Social housing tenants in the UK and Hong Kong

Parker Tron linked to this article in The Guardian:

Almost half of social homes are occupied by only one person, and only a quarter have two residents:
43% are one-person households
32% have more than two residents.
This is partly down to the high number of retired people living in social housing, especially in supported accommodation.

This is partly down to the high number of retired people living in social housing, especially in supported accommodation.

So to generalise, social tenants are disproportionately pensioners and one-parent families.

Coincidentally, Kj emailed me a link to an article about public housing in Hong Kong (link extremely dodgy, open at your peril):

Impoverished inhabitants have reappeared in the city. The public renter-housing sector today is a concentration of poor elderly retired households and low-income single parent households.

At the same time, among households with heads aged 20-65 the percentage living in public renter housing declined from 36.3% in 1976 to 27.4% in 2011, while among heads aged above 65 the percentage rose from 30.6% in 1976 to 48.6% in 2011.

Same old, same old.

The article was written by somebody working on behalf of banks, insurance companies and possibly the old-age care sector, who are salivating at the proposal of selling off public housing.

How about this for a Home-Owner-Ist tour de force, all done presumably without any intention at irony:

Given that demographic, it seems obvious that old age support should focus on selling our public housing estates to sitting tenants at an affordable price. In particular, this would allow the elderly to immediately and cheaply acquire an asset to provide old age support. It would go a long way to addressing the problems of elderly poverty in Hong Kong.

Privatizing the public renter housing estates would create a very large client pool of elderly homeowners willing to take advantage of mortgage backed annuity schemes. This would create better opportunities for diversifying risks associated with the uncertainty of life expectancy. A bigger market could also lead to better terms for all participants.