I pit the stupid fucking over-inflated absolutely obscene housing prices in London. It’s hard enough for DINKs to buy a small flat, but for a family of four living on the salary of one academic it is impossible. With the Olymipcs coming in a few years I can’t see this situation improving. I’m so frustrated I could scream. In fact I think I will.
AAARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!
What’s a DINKs?
Double Income No Kids
Thanks.
My younger brother is trying to buy a new flat in London.
He and his wife are both doctors, no kids, and own a £400k mortgage-free flat in Hampstead.
They can’t afford to move anywhere bigger to start a family.
(Well… actually, they can’t afford anywhere bigger in Hampstead so I have limited sympathy.
We moved away from Cambridge due in part to house prices - the midlands is bad enough, but we’re pretty much priced out of anywhere south of Peterborough.
I can’t understand why anyone would choose to live in London - revolting place!
By choice I certainly wouldn’t live in London. We moved from the south-east (Kent) many years ago to the very much cheaper East Midlands although it was well before the housing boom so the sale of my parents’ house in Kent realised enough money to buy a bigger house in a decent part of Nottingham’s suburbs.
My mother sold the house a couple of years ago and made a very good profit on it, at least it will be enough to keep her in her old age as she’s investing it wisely. My brother’s wife had a flat in Enfield which they sold after the birth of their child, in order to buy a house in another part of Enfield - sadly they’ve mortgaged themselves so deeply that there’s no reserve left for improvements to the property which is in dire need of a lot of things.
I consider myself very lucky, although I don’t live in a particularly nice area of a nice city, I live in a mortgage-free house that we are slowly and steadily renovating. It was a complete shell when it was originally bought - no carpets, no heating, no kitchen, a bathroom the army barracks would consider luxurious, no wallpaper, no insulation…
Why do I get the feeling that the Great Lakes region of the United States is the last part of the world with affordable housing prices?
Nope, there’s lots of affordable property in the UK too. It’s mostly just a few areas that are priced beyond all reason.
But for some reason, suggest to Londoners that they might want to consider looking at moving to somewhere a bit cheaper and they get very upset.
It’s a good example of borked supply and demand. You have a city with massively inflated, probably unsustainable property prices, and yet people are still prepared to mortgage themselves beyond all sane levels (with lenders offering up to 6 times salary) to live in a tiny house or apartment. Go figure.
Londoners seem to believe that there’s no sustainable life outside the M25.
It’s one of the reasons I left the country. Commuterville was spreading as far as Oxford, and this was 11 years ago.
I’ll moan about house prices here (D.C. area) but that is only in comparison with Nashville. Any time I go back to see my family I realize that I could never live in London. And it isn’t just the housing. Everything seems so expensive to me (and that was before $2 to 1 UKP).
It’s true that London prices are far higher than practically everywhere else (and the South-East of England is in turn generally pricier than other regions).
Here is a property for sale in London:
It’s the most expensive house currently for sale in the UK - and its asking price has been rising steadily (not an error, I did mean “rising”), from an initial £30 million to its current (word-of-mouth) £50 million. Toprak Mansion, on The Bishop’s Avenue, is a faux-plantation style home, built for Turkish industrialist Halis Toprak. Measuring an immodest 28,000 square feet (not including guest and servant quarters), it has a whole bunch of tasteful features, including a dining room to seat 40, an underground driveway, two acres of water features and a glass lift.
I moved out of London years ago and was able to buy a bigger property in the East Midlands. I know I will never be able to afford to move back.
Gradually the regions outside London become commuter areas (and their prices duly rise). Peterborough, for example, takes 55 minutes by express train to London and the morning trains are packed with commuters.
I certainly don’t agree with e-logic that London is revolting. There are masses of restaurants, theatres, museums, historic buildings, interesting walks, markets and specialist shops.
It’s too expensive to live there, but it’s great to visit.
If only it were that simple. For many people the choice is between working in London or not working (in their chosen profession).
I lived there under the most perfect circumstances in the 1970s. I was able to rent a flat a couple of streets away from Portobello Road. I found out later that the only reason we were rented the place was because the ageent assumed we were Aussies. Well, in reality I am, having lived here since I was 2 but since I was born in Doncaster I still travel on my British passport. In some way that I never understood this prevented them kicking us out when they did up the building. All the other tenants (mostly French) disappered real quick.
There was so much to do in London that I had to take rest days and let my wife go out alone. We were there for 2 years but I could have spent many more wandering around.
Although we Americans probably don’t realize it, many countries are like this. London, Paris, Tokyo - all of these countries have, basically, one city with 10% of the national population. That means that virtually everything happens at the point of concentration - the best industries, the biggest opportunities. The U.S. or Chinese spread-out civilization has very different consequences for housing prices. Or at least, they do where rent-control doesn’t exist (as it does in New York. Sometimes, you get markets so flush that prices shoot up way beyond what people can afford (like the L.A. area), but most cities are affordable.
Prices are pretty silly here too (check location) but they’re out of control mental in London. My house has gone up in “value” over £100k in five years, my parent’s house in a London suburb is probably values at £400k+.
What’s the threshold/rate for inheritance tax these days?
Make that rhetorical, wikipedia says threshold is £285k rate 40%.
The average house in Bromley is more than that.
Are you kidding? About New York, at least? Because even with rent control, housing prices here are pretty obscene. I don’t know how it compares with London, but New York has to be the priciest city in the US. Friends of mine who have moved here from LA and the Bay Area agree. I’m moving somewhere else sometime this year–something’s got to give!!
Millit, you’re right that Manhattan housing prices are obscene (for instance, friends of mine live in a 2-bedroom, 800-sq ft apartment on West 51st, and pay $7K a month rent. Other friends, on the other hand, live in a comparable apartment in Brooklyn for $2K). But even New York has only about 3% of the nation’s population. If you need to work in a “big city” you can go to LA, San Francisco, Chicago, or anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard as your first tier of choices–Austin, Houstin, Omaha, Detroit, etc etc list goes on interminably for other options.
Historically, in England, EVERYTHING happens in London. There is nowhere else.
Not that things might not have changed–I sort of lose track of the social history in England after 1938.
Exactly.
Some people act as if you can just pick up your job and move it with you. Places like London and New York don’t just attract people because they’re fun places; they attract people because that’s where the jobs are.
In our increasingly electronic society, there are jobs you can do from just about anywhere, but the fact is that most people still need to physically drag their asses in to their place of work. And if your place of work is in London, then commuting from South Yorkshire or Shropshire is going to be a bit difficult.
Conversely, many of the places with low real estate prices have such low prices because there’s not as much demand to live there. And part of the reason for this is that there are often very few jobs. If you can find a job in one of these cheaper areas, then you can do very well. But just leaving London (or New York, or whatever), moving to a cheaper area, and hoping you find a job, often won’t work.
My sister and her family moved from a high-price area (Sydney, Australia) to a lower-price area (North Coast of NSW, near Coffs Harbour) a few years ago. They sold their suburban Sydney house and bought a larger place about a block from the beach in their new town. They love the lifestyle there, it’s cheaper and less crowded, and it’s a great place to raise kids. But the only reason they could do this was that her husband’s company happened to have a job opening for that region. There’s no way they could have just sold the house and moved without the job, because many of those coastal and country towns have double-digit unemployment rates, often getting up into the 20 and 30 percent range.
I have to ask just what profession it is which can only be practiced in London?
As a rural American, I was stunned by the housing prices in London. I actually saved a newspaper ad to show my friends back home. It pictured a tiny* run-down and rather unattractive house that was listed at hundreds of thousands of pounds. The same property would be lucky to fetch $30,000 in my neck of the woods.
A few years ago, Hubby and I bought a nearly 3000 square-foot brick house for $150,000. I brought out the ad again when Hubby grumbled a bit about the property being overpriced. We don’t know how lucky we are.
- By American standards, of course.