Poor people being priced out

[veggifriedbreakfast]

I live in East London and need to move, I currently rent a 2 bedroom flat. But, looking around now, for a 2 bedroom the minimal is £1400 a month up to £2000 for a 2 bed!!!

It seems to me that what is happening is that actually poor people are being priced out of London. I lived in Stratford and had to move out of there due to the market going up and now where I am again it's happening. How can people on lesser incomes afford this? I am now looking to having to uproot ds again and move even further out because of this. Aibu in thinking that this is a part of forcing the poorer people out of London?

The case of London house prices are the symptoms of the snake eating itself.

House prices as a multiple has made many desirable areas outside of london unachievable to the locals for over a decade.

When we as a country enjoyed houses being more of a commodity than somewhere to live it was inevitable it would turn out like this, the blame lies across all sides of the government all the way down to local councils and NIMBY-ism

Around 1997 the self cert mortgage boom was just starting to go off as well

Although plenty of people still just have one house they live in - my grandparents did, my parents did (over 50 years and died in the house, in the NE), I hope to live here about 40 years in all and only own one house (at a time and won't move again).

I have been scanning my 1983 and 1984 diaries when I fierst started working in London. I did work with law firm partners (so fairly well off people even in those days) and one commuted from Brighton every day; another from Kent, another from Herts, another Cambridge. (One was chiswick and one notting hill). Whilst they had very lovely houses in those places they certainly had a fairly long train ride into work presumably because they could not afford a house in Mayfair or Hampstead even then.

It's interesting as amongst my colleagues at work, thinking back to several (central London based) companies I've worked at, the ones who've moved out of London to get houses with gardens etc in rural Norfolk or Suffolk villages, Kent coast, Sussex countryside etc are all male. Because they have wives who are SAHM, to be at home with the kids - because there's no way both parents could commute and do drop off / pick up. That or they'd have to have live in nannies - and most women don't want their children never seeing BOTH parents during the week.

My female colleagues and friends with families all either live in pokey flats or in rough areas within Greater London, to avoid a 2h commute and enable them to have a career and also share drop-off / pick up with their partner.

So is the proposal that due to chance of birth, a certain group of people should have a right to cheap housing in the richest city in the world?

It's called community.

You might need a dictionary, no one seems to know what it is or give a shit any more

If you only care about money, you might like to know that it saves social services and the NHS billions. The more you break down communities, the greater the burden on our already stretched services.

Community is about much more than living where you are born.

No but it helps.

Well I'll await my subsidised north London house with pleasure then. Meanwhile I'll keep on being part of the community where I actually live.

Wages of the lower paid are definitely not being increased- the supply of workers is just imported. London weighting is only about 5-6k for NHS staff, for example. There are far fewer brits in the London nhs and many foreign staff, who are willing to rent rooms and send money home. Nurse wages have been held for years despite massive shortages. Cleaning, waiting and coffee shop staff are almost all young Europeans in London.

There are whole blocks of new high end flats and rows of houses left completely empty because they’ve been bought by rich overseas investors who don’t even bother to rent them out. This has been going on for years and neither government has done a jot about it.

Housing benefit has done a great deal of damage. Paying the middle market rate made it the new floor, this repeated over many years really raised rates.

Now benefits are cut both poor and middle income earners are really struggling.

Renting should be cheaper than buying, like it used to be. But decades of interference has really messed up the housing market.

We own a home in zone 4 but I worry so much about housing for workers providing the services all Londoners need.

How have successive governments allowed this to happen? It’s a disaster. :-(

It is not just in London though. I live an hours commute from a major London train station and the houses in my once sleepy country town have basically doubled in price in the last 10 years. My own house went up 15% in 3 years. Families have lived here for generations and now their DC can't afford to live near them.

The only plus side for me of living down south near London is the money to be made which I will then take back with me up north. If I had my time again I'd stay up north TBH. They may have less cash but they have more time and better quality of life, less commute and less stress not working to pay a massive mortgage off. Most people I know over 40 who work in London are a couple of episodes off a hospital stay through stress.

I’m confused by the notion that London has always been expensive & only the rich could afford to live/buy here? Of course this is true for certain areas but all zones?

I’m born, raised & educated in SW London. Now my dad had a good job (mum didn’t work) but this allowed them to buy a large 5 bed in a leafy area. Today that would cost you about 2m. I went to school with children of nurses, teachers, police, etc & many of those families only had 1 parent working but they could afford houses in various parts of S London.

In the 80s a house in West Norwood would of been approx 35k, a large flat in Balham similar pricing. Now you have to be on 2 good wages to afford a house in not so great Mitcham. Pretty much everywhere has gentrified on paper.

@bananafish81
This trend seems to hold true wherever big commutes are reasonably common. I think you're right that it's really difficult for families to sustain two FT careers with long commutes without very heavy usage of childcare or extremely high levels of family involvement. The latter may not be an option for many and the former is not palatable for everybody.

I personally think the younger generations should be revolting & feel sorry for them. Higher education & transport costs, lower wages, much harder to get a house (stricter lending) & they are probably going to have to start paying more tax to help the NHS & social care.

I feel huge social unrest when the younger generation work out they will never own a home, have a state pension, retire, NHS when they need it andce ever bigger tax bills to fund others that get these.

There's only so much you can be told you are lazy and entitled before snapping. The fall in the quality of life is going to be very dramatic.

It's true about housing benefit rates skewing the market - and the annual HB bill is something like 25 billion a year.

I've seen episodes of Homes Under the Hammer where landlords have bought a relatively cheap house - almost invariably somewhere in the north - have done it up very cheaply, and later with a gleeful smile told the presenter that they've already let it for a huge yield - I've seen as much as 14% quoted. And it's usually quite clear that they know in advance what rent they can expect, courtesy of HB aka the taxpayer.

If very high yields are possible, it means that HB rates - at least in cheaper areas - are too high. And the only people to benefit are the landlords.

"The banks were deregulated by Labour according to, er, Gordon Brown no less."

No they weren't and that link you provided merely says the banks did not want to be regulated. The main deregulation of UK banks happened in the 1980s under the big bang of the Thatcher era. Brown merely did not introduce more regulation, and extended the powers of the FSA. There was significant pressure from the City and the Tories all throughout the 2000s to deregulate further, but this did not happen.

There was no further deregulation of the banks under Labour and your link doesn't say what you think it does, did you actually read it or just google for the first thing that fit your argument.

Secondly, London's population stopped falling in 1989 and started growing.

"Why tell such an easily exposable lie?"

You didn't expose a lie, tell you what, next time don't correct someone on their area of expertise by trying to find a random google link to correct it, without reading it.

It just makes you look more stupid than you actually are.

Housing benefits don't skew the market because it makes up such a small share of the private rental market, and reacts to rent changes rather than causing them. Only 24% of private renters receive housing benefit, but only 5% had their full rent covered by HB.

What skews the market is the under building of affordable properties to rent.

In 1978 42% of the UK population lived in social housing, its now far smaller, and many of the old social homes are rented back to the market at a far higher rate.

Buying in London has always been more expensive, hence the London weighting that has been on wages since 1920.

It was cheaper in the 1960s to buy in the less desirable places, but what has happened as the population grew is that those places became more desirable. It happened to the area we live in now, no one wanted to live here in the 80's.

It's entirely affordable to live in London when you're child-free, because you can merrily live in a box. The OP is struggling because she has a DS, hence the need for the second bedroom which makes rent suddenly very expensive.

It's not poor people being priced out - it's people with children.

But the thing is the OP has been shown cheaper 2 beds than she quoted the price of.

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-73741721.html

Here is another, but I bet its not in the right location.

As I said people are sniffy.

topcat, that flat doesn't even have a tube station within a mile. You don't know where the OP works. That location might be unfeasible, for reasons completely unconnected with "snobbery".