YOUR report ‘House prices could drive people out’ (Saturday, April 23) cites buy-to-let investors, and student homes of multiple occupation (HMO) as factors that will contribute to people having to move out of the city to find affordable housing.

Is there any finer example of the ‘something-for-nothing’ society than the buy-to-let investor?

The property is actually bought by the hapless tenant, not for himself, but for his landlord through his rental payments.

This has the multiple effects of reducing the available stock, pushing up the price of what is left, and increasing rents so that the prospect of saving for his own home gets ever more remote for the tenant.

Combine this with the scourge of student occupation of HMOs, utilising great swathes of family housing so that young people who have managed to buy first-time homes find themselves unable to move into appropriate housing to bring up their families, and are instead stranded in overcrowded accommodation as soon as they have a first child.

Meanwhile, the students, of course, are actually buying the HMO for the property owner.

Is it not time for our universities to insist that all students must live in purpose-built halls for the duration of their courses, so that family homes can once again be available for families?

I am also struck by the irony of the ‘I’m all right, Jack’ NIMBYs, who, as we frequently see in my own area of Netley Abbey and Hamble, are themselves living in properties that were built on open space within living memory, but now want to ‘pull up the ladder’ and stop new homes being built for the current and future generations.

Of course infrastructure needs to be part of the plans, but that’s what we should campaign for, not trying to stop the houses being built at all.

Unless we as a society become much less selfish, I fear for the housing needs of our children and grandchildren, and what we will reap as a result.

Siobhan O’Rourke

Netley Abbey