Both Labour and Conservative are pledging to look after the older voter while Gen Z is being ignored
Baby boomers are being courted with financial inducements from both main political parties. Millennials and Gen Z, not so much. Here we assess the intergenerational impact of the election so far.
Dublin does not seem a fair city to those who move there to work but can’t afford a home. Ireland’s coalition government says it is acting on housebuilding, but bosses and staff say it must try harder
Ireland’s economy is “absolutely booming,” says Stephen O’Dwyer, the founder and owner of Dublin’s Tang cafe/restaurant chain. “But it has left people facing a very unequal and difficult society to work in.”
At the top of O’Dwyer’s concerns is housing, which is cited by businesses large and small as a significant barrier to Ireland’s economic growth. The capital is not alone: cities from Cork to Limerick report acute housing shortages and rising levels of homelessness.
The belief that heat pumps will work only in newbuild homes is still widely held.
The number of heat pumps installed every year across the EU is expected to surge by the end of the decade as governments take aim at household carbon emissions.
If you're struggling to make your monthly mortgage payments due to financial hardship, a loan modification could provide much-needed relief. A mortgage loan modification is a permanent change to your loan terms that is agreed to by your lender in order to make the payments more affordable and help you avoid foreclosure.
What does mortgage loan modification look like?
Common ways a loan can be modified include:
Reducing the interest rate, even if only temporarily
Extending the loan term to spread costs over more years
Adding missed payments to the loan balance
Switching to a different loan program or type
The end goal of a modification is to get you into a more affordable payment based on your current financial situation. Lenders are often willing to modify loans for borrowers facing legitimate hardships, rather than go through an expensive foreclosure process.
What qualifies as a hardship?
To be eligible for a mortgage modification, you'll need to prove you are facing a real financial hardship that is impacting your ability to pay. Hardships that may qualify include:
Job loss or income reduction
Unmanageable increase in housing expenses
Excessive debt or monthly obligations
Divorce or death of a spouse
Serious illness or disability
Your lender will require documentation of your hardship circumstances as well as detailed information on your income, assets, expenses, and other debts. Having missed mortgage payments already often strengthens the case for modification.
How to apply for a loan modification
The first step is to contact your mortgage servicer (the company you make monthly payments to), and specifically inquire about their loan modification programs. Many participating in government-sponsored programs, which have specific eligibility criteria.
You'll need to fill out a modification application package with detailed documentation on your hardship, income, assets, and any other requested information. Be prepared to provide evidence with documents like tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements, bills, and more.
Your servicer will run the numbers to determine the most affordable modified payment plan they are willing to offer based on your specific situation and loan characteristics. You may be required to do credit counseling or go through a trial payment period successfully before the modification is made permanent.
If approved, the new modified terms will be documented and made permanent. While your credit will take a hit, a loan modification is better than foreclosure or bankruptcy for your credit score in the long run.
Even if you're not yet behind on payments but see financial challenges ahead, it's better to work with your servicer proactively on a solution rather than get behind. Being transparent about your hardship and exploring modification options early can help you avoid further setbacks and keep you in your home long-term.
When I shared complaints about my housing on social media, they went viral, and I began hearing from people in similar circumstances. It changed the course of my life
I never planned to become a housing rights campaigner. I hoped to become an artist; I always loved to paint. But events put me on a different path. It feels as if I missed an exit on the motorway somewhere and now I can’t turn back.
It started when we moved into a housing association flat on the Eastfields estate in Mitcham, south London, in 2018: my father, my two sisters, aged 17 and 20, and 19-year-old me. Before that, we were in temporary accommodation: a half-converted garage that had mould and damp on the walls and a bathroom the size of a cupboard. We had been there since 2016, waiting to get a permanent council property, but the new place was no better. The carpets and wallpaper were decades old. There were cockroaches, flies and woodlice. The mouse infestation in the kitchen was so bad, we didn’t want to use it. The glass patio doors were broken, so the place was freezing. We had lights that filled with water whenever it rained, especially in the bathroom, which had no windows. It wasn’t just us; the whole Eastfields estate was dilapidated, but despite residents complaining to Clarion, the housing association, nothing seemed to get fixed.
The party must ensure the benefits of significantly increased land values in the proposed areas for development are shared by all, says Miles Gibson. Plus letters from Christina McGill and Peter Waterman
As a former town planning policy adviser to both Tony Blair and David Cameron, I have only one question about Labour’s proposed new towns: who will benefit from the significant increase in land value arising from granting planning permission for them (Labour will aim to reveal new town sites within first year in power, 20 May)?
Postwar new town legislation forced landowners to sell land to the state at the existing use value. The surplus from the later resale of the land at market prices paid for infrastructure and affordable housing. Angela Rayner gave no suggestion that Labour would deploy such heavy artillery. But if it does, it would be well advised not to announce new town locations until it has control of the land, “grey belt” or otherwise.
The hopes raised by the ANC coming to power in 1994 have, 30 years on, been dashed for millions still without a decent roof over their heads
A picture of Nelson Mandela watches over the dimly lit room where Maggie Mothemba has lived for six years. “He’s like my father,” says the 57-year-old, who remembers the day in April 1994 that she voted for Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa’s first democratic election.
She was then “full of hope” to be on the list for a government-subsidised house to raise her two children – a key ANC’ election promise. But Mothemba is still waiting, along with 2.5 million households languishing in a housing crisis. In 2017, facing eviction from a private rental , she moved into a derelict hospital in Woodstock, a Cape Town neighbourhood, squatted by people protesting the slow pace of affordable housing development.
Countryside semis are strongest-performing property type, with average price up 22% over five years
Rural areas have trumped towns and cities in house price growth over the past five years, with a semi in the countryside the top-performing property type, according to data for Great Britain.
The figures, issued by the mortgage lender Nationwide, showed that average house prices in predominantly rural areas rose by 22% over the period, compared with 17% in predominantly urban areas.
Social housing providers claim platforms are refusing to cooperate with requests to remove illegally listed holiday lets
Airbnb and Booking.com have been accused of facilitating fraud by refusing to take action against social housing tenants who illegally sublet properties to holidaymakers.
Local authorities and social housing providers claim the platforms are refusing to cooperate with requests to remove illegally listed holiday lets and, as a result, are depriving homeless families of secure housing.
“Energy efficient”, “carbon neutral” and “net zero” are buzzwords we hear more and more as we face the impact of climate change. But do we think about them enough in building?
Globally, a move towards sustainable housing is growing. In Europe, efforts to move to greener homes hope to combat rising energy costs and be better for the planet. But 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions still come from the real estate sector.
The government knows this accommodation is unsafe and potentially even deadly. Its inaction is scandalous
Parenting a young child is difficult enough. But imagine taking care of a baby inside a single bedroom shared with two or three older siblings. The bathroom and kitchen are communal, so you either have to carry the child with you or lock them in the bedroom. When you need to wash yet another set of the baby’s clothes or sterilise their bottle, you must do so using a tiny sink and a kettle in your bedroom.
That is what one woman told me it is like living in a temporary accommodation hostel with her young children in England. When I interviewed her, she detailed how, in the first months of bringing up her newborn son, she worried for his safety and health, specifically because of that accommodation. Her story is not unique: a recent investigation by my colleagues at Inside Housing found more than 35,000 households like hers, living in temporary accommodation with children under five across England, Scotland and Wales in 2023.
Katharine Swindells is the deputy features editor at Inside Housing
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Netflix’s distasteful ‘reality’ series holds up a gilded mirror to the people making the city harder for the rest of us to live in
When I first arrived in London, seven years ago, I used to enjoy stopping outside estate agents’ offices and browsing the listings in the window. Though they were almost always ludicrously out of reach, there was idle pleasure to be had in seeing what you could get for £5m v £10m, and debating with yourself the merits of a home spa v home cinema.
These days, however, I find it hard to indulge in fantasy real-estate without being reminded of London’s housing crisis, and where it has landed me and many others my age: shut out of home ownership. Now a flashy new reality TV series from Netflix is seeking to take us the other side of the glass with a view into on London’s “super-prime” property market.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The struggling NHS, the climate crisis, education and childcare will be among the issues on voters’ minds
Rishi Sunak has sought to frame the Conservatives as the party of the future and one that can be trusted with the economy and national security.
The prime minister, who once billed himself as the “change candidate” and unsuccessfully tried to distance himself from years of Conservative rule, now claims his party’s experience in government makes it more likely than Labour to have a secure plan for the future.
Workplace killings in 2023 revealed hazardous working conditions of migrant farmworkers in Half Moon Bay
The owners of two mushroom farms in northern California where a disgruntled employee shot and killed seven people last year will pay a total of more than $450,000 in back wages and damages to 62 employees.
In an announcement released on Monday following an extensive investigation, the US labor department said the payment is an element of administrative settlements reached by the department’s wage and hour division with California Terra Garden and Concord Farms.
Moving into a new house is stressful, no matter how you approach it. There’s the expense, the chaos of physically moving all of your stuff, not to mention finding your new home in the first place. We all do a lot of research and due diligence when looking for a new home for our family, but that research tends to be focused exclusively on the house itself. When it comes to the location of that house, the research can get a little muddy.
You probably have a good idea of the general area you want to live in, but what about the specific block you’ll be moving into? A few years ago, Trulia coined the term “neighborhood regret” when a survey they conducted revealed that 36% of homebuyers wished they’d bought into a different neighborhood. Are your neighbors going to steal every package you have delivered, or will you be embroiled in endless drama with them? How can you tell if you’re about to join a thriving, friendly community or step into a hell composed of other people?
It’s impossible to know for sure until you live there, but there are some signs you can look for during your house hunt.
Home maintenance
Ask any real estate professional: The level of upkeep and maintenance by a homeowner is very telling. Not only does a poorly maintained home probably have hidden damage and defects that will need to be repaired, but a poorly maintained house will negatively impact all the houses around it.
A single ramshackle house with a sagging roof and an ancient, rusting washing machine on the front lawn is one thing—multiple homes in disrepair are a big red flag that the whole neighborhood has gone to seed. If you see several houses featuring any of these signs of neglect, it’s time to reconsider your neighborhood choice:
Lack of landscaping (overgrown grass, uncontrolled weeds)
Sagging or missing fence
Peeling exterior paint or damaged siding
Garbage and junk piled up in the yard
Damaged roof
Crumbling concrete steps or walkways
Noise
An obvious red flag for a neighborhood is the noise level—but it’s easy to assume that high noise levels are temporary. After all, that guy across the street can’t be revving his motorbike or his chainsaw every day, can he?
It’s essential to visit your prospective new neighborhood on different days and at night. You’ll learn a lot about what life is really like there. A few signs that this neighborhood is not your new home include:
Noise. It’s an obvious red flag, but if you only see the neighborhood during the day when adults are at work and kids are at school you don’t know the true volume levels you’ll be dealing with. You also need to ascertain if some of your neighbors just have extremely loud hobbies, or like to blast music from their car stereo for hours every day while they work out in their garage.
No noise. On the other end of the scale is a lack of people and noise. If the neighborhood is terrifyingly dark and empty at night, ask yourself if you’ll be comfortable walking around or letting your kids play when the sun goes down. If it’s also a ghost town during the daylight hours, that can indicate an unfriendly atmosphere and a lack of neighborly camaraderie.
For sale signs
You feel lucky to have found a house in your price range in the area you want to be in. That’s great. Unless there’s a very good reason for the low price.
If you notice that the neighborhood has a lot of homes for sale, this could be a red flag that something is driving people away. It could be anything—a rise in crime, quality-of-life issues, or simple coincidence—but a large number of “for sale” signs should prompt you to hit pause and do some more digging before you make any final decisions.
Speed bumps
You probably don’t think twice when you drive over a speed bump—they’re a common way to force people to slow down. But if the quiet residential street you’re considering moving into has speed bumps every few feet, it might be a sign that your cute spot is a cut-through for impatient drivers trying to avoid nearby traffic. Unless you enjoy the sound of cars bottoming out when they hit a speed bump way too fast and briefly attain flight, or like the sense of danger involved in a dark quiet street being invaded by tired, speeding drivers, this is a sign that you should at least ask around a bit to find out how big of a problem it is.
Crime rates
This one might seem obvious, but most homebuyers rely more on their impression of a neighborhood than actual stats. It’s important to remember that not all crime is violent crime—a neighborhood might be plagued by petty thieves, vandals, traffic scofflaws, or residents who disturb the peace.
One simple red flag to look for? Fortifications. If all the houses on the block have bars on the windows and gated porch areas, if everyone has security cameras and big signs announcing alarm systems, it often means the neighborhood was not particularly safe at some point.
You can get a quick glimpse of the crime in your area with a site like Niche, which uses local and federal databases to calculate crime rates, and sites like SpotCrime will show you a map or list of recent police activity in that particular neighborhood. This won’t be comprehensive, but if you see a long list of arrests and other crime-related problems it’s a sign that your cute, quiet prospective neighborhood isn’t that cute or quiet. And while you’re doing your research, why not check to see if there are any registered sex offenders living there, too? The Department of Justice maintains a searchable database you can use, and the site Family Watchdog offers a similar database.
Animals
Most people love dogs, and having dogs in your new neighborhood is probably not a bad thing. But there’s a difference between neighbors who take their leashed pets for a walk and neighbors who let their dogs run wild. Aggressive dogs can be dangerous, and dogs left outdoors at all times can be a loud annoyance.
You can also often judge the character of potential neighbors by the way they treat animals. Pets who are left outside in the heat or cold, who are chained up and given little space to move around in, or who are generally mistreated are not only heartbreaking, but they indicate that the human being in charge of them isn’t going to value your health and safety very much, either.
Families say wait for charges is ‘unbearable’, as police say they must take public inquiry’s final report into account
The bereaved and survivors of Grenfell Tower must wait until at least 2027 – a decade after the blaze that killed 72 people – before those suspected of being responsible for the disaster could face criminal trials, it has emerged.
Families described the news as “shocking” and called the wait for charges for people to be held accountable for their crimes “unbearable”.
Planning experts are considering areas near Nottingham, Stafford and Northampton for housebuilding drive
Labour’s plan for new towns looks likely to focus on the Midlands as much as England’s overcrowded south-east, with planners already considering areas near Nottingham, Stafford and Northampton, the Guardian understands.
Close to the M1 and M6 motorways, some of the locations have the advantage of being in areas of Labour local political control, giving Keir Starmer’s government a better chance of delivering on its promise to have the first homes built by the end of a first Labour term.
Gove claims that the anti-Israel protests that have sprung up on university campuses around the world have not appeared in a vacuum, and are the product of “years of ideological radicalisation”.
He says the decolonisation narrative is attractive to authoritarian states, because the iddea that “the success of liberal Western nations is built on plunder” undermines their legitimacy.
There are no BDS campaigns directed against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime guilty of killing more Muslims in living memory than any other.
There are no student encampments, urging university administrators to cut all ties with China given what is happening in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or what happened in Tibet.
The proportion of employed young people living with their parents in the EU have risen significantly in recent years, data from an EU agency shows, with Ireland outstripping other nations amid an acute housing crisis.
An analysis of Eurostat data shared exclusively with the Guardian found that on average across the bloc, the proportion of 25- to-34-year-olds in employment living in their parental home had risen from 24% to 27% between 2017 and 2022.
Angela Rayner to promise party will build homes on sites by end of its first term and support private developers
A Labour government would aim to announce the sites for a series of new towns within a year of taking office, with the promise that homes would be built in them by the end of a first term, Angela Rayner is to say in a speech.
Giving more detail to a plan first outlined in Keir Starmer’s party conference speech in October, Rayner will tell a housing conference that Labour will strongly support private developers who create high-quality and affordable housing.
We’re interested to hear from people under 45 in the UK who have moved to a smaller community with a lower cost of living, and how they’ve been finding it
We’re keen to hear from people under the age of 45 who have in recent years relocated to a smaller, more affordable community in the UK – whether that’s a small city, town or village.
We’d like to know why people have made such a move, how their new life has been working out, and what the positives and the negatives of living in these communities may be.
We would like to hear from home owners who purchased their property with one or more friends in the UK
While house prices have steadied in the first part of 2024, home ownership remains out of reach for many as the average cost of renting continues to increase. This has prompted some to find different ways to get onto the housing ladder.
We would like to hear from home owners who bought their house with one or more friends. Why did you choose to pool your resources? What are the pros and cons of sharing your property with someone who is not a significant other? Tell us all about it below.
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