| Original Message |
Rob
Posted Nov 7, 2008 12:30 PM
I've been thinking about this quite a lot. Should we rejoice - or be sad - when the era of rapid house price inflation has come to such a rapid and inevitable end?
Of course fortunes have been made, and lost on the back of the boom. But I think in our hearts we knew that it was unsustainable - houses and even flats were selling at prices that meant that young people - our kids - were unable to get a foothold on the housing ladder without taking on horrendous debt. Many of them will now be struggling with negative equity for a decade or so - it happened to my sister in the late 1980s. I'm glad that my stepdaughter - a qualified nurse, opted to go and work in New Zealand for a year or two rather than take on a mortgage here in Scotland - I wonder how many other bright young people left to work abroad?
Where do we go now? Well, it looks like belt tightening will be the order of the day for some time to come. How severe this recession will be we do not know. But it will certainly contribute to much of our remaining manufacturing industry closing down - possibly for ever. Business bankruptcies are at a high level, and rising, and unemployment is sure to follow.
For the housebuilders, there will be no shortage of brownfield sites to choose from, and hopefully in future they will focus on affordable, eco-friendly houses that cost far less to heat and use less precious fossil fuels. |
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