Apocryphal prostitute-killer?
Alas, recent events have shown that you can do this job in the regions.
Media, advertising and investment banking are pretty London-centric, but there are very few people who can only do this work and absolutely nothing else.
I guess there may be some academics who require the research facilities at a specific London university, but I am always slightly suspicious of people who say they “have” to live in London…
Last year, 'im indoors took on a contract based in London which he argued could have been done from home. However, the person he was working for insisted that he worked in their office due to the “delicate nature of the project”. So he moved into bed and breakfast accommodation in Leytonstone because it was outside the centre of London and was the most reasonably-priced place he could find.
His reasoning was that although he was getting a stonkingly huge daily rate to be working there, what was the point in wasting the majority of it on city-centre accommodation? So he lived out in Leytonstone, commuted in by train/tube every day and eventually persuaded his employer to let him work from home one day a week. He used to come home on a Friday night and stay for the weekend, work from home on Monday and then travel back to London on Monday evening.
Far better than having to live down there full-time. Now he’s been approached about a contract in Wigan…
It’s like suggesting to a New Yorker that they move to Scranton, or that an Angeleno should consider moving to Palmdale*. It often boils down to a choice of chronic tenanthood in the place where you want to be, or affordable homeownership in a place where you don’t want to be.
*I was going to say Lancaster but realized it might be confusing since we’re talking about England. That would be a damn long commute to L.A.
Palmdale’s getting expensive now. Must be depressing to live in nowheresville and still pay through the nose for it.
People actually buy houses in Bakersfield(!) now, and commute to jobs in the Valley.
I thought this was the most expensive home in the UK currently for sale. Just for background it was all over the national press a few years ago and they still haven’t found a buyer. I can’t think why. I suppose Mr Abramovich wouldn’t miss £75 million - it’s only a few weeks profit for him.
(it’s the first house on the slideshow)
http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/24/cx_sc_0724homeslide_top.html?thisSpeed=6000
I’m not sure who to pit out of that, but somebody can fuck off and die
The whole city of New York doesn’t have the most expensive housing in the U.S. That honor belongs to San Francisco. Boston often comes out as number 2 depending on how and when they compare. New York is usually in the top 3 but not the most expensive. Manhattan alone is expensive but that is because it a geographically dense island. Actually, geographic compactness goes a long way to explain why San Francisco and Boston are so expensive as well. In other cities, housing just sprawls out into open land as housing prices put pressure on the market. You can end up with cities like Chicago and Dallas where the city is 40 - 50 miles across but housing prices aren’t that outrageous because they have the space to sprawl.
I thought you Brits just “managed” somehow
It’s shocking how centralised the UK is. I’m a recent Oxford grad an I’d guess that over 70% of my classmates now live there - especially those making careers in the media, the law, politics, the civil service or banking. There is simply nowhere else to be.
Those friends in banking in particular laugh at the prices, but junior level salaries in the media or political networking/think tanks/googling are often well below £20k, and more like £15k.
And those who don’t live in London usually aren’t those pursuing careers: many of them are at universities elsewhere in the UK, or internationally.
London is it. With prices to match, sadly.
Cymro
More employers need to move out of London. I don’t like megapolises, so I consciously moved to another not-so-large city when I graduated from university, but most of the jobs I was interested in were in London (media and voluntary sector). I was lucky enough to get work in an organisation with its HQ in a third, even smaller city, but this is the exception rather than the rule, and property prices are no breeze in this city either. Quality of life (being able to walk or cycle to work, or at worst take a short bus ride) more than made up for it.
Actually, rent control has the net effect of increasing housing prices. The “problem” is that landlords and builders are not stupid. They won’t make places available if they cannot charge the market rate for them and increase it as inflation and the market increase. Which in turn means they don’t build more stuff and in turn means fewer places to live. So the owners have strong reasons (like bankruptcy) to avoid improving their facilities in any way, and never build new additions, and, on average, housing gets tighter and tighter.
What does this mean? Will they leave property they own empty, and receive no rent, rather that accept controlled rent? How is this a good investment decision?
Accepting rent control can be dangerous for owners because they can be stuck with it for the long-term if they let someone move in who qualifies. It would be safer in many cases just to let some units sit empty while they figure out something else. There are always other options such as converting it to a different type of houses like condos for example. Mainly the just don’t build new housing however which does, in fact, cause rents to rise in other housing as the market gets constricted.
Huh. Perhaps a quarter of my fellow graduates, who I know of now, are in that dirty shithole. Which isn’t far off being proportional. I’ll accept that there’s some specific fields where London dominates. For everything else, there’s huge opportunities elsewhere.
My officemate lives in Corona and we work in El Segundo, 53 miles away. At least he does take a bus so it’s not as bad a grind as driving it every day would be.
I look at the real estate pages most Sundays and find that there is housing in L.A., though it might not be what you’d call a dream house. It won’t be as big as what you would get in Palmdale, or it might even have to be a condo. IMO a lot of the notion of obscene housing prices here is based on the idea that a suburban lifestyle is a birthright, a cultural artifact of America which really took off after World War II, but probably has deeper roots in the centuries-old concept of cities as loci of wickedness. Which I’m grateful for, because when I’m ready to buy a loft or condo in town, it won’t be as expensive as otherwise.
Have you ever left your wallet at work, Spectre?
Can you clarify this, please?
And no. I’ve been known to leave divers things in divers places–my spring break of hosteling through Western Europe during my college days was well marked by a trail of lost umbrellas–but I’ve never left my wallet at work.
Question for UK Dopers: did the “London Allowance” ever get up?
Sydney is experiencing similar problems - it’s insanely expensive to live within any reasonable distance of the city centre, and still very expensive to live further out. Traditional 1950s working class cottages an hour from the city can go for half a million dollars. Downtown retail square footage places Sydney in one of the world’s five most expensive, putting us up there with London and Tokyo (no cite, sorry).
So we heard the Brits were considering a “London Allowance” which would be a salary loading for blue collar workers, and there was talk of a “Sydney Allowance”. The argument is that although you shouldn’t really need to get paid more if you make the voluntary decision to move to an expensive place, large expensive cities like London and Sydney, whose inner areas are dominated by high-income professionals, still need street sweepers, postmen, cops, teachers, nurses, etc, and many of these people now need to spend four hours a day travelling. A dire shortage of them is predicted, and the allowance was a proposed way of alleviating that.
I must admit that I get frustrated earning the exact same amount as one of my colleagues in a little country town - but in my case it’s by choice, so I don’t whinge too much.
And you’ve got to consider the fact that there’s bugger all to actually do in small country towns. Of course, in these days of broadband internet and cheap airfares, that’s not an issue if you’ve got a decent job…