COLIN CAMPBELL: No easy answers when it comes to housing dilemma
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A young woman who’s been on the housing waiting list for four years inquired about the chances of her getting a place any time soon and apparently was told, “You’ll stand a better chance if you’re pregnant.”
She wasn’t impressed by that unexpected piece of family planning advice. “I’m not getting pregnant just to get a house,” she told the Courier.
That’s obviously the sensible and responsible response.
However there was a time not so very long ago when it was widely believed some single women did get pregnant precisely to jump the queue and get a property. And that this fairly drastic course of action had a 100 per cent chance of success. Many people didn’t like that.
In truth, whatever anyone’s views are about acquiring a child to acquire a permanent home, the housing department must be plumb out of encouraging advice for many seeking a property. Thousands of people are either seeking their first home or want a transfer to one that better suits their needs. There is nowhere near enough homes available to meet these desires and expectations. If a housing worker did, out of frustration or sympathy, go off message in speaking to an utterly demoralised applicant, I wouldn’t really blame them.
Along with so much else that’s changed there is no doubt the stresses and strains of trying to get on the property ladder has increased drastically over the decades. Young people face a very hard time of it compared with what older people experienced.
Of course there was a housing waiting list in times past – there always has been – but things weren’t so bad in terms of shortages as they are now. And because property prices weren’t so cripplingly high compared to earnings, most people in average paying jobs had a much higher expectation of buying their own home.
The dire situation now makes me wonder how much worse things would be if there hadn’t been a large scale exodus of Polish people and others from eastern Europeans as a result of Covid and Brexit. Their departure freed up property but still things are desperate for the woman involved and many others.
Most of us are in a more fortunate situation. And there must be sympathy for people who are in that unsettled predicament. Unfortunately sympathy is all there is to offer, and all too often that’s all the hard-pressed housing department will be able to offer too.
And what about the role of the Scottish Government, under whose tenure the housing crisis has significantly worsened? Ministers have succeeded in piling on the misery through their “ban on evictions” which has slashed the number of properties available for rent, in Inverness and everywhere else. Tenants can now legally run up an extraordinary six months in unpaid rent before home owners can even think of taking any action against them. Not surprisingly, many owners have pulled the plug on rentals altogether.
This woman, aged 27, is living with her grandmother. I’ve no difficulty remembering where I was living when I was in my mid-20s, in a room split in four in a YMCA in Ealing, in London. I stayed there for two years. There were no mod cons and it was a bit confined but I remember it as being OK.
I wasn’t worried about my situation back then because if I did think about the future I thought things would turn out well enough in the end. They did, but that was in a different era. And it will be much more challenging to keep the flame of optimism burning when the keys to a home that fell fairly easily into the hands of so many of my generation are but a distant dream for so many people now.
