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?

(Not to mention the fact that it is clearly so far from east London where the OP currently lives that she would still have to uproot her son and send him to a different school if she moved there. With no guarantee that she wouldn't then be priced out of that flat within two years. Which is, if I read the OP correctly, exactly what she is complaining about.)

possibly, although as it is London there will be buses ( evenings and Sundays too, imagine!) and there are three stations within 20 mins walk. hardly isolated.

When I win the lottery I'm going to buy some apartment buildings in the very centre of London and rent them out dirt cheap 😁

That was a totally irrelevant last post by me, lol.

yanbu.

Yes but unless those stations are on lines which actually go to useful places (like where the OP works), moving to that flat could well mean the OP would have to change jobs or commute for hours to get to work (in addition to moving her son out of his current school).

In which case, there doesn't seem to be much point staying in London at all.

That flat is within 1 mile of 3 different overground stations, all of which get you to 7 sisters in 5 minutes.

Edmonton is North East London.

There have been other flats shown to the OP in different areas below the price she quoted.

Long term private renting has always carried a bit of risk to it, which is why it was better prior to right to buy when 42% of the UK population ( higher in London) lived in social housing.

But there are 3 railway stations within 10-20 minutes walk and no doubt bus routes too.

It's right on the North Circular, which probably isn't a great location, but it would be brilliant if the OP worked in the hospital that's pretty much on the flat's doorstep.

To those of us outside London, 3 railway stations within a short walk is pretty much an impossibility.

But agree we need more social housing that is secure and affordable with priority people who work locally in low to averagely paid jobs.

Oh OP yanbu. Come to Derby. We moved here from London and haven't looked back.

I lived outside London and I was 1.5 miles from the nearest station (there was only one nearby). But that station took me directly into a major terminal and from there it was only a short walk to my office. And, more importantly, I wasn't at risk of being priced out of where I was living, because I wasn't privately renting, and in any case, I didn't have children so the consequences of being forced to move wouldn't have been anywhere near as severe as they are for the OP.

London is vast, and if you have to change trains or tubes several times to get to work, it can easily take as long to get to work as it took me to get in from 40 miles away.

I don't think it's very helpful to post Rightmove links to flats in random parts of London when you don't know the OP's circumstances.

We know she is concerned about having to uproot her son and move him to a different school. Realistically, unless she stays pretty close to where she is now, he can't stay in the same school. So if she moves to a random part of London where the rent is cheaper, it is going to disrupt his education, his friendships and potentially his childcare arrangements.

And nobody is acknowledging the issue that even if the OP does as you are suggesting and moves to a random flat in North London because the rent is cheaper, (with all the associated cost and hassle of moving such as agency fees, finding another deposit before you've got your old one back, fighting to get your old one back because letting agents are invariably arseholes, removal costs, time off work etc etc etc), in a year or two she could find herself priced out of that area and in exactly the same situation again.

Where does it stop?

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-65684398.html

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-71062151.html

There you go, East Ham, second one is big and near a park, 0.8 miles to Upton Park tube.

Or again... being sniffy?

There's no point reasoning with you topcat, because you refuse to even acknowledge that there is a problem.

"it can easily take as long to get to work as it took me to get in from 40 miles away."

That's London, very few people live on the doorstep of work. Even getting the bus to work a short journey can take 40 mins because of traffic.

The fact is that private renting has always been precarious in the UK because we don't have a system of long term letting like they do in Europe.

You keep saying that we don't know the OPs circumstances and its true, but it has always been expensive to get private rents when you have a very specific list of requirements ( on this tube line, near this school, within x distance of my friends etc) because of course you will not be the only one who has these.

Those kind of things aren't "a very specific list of requirements", they are the kind of requirements that everyone has when looking for a place to live for very obvious reasons.

A very specific list of requirements would include things like, "must have a south facing garden, a downstairs toilet which is separate from the main bathroom, no wood chip wallpaper and be less than half a mile from the nearest Cafe Nero".

I don't even know what point you think you're making. You're admitting in your own posts that renting privately is precarious. The vast majority of people who privately rent in the UK are not doing it out of choice - they would far rather be able to own their own home or have a council house. But successive governments have made that impossible for them and now they and their children are paying the price (notably in terms of stability, education and quality of life).

Let's not mince our words here. It's shit, and it's unfair. It doesn't have to be this way, but stupid government policy, the greed of investors, and people pulling the ladder up behind them have made it so.

Young people in particular need to start getting really, really angry. They have been completely screwed over and when they complain that it's not fair they get called entitled. (Usually by the luckiest generation in history.)

God the resentment and moralizing on this forum is beyond words.

London is crowded and expensive because people want to pile in to live and work there. Should we have internal passports saying where we are allowed to live, as in the old Soviet Union?

I bet you're a homeowner, eh Ethylred?

Hb is claimed on 24% of rental properties but it doesn't affect the market what the fuck thats a huge influence!

"Hb is claimed on 24% of rental properties but it doesn't affect the market hmm what the fuck thats a huge influence!"

76% of properties therefore do not have HB which is a bigger influence on the market.

If only 5% of properties have full HB then it isn't determining price, and other factors, like shortage of supply are more important.

They are a very specific set of requirements in a large city, if you only have a radius of a mile or so it means that the list of available property is extremely small and that you are probably competing with others for them, hence the prices increase.

"It's shit, and it's unfair. "

I agree, but the main thrust of this entire thread is that London is too expensive, I've pointed out repeatedly that there are places to rent within the budget of the OP in lots of different areas.

You countered with the fact that they had DC and needed to be close to XYZ, and I said that having a specific set of requirements always does make renting more difficult.

It is shit, and unfair, but after 1980 or so renting in London has ALWAYS been difficult especially long term. BUT there are also plenty of people in London who currently get the train to school with their kids, loads of people making long bus journeys etc. Lots of us who have done so in the past too.

You can't compare the 1980s to today.

As other PP have pointed out, in previous years it was possible for ordinary families with ordinary jobs to have houses in London. Today it simply isn't.

You can't blame the extreme price rises in recent years on organic factors such as immigration. Yes, supply and demand, blah blah blah, but that's not the full picture.

When you have entire neighbourhoods in central London which are like ghost towns and luxury flats in Nine Elms sitting empty because prime central London real estate has been bought up and left empty by global elites looking for somewhere to shelter their laundered cash, and developers are only interested in building luxury apartments for foreign investors which local people can never afford to live in, there is a problem. It is a problem of government policy, and it is a problem which could be alleviated if the political will were there.

But it isn't, and so the problem will continue until the situation is simply unsustainable. When will that point come? When there are no longer any teachers or nurses left in London? When people start rioting? I don't know what the trigger will be, but so much pressure has built up that the current situation is unsustainable and sooner or later something will cause it to collapse.

It is possible, as has been shown by the number of links thrown up here.

Foriegn owners make up about 5% of the entire London market, its very small, places like 9 Elms were never going to be for "ordinary" people anyway so that's a very bad example.

There are plenty of ordinary people in London, yes its expensive, yes things have changed since the 1980s but there are plenty, in fact the majority of people here are very ordinary families getting by.

Life is harder when you are a single parent, it is anywhere, its made harder in private rentals by the instability, it is anywhere!

Houses;, topcat, I said houses.

Me: In previous years it was possible for ordinary families with ordinary jobs to have houses in London.
You: You are wrong because I posted some links to two bedroom flats that are available to rent.

The point I am making is that there is absolutely no correlation between what an ordinary person could buy or rent in London in the 1980s and what they could buy (probably nothing) or rent in London now.

So talking about how it was hard in the 1980s too is chuffing ridiculous.

*76% of properties therefore do not have HB which is a bigger influence on the market.

If only 5% of properties have full HB then it isn't determining price, and other factors, like shortage of supply are more important.*

How can you draw a conclusion that when 1/4 of rentals receive HB it doesn't affect the market?

That's fucking huge with drastic affects for the whole sector.

The OP was talking about two bedroom flats.

It was hard in the 1980s, private rents in good condition were difficult to come buy. Buying was easier, but only in areas that people weren't keen on living in and have been totally transformed in a short amount of time.

Do you remember what Queens Park/Kilburn and Cricklewood were like in the 80's? These were not desirable areas with good amenities, but very rough round the edges with quite high levels of crime ( far higher than it is today anywhere in London). These are the places where people bought who were very ordinary back then, and yes it took two incomes to get there.

Ordinary families with ordinary jobs have always made compromises in London and it has never been easy.

Yes its harder for a single parent, but a single parent on one income would have found it hard in the 80s too.

"How can you draw a conclusion that when 1/4 of rentals receive HB it doesn't affect the market?"

Because three quarters of the sector doesn't which is a far higher influence on the market. Also how much of that 3 quarters of the sector do not accept HB? A large amount.

HB is not as big an influence as you are making out.

God, there's just no reasoning with some people.

I have a theory that people who are not overly affected by the housing crisis because they are older and/or bought their own homes at a time when things were less crazy will go to any lengths to pretend that either things are not so bad now or that they were always this bad out of some deep-seated guilt that they are OK but so many other people are completely screwed.