Should housing associations be able to sell homes?

I SYMPATHISE with those who long to own a home and are disappointed that housing associations are to be prevented from selling off their stock. Many young people are forced to move due to a lack of affordable local homes to buy or rent. The issue is: why is there a housing crisis? Since the Eighties, more than two million council houses have been sold off. Uncontrolled immigration has played a large part, coupled with the fact there’s a severe shortage of new homes being built. In 2010, rents in social housing were an average 50 per cent of private rents; this is now 80 per cent. Local authorities estimate there are 1.4 million households on waiting lists, with high rents and low wages preventing young families from saving for a deposit. The average house price (outside London) being in excess of £200,000 requires an income of £41,000 a year. The solutions include controlling immigration, building more affordable homes, returning social housing to local authorities and building more homes for the elderly to enable them to downsize when the children have grown up and gone. Cllr ALAN DIMMICK, Yeovil, Somerset. Some people feel unfairly treated because they can’t buy their housing association home (Letters). They should give more thought to those who have never qualified to join a housing list in the first place (sometimes by dint of standing on their own two feet). Such people have often had to make great sacrifices, including subsidising social housing occupants’ rent, only to end up with a larger mortgage while living next door to a family who’ve had the good fortune to have had state largesse shown to them. That is the true unfairness of housing policy. Selling off housing stock always has been an economic disaster. It exists as a vote-catching policy in our corrupt political system. B. BOND, Cambridge.