1.22. A) Do people in Russia usually own or rent their dwellings? Read the

passage below about Britain and answer the question above for Britain. What is the major reason that prevents people from owning a flat/ house? What would you choose – a rented or owned housing? Give your reasons.

b) Calculate the housing expenses for your family.

c) Discuss the problem of the homeless in Russia. Compare it with the British problem.

Most people given the choice would prefer to own their houses rather than to rent them. Consequently renting is usually left to the young (from private landlords) and the poor (from local authorities). But private housing means a market economy, which means an ability to pay. If you can pay, you can have; if you can't pay, you can't have. Obviously a lot of people cannot afford to hand over the full price of a house (an average, not-very-special house will cost about five to seven times an entire annual salary before tax.) So such people have to live in council estates (= groups of council houses laid out some way from the town centre). A typical council house is either semi-detached or terraced.

Council flats and houses are built and owned by the local council. After the Second World War, a lot of high-rise council flats, known as tower blocks, were constructed. Some were as high as 20 storeys and so badly built that they had to be pulled down only thirty years later. Modern council housing estates are built differently. There might be a mixture of two-storey terraced houses, together with a four-storey block of flats. There are play areas for children and there is often a community centre where people who live on the estate can meet. A recent development has been the growth of sheltered housing. This con­sists of blocks of modern flats or groups of small houses specially designed for elderly people. They are usually situated near the centre of a town, close to shops and other amenities, and have a resident warden. As with council houses, the residents rent their homes from the local council. Since the 1980s, council tenants have been able to buy their own homes very cheaply if they have lived in them for over two years. By 1993, 1.5 million council houses had been sold, but only 5,000 council houses or flats were built to replace them. This means that it is now very difficult to find cheap housing for rent — a real problem for the poor and unemployed. Most homeowners have bought their house by means of a mortgage loan through a building society or a bank. Houses are usually bought and sold in Britain through an estate agent, using the legal services of a solicitor.

First-time buyers (= people such as young married couples setting up home for the first time) almost always buy their houses this way. A typical loan is for up to 90 per cent of the price of house, repaid over 20 or 25 years in monthly installments. Take this sample family:

If spouses are both earning full-time, their joint income might be £26,000 before tax. Tax would reduce that to about £18,500. Then they will pay for gas and electricity, perhaps £1,300 a year, £650 for television, £350 for insurance and water rates. Total spent on the house which is covered by a standard Russian rent would be £8,300 a year, getting on for half their disposable income. That is fine if they can use the other half of the income for living, but a great burden if, say, the girl wants to give up work for a time and have a family. If they move into a bigger house, they can take with them both the money from selling the flat and the debt. In practice this means simply paying a larger mortgage for a larger house. For older people, as the debt gets paid off, financial worries improve steadily, but for young people house-buying is an exciting but burdensome commitment. Why not then rent a house? Unfortunately there is always an enormous queue for housing subsidized by local authorities and councils try to allot homes to those most in need — which do not include the young. So the alternative is private renting, and in this housing sector, rents are enormous. So you are paying minimum £5,000 a year anyway, and if you leave for somewhere else, you have gained nothing from all that expenditure. Better at least to have a twenty-year loan and your own house at the end of it all.

So as you can see the major problem for English people is not the cost or availability of basic consumer goods — on the whole these are cheap and getting cheaper — but the cost of housing. Since the British pay such an enormous proportion of their income for the roof over their heads, other parts of other choices in their lives, such as where they live and what they work at are immediately affected by the decisions they take about housing. That is why some people choose to live in a mobile home on a caravan site (usually called a home park).

Many people in Britain have no home at all, with the number of the homeless increasing. This increase is mainly due to changes in the way social security benefits are paid, periods of rapid increase in house prices, and a sharp decline in the number of council houses being built. Local authorities have an obligation to provide accommodation for home­less families in their area and many families are housed in bed-and-breakfast accommodation until permanent housing for them can be found. The homeless also include young people who have run away from home or a children's home, elderly people who have no family, and the mentally dis­turbed, all forced to live wherever they can. This often means "living rough", begging or travelling by day and sleeping in the open or in door­ways at night. The big cities, especially London, have a large number of such homeless people. One part of London's South Bank area has come to be called "Cardboard City" because of the many people living there in huts made from cardboard boxes.

There are some free hostels for the young homeless, but these are for short stays. The charity Shelter works on behalf of the homeless, and the Sal­vation Army, a religious charity, offers them food and shelter.