Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
The big safety valve though is inheritance/family help. Most of the people who can't buy now but would have been able to buy in the past do have parents/grandparents who either die or are even willing to remortgage to help out their kids. Everyone I know who has bought a house in London did so with the help of parents - parents who are asset-rich partly because of the never-ending housing bubble. So I'm not sure any tipping point will be reached any time soon while the middle class youngsters have a lot of housing wealth in their families.
Chilli.s
mingling jets and statuettes
Now anyone who lives long enough will have such high care costs that many properties will be sold to cover that. Other constraints will be student loans, preventing people from getting mortgages and taking a chunk out of property their parents give them.
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
There’s only so much family wealth will stretch between more than two kids, especially if housing costs increase and wages stay as flat as they are
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
Sure, and some people will be left out in the cold, but there are a lot of families with only one or two children and my experience is that many of them will go to some lengths to help their kids. The point is the numbers of kids of middle class parents who won't be able to buy is significantly smaller than I think some people are implying. Meanwhile I've been getting adverts from a specialist mortgage company that allows you to add your parents to the mortgage - not just as a guarantor but as a payer. Which will help the game keep going a while longer if they take off.
Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
Hovering under 20 pc for a few years now
England: share of private rented households 2000-2023 | Statista
The proportion of households occupied by private renters in England from 2000 to 2023 generally increased during this period, from a share of ten percent of households in 2000 to a share of 20 percent of households as of 2017.www.statista.com
Not sure if these stats include council houses? Or housing association?
There is a probably fairly substantial subset of that though made up of people for who shorter term housing genuinely does meet their needs at that point. When I moved to London in 2003 for a few months to give it a go I didn't feel excluded from the housing market - my flatshare was fine then.
Not to dispute the general point which I agree with but I don't think there's a magical tipping point at 50%.
It might still take a couple of generations.
My surviving Grandma has 3 children and 7 grandchildren, but only one house, so inheritance won't necessarily help her grandchildren. My surviving Grandpa has only 1 child and 2 grandchildren - however his dementia is getting worse quite quickly and government removing the cap on social care costs means he will likely have to sell his house to pay for care, as will happen to many pensioners:
UK minister refuses to rule out people having to sell homes to fund care
Paul Scully sends mixed messages about impact of government plans to scale back English social care cap
So his house will likely go to some institutional investor based in the Cayman Islands or similar.
Scenarios like the above mean that inheritance won't necessarily guarantee a consistent supply of property owners. Some people will inherit but many more won't, and institutional investors will take an ever greater share of housing to turn into rentals.
MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
The profile of renters going forward is going to be important I think. If you're young and single then renting is fine. It's when we end up with a high proportion of couples and especially families renting that there will be disquiet.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Even that doesn't matter so much, in a well-regulated housing market. Look at Germany, for example, where many more people rent than here.
We could already be close to a tipping point tbh. I rent a room in London for mortgage prices elsewhere in the country. Every room in the house except mine now has a couple in with one couple even having a child to stay (I assume contact following a breakup).
It isn’t right.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Maybe. I thought similar 20 years ago, though, and we weren't.
Well presumably couples are now in rooms as they can’t afford flats. What happens when they can no longer afford rooms?
ska invita
back on the other side
theres historical precedent for this kind of housing crisis- im not expert - Japan perhaps?
Does Japan have 100 year mortgages? | EveryThingWhat.com
JAPAN'S 100-YEAR BANK LOANS - May 21, 1990. (FORTUNE Magazine) – The Japanese, famous for saving, are now loading their future generations with debt. Nippon Mortgage and Japan Housing Loan, two big home lenders, are offering 99- and 100-year multigeneration loans with interest rates from 8.9% to...
everythingwhat.com
without a political alternative people are forced to put up with less space and more debt
scifisam
feck! arse! girls! drink!
Home ownership meaning you can't be working class doesn't really work for some generations across the country, and probably for some areas even now. My mother bought a flat on her sole wage as an auxiliary nurse, what would now be called an HCP, a job you could then get without any O levels or CSEs. She then owned it alongside my Dad and subsequent stepdads, who were a hospital porter, a supervisor at a power plant, and a pub landlord. My best friend's home was also owned, by her Dad who was a mechanic at Ford's and out of work for several years after the redundancies - her Mum never worked.
They'd all left school at 15 or earlier, were all in skilled working class jobs, and it would be really fucking odd to claim they weren't working class. Houses were cheap, mortgages were easy, council estates were often underfunded places that you wouldn't want to live if you could pay literally the same amount on a mortgage.
And that was on the outskirts of London - lots of places made homeowning cheap if you had a basic, regular job, until very recently.
They'd all left school at 15 or earlier, were all in skilled working class jobs, and it would be really fucking odd to claim they weren't working class. Houses were cheap, mortgages were easy, council estates were often underfunded places that you wouldn't want to live if you could pay literally the same amount on a mortgage.
And that was on the outskirts of London - lots of places made homeowning cheap if you had a basic, regular job, until very recently.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
But I was trying to talk about class as process rather than identity or purely job function. All those relatives of yours have gone through a process by which their material interests are now partially re-aligned with those of the ruling class because they all have some interest in rising asset prices. The asset isn't always realised in the form of cash, but that doesn't mean it can't be - the great hyper-gentrification of London has had as one of its mechanisms working class people moving out in order to put often upwards of £100k in their pockets (or get rid of the mortgage). They can be cast as 'victims' of gentrification, but they are also beneficiaries, and the lucky ones who could buy their dream car or boat or whatever would probably not see themselves as victims and are instead saying 'thank god for crazy house prices'. I am arguing that a process like that changes the class position of a hospital porter (or whatever) to - at the very least - a more blended position.
It was widely reported that in the last year many homeowners earned more than their annual salary in house price growth. Despite what some people here seem to think, remortgaging, downsizing or moving areas to realise that cash is pretty common. What do we call someone who lives partially on salaried income and partially on unearned income from assets?
MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
There is definitely going to be a massive crisis at some point but I think it is years and probably decades away yet. The number of people totally excluded from home ownership is nowhere near big enough as a proportion of the population.
Two thirds still "own", nearly half of the remainder are in social housing which is broadly secure once you've got one. The 20% of the population in private renting is going to include students, young singles etc. It's when that number is 'mostly' families and probably even worse a large number of people trying to rent on a pension that things will tip and that isn't going to be soon.
bellaozzydog
rolling turds in glitter
In my town it goes flats-double room-caravan-tent/tipi/yurt-van-sofa surf-leave area
I have actually watched this process, at the same time people I know on universal credit are being offered 8 separate jobs with barely any selection/interview by desperate service industry managers
The town is eating itself, tourism needs workers and tourists, Tourists drive up the accommodation costs, home owners rent out their house for huge amount in summer and hoover up all the reasonably priced rentals, the workers are thrown out of their winter accommodation to make way for air B and B summer rentals and can’t find accommodation as each property has up to 80 applicants and they want six months in advance rent
Pure absolute greed
Now hotels are buying HMO up to guarantee accommodation for their seasonal staff, taking more HMOs off the market
Owner of a taxi firm asked if I wanted a job on my way to airport, desperate for drivers
Eventually tourists will stop turning up as they aren’t getting waited on hand and foot by a
Missing army of minimum wage service staff
Somethings got to break/give
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
The idea that the people that the poster was talking about have had their interests ‘re-aligned’ with those of the ruling class purely through the act of owning a flat is hugely reductive.
Trying to isolate one thing and then separating it from a nexus of overlapping, interlinked and often highly complex and contingent economic, social, cultural and historical ‘processes’ is, in my view, spectacularly wide of the mark as a method of inquiry or explanation.
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scifisam
feck! arse! girls! drink!
If you exclude those people from the definition of working class, for whatever reason you do it, most actual working class people will laugh at you. They do benefit from not continuing to pay rent; I did think of adding that, but thought it was too obvious to be worth mentioning.
I never made any claims that they were victims of gentrification, and they don't live in areas where there's been much, if any, gentrification anyway.
I'm wondering if people talk past each other because it's very location specific. It's much easier to own your own home in the NE than it is in London nowadays. London has great job prospects but little home ownership prospects where as it's also difficult to get on the ladder in the NE; it's easier than London but shitter wages and fewer jobs.
scifisam
feck! arse! girls! drink!
It is, and yeah, those areas are the ones where people on ordinary (or even low) incomes can still buy a place, especially if they're a couple rather than a single person buying.
But actually the specific people I referenced bought their homes 40 or 50 years ago, which is another thing maybe I should have specified, but thought referring to them as my parents and my friend's parents would give a hint.
Loads of boomers own homes but spent their entire working lives earning not that much in jobs that don't require even a CSE. It does mean they benefit from house prices rising, in theory, but as a metric for saying "you're not working class" it excludes enormous numbers of people who fit in every other way.Loads of people owned their own home where I was from in the NE in the late 70s early 80s. But I guess that was the start of Thatcherite Neoliberalism. She wanted that. What we have now is where it has led. Nobody wanted this.It is, and yeah, those areas are the ones where people on ordinary (or even low) incomes can still buy a place, especially if they're a couple rather than a single person buying.
But actually the specific people I referenced bought their homes 40 or 50 years ago, which is another thing maybe I should have specified, but thought referring to them as my parents and my friend's parents would give a hint.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
You're right, it's complex, but one of the things I'm trying to do is talk about how we can't use the same class categories as a hundred and fifty years ago (pretty sure too that Marx would be outraged at the idea that we could). The inability to talk about these new more conflicted or ambiguous class positions in any nuanced way results not only in people (on this thread for example) trying to simplify things by referring constantly to culture (because the cultural rifts in British society are much simpler than the crazy paving of structural class rifts), but also the left's inability to grasp their constant defeat at the hands of a Tory voting bloc that has been kept together by the simple expedient of protecting pensions and house prices.
I could talk about other tensions too. In theory the working class of the UK might have the same interests as the Chinese working class, but that is on such an abstract level as to mean almost nothing. In fact we benefit from low wages in China. Our working class live in China, to a large extent, and 'our' (British) working class lifestyles are subsidised by their immiseration. This is not to blame anyone for anything, but we need to admit that there is no existing (or planned, to my knowledge) level of international organising by which the elevation of Britain's working class in China and the elevation of the working class in Britain can be tied together.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
You don't engage here with recent publications on class, well not really recent but this century, like Michael savage and others' 2015 social class in the 21st century which proposes a rather different way of seeing things. And one of the disappointing things about discussions of class here is the dominance of Marx to the detriment of other analysts of stratification like weber.
Yossarian
⏭️
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Smaller cages shorter chainsSmaller rooms, dodgier landlords.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Someone on here has ratted to The Guardian
www.theguardian.com
‘We’re not all terrible’: the landlords who keep rents low
Tales of misery for tenants hit the headlines but there are property owners who go the extra mile
Yossarian
⏭️
The working class is builders, nurses, bartenders, retail workers, bus drivers, data inputters, taxi drivers, bin men, etc, etc. - while a lot of manufacturing has shifted to China and other countries, I don't think it represents a transfer of the working class. Automation has probably killed just as many jobs as outsourcing.
mauvais
on reddit or something
This suggests to me far more that their salaries are shit, rather than being beneficiaries of some great asset growth.
I think you should think much harder about this than you apparently have.
I own a house, or rather, I pay a mortgage on one. It has gone up significantly since I bought it. But what am I supposed to do with that?
Let's say I can successfully downsize or move to a cheaper area (with proportional growth) and that will release some cash. And then what? This is a card I can play once or twice, at best.
But you can't live off your one-off windfall for very long, can you? What you're hinting at is a different group of people who have assets that continuously produce income.
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