Can the last poor* person to leave London please take their kids with them.

[fakenamefornow]

WTAF is going on with house prices? I want to move to London but it seems impossible.

I think Surrey's going to be next to remove all traces of the poor.

• By poor I mean anyone on average income or below, so actually, just not rich.

(I'm talking about as upcoming generations)

I lived in London for approx 10 years. Moved out 2 years ago because I couldn't afford it. Me and DH both had reasonable jobs- £26,000 and £19,000 respectively. We were paying £700 a month for a single room.
We were thinking about children but couldn't work out how to afford another room or for one of us to stay home and care for it. (In the immidiate short term i mean- not SAHM as a lifestyle)
Well actually I could work out how we would do it- but I didn't like it. Housing Benefit and Tax credits basically.
But the income tapers are so vicious- normal working class jobs leave you only marginally better off than if you were on Income Support.
I have done numerous "better off calculations" for people living in London and sadly had to advise many of them that they would be better off on benefits.
Because, if you are earning a normal wage and renting in London, you never quite get to the point where you can afford your rent without Housing Benefit topping it up. The very marginal increase in income is then often swallowed up entirely by the massive cost of transport to and from work.
We would have been bringing up Ds at benefits level- with all the stress and difficulty that implies.
Its all very well to say "Move somewhere you can afford" but rich people can't live in a city all by themselves. They need nurses and street cleaners and people to serve them in shops. How are those people living? Fucking hand to mouth. In London I met people renting the use of a single room during the night, which they shared with someone working a day shift. I met people who had three jobs and slept on the bus between shifts. I knew numerous families where the Mum and Dad worked alternate shifts and saw each other for perhaps 5 minutes a day, in order to pass the children between them.
Its worse now as well because Council Tax Benefit has been reduced, Housing Benefit has been capped and the price of utilities is higher.
So now we live in Glasgow. We bought an ex council flat for £50,000 and live the life of Riley.
When i lived in London I used to go on about the lovely museums and parks and arty films at the BFI and yadda yadda yadda as well. But life is so, so much better now we don't live there.
One thing I didn't realise till i moved out- that slight hostility you feel off of strangers? That edge? Its what the stress coming off of 8 million people trying to get by feels like.

We're off soon I hope. Both higher rate tax payers but can only afford a flat with a tiny garden. We're looking at commuter towns and as said up thread, we won't get much more for our money. We were lucky to buy in an area that has seen very rapid investment in the last few years so we should just swing a house and garden. The big pull for me though is schools. I want state to be an option but the kids at the local secondary scare me never mind sending DD there. Yes, there are excellent state schools in London but the catchments are in meters and the house prices around them reflect that.

Dashoflime

I'd also say glasgow has it's share of quality art galleries, museums and theatres and it's all so much more accessible. London is so relentlessly crowded. I like London to visit but I love glasgow.

SybilRamkin - where is the lovely place you speak of in zone 3 for 250k

And 3 bed ?!? Wow

a friend of mine bought a 3 bed in Plaistow for around 260k last month.

Is that a nice area then?

I got my first flat in Herne Hill for £80k in 1997. Sold it for £200k in 2004. Been saying the bubble will burst for years now, and no sign of it, not in London at any rate. I reckon I would need £750k to even get within a sniff of a small Victorian terrace in Brixton now.

It's going to have to be one almighty 'correction' to bring the market back to anything approaching sanity.

I think it's terrible the way ordinary people are being squeezed out of London. Rough areas being colonized by gentrification, OK areas becoming entirely unaffordable, the better off being serviced by people in substandard and ridiculously expensive accommodation. Where the hell are people on average wages meant to live, let alone below average?

Townships edam

I think south East London and maybe the outskirts of walthamstow are still vaguely affordable? Small workers houses though IMO. I think it's really sad actually that the most important city is effectively off limits for most if they want to buy which, let's face it, is the British dream given the lack of security for tenants.

I grew up in a nice centralish (zone 2/3) part of London and my parents had good jobs but nothing remarkable. They bought a flat first in the 1970s when it was considered a very ordinary area and then bought again, a good size house, in the 1980s. My dad sold it recently for crazy money. I'm embarrassed to even say! I think it was bought by a GP and a City finance worker who were refugees from Notting Hill!

I'd love to live close by so my children can really know their grandad (widowed) but it's never going to happen without serious sacrifices and a real downsizing. So we live 2 hours away and my children will obtain a dodgy accent but IMHO the quality of life is better and more relaxed.

As an example of the escalation of prices, I remember about 15 years ago when we moved I looked at 1 bed flats at the Barbican out of interest as we worked near there. The flats were a similar price to the 2 bed terrace house we eventually bought out in zone 6. A one bed flat in the Barbican is now £700,000 and our old terrace house would be worth about £250,000.

Absolutly TheBogQueen! Glasgow has loads going for it!
I just meant that, when I lived in London, I used to buy into the whole idea that its this world class city and the privilege of living there is worth the hardship. It really isn't true though. Its just something we told ourselves.

I go to London for work quite a lot Although I live elsewhere in the country. I often see jobs in coffee shops, restaurants etc advertised, these would be minimum wage or thereabouts, so how do they get staff when the cost of living in London is so high??

A council estate near where I grew up has just been redeveloped by the local council. It needed knocking down it was a soul sucking concrete jungle. But it was also a community.

It has been developed into 'Kidbrooke Park' part if the 'Blckheath Quarter' but many old tenants were decanted away to Erith and Thamesmead - these are the 'affordable' areas now.

I can almost respect that as honest social cleansing Bog

It's fine Laurie.

Depends what you are used to, it is not Knightsbridge

Potato be honest, it's fecking Plaistow. I'm not trying to be rude or start a fight, but the fact that anyone is paying as much as that to live in Plaistow is highly illustrative of what is happening.

And i say that as someone who lives an equivalent postcode

Gingee, people are living four to a room in shared houses.

I think talk of the bubble bursting is a bit of wishful thinking. It burst big time in 2008 but is now way, way higher than the 06/7 peak. People wouldn't have imagined the prices being achieved now back then. As long as people don't need to sell, the investment is safe. For many professions London is the place of highest levels of employment so redundancy is often not quite as damaging as elsewhere - 2 of our friends were made redundant during the credit crunch, neither were out of work for more than a couple of months. Our friends house has just been sold for double what they paid in 2006. They didn't need to move and so didn't even notice any fall in prices (and they didn't actually fall in a lot of London they just stalled or grew more slowly).

We moved out yonks ago as is seemed so unaffordable, if only we knew!

People keep saying the bubble burst in 2008 but I didn't see it. That's when I came back to London after 4 years away - the flat I bought for £80k in 1997 was now nearly £300k and I couldn't afford it. Not much of a pop on that bubble.

The bubble burst countrywide but it really wasn't that noticeable in London. Houses took longer to sell but then people stopped selling so they didn't sell at a loss and either stayed put or rented their house out which is another factor which protects London house prices, the strong rental market means selling often isn't necessary and people hang to their houses as investments, reducing the stock to buy and pushing the prices up.

Its not a fluke that London prices seem Teflon coated and those who seem to win are those who get that, leap in and hang on. We didn't!

Looks like 40hs a week at minimum wage would net you £989.92 take home a month. £600 for a room in a less than smart shared flat. £100 maybe for bills. £300 left for food, travel and entertainment and clothes etc. Not a great lifestyle but with no children and a shared flat it is possible to exist.