I was initially planning this episode.  She aired me.

I get it, she’s high profile, but I do actually live in her constituency, Jeremy Corbyn said he had no time, as did Saddiq Khan, Stella, Creasy and David Lammy, all MPs in my neighbouring constituencies.  I even reached out to Alastair Binnir-Lubbock who ran for the greens in Hackney, he also aired me.  So basically I’ve come to the conclusion these people could care less unless there’s an actual vote going on or you’re calling from the BBC.  So much for caring about the real people.

So what are Londoners and big city dwellers up against?

[SOPHIE] To give you an idea of price. I rent a two bedroom flat with a really good friend at the moment, the flat next door to us sold for six hundred and forty nine thousand about three months ago. So a two bedroom in flat zone three like, there's no tube in Crouch End is well there's no train you have to go by bus to the closest station sold for 649.

[RENAY] £649,000 for a two bedroom flat in Crouch end with no tube connection. I wonder whether the government actually thinks about non-millionaires living in London. And this isn’t a party thing at all as I don’t think any of the parties think about the average women, with a job living life.  They seem to only think in extremes.

[SOPHIE] I don't think that our current government thinks about what it's like for people to get on the property market solo.  I think that's got to do with the fact that our current government are a government of landlords as far as I'm aware.  So they obviously sort of work in their best interests. I also think they just are a bit removed from it and don't have a clue what it's like to actually have to try and buy on the market somebody with a salary that isn't considered high.

I don't really know what they're going to do about it. I read apparently in the next budget they're looking at capping things like gazumping which means you can't be outbid once you've put a bid in and making the process easier. But how long those rules and regs will take to come in is is another thing altogether.  

[RENAY] In February 2017 the UK government announced ambitious plans to fix the “broken” housing market.  These plans including diversifying who builds housing.  Can you believe 60% of homes in the UK are build by just 10 companies?  They want to widen their affordable housing schemes which will help over 200,000 people.  I’ll flag here that the UK has 65 million people, so that’s barely scratching the surface.  Basically they wrote a lot of words down that will, if we’re lucky, help 0,05% of the UK population.  So people are having to find other ways of changing their odds.

[SOPHIE] People have mentioned social housing to me recently. It's something I'm thinking about more and more. I was always sort of brought up to think that social housing wasn't something that I should apply for unless I was really in need or in a bad situation and it's there for people who genuinely do need housing and don't have a lot of money but lately I know a few people who use it to get on the ladder because it's just impossible to buy on the open market. Maybe it's something I need to seriously look into in my borough and see what my chances are.

[RENAY] Social or Public housing is housing provided for people on low incomes or with particular needs by government agencies or nonprofit organisations.   in 1980, a government scheme called Right to Buy was introduced.  This meant eligible social housing tenants could buy their homes at a discounted rate.  This is what some say began the housing mess, which may be true, but it also enabled lower income families and people to break the cycle and buy a home.  AS of 6th April 2017 Maximum discounts available to those buying via Right to Buy are £78,600 across England and £104,900 in London.  So you can see, should you be able to get social housing, why it can be beneficial for you later should you wish to ever buy your own home.

Something I’ve noticed about people who want to buy in London is there’s a bit of a snobbery about the zones.  

[SOPHIE] I suppose there is an element of compromise so I know a lot of friends who have moved out to further boroughs in London zones, the zone 5s in the zone six is as you say but they really live in the middle of nowhere.

[RENAY] I get it, I live in Zone 2, it’s nice being able to walk to work or get an uber home and it costing a tenner, all the bars, cafes, restaurants on your doorstep it’s nice. But let’s be real for a sec, I was born born and bred in Dagenham Essex, so zone 4 of London.  It wasn’t the middle of bloody nowhere.

[SOPHIE] When you're used to a certain area in a certain way of living and a lifestyle and even invested in the area and invested in the community I’m eventually going to have to leave that area that I've invested a lot in because I can't afford to live there which I think is really sad.

[RENAY] There are still bargains to be found if you’re willing to give up that Waitrose round the corner life… There isn’t a waitrose round my corner I live in Hackney.  But I do get people wanting to live where they wanna live but I’m not sure when it came to home ownership there was ever a time where you didn’t have to compromise something in order to find somewhere in your price range

[SOPHIE] I have considered living out of London.  I'm even looking now at places as far afield as Manchester not even to move there, just to invest there because I'd like to have some bricks and mortar and my money in something like that.

Another issue is obviously I'm just perpetuating this problem of me buying in somewhere else and renting it out and becoming sort of a landlord. I'm worried now that the state is it's just going to get worse and worse and eventually I'm not going to be able to buy anywhere.

[RENAY] It does seem if people just continue to be pushed out of the cities they grew up in and move to cheaper areas but then build up the environment they are used to (gentrification) the problem will just keep getting bigger and bigger.

[RENAY] So a little about me, I did have the foresight.  My mum was an estate agent and the only way I was allowed to move out was if I bought somewhere.  So at 21 I started looking for a place to buy, because at that time like Sophie said, pre financial crash, pretty much the only criteria for getting a mortgage was to be alive.

Sophie is weighing up all her options, so I asked her how she sees things going.

[SOPHIE] So how do I see housing market going in the future. It's a tough one. I don't see any immediate fix. I don't know if it's possible for that to be a media fix. I am worried that because I am 34 and next year I'm 35 I have this fear in my head that the government is going to bring in some young person to get on the housing ladder scheme which like his twenty one to thirty five and I’m gonna miss the cap and I'm going to be stuck in this weird boat of non home ownership. That's what I fear.

I don't understand how London will change. People constantly say to me it's a bubble it's going to burst it's going to be fine you know everything will go down and I just say to them look at New York everyone said that about New York and all that happened was it just went up and up and now the only people that own in New York are millionaires and the rent is extortionate and that bubble hasn't burst. Same in Tokyo's one of the most expensive places in the world to live in terms of real estate per square foot. And yeah I just I don't know what's going on with the London bubble. People talk about it bursting but I think it's going to be a lot worse before it gets a little better.

[RENAY] That was Sophie, who like many women in big cities like London, wants to feel secure in the home she lives and possibly lay down some roots for a chance of financial stability in the later years.  Sophie mentioned the comparison with New York and how to buy in Manhattan you have to be a millionaire.  That I guess would be the equivalent of buying in London zone 1 and 2.  So we’re not far off that really.

I wanted to hear from a New York real estate agent to see if there have been any changes with how women over 30 live in the city.  I spoke with Gift Saengpo-Reger from property App Nooklyn.  Nooklyn is a real estate app focusing on buying and renting in Brooklyn.

[GIFT] The trends of the women right now I can see and notice like some of my clients, mid twenties after they have been working for a couple of years. They still rent apartments and still living with roommates because they have to be close to buying or owning their own apartment.

[RENAY] So there is a trend of women renting with roommates longer, past their mid-late 20s.  Of course this may not only be down to property prices as there are statistics that there more older single women than there used to be, but we’ll save that for another episode.

I asked gift what sort of prices are people looking at to buy in New York.

[GIFT] Budgets like two hundred and three hundred are going to buy something upstate you know. So it's still to go to that direction they still  need to still  rent and cut the costs as much as they can so they're going to still like living in three or four bedroom apartments for 800/900 a month to just save some money and they can mortgage and buy and own their own property in a couple of years.  

It depends on which property you are interested in, if you can buy something in Manhattan maybe House.  And that's why I like the city it’s expanding out like living to Queens or to Brooklyn and Brooklyn is  kind of a big big borough in New York City and still has tons of cool stuff to do. So the property in Brooklyn actually is cheaper and people can afford and find something in Brooklyn that’s less than a million so there’s no need to be a millionaire there and they can afford like one or two bedroom apartment that’s less than five hundred thousand.

[RENAY] So just like London if you want somewhere within your price range you have to be willing to compromise on location.  They say the UK is Today ‘s america tomorrow, you can definitely say that of New York and London.  Just the way the cities are growing outward as Gift has said here with people moving to Queens and Brooklyn for cheaper prices.  It’s the exact same thing happening in London with people moving to Walthamstow, Peckham, Leyton etc.  People buy there because the prices are lower but then the people from those areas are pushed out because they can’t afford to live there anymore.

While talking Gift made an interesting comment about rent and mortgages.

[GIFT] Compared with the rents that people pay for their their rents for one bedroom two bedroom per month but calculate if you buy something you pay the mortgage it’s actually not that bad you know.

[RENAY] So think about that, if you are currently renting somewhere with friends or on your own, think about the combined rent per month cost.  There’s a good change for a one or two bedroom flat you’d like to buy, the mortgage repayments would be cheaper than the actual rent you’re currently paying.  Mad isn’t it.  It’s not that you can’t afford to own a home it’s just on paper you don’t qualify for that massive loan at the beginning,  even though, if you were to tally up all the years of rent you’ve been paying you’ve most likely proven you can afford to make the repayments.  It’s a frustrating place to be in for sure.

[GIFT] In New York City, even in New York it seems very, like oh it's crazy because it's still living in New York and people living in upstate it’s going to be different.   If you live in here, in Brooklyn, in Queens, in Manhattan you still get a lot of network and connections and opportunity to do a lot of stuff here.

But you live like further out, rural living, I don’t know probably opportunity to work and have connections will be like less but the cost of living is definitely cheaper. But I can see the trends that people move further out to some suburb if they can work from home. So that's another trend too because right now we you know in the years, an era that has internet everywhere and you can work from home you can make money from home. You can do, you know, anything from home from anywhere so but you still you do have to have connection.

[RENAY] So according to Gift, the ability to work from home is giving people more options of where they can buy.  This is really interesting, last year there was a Forbes Article called When Will Modern Offices Become Obsolete and even though they concluded the culture will probably never truly die out it listed many reasons why it could die out.  Housing was not one of them but it should have been.  If you’re able to work from anywhere, the opportunities of where you can live and afford to live are limitless if we ignore visas of course.

I asked Gift her advice for anyone wanting to buy.

[GIFT] Yes. Saving you know very disciplined like how much you spend and what about the money, the income you make or save at least twenty percent per paychecks just for your dream homes. And you just need to budget wisely.  And as I say like right now in New York City we have like a lot of rental and we go like cheaper if you go with like a bunch of roommates. So that's a lot of people who go to do this option to live with a lot of roommates and pay the rent as cheap as they can as long as they can and save the money for the future and for your dreams and your goals. Yeah.

[RENAY] So owning a home is still possible!

Gift was all about making sure you save, which we all know is way harder to put into practice, particularly if you want to buy alone.  So there’s saving, buying pre-crash, which obviously isn’t an option now useless you have a time machine but are there any other ways you can get a house, short of winning the lottery.

[MIRIAM] As a northerner I find the market terrifying.

[RENAY] This is Miriam, a freelance events manager and MA student.

[MIRIAM] I have a house in Liverpool but I'm currently living in London.  It was my grandad's house, my grandfather died about 2010 and me and my cousins inherited the house. There's only three of us. One of them wasn't interested at all, so my mum bought her share out. And then my second cousin at the time was pregnant. I was in Australia and didn't need a house so they as a pregnant family lived in there together and then when I got back from Australia I moved in with them and we all lived together which was really nice because we hadn't really grown up close.

[RENAY] So how did the house become Miriam’s?

They decided to move out and set up on their own and at the time I'd gone back to university which was just around the corner from the house. It made sense for me to stay there. So my parents bought their share.  I think it's less complicated if you get your inheritance when people are still alive. So essentially that's part of my inheritance. And then a year or two ago I took a mortgage on the House to do a big load of building work. So I have a small mortgage on there but nothing significant.

[RENAY] So Miriam is one of the ones who with  the help of her parent’s and inheritance has become a homeowner.  Not looking good for those simply trying to save up from working a normal job.  

[MIRIAM] I think I had assumed I would buy a house at some point in my life,  before I'd been away travelling I was travelling three or four years so the concept of buying in London had never wasn't even a consideration for me so I'd always been looking at things in the north which 10 years ago were affordable so they weren't out of reach.  So I think I'd always just assumed I would buy a house. But then I went away travelling and then I came back to university and it just happened in this way. I'm very conscious of how lucky I am to have that, and I think if this hadn't happened I may have gone down a more structured career path in order to buy a house.  At the moment the house costs when I factor in mortgage repayments and bills, it costs about a thousand pound a month to run probably eleven hundred pounds a month over winter. So I rent out the rooms in the house which covers the costs. And then there's a surplus of a couple of hundred pound which I don't really factor in because if there's any emergencies or anything happening up there I need to be able to sort it out easily.

So one of my really good friends just moved out of London because she wanted to buy a property. It was totally unrealistic for her to buy something here and she bought a really nice flat in Cardiff which sounds a bit random but she has work connections so it did make sense.  I think it's a shame for people who were proactive and engaged in building communities within London especially like creative and arts communities and grassroots stuff as well, which generally isn't paying the money that working in the city does.  I think it's a shame that people in those situations can't afford to buy because they are key in developing and creating local communities and maintaining them. I think if you are set on buying somewhere when you feel like you want to do that and you want to move to another city to do so then go for it.  It would be a shame to think that prices from London would then be driving up in other key cities around the country but that's not really the fault of the individual who chooses to move out of the state to say Tobiason can afford. I think the people controlling that are making those decisions are quite far above us.

[RENAY] I wondered whether Miriam thought, buying a home would be something that would become less important.

[MIRIAM] It's hard to get out of your own mindset.  Both my parents worked full time and bought their house. My grandparents on both sides all worked full time and bought their houses.

So it's hard for me to imagine not doing that. However I'm fully aware that in lots of big European countries it's quite unusual to buy your own property.  A lot of people in Paris and Barcelona rent properties throughout their entire lives and that's just how it's done. It's actually quite nice to rent someone else's property in the aspect that you know you pay a certain amount each month. You don't have to worry very much about the upkeep or anything going wrong with the house. But  I think the mentality that the UK have been raised in striving to buy a property is sort of a rite of passage and a goal that it should be achieved in by a certain age and I don't know if in the short term we're going to be able to change that.  Perhaps over the next 20 years views on buying will change and people will become more accustomed to renting.

[RENAY] You can probably tell i have a lot of thoughts on what councils and governments aren’t doing to help, people from different backgrounds get on the ladder.  You know, what if you’re alone, or don’t have a family etc.  Do you not deserve to have a place to lay your head that’s your own?  

I wondered what Miriam thought they could do to help the situation.

[MIRIAM] I think it's probably more complicated than what they could be doing because I think they're probably controlled by financial restraints from above which are churning the wave and moving forward for higher rents and private property owners and private development funds that.  I suspect local authorities are probably doing as much as they can within their own abilities to make things attainable. I think it would be easy to say like the government could make more, well the government could make more affordable housing, they could put caps on local landlords, they could manage their own housing stock, they could not sell it off to private buyers they could control who buys things privately and what commitment they have to buy them on.  I know there was old council housing stock in Liverpool, it was quite rundown and derelict but what they did was they basically sold it off for a pound a house but you had to show that you had £50,000 available to renovate the house.  You had to agree to works and you had to live in that house for at least five years, which I think, they were quite strict on monitoring but schemes like that rather than imposing compulsory purchase orders or knocking down hundreds of houses and then rebuilding through private developers. There are other ways around it but I don't know where that financial controls are.

Essentially we live in a capitalist society, then owning a home is your own little bit of capital and your own financial security.  Given that it's unlikely that we're going to change the core structure of the place we live in within our lifetimes, I'm definitely not active enough to make that happen, So it's quite reassuring to have that. And I can understand why there's a lot of pressure on people to want to buy a house for that security because it's given me a lot of freedom to do things I want to do. It's taken a lot of pressure off me financially and I understand how hard people work, trying to save deposits is crazy, they're big numbers and it's not easy to save especially if you're paying rent somewhere else.  But it's nice to have that little bit of security and I do understand why people of our age are still pushing towards that,  that's what we're being told we should be doing.

[RENAY] Is there a way to beat the system?

[miriam] I think it works really well for me to have a house in Liverpool. And the way that my work is progressing it's easy to work from home it's easy to commute.  I can get from my house to Euston in two hours and 30 minutes, which really isn't a big deal.  Perhaps there's potential for the development of that work industry for people to work from home. If we all do start to move away and put down roots in places around the country that might encourage the service industry to progress a bit quicker. There's definitely technology that makes it very easy to work from anywhere in the world. I think people have a very set idea about what they want to buy and where they want to buy it and if people are set on buying in London then it's because they have the means to do so. Somewhere along the line they know that they're going to be able to. And if they can't then I think they will probably look elsewhere.

[RENAY] Aha, the same thing Gift mentioned earlier and something I have been thinking about a lot.  If companies enabled more employees to work from home, people would be able to live anywhere in their countries and the world which would mean hard working people wouldn’t be pressured into living in expensive cities simply because that is where the jobs are.  If you think about how small the internet has made the world now, location should really not have that much bearing on how you hire people.  Especially with so many companies still failing horribly when it comes to diversity and representation.  Maybe if companies thought out of the box a little more and adapted to modern life and the technology we have at our fingertips a lot of jobs could be done from any location which would not only make home ownership achievable again for many, it would also bring in varied points of views in the workplace and get the different social bubbles people find themselves in to connect with other bubbles.

Governments don’t seem the be the most forward thinking institutions and they definitely don’t have 100% of their citizens needs at the forefront so it’s up to you, those in power to help change your employees opportunities.  If you have a job and are putting in that work you should have the chance to have a place to call your own.  

Will things change, I don’t know, can things change, absolutely but it will take a combined effort and some non traditional thinking.  

Thanks to Sophie, Miriam and Gift for talking with me.  That’s When You Get a Dog is produced by me, Renay Richardson, our original music is by Aaron Williams, cover art by Adam Cohen.

Follow us on Twitter @GetADogPod, follow me @RenayRich, always use our hashtag #GetADogPod.  We’re are on all the fun apps, CastBox, Acast, Stitcher, PocketCast, OverCast, RadioPublic and Apple Podcasts.

For those who are deaf, hard of hearing or just like to read along to thier podcasts, all episode transcripts can be found at getadogpod.com

Bye, see you on the flipside.