Here's my personal story, some may find interesting- I was finishing my masters in the UK and split up with my ex girlfriend, this meant I had to get a job quickly to sustain myself because I had nowhere to live and no money. I visited some different groups of friends who were kind enough to let me stay for a few days on their couch but I couldn't risk outstaying my welcome.
At the same time the Occupy protests were happening in St Pauls. I secured a short term contract in an investment bank, and stayed in a tent with the protestors while saving for a deposit to rent a room. I had to put on my suit and dash away from the camp in the morning before I was spotted, I'd then change before coming back in the evening. I washed in the local swimming pools.
Looking back on it, it was nuts that I was able to finish my thesis. So yeah, rents are high, you need to know someone to make it in London.
Yes. My colleagues in London were advised to dress down during the protests to avoid drawing attention to themselves, I think this was fairly common at the time.
To be fair, if you had been found out, I think you would have deserved what you get for being such a glaring hypocrite. I am sure some people were giving up work to protest against a system. You were supporting that system, while using the protests as a place to stay.
What do you imagine this would have been? What would a "fair" reaction of the protestors have been?
The poster wasn't 'using' the protests, they were using a public park. It is hypocrisy of this movement to take over a public space and claim it for their own exclusive use, while not acknowledging that the fact that the police let them get away with this is a sign of their own privilege.
I think you have your wires crossed, I am just someone confirming the whole "you should dress down" advice - neither my london-based colleagues nor me (I don't even live in the UK) were living with the protesters during the occupy movement.
If it's anything similar to Occupy Wall Street, wearing a suit would be taken to mean that a person is some sort of terrible exploiter of the proletariat.
I remember visiting a similar protest, in my work clothes, to show support years ago. Being well dressed is taken as a sign you have some kind of malicious intention.
good for you! I always found it unfair that left wing protestors are allowed to do illegal things, like camp in parks. They complain about privilege, while they themselves are afforded privileges that ordinary people (like you) don't have.
This is misguided. The Occupy protests were often focused on providing privileges like housing, shelter, and amenities to those who didn't have access to it.
My point is that the police turning a blind eye to the occupy protests using public space in an illegal way, and effectively claiming that land for themselves, is evidence of the privilege of these protestors. If the poster had pitched his tent in other circumstances, the police would have made him take it down.
They didn't turn a blind eye, that is disingenuous in the extreme. The police in the US and the UK detained and incarcerated thousands of people over the course of the Occupy movement, often with disproportionately violent methods. In addition, thousands of dollars worth of communal property were confiscated or destroyed in the course of their raids against camps.
You are the one being disingenuous. An ordinary person would be kicked out of the park before a single night had elapsed. The fact that the police eventually to some action doesn't mean they didn't also turn a blind eye for a long time.
They literally did the opposite of turning a blind eye. They placed Occupy activists under surveillance in multiple cities. They sent undercover cops. They used every tool at their disposal to get information on and contain the movement. If you followed the entire affair with any semblance of good faith you would have seen the numerous articles that detailed this police activity. A squatter is not the same thing as a protest, that little equivocation is probably at the root of your disingenuous approach to this issue,
Your are exhibiting precisely the privileged attitude I referred to earlier. You believe that merely being a protestor entitles you to more rights than a mere squatter. In fact, both have equal rights under the law. Both a squatter and a protestor have a right to carry a sign or chant slogans. Neither have a right to camp in a park.
As someone who was actually at some of these protests, I don't think putting my freedom on the line for said squatters is a sign of "privileged" thinking. Both have good reason to squat in the park, though your simplistic legalistic reasoning would deny that. It just turns out that protesters en masse have more power to resist outright police action, and so they can remain longer in contravention of the laws set down by the elite. Call it the privilege of the mob if you will. At the end of the day though, both groups were forcibly evicted with great violence.
Also, I don't think you comprehend how privilege even factors into this discussion. You can't just use the word "privilege" as some sort of trump card that defeats any argument.
I think it is fairly obvious that they all wanted a fairer more just system. That there are so many so many elements of the current system that they complained about is not a reason to ignore them.
That's the perception that was heavily pushed by the media, yes. From personal experience with three separate Occupy encampments in different parts of the country, I saw dedicated efforts in all of them to set up things like food distribution to the homeless, shelters, free legal advice and other amenities. Of course no one ever hears about that because it's easier and more enjoyable to trash subcultures instead.
This is not to mention the larger scale efforts to provide debt relief and outreach.
They wanted the public space in front of the Goldman's building (the basis of which the development of the square was approved). Regardless of whether you support them or not (I don't) they certainly weren't "focused on trashing a church".
I really don't understand several things about this story.
1. Why move to London if you're an unskilled worker? Are opportunities elsewhere even bleaker?
2. London has a huge problem with absentee property owners because London real estate is currently a hot investment. It's a feedback loop. The more rapidly London properties appreciate, the more absentee owners there will be, and the more demand will rise. Why haven't bylaws been passed to curb this? For example, why aren't residences that are unoccupied by their owner for a significant portion of the year taxed at much higher rates? It would probably be necessary to offer a renter rebate to compensate for increased rents, but this would discourage the practice of leaving residences vacant. If this doesn't actually drive prices down, at least it would prevent them from continuing to rise.
3. Why aren't the barge-lords being treated like slum-lords when the barges they run are overcrowded, full of mould, etc.? I understand it's hard to legally enforce a tenant-landlord relationship when it's all under the table, but there must be something the police can do to hassle these guys until they improve conditions.
4. Where are the government programs, volunteers, etc. that you usually see in other cities building low-cost housing? e.g. Why isn't anyone building legal barges with decent living conditions to compete with the barge-lords?
1) You were born there. Your spouse lives there. Etc
2)!london is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules. They'd all need to agree and coordinate. I don't know why it isn't done better.
3) people living in slums ether don't know their rights; or how to enforce those rights. Sometimes their own legal status is dubious and they risk deportation. Even if they do know their rights, and how to enforce their right, and they can get the regulator to take action, and they're totally legal and above board, they may just end up without a home.
Housing in the UK is weird and broken and at the low end there are some strong weirdnesses built into the system.
> London is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules [...] I don't know why it isn't done better
Politically, London will never have a unified council because it would wield too much power over the presiding government. This is effectively what led to the downfall of the GLC (Greater London Council) - in the early 1980s the socialist GLC antagonized the Tory government to the point where Thatcher ended up forcing it to be abolished.
London produces so much of the GDP it would be very easy for a centralized London council to hold the national government 'to ransom' (this happens to some degree now with the London Assembly, but since the Assembly has little power over issues such as housing it's not as pronounced as it could be).
The upshot of this is you end up with a pretty crazy system whereby someone at one end of the street could pay twice as much council tax as someone at the other end (in the case of, say, Wandsworth - which has one of the lowest council tax rates in the UK, and Merton - which is more around the average). I would agree having a centralized London council would be far better than the current system, but there's no way it will ever happen.
Couldn't the government pass laws that would give it more power over a unified London council, so that the holding-for-ransom dynamic would be minimized? It seems like that would be preferable to uncoordinated city ordinances. (Here in the States, we've got tons of fragmented municipal governance arrangements, so I know there's no simple fix.)
2) Council tax has all sorts of central govt limits on it, including the banding system. They can't fix the problem of empty property on their own.
3) A houseboat is not a building, and is therefore exempt from all the laws about building minimum standards that were instituted the previous times London had a slum problem. I'm not sure if there even are any standards about living on a boat, only standards about in relation to the river and other water users.
Housing in the UK is weird and broken. This is about 50% due to Right To Buy and the slow abolition of the council house.
3: The Boat Safety Scheme applies to boats on most inland waterways in the UK. There are a couple of things in that article that shouldn't have passed a BSS examination - "drips coming through to the electrics" is the one that leaps out at me. But yes, it's not intended to enforce minimum living standards. The local authority should be doing this and I believe they have the same powers against on-water landlords as they do on-land.
I don't fundamentally disagree with the existence of Right to Buy, but it really required a comprehensive house-building program to back it up. Now we're fucked.
The requirement for all new development over a certain number of units (12? iirc) to provide a perecentage as affordable was supposed to deal with this but the govt has redefined affordable too. Some of my professional colleagues in their 30s not only qualified for these but struggled to afford them. this is where the system really failed IMHO.
> Some of my professional colleagues in their 30s not only qualified for these but struggled to afford them. this is where the system really failed IMHO.
That is bonkers. It's just really weird.
The Tower Hamlets evidence pack has some eye-popping statistics. (Tower Hamlets are building more social housing than anywhere else in the UK)
They have 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing.
48% of those are in category 1 or 2 which means they have medical need, or are homeless or overcrowded.
9500 households are over crowded. 1228 households are under occupied with 271 having 2 or more bedrooms than they need. (I think a bedroom is anyroom that can fit a bed in it.)
I'm not sure no 1 is a good explanation. For 300 you can share a nice house with 2-3 other people in the south west regions. How does being born in London, or (especially this) having a spouse with you explain choosing to live in terrible condition instead of pleasant house in a different city?
People do (understandably) become attached to the area they live in. In particular, being born and growing up in London means that an individual's family and social group is likely to be there. While it's sometimes inevitable that people have to move, it's a bad state of affairs where individuals born in a city are being priced out of it due to broken housing policy.
Spouses can also end up meaning a life in a less desirable place. For example, my partner's in a career that can only really be done on-site and in London. That means I have to live here too. Less of a problem for unskilled workers, maybe.
And it's worth bearing in mind that work is pretty difficult to find in many cases – even inside London. A relatively sleepy town in Cornwall is going to have fewer jobs available, and they'll offer lower incomes.
But I guess the biggest objection is that this doesn't really get to the core of the problem – there is a load of underused housing stock in London, there's insufficient supply of cost-effective housing, and there is consistent government policy in place which encourages people to move to London. That's a really unstable situation and we need to make moves towards fixing it.
There's also the situation of separated parents. The children and one parent may be living comfortably, but the other parent on a low income battles to live close enough to remain a regular part of their children's lives.
>Spouses can also end up meaning a life in a less desirable place. For example, my partner's in a career that can only really be done on-site and in London. That means I have to live here too. Less of a problem for unskilled workers, maybe.
Does your spouse stop you getting a train or a tube to work as well?
Commuting can end up costing the same (or more) than you'd save by moving out of London. Also time consuming and frequently unreliable (eg. Southeastern trains). It's not a simplistic option for most people.
4: People are building legal barges. You can pay £90k and buy one off the shelf[1]. The difficulty is finding somewhere to moor it: London's waterside is as much in demand as land in the city. You'll have to pay the riparian owner for this. Tidal Thames prices are very high; historically the canals have been lower, but they're largely full up.
In addition, the waterway authorities don't really want more 'liveaboards'; they place a lot of demands on waterway infrastructure yet it's difficult to charge them much (for legislative reasons, and getting legislation changed is a slow and unlikely process).
Somewhat related to point #2, this article (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230454950...) was shared here a while back that discusses a way in which vacant property is being used to house people at a discount, but it deals more with office buildings. Perhaps they could implement something similar for absentee property.
> 1. Why move to London if you're an unskilled worker? Are opportunities elsewhere even bleaker?
Sometimes. Sometimes it's the best option available. Sometimes people move to London believing they have a job and it turns out badly. And sometimes people make bad decisions.
> Why haven't bylaws been passed to curb this? For example, why aren't residences that are unoccupied by their owner for a significant portion of the year taxed at much higher rates?
There's little popular support for it, particularly under a conservative government - historically the party of property owners. The English are very protective of their houses and would fight anything that was perceived to reduce the rights of homeowners.
> 3. Why aren't the barge-lords being treated like slum-lords when the barges they run are overcrowded, full of mould, etc.? I understand it's hard to legally enforce a tenant-landlord relationship when it's all under the table, but there must be something the police can do to hassle these guys until they improve conditions.
Hence the eviction in the article. I think it's legally harder to treat something (legally) mobile as a home. And any law to tighten the regulation of mobile homes would probably be opposed by guardian-reading liberals as oppression of the traveller community.
> 4. Where are the government programs, volunteers, etc. that you usually see in other cities building low-cost housing?
Some exist. But their popularity is limited - voters are happy to see their house prices increasing, and no-one wants to live next to people who, as the article admits, party loudly late into the night, use a lot of drugs, and live in unsanitary conditions.
1. I lived in a car in London for 6 months. It was pretty fine. McDonalds was my washroom.
2. These boats are rare. I mean really rare. This is not the norm. The boats and the moorings are damn expensive so this doesn't make sense even for the landlords. Even crappy moorings cost.
3. You can go to the council and get a bedsit if you're in this situation. Literally the next day. Might have to share with a crackhead for a week but that's life.
4. There are plenty of other places to go in the UK where the salary/housing cost ratio isn't crazy. I lived in Nottingham for a bit and had a 5 bedroom detached house in a nice bit for £500/month. £230/month will get you a 2 bed flat better than this.
> These boats are rare. I mean really rare. This is not the norm. The boats and the moorings are damn expensive so this doesn't make sense even for the landlords. Even crappy moorings cost.
My Girlfriend lives on a house boat in battersea and its beautiful and bigger than most flats we have looked at. The moorings are crazy expensive though hers is a bout 650 per month of sunk cost - then obviously plus the cost of the boat and cost of oil to heat it (no gas to central heat).
I feel sorry for this guy but as someone points out, there is council accommodation exactly for this reason (wage =/= rent).
I live on a boat and don't pay mooring fees. I'm a "continuous cruiser" which means I move my boat every two weeks to a new location. All of my fellow boating friends do the same and most of us have pretty nice boats. And yes, the boats described in the story are very rare.
I can't say I've seen anything like the ones described in the story in my time on the water, with the exception of one 25ft fibreglass that was pretty much abandoned save the odd homeless person who used to sneak on it.
I'm actually amazed that the Canal and River Trust would even give a license for such a boat.
Most boaters I know have lovely boats and are incredibly proud of their homes.
It's not on a Canal and River Trust waterway. It's the Thames above Teddington Lock, which is controlled by the Environment Agency. Historically the EA has fewer powers on rivers (because it doesn't own the riverbanks) than CRT/BW does on canals.
The boats in this article are moored about 1/4 mile from where I am right now. This particular riverbank is owned by the council - it's essentially a strip of parkland. As far as I understand, mooring is free, but you're not supposed to stay more than a few days. Certainly not the years this small floating shanty town has been growing there. That's why the article mentioned that the council has been taking legal action to move these boats on.
This is the exception not the norm. Most people don't live like this but i have to agree the prices for renting in London are completely crazy and don't even think about buying a house or getting a mortgage.
I really wish i could buy a house in London (renting it out wold pay for the mortgage and some other bits) but there's no way in hell any bank would give me the amount necessary.
Only rich people and the ones that got council housing will ever be able to live/work in London cheaply.
We arguably rich people have the funds necessary for living in London cheaply in the long therm.
If you buy the house you will never have to pay rent ever on the other hand if you rent you may rent for the rest of your life and adding up all the money you spend on rent over your life would more then pay for the house.
A typical house in London is worth about say £300000 an you're usuall rent for a house like that if you're lucky would be about $1200 but more like £1500 if you want to be realistic.
That means that if you rent for more then 21 years (if you're the luckiest guy in london and find one with a rent at £1200) you have already payed for the house (if we ignore inflation and other things).
Regardless in the long run purchasing the house is the way to go however very few banks a willing to give out that kind of money so only the people that are already rich can pull it off.
If you buy a house, you miss out on all the other things you could do with that money, eg earn a return on the bond market. (That's what economists call opportunity costs, and they are realy.)
So, rich people have enough resources to live in London, but not to live in London cheaply either.
You can not ignore inflation and yield of alternative investments for these kinds of arguments.
Free market! London housing!? The politicians are all getting second homes funded by the taxpayer. The banks went bust but got bailed out by the taxpayer. "Emergency" low interest rates for the last 5 years.
The UK / London housing market is anything BUT a free market.
I agree, and the banks should have been allowed to fail. There should not have been any bail out. But that's a completely different argument to the one of "is there cheap enough housing".
The Guardian is often extremely left-wing and by far the worst of the broadsheets at letting their opinion bleed through into their news pieces. Just different types of editors than the others. Doesn't mean the other broadsheets don't push agendas, it just that the reporting tends to be less emotional and the manipulation is subtler.
This does appear to come from the 'society' section though, which I think is more of a magazine section. Magazine sections tend to be opinion pieces.
Wow, the North is much cheaper than the Midlands and the South! My sister lives up North and housing is much cheaper than the Worcester area where I live.
A friend of mine (who is well known in the London tech community, and might pop up here) has lived on a house boat within spitting distance of London bridge, it's not a 'slum' but rather cheap, centralised accommodation.
I really don't understand why people are looking at the wrong problem the whole time. Housing is not a problem, transport is. Commuting from outside London costs more than 500 pounds. UK transport (trains, tube) got the worst price to quality ratio in the world. You can rent a whole house for 1000 outside London, but the cost of transport is equivalent to nice flat in London (plus painful commuting[1]). Many agencies won't let you a flat if you make less than 36k, but that's below average and way below median.
Any regulation or tax will we bypassed. Government should do the opposite, deregulate to reduce the cost of building new houses.
Startup idea: Cheap, sustainable and safe transport for London. Investors are reluctant to buy properties outside London, cause of poor liquidity, hence cheaper and faster transport would solve that problem. Elon! help!
[1] It's not only the time, but trains are so unreliable. 1mm of snow and everything stops. I can't image what would happen if there would be proper winter.
I agree. I don't understand this reluctance to do so. I think it has a lot to do with good old british resistance to change and sticking blindly to some ridiculous traditions (2 taps in the sink I'm looking at you)
Higher residential density wouldn't add that much strain---the destinations (ie workplaces) still have the same density, it's just that commuters don't travel as far on the tube.
So you could make the system more intense, and less extense; concentrate the investments in tube upgrades on the centres.
It's impractical to produce new transport routes without government powers (e.g. compulsory purchase). And demand rapidly absorbs any new supply. e.g. Crossrail will bring new areas into commuting distance when it opens in 4 years - but house prices in those areas have already spiked up to match.
Transport in London is cheap and easy. The problem is if you have to commute great distances. A shit bike can get you around most places and as someone who walked to and from work every day for a bit (10 mile round trip daily), it's actually pretty good.
So for £230 per month in London, you get an unpleasant, unsafe, tiny, and marginal place to live.
Given that it's one of the most expensive cities in the world to live ("typical" 2BR apartments in nice areas are more like £400-600 per WEEK), I can't say I'm surprised.
The ways people are willing to trade off comfort to live in the center of things sometimes surprises me, but not that much.
You can get a 3-room house with garden and parking for less than £300 per week. I know because that's what I have; 10 minutes by motorbike to Old Street, or 40 minutes by public transport.
The wildcard is your qualification of "nice area". There's a very wide scale, and what would qualify as "nice" somewhere else will be a lot more expensive here. I've never felt physically in danger, though I have had motorcycles stolen.
As an admitted tourist, my most tangible reference point was my friend's place in Marylebone, for which I believe he was paying about £500 pw. It was a 2 BR in a quiet, clean building but not over-the-top luxurious. I suspect the price came from the central location in City of Westminster.
Similar to NYC / SF prices if you do the conversion.
I remember my friend moved to London a couple years ago. He said that tube tickets were taking up a large chunk of his income and barely had enough to pay for rent in his flat. He eventually moved back home to NZ 6 months later cause he was sick of being broke.
I know a few other of my friends have moved to London with great success, but I think the trick is to lock-in a well paying job before you move over there.
No..the trick is to find some sort of network of friends before you go.
I went to London with about 500 pounds of cash and no concrete job, on a one-way ticket.
For a start - renting is out - you have to find someone who is willing to lend a couch. Living the highlife is out - no pubs for you. Your only status is to (1) clean the flat for the people who let you stay there and (2) look for jobs. This should be a full-time occupation until you find a job - any job. Your ability to continue to sponge off someone else is tied to how they feel when they get home tired and find you sitting on their couch, coupled with how quickly you can find employment and vacate said couch.
Locking in a well-paying job before you get there is like saying you should find a good looking girlfriend before you start university. It's not going to happen unless you are very established somewhere already and get a transfer, or are internet famous for something. Or you are going to get sold a pup and end up locked into a crappy job in a crappy part of town.
I found my first job within 10 days of landing, worked that for a couple of months, asked to be paid after 1 week and then spent the entire cash amount on a deposit for a short-term one-room flat, which took all my money so I ate pot-noodles for a week. Stayed there for 4 weeks until I amassed enough cash for a proper flat. By that time I found two other people who wanted to share and the three of us rented a decent place for a decent price. After that it was better jobs, more fun and a great time. I passed it on by helping other people out with time on the couch, coupled with strict rules on what goes on.
In case you think that was a fluke, I repeated the same thing about 4 years later, only this time it took 8 weeks to find a job because the economy was more strained. I had (marginally) more savings this time but it was more tense.
The hack for housing in London is finding a borough with low council taxes with the lowest transport zone you can afford, and if you have an established job, one which offers a short commute. And don't blow all your weeks surplus on a big friday night out including an expensive cab ride home.
The only trick is being hungry for success in a city that doesn't seem to want to give it to you unless you fight for it.
That's very start-up-y of you. But honestly, just interviewing at a few banks will get you a decent paying job before you move to town. (If you can bear that kind of work.)
Don't know much about other stuff but from what I experienced in England (London area especially), the public transport is unbelievably expensive. I went there for 2 weeks and maybe the biggest part of my expenses was spent on trains/buses/the tube. Especially trains.
This from the point of view of a tourist, though. I guess English citizens have some preferences/reductions?
No particular reductions, though there are a few railcards for certain groups (e.g. <25s, retired) that generally offer a 33% discount. The best way to save money on trains is just to know your way around the labyrinthine system. For example, if you're going to Birmingham, don't catch the crazily expensive Virgin service from Euston; take the London Midland semi-fast, or the Chiltern line from Marylebone.
You use an Oyster card in London and you buy train tickets in advance and after peak hours or arriving to less "main" train stations (like Liverpool Street instead of King's Cross). If you can, you take a National Express/Megabus coach. English, British doesn't matter unless you are an OAP.
I can't imagine why so many people making under 2000 GBP after tax move to London. Especially younger people with no roots anywhere, why on Earth moving here under these conditions?
Part of the problem is the influx of recent young immigrants from other EU countries where they have it even worse and they seem to default to London when many cities in the UK would be much better at least as a starting point.
Because why would you move a thousand miles just to live in Nottingham? World cities such as London have something to offer to everyone, not just professionals with established careers and this is exactly what makes London special and exciting. I remember at the beginning of my career I was living in London on a £25K salary for two years and I was just fine. Don't be elitist.
Firstly Nottingham is fine and there's plenty to do there. But you have places like Bristol, Bath or Manchester where life and especially housing is much cheaper than in London and they have a lot to offer. Personally I like Liverpool as well, Edinburgh, even Newcastle, but for some reason they are not popular and they are deemed as insecure (when in reality, living in a dump in the East end in London is definitely more insecure than living in a cheaper place up North, South-West, Wales, etc anywhere but London and the South-East).
This "London or bust" mentality is not only ignorant - there's a lot to the UK other than London - it's financial suicide for people on low salaries.
> I remember at the beginning of my career I was living in London on a £25K salary for two years and I was just fine. Don't be elitist.
Firstly, I don't know when this was but now you are definitely poor on that salary here in London. And if you have the choice to make a similar salary elsewhere then it's absurd not to do it because of some "The Secret of my Success" pipe dream. You can always move to London later in your career.
Secondly, I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to make absurd decisions. I'm just calling them what they are.
The rent differential alone is higher than the pay differential let alone all the remaining living costs. At the same time, many jobs don't pay more than in other places and yet there are flocks of people coming to do these. Their hardship is the direct result of their poor decision making.
Yeah that's because a lot of people have decided to live in hardship just to remain in London.
Poverty is not (or should not) be a comparative thing to what other people make but a relation of income and living costs.
Around 30-40% of the population struggle to make ends meet in London. Appalling, I know. Another 20-30% just get by without much trouble. The rest have extra to save and spare.
I suspect it's similar in San Francisco and New York but I don't know these cities enough to make a proper comparison.
I was in a similar situation but I was not living in a houseboat slum but was technically squatting for a short while. The reasons people do this is varied - they could be saving up to be able to pay down a deposit to live (and trying to find a decent place here is bad enough!), they could prefer to live 'in' London instead of outside due to the cost of transport and also more opportunities in London and so on. There are other factors as well - for example you had to have a NI and have a bank account to get paid, and to get an NI/bank account you needed a place to stay.
The thing here is that unless you are in the upper-middle income bracket then you are locked in the London rat race. London is good to live in for a few years but in terms of a lifetime here, it's not good or you find 'strategies' in evading council tax.
> Comfortable rooms appear on flatshare websites from time to time, at typical rents of £600 a month in areas such as Richmond.
Even if you are working at minimum wage* you are earning over £900 after tax. Assuming you spend £100 a month to get to work, that's still £200 to spend on food, the pub, whatever else takes your fancy. You could also save more by not trying to live in one of the most expensive areas of London. When I was there (ok nearly two years ago now), I was paying under £400 a month for a rather comfortable (and warm) house share in South Wimbledon. It was zone 3, and took 25 minutes to get to work in central London.
*A 'living wage' of £8.80 has been getting popular over the last few years, I'll use the UK minimum of £6.31 though. Also, yes I understand not everyone can get a full-time job, but bear with me for sake of argument.
That would require many landlords to cut the rent, reducing profit; it's not uncommon for people to be paying half or more of their income on the rent.
Not in my experience. The requirement of 6 weeks' rent as a deposit is, however. I wouldn't be surprised if some ask for 8. This is partly what makes it so difficult to get in to the rental market for some people.
It varies. I only had to pay a month up front, but as others said it depends on the landlord and situation. I believe a month is most common in the UK.
"That middle bit there, as you put it; "....it's depressing how easily you get used to the slugs, the dampness, the cold and the filth".......that's what is counted on. This separation of living standards, it's manufactured. Yes there are some random elements mixed in, but by and large everything is engineered to be this way. Government, banks, housing moguls....they know they have people over a barrell, they know people just have to get on.
They also know that if they keep it this way for long enough, not so awful as to make people revolt but awful enough to serve their greed, people will get used to it. It will become expected. Then people will feel lucky for having the things that should be standard for everyone, not one person excluded.
You are indeed lucky, good Sir, but you feel that way because of what you've been put through. They made the System, and the System has made you this way because that serves a purpose. That purpose is to keep the rich rich, the poor poor and to make everyone believe that that's precisely the way it should be."
That sounds an awful lot like a conspiracy theory.
How about: someone has a boat, and the government lets them moor cheaply in central London. They make money renting it, out of natural human self interest.
I think the thing this article fails to mention is the perfectly adequate Public Transport system there is around London. I would think the number of jobs where you physically have to live in London would be very small. For everyone else there is Tube/Train/Bus/Coaches.
Complaining you have no money because you chose to live in Central London is like complaining you've got no money for food because you spent all your salary on payments on a Ferrari.
This seems a rather odd article, there are many useful sites (particularly in London) that enable you to search for properties in a much smarter way these days, check out the tools on www.findproperly.com , find spare rooms on www.spareroom.com or even act as a property caretaker on www.guardiansoflondon.com
Or even get a tube/train map and not live in London. Plenty of people commute to work and seem to cope OK. Living in London is no more a right than owning a Rolls Royce.
Commuting doesn't actually save you any money in most cases. Transport costs eat most of those savings. The thing that commuting gets you is access to a nice area with nice family homes close to good schools.
The cheapest on the first page is £300/month - about 25% more than the £230/month mentioned in the article. The second cheapest is £360/month - almost 50% more. If you're trying to demonstrate that there are alternative cheap places to rent, I'd say you failed.
And all of those rentals will require at least a month's rent up front, which is the main point that the article was addressing - starting out renting is beyond the pocket of many people.
"Found 43,415 Flatshare, Rooms to Rent ads in London"
Gumtree displays 55 ads per page. So, after looking through ~0.25% of the adverts, you concluded that there was nothing cheaper than £300/month? Wow, that's pretty thorough!
It took me less than five minutes to find a hostel-style roomshare for £7 per night (less than £220 per month).
I stayed in a hostel for £5 each day (3-4 years ago) while in London. Wouldn't that plus a locked container somewhere be cheaper? Surely beats a car or a boat
5 quid sounds unbelievably cheap for a hostel in London. Unless they have some special rule for not letting people stay longer than few days, they would be swamped.
While they're in parliament, MPs can expense mortgage payments on a second home.
This isn't entirely unreasonable - it means you can be elected even if you're not already rich enough to own a second home in London as well as your home in your constituency.
But it does have the unfortunate side-effect that rising London house prices put cash in MPs pockets.
What we need is to do away with expense payments and instead give MPs a per diem, based on today's expenses and rising with CPI. That way, keeping a lid on housing, transport and council tax prices will be in their interests.
MPs get paid over £60,000 per year. If they cannot live on that they need to think about the nurses, teachers, etc who get paid less.
They don't need a second house in London. They do need London accommodation. It is bizarre that millionaire MPs get paid public money in the form of expenses on top of their wages to buy a second home in London.
I can understand expecting MPs to live in their constituency, and also that they need some London accommodation. If you're proposing it could work like a university halls of residence, I agree with that. My thinking with a per diem is any change would need MPs support, and they'd go for a per diem more easily than a cut in their benefits, however deserved it may be.
The origin of paying MPs was in the Chartist movement [1] - back when MPs were unpaid, no-one who relied on a salary to feed their family could get into parliament; only rich landowners who didn't have to work for their income could afford to be MPs. The intent of paying MPs is to allow working class and middle class people to stand for election.
It is also produces a conflict of interests. If they own two homes, why would they have the incentive to make prices affordable for the general population on normal wages.
At the same time the Occupy protests were happening in St Pauls. I secured a short term contract in an investment bank, and stayed in a tent with the protestors while saving for a deposit to rent a room. I had to put on my suit and dash away from the camp in the morning before I was spotted, I'd then change before coming back in the evening. I washed in the local swimming pools.
Looking back on it, it was nuts that I was able to finish my thesis. So yeah, rents are high, you need to know someone to make it in London.