To think London will become a ghostown

[dearreme]

People of my parents age could get a nice house in zone 2 on one wage. People of my age if they bought 10 or so years ago could get a little flat on two full time wages. And of my friends any that didn't buy have now left for other cities or are planning an exit.

Younger people I work with now are planning on never even moving to the city as they know the quality of life is so much better in other cities.

What will happen to london? It seems like much of K&C has been purchased by people as a store of money and is left empty.

Less jobs are apparently being created now, with employers favoring other locations in europe or the UK.

The problem with spending up to your max on a fixer upper is that you have no money to do the fixing up. In a falling market there is a high risk the bottom falls out of the fixer upper market first. There are hardly any flats (or 300 or so depending on your pov) at £250k in London. However there are thousands and thousands at around £500k - the second they become more affordable to rent or buy or HTB or shared ownership no-one is going to want a fixer upper at the bottom end on the outskirts.

There is a thread running in property assessing the merits of a £480k shared ownership in Canada Water. The Op could afford a £250k mortgage but is thinking about a £120k 25% share of a £480k instead. The sums are about the same. However they end up with much less exposure to a falling market and get to live somewhere nice centrally.

Xenia one of the reasons Docklands was affordable in the early 90s was that living centrally wasn't fashionable in the way it is now. Even then we did pull the not so occasional all-nighter but when I left London I found it hard to adjust to normal working hours being 5.30 rather than 5 and being expected to do actual work on a Friday afternoon.

In the 90s large parts of Central London were deserted at weekends and holidays. Living centrally felt like a well kept secret. - Before Docklands I lived close enough to Selfridges to do my food shop there- back in the days when they had a decent food hall - mostly went to Berwick Street or just ate out at the Stockpot though

London population was about 6.5m in the 90s which is why I think capacity is lower than the current 8.5m but probably not by much. I think there is a lack of money to support current property prices but not a lack of people or infrastructure. Therefore in answer to the Op prices falling seem more likely than hollowing out of the population.

I remember getting taught at school
during the 90s that people wanted to live in the green belt & inner city living was not desirable. My dad was unusual at his work in that he lived in zone 2/3. I think they only ended up there as when he started work he ended up in a house share in Clapham with other colleagues. As he was an immigrant when it came to buying it made sense to
stick with what he knew & he needed access to the northern line.

My friend has just been approved for a £400,000 mortgage with a £30,000 Deposit and £100,000 additional loan from the government for buying new, her salary is £19k her husbands £55k, the repayments for the mortgage (over 35 years) work out £400 less than the rent they are currently paying so its affordable but a scary amount to borrow

We took on £500k loan to move here and later I owed £1.3m (never divorce a man who earns a tenth of what you do!)

Jenasaurus 35 years though, not so bad if your 20 but quite scary.

Xenia eek, that must hurt.

I survived it and I was very very keen to give him a clean break (he wanted maintenance for life on top). I hope to work for myself until I die so I can manage. Slightly off topic but it was quite hard to sit there and decide when is the marriage so bad you will give most of what you've worked for for 20 years together to be rid of that person - nearly £1m - feels like kind of blood money and to pay when the person is in the wrong is pretty nasty of divorce law - they are kind of paid for having done wrong).

Xenia that’s awful, i’m such a hypocrite in that i do think a mother should be entitled to maintainance etc & that a SAHM should be seen as contributing to a fathers success. However I hate the idea of giving away anything I worked for if DH left me.

Howeverxenia it would have been exactly the same as if he earned what you did and you earned what he did.
It must be tough to pay but the court decided he needed that money.

We both worked full time. the court didn't decide anything as we negotiated it between us. the unfairness is mot that he got 59% particuarly but that we both work full time with no career sacrifice and secondly that he doesn't see or help with the children and doesn't pay any of their costs so in a usual situation you mighrt have mother does loads of childcare and is paid by the man . In my situation he chooses not to see them, no help with them (I work full time), I paid him and he pays nothing. Anyway it doesn't matter now the youngest are teenagers and he has an unmortgage 4 bed detached near us and a lot of savings and I have no savings but at least I am rid of him.

Anyone else click on this thread thinking it was about streets being deserted this afternoon due to the football?

I live in Nantwich (just outside of Crewe), so NW England. Loads of companies from London and the Home Counties have moved up here as we now have great transport links, it’s cheap and loads of people ready to work (invasion of Polish and Romanians looking for jobs).

YABU.

But I’d be happy for it to be a bit less crowded.

I am 55, left London because all I could afford was a room in a rented house. I met plenty of people in fairly decent jobs also living in rented rooms. House prices were cheaper, but it was very hard to get a mortgage and anyone renting a house paid more than a mortgage would have cost.
OP your parents must have been in very good jobs.
Also worth noting that many areas that are now desirable to buy, used to be crime ridden. I know someone who bought a house in West Ham and most people thought they were crazy to have bought a house there at the time. They got constantly broken into and their car constantly vandalised.

London is a ghost town and has been in some areas for many years.

It is deceiving because the hordes of people you see during the day are either commuters or tourists. But I have family living in parts of Central London and the apartment blocks they live in have, at most, a 10 percent inhabitancy rate at any one time. After a certain time, usually 8pm-ish, the streets are totally dead: no lights, no movement, no nothing.

As a pp said, London is very much like Venice now: rammed during the day, but hardly anyone lives there. It's noticeable in other areas that, for example, lost their primary schools years ago. DH's old primary school was closed in the 90s and has never been replaced and there's now next to no children living in that rather substantial area of residential London housing.

Another thing I notice these days are the pubs. You never used to be able to get into a pub in zone one in the 90s after about 4pm, let alone find a seat. But these days, places are quiet. Really quiet.

Seriously? Well, clearly there’s an awful lot of tourists deciding to hit the sites from their hotels in zone 2 in the rush hour, if the two stations I use the most (one mainline, one tube) are anything to go by.

My area depopulated massively after the war, huge Victorian school buildings left empty or used for different things. In the last 5 years the school aged population has boomed and they’re being brought back into use.

Maybe central London pubs are quieter because there’s more places to go nearer to home? The number of bars and pubs here (old nigh-on dead pubs being given a new lease of life), and restaurants too, that have opened in recent years is staggering. Young people travel across town to hang out here, which I find extraordinary!

Different areas boom and deflate at different times. Doesn’t mean London is a ghost town, unless you think London is central, west and maybe north only.

Pubs have suffered major decline because of the smoking ban. I thought so many london offices had been converted to housing the move was the other way - more people fewer businesses and inner London primary schools full to bursting including because of much needed baby boom from new arrivals in the UK with very large families; we certainly out here in zone 5 have a lot of people and more over crowding and even beds in sheds than any other London borough - that partly will have been people like us in 1984 doing the same today - small house in zone 5 rather than 1 bed flat further in.

I lived in London in the late 80s and DH and I very nearly bought a flat in a not very popular area costing £90,000. I worked for a blue chip company whose financial adviser managed to swing a deal for us more than we would have got anywhere else. I don't remember now why we got cold feet, but that was the point where mortgages rates went up to 15% , and we would have been in a scarey amount of negative equity. In 1988 we were paying £600 in rent for a one bed flat in north London.

Thank god we didn't do it, we moved back to NI and bought a 3 bed semi for £28.5, and we have lived in a 4 bed detached for the last 20 years.

But how many 4 bed detached would you have been able to afford if you had that flat now

"I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 'A Study in Scarlet', 1887)

London's gravitational pull hasn't changed for 130 years - can't see it changing any time soon!

@river

Take out shared ownership and retirement homes and you have 200 two beds for 250,000 and under, a load of those being ex councils/ cash buys, and a few house boats!

And even for that you'd need high earnings - 60k if single, or two people earning above average salary working full time.

Er, no way!

"60k if single, or two people earning above average salary working full time."

Buying in London when single has been very difficult for a long time.

Two people earning the London average earn over 60k.

You know what made the difference in the 60s and 70s? that 42% of the UK population lived in social housing, higher in London.

Buying in London was easy for boomer generations, my parents were even given a grant to move into Camden.

Now even bankers can't afford non prime London like Fulham.

With technology and more companies avoiding London it probably will just end up full of day trippers and workers.

Well, with news from the Governor of the Bank of England that they're stress testing 30% house price drops, perhaps London will become a little more affordable in the next few years. I hope so, for our children's sake.