To be irritated by the Londoner exodus to my town?

[thesecondnamegame]

I've been priced out of my Greater Manchester town by the London diaspora. Anybody who knows the area will know which town I mean. My tatty council town centre terrace is worth 300k. A load of Londoners came up after the BBC moved to Manchester. Half the kids in my kid's school's parents are from London and they love to make sure you know that. House prices have become ridiculous and are in a different world to the rest of Greater Manchester. It's ridiculous as it used to be a very unremarkable market town (albiet with not much to it) and now it's gone all 'naice' and I'm having to move 10 miles away because it's reaching the surrounding towns and I simply cannot afford to live here and I want to buy a property. It annoys me, I keep imagining somebody who had a London salary and bought a house in London, sold it, and came up here and bought a house 3 times bigger for the same price as their smaller London home. It just seems like they cheated. There are no school places either, because a lot of the Londoner's chose this particular town for the schools. The catchments are bloody tiny, I know somebody who lives in a village about 4 miles away. The schools in this town are the closest schools. No school would take her child and she ended up having to home educate for months.

All my relatives who bought properties or private rented have had to leave, even those who went to uni and got great jobs.

Manchester folk own most of Cumbria. Lovely places in Devon and Cornwall have succombed to blowins and Kingsand is about 40% second homed
Daughter has a £1.5 million house in a dump called Brixton . Not her fault but she will in ten years or so buy a large chunk of Dorset

Covid has changed everything and pp now want to live differently. Hopefully in time there will be a rebalancing as everything has been much too London focussed for decades

Yep. I hope there will be a rebalancing over time - higher house price growth outside London and hopefully stagnating in London - with wage increases outside London at the same time at least partly keeping pace.

I have no hope that any amount of stagnation in London will put even those mythical London wages on any sort of parity with wage/house price ratios in other parts of the country - it’s too far gone - but it might stop it spiralling further.

Mind you I see no sign of that at this point, London prices are going up just as fast as elsewhere outside of premium properties.

you do not own the place people can move where they like. So can you if you don't like the place now

@TheWaif

They love to let you know they're from London? What would they possibly get out of that?

Yes, what kudos to being a Londoner??

This article says more people move out of Manchester than in. A lot of people move from Manchester to London
www.centreforcities.org/reader/the-great-british-brain-drain-an-analysis-of-migration-to-and-from-manchester/the-nature-of-migration-between-manchester-and-the-rest-of-england-and-wales/

Yes, what kudos to being a Londoner??

Twenty quid says that the people ‘going on about being from London’ are answering the question ‘where are you from’ or ‘where was your kids’ last school’.

People should live wherever they want really. This Great UK is for all of us. Londoners moving elsewhere for more space is reasonable as is people moving from other parts of the country to London for jobs or simply because they want to.

Move on from this anti Londoner rubbish. It’s just nasty. Every single ‘Londoner’ I know originally came from various parts of the Uk - Cornwall, Wales, Northern Ireland, Newcastle - they came to London to get themselves a good job (or any job), work their way up, and found it pretty tough. If they now want to move back to their ‘hometown’ or anywhere else for that matter, to strive for the life they want, why the hell shouldn’t they?
You can’t complain about the South East supposedly being the focus of the UK and lack of investment in other areas but also complain when people bring businesses and money to those other areas.
People are becoming very insular and closed off.

It's the same on the North Norfolk coast aka Chelsea on Sea. No locals can afford the inflated prices that has been caused by the buying of second homes, which prior to the pandemic were ghost villages during the week. There should be a limited number of properties within these small villages that can be used as second homes or clauses allowing locals only. I think the current exodus from the cities is so noticeable because of the sheer numbers now working from home, preferring to look out on countryside rather than buildings. Difficult to see how you can stop that from happening when it's their sole residence

“ My tatty council town centre terrace is worth 300k.”

Sell up, move elsewhere and stop whinging! I mean seriously, you come across as a horribly entitled little brat…. grow up.

If you're talking about Altrincham, it's been expensive for years. My parents are property developers and that was a hot spot years ago. I remember looking at bloody expensive flats with them there where various well-paid actors lived about 20 years ago. The houses only sold cheap if they were in a bad state of repair and once done up the profit margin was pretty good. If you were talking about Salford or somewhere like that, I'd see your point.

I was born and brought up in London.
Sadly I can not afford to live there or bring my family up there. I have some family members still living there who bought property a long while ago but they can’t afford to move as they wouldn’t get anything bigger or better in London for the money. They are effectively stuck in their small shoebox properties. Normal people making normal money have to live somewhere!

All those in Greater Manchester are now moving to Wallasey,

Not all, to be fair. All the sweeping generalisations on this thread aren't helping anyone's credibility.

Yes it's happening everywhere, has been ever since property ownership and cars became dominant and expectation of owning both became the norm. I live in London. I used to live in an area that was very run down, drug dealing and stabbings, people were frightened to visit me. Now it's got craft beers named after it and estate agents assign that area name to neighbouring areas falsely. A Hollywood star has a second home there. I moved a couple of miles further out and locals here are angry about the "push out" incomers. It's not the incomers fault. Thatcher policy of selling off social housing, and other pro home ownership moves have in part created this.

@thesecondnamegame

Somebody born and raised in London who was able to go to uni and go into a job on a London salary is incredibly privileged. They had the opportunity buy a shoebox in London, stay there while it builds equity for a year or 2, then sod off up to Manchester and buy a 4 bed semi-detached without batting an eyelid because it's "Oh so cheap compared to London!" When lots of people are doing that it then unnaturally inflates the local house economy and so they all benefit even more. The issue is, it doesn't work the other way round. All that happens is house prices sky rocket and the locals have to leave so the town just becomes London away from London with the ridiculous house prices and pathetic school catchments to go with it.

"A London salary"? Not everyone is on over £100k a year in London you know!!

A lot of people lived in London only for their jobs, now so many can work from home why wouldn't they move? I can understand anyone not wanting to raise children in London, so in that respect I think you're BU.
I do however take your point about some people arriving and feeling they'll change the place because there's not enough culture etc, I've met a few in my home town who think we're all a bit rough and ready and they're helping to modernize us. It's a small town, we love it, don't spoilt it's old fashioned charm :)

You have made some very good arguments and comments. Well done for giving a good discussion. I think the same applies to some coastal towns as well.

I wish they would make it illegal to buy more than one property

OK. Let me clarify. Yes, my main beef is with the selfish bastards who flog their gardens to developers, make a fast buck and then piss off, having sold their house as well as the garden plot attached to it, for an insane amount of money. But there is also the question of a certain type, who move into an area and form cliques in the local schools, where there are lots of similar people with similarly enormous cars, off roaders in many cases, bought as status symbols. One analysis of my hometown suggested that you dare not turn up at the (state) school gates here in a humble Vauxhall Corsa if you want your children to make friends, for fear of ridicule! People are moving here in herds, and many do not even try to integrate. OK, that's a generalisation, but there is more than a grain of truth in it. There are several problems: 1. The actions of successive governments, which have failed to address housing shortages, and who have failed to penalise the foreign investors who are at the root of the inflation of all house prices in all areas (domino effect). 2. The attitude of some newcomers' cliques 3. The NIMBY attitude of those who can't accept newcomers, even if they are nice people.... The real problem is selfishness. That underpins all of the above. Basic human selfishness and greed.

Don't blame the players, blame the game.

the answer to all of it is smash capitalism. :)

@JassyRadlett

Yes, what kudos to being a Londoner??

Twenty quid says that the people ‘going on about being from London’ are answering the question ‘where are you from’ or ‘where was your kids’ last school’.

Huh?

The smug London’s are in my village too. We call them urban emigres. It’s priced most everyone who was born there out. We’re the other side of manchester, on the Derbyshire border. We see some of the celeb emigres describing their homes as in Derbyshire, nope it’s east manchester.

Not all of these people 'come from London'.

You graduate, move to the bright lights of London for a few years, rent, buy a shoe box to live in, save (hopefully) get hitched then move out of the city for a 'better life' for yourself and 2.3 kids.

There are just few options in London and SE that doesn't involve ridiculous prices or raising kids in a shoebox with paper thin walls and window box for a balcony instead of a garden.

But someone is benefitting from the 'incomers' aren't they? Those who have sold up to the poor fools who don't realise they've been sold houses for overinflated prices. So someone is laughing all the way to the bank (or off to some other area where they will be the incomers).

As for the 'and they love to make sure you know they're from London' remark. I was having a conversation with two colleagues years ago and all they harped on about was how awful London was, how lovely their northern town was. So I asked them why they chose to live in London - 'oh we couldn't earn this salary in our home town'. So I suggested they didn't bite the hand that fed them (and helped the get a nice house in a nice area). Oddly enough one retired and went to live in Norfolk. The other moved jobs then set up as a consultant. Did they go back 'home'? Nope, they live on the South Coast. They may have come from a lovely town but they sure as hell didn't move back. Of course, they're probably seen as two of the 'Londoners' that have pushed prices up in Norfolk and the South Coast...

I think you will find most folks moving from london are not 'londeners' they are likely like me who moved to london for uni or for work in their youth. Now as they have grown older and life has changed want to move back to closer to home or somewhere that is cheaper to live.