House prices drop 1.2% says the Halifax
This article makes me gloomy. Living on a day by day basis with the recession leads us to forget how bad things have got over the last 3 years. House prices and house building are stagnating but many people are still completely shut out of the housing market. Society is becoming unsustatinable for many people and increasingly so in a number of very high cost rural communities. I think we have a second dip on the horizon and I am not sure we have many or any further shots in the locker to tackle it.
I was chatting to someone from Southern Ireland a few weeks ago and he was reflecting on the growth of the informal and alternative economies which have been springing up there at the local level, as part of people with no medium term prospect of the sort of housing and job norms they may have aspired to 5 years ago, seeking “another way.”
At one challenging end this leads to groups like to the Dale Farm Travellers seeking to subvert green-belt at the other it could just give a lot more meaning to those committed to things like to transition town movement. If it does I wonder how many people engaged in these micro-economies ,which put local first, will be prepared to let their comfort blanket slip and fully live the dream- without recourse to supermarkets and owning their own homes. Makes me think of Gerrard Winstanley – 10 points for anoyne who can tell me who he is!
The article says: “House prices dropped 1.2% last month, theHalifaxsaid today, ending three months of price rises.The average price of a house fell month-on-month to £161,743 in August, although the “more reliable” quarterly change showed a 1% rise.” It goes on to explain “The fall in prices comes as activity in the housing market remains low. While the Bank of England reported that mortgage approvals for house purchases rose modestly to a 14-month high of 49,239 in July, this was still substantially below a monthly average of around 90,000 since 1993.”