Letter: House price trap

"House price crash" cry headlines (3 September) but house prices may be flatlining or even falling modestly. The assumption is that rising house prices are a good thing.

But record numbers of first-time buyers are locked out of the market. Land prices are too high and the private sector development model is trapped into gambling on rising land prices as its main source of profit.

This is economically inefficient, socially divisive and grossly unsustainable. Let's start to see the return of house prices to some semblance of sanity as something to be celebrated, not feared.

Graeme Brown

Shelter Scotland

Edinburgh