Right to buy.

Council housing in England and Wales has been mentioned recently (here and here) in the pages of my local daily newspaper.

A lengthy, June 29, 2022, Guardian article, "From Thatcher to Johnson: how right to buy has fuelled a 40-year housing crisis," reports that: "Ever since the 80s Tory leaders have dreamed of creating a 'property-owning democracy'. But selling off social housing has left millions of Britons in grotty privately rented accommodation."

How this came about is elaborated on in great detail in the article, the basic facts of which are:

Right to buy was "Margaret Thatcher's flagship policy, which has seen 2m homes bought by council tenants at massive discounts since 1980." Further: "When right to buy was launched as part of the Housing Act 1980, 55% of householders were homeowners. The figure peaked at 72% in the early 00s but currently stands at 65%. Meanwhile, council housing has decreased, too. In 1979, there were 6.5m council homes; now there are 2.2m, while 4.4m households rent privately, twice as many as 15 years ago."

And: "While an older generation of working- and lower-middle-class people gained their first big asset upon buying council homes in the 80s, millions of mostly younger people have now been forced into insecure, grotty, privately rented accommodation."

A beneficiary of right to buy whose story is recounted in the article is "Phil Salter, a 79-year-old retired carpenter in Cornwall, who bought his council house in Devon in the early 80s for £17,000. When it was valued at £80,000 in 1989, he sold up and used the equity to put towards a £135,000 fisherman's cottage in St Mawes. Now it's valued at £1.1m."

As of the date of the article, right to buy was being extended, despite the fact that "the waiting list for social housing in England stands at 1.6m."

In general, reducing the availability of affordable housing, as for example razing the Village Green apartments in the James Bay neighborhood of Victoria BC, where I live, and replacing them with a "market rate" development, increases both the value of wealthy investors' portfolios and the number of people facing housing precarity.

The Guardian article describes "Danielle Nicole, a 32-year-old who graduated 11 years ago, still living with her mum in the terrace house she bought in 1990 using proceeds from right to buy. [Buyers of council homes in the 1980s who sold in the 1990s enjoyed significant capital gains.] Danielle, an NHS worker, could neither afford to buy – flats in the area cost upwards of £350,000 – nor rent privately, and with no dependants and a reasonable salary she would spend up to a decade on the waiting list for social housing."