I think you need to look beyond the housing market because I'm not necessarily talking about houses, I'm talking about their value as an asset and how that feeds into everything else.
Wishing for housing market collapse is incredibly stupid because who do you think pays to develop those fancy new flats in Manchester that have gone up over the last 10 years? A lot think it's the Chinese or Russians but actually it's your pension funds invested in property so it's your pension that stands to lose from collapse.
The only people wishing for housing collapse are those who aren't on the ladder. Naturally though those same people will change that view very quickly once they get on the ladder. Any sane homeowner will therefore vote accordingly to their interests which will be to protect the housing market.
I get that, but there are large parts of society that aren't on the property ladder, and I'd guess that the majority of those also don't have a huge amount invested in a pension fund either, because after saving up for a deposit, paying for extortionate rent, utilities and transport, and possibly paying off a student loan that they were promised would lead to a high-paying job, they don't have a lot left to save for the future. And even their parents are now expected to use the one asset they could pass on to pay for their old-age care.
But equally, as fewer and fewer people are building a sizeable pension fund, the companies building the houses are less and less owned by the wider public, and more and more by a smaller number of ultra-rich investors. The idea of people being able to own their own homes is actually an anomaly in history. The number of houses has increased more than the population in the last ten years. The normal rules of supply and demand should say that prices should go down, and yet that hasn't happened, because there's a huge shift of wealth to the ultra rich, who use it to buy assets. House prices are artificially propped up by people who are buying them as an investment, and a correction is long overdue. But it won't happen, because effectively your young family is now competing with a hedge fund for property rather than other young families. And there's absolutely no reason to assume that this will correct itself as long as the flow of money keeps going from the poor to the ultra rich.
The main question for you would be, do you think house prices continuing to increase is a good thing? The average price is now 8.3 times the average annual salary. Do you think it would be a good thing if that went to 10 times, 15 times, 20 times? Or would it be better if it stayed the same or came down? Obviously a proper 2008-style crash would be a disaster for plenty of people with a mortgage, but a price reduction would involve at minimum a stagnation of house prices, to allow wages to increase faster that property, and everyone who owned a house would lose out on their 'investment.' You're not voting to 'protect' the housing market, you're voting to make it skyrocket in a way that you personally won't actually benefit from.
For most ordinary people, a house isn't really an investment, because you can only cash it in by selling it. It would be a bad thing for people who own more than one house, of course. It would also mean that people with a mortgage find that their house is only worth roughly the amount they paid for it, but then the same would apply to any house they wanted to move to, so again, for ordinary people who buy a house to live in, there's not a massive interest in how much the house is worth, because it's all relative. There's no point owning a flat that goes up from 150 grand to 200 grand if the house you wanted to sell it to buy goes from 200 grand to 275 grand in the same time.
But you get this all the time. Homeowners convinced to worry about the price of their house when in reality, it makes fuck all difference to someone who owns a single house. Who it does make a difference to is the huge investment funds buying up shitloads of property, and developers being able to charge a fortune. And yes, some of those developers might be owned by my pension fund, but call me old-fashioned, I'm not a huge fan of the idea that my pension fund gets record profits by pricing my own kids out of the housing market. Especially if it then leads to me having to gift them 10 or 20 grand towards a deposit anyway, which is what increasing numbers of middle class families are doing.
