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.

I think it's important that communities get re generated by the influx of new people rather than complain be grateful they want to come it helps rejuvenate schools local shops etc . The solution to affordability that is a different issue . No government has solved that one. People tend to move because of work.

@AngeloMysterioso

Well if this thread proves nothing else, at least OP has well and truly shattered the “it’s friendlier up North” bollocks. The weather up there is crap as well. All that Pennines relief rain? No thanks! No wonder you lot are so bloody miserable. I’ll stay down south where it’s warmer and nobody resents me for existing.

Afflecks Palace is just a shit imitation of Camden Stables too.

With your attitude I'm sure there's plenty of people who resent you just for existing.

You should be irritated with the government, not Londoners. Poverty in London is the highest of any region in the UK and most Londoners are priced out of their city - www.trustforlondon.org.uk/publications/lpp2020/
People working in transport, the NHS, teaching etc have no chance of every owning a property there.

I think the problem is society encourages people to view property as a way to make a profit (hence all the buy to lets); second home owners are allowed to skew the market; there is little to no social housing and there are no fair rents or security of tenure. The Tories were responsible for this devastation with their sale of council homes and the repercussions of that - and no government since has seriously tried to fix it.

Of course there are wealthy people in London (and Manchester) but home ownership for many people is not a possibility. The average house price in the UK is now £250k and on that basis I can’t see the young generation of teachers, nurses, bus drivers, secretaries etc ever getting onto the housing ladder, whether they are in London or Manchester.

@sheridanstar

Do one, this attitude is what causes the bad feeling. Little towns? How fucking offensive.

And I'm not even a northerner. London wouldn't exist if in it's current form without the existence of working communities in the north and midlands during the industrial revolution. Where did you get all of your fucking coal from?

Unlike OP, I have nothing against people from London personally (except the likes of SheridanStar and her wisdom) but London is currently providing nothing to the rest of the country. Tax, haha. Newsflash, a country's capital city generates the most tax. Who would have thought it? Young people actively avoid the place. People are scrambling to leave it. I wish they'd scrap bloody HS2, how will us thicko Brummie's ever cope without being able to get to London 50% quicker? I'm good, thanks. Perhaps it would make it more convenient for all of London's displaced homeless who have been forced here by their council's to go home and visit their families though.

Well if this thread proves nothing else, at least OP has well and truly shattered the “it’s friendlier up North” bollocks. The weather up there is crap as well. All that Pennines relief rain? No thanks! No wonder you lot are so bloody miserable. I’ll stay down south where it’s warmer and nobody resents me for existing.

Afflecks Palace is just a shit imitation of Camden Stables too.

^

Cursory agreement, yes the North's a shit hole, don't bother coming up 'er, etc etc etc.

Please someone kindly advise as to which GM towns OP is referring to?

It's amusing seeing people complain about being priced out of 'their area' by Londoners, when people from their areas have been pricing Londoners out of theirs for decades.

Houses are flying in this area - rural , notmuch going for it, houses in and out of the town are selling in days.
It's a bit of catch up after covid, and a bit of people moving to the country but otherwise a mystery.
Likewise the south east, family there say properties move v fast.

@arithanaggerton

Unlike OP, I have nothing against people from London personally (except the likes of SheridanStar and her wisdom) but London is currently providing nothing to the rest of the country. Tax, haha. Newsflash, a country's capital city generates the most tax. Who would have thought it? Young people actively avoid the place. People are scrambling to leave it. I wish they'd scrap bloody HS2, how will us thicko Brummie's ever cope without being able to get to London 50% quicker? I'm good, thanks. Perhaps it would make it more convenient for all of London's displaced homeless who have been forced here by their council's to go home and visit their families though.

You sound confused, in one breath saying London provides nothing and in the next saying it provides the most tax.

@Myothercarisalsoshit

You just stay where you are then, petal.

I KNEW northerners use ‘petal’ to patronise! I always see on threads that it’s never patronising, just a regional thing, but clearly not true.

[quote userxx]@lotsofdogshere please don't tar us all with the same brush. The majority of people around here aren't snobs, not sure why the op has a bee in her bonnet. [/quote]
I spent yesterday in Chorlton, along with a good friend who lives in Altrincham, and two others (west didsbury and Chorlton). I apologise for being unpleasant when criticising the OP for exactly that

One of the factors is that London property is a good place for dodgy people to park money, including Russians oligarchs. So the mansions in the middle get bought for zillions, it inflates prices in the whole city, then you get the problems we've seen as the middle class decamp to smaller cities. Politicians wanted the dirty money.

YABVU. We have a capitalist structure that allows movement globally. Coupled with lack of housing in UK period. Gov would need to build millions of new housing to cope with current demand. You have people buying houses in cash in London from overseas. Investment homes left empty. Which creates this domino effect and ripples out to towns like yours.

@tillytown

It's amusing seeing people complain about being priced out of 'their area' by Londoners, when people from their areas have been pricing Londoners out of theirs for decades.

So true.

I doubt the billionaire, money laundering foreigners are really having a big effect on the 3 bed detached prices.

Im not so sure about that!. Scandal in my country recently where foreigner investors bought an entire new housing estate to rent out. I have ahouse but it beggars belief that that was allowed.

I doubt the billionaire, money laundering foreigners are really having a big effect on the 3 bed detached prices

Don't you believe it. The 1 and 2 bed tiny flats and small terraces which were once social and peabody style housing for families where I grew up in London are now £1-2m "luxury" apartments and "cottages" for the wealthy to use as weekend flats or keep empty as an investment. That pushed an entire population further out putting pressure on both social and commercial house prices.

I don't think many people outside of London realise the sheer extent of foreign ownership of property in the central zones, nor how much of it is empty most of the time.

People have a choice of where to live, but what pisses me off (being in a rural area) is those people who move out of the cities and then drive too fast on country lanes with no thought about walkers, horse riders, kids on bikes or other road users. Oh and no clue that living in the country means that cattle and sheep in fields will make a noise and shit on footpaths (toilet training either is a bit of a stretch) and complain that foxes scream and owls hoot. And that farm gates need shutting, dog poo bags should not just be left to decorate trees and verges, and farmers crops should not be walked all over.

You made me laugh, with your tale of woe. The north wanted this, the government gave in and has a plan to move business north, so what did people in the North expect that people wouldn't move north with their jobs. If you want London jobs you'll get London prices but now they are called Manchester prices. You can't have your cake and eat it. And please bear in mind that many people from the north moved to London for jobs when they were younger, surely they are just moving back 'home' now!!

Brexit (which many working class Londoner’s did vote for) Largely in the outlying boroughs rather than the more central zones, by which I mean places that are 'less London'.
Isn’t Canary Wharf a ghost town these days? Always has been IME, as are many financial/commercial districts in towns and cities everywhere. Canary Wharf is not a good example from which to extrapolate the character or state of London as a whole.
I find it to be a quite a soulless, tragic place in its current form. It’s all very much a front, without much going on within it. I hate having to travel there and find the place incredibly oppressive and dead
Well, again, if you come exclusively to Canary Wharf and that's what you're talking about, I don't disagree. But if you're extrapolating from that that London must in its entirety be 'a front, without much going on' or 'dead', then you are simply wrong. My Zone 2 neighbourhood is busy and buzzing, particularly at weekends; we have lots of small indie businesses and lots of life going on in the street. IME many neighbourhoods are like this (where people actually live, not just places primarily for business like Canary Wharf).

This kind of generalising post is quite probably why you find people on MN being defensive about London. Because it's inaccurate, and that's annoying.

As a Londoner I’d rather that people didn’t have to come to the City to find work, or that parents of my wealthy uni friends bought them properties in their 20s and I was priced out of it, in my own home town; but that’s life and I’m happy for them and it’s actually turned out to be good for me in that it broadened my horizons. Don’t be a hater.

YABU. House prices are very high everywhere, and nowhere higher than London. London salaries are not high enough to compensate for the higher cost of buying or renting in London. Young people are priced out of the market here entirely. Should they not be allowed to go to places they can afford to live?

We owe it to each other to make sure everyone has a decent place to live. The Conservatives have not only failed to accomplish this, they have worked actively against it by selling off council homes and refusing to allow local councils to borrow to build more. They are responsible for the current housing crisis and should be held accountable at the ballot box.

But no one owes you a place to live in the town you grew up in. There is nobody tasked with providing this. I'm sure if there were some way to prevent Londoners from moving to your town plenty of your neighbours who own property would object to keeping house prices down.

I think we do have housing. Maybe not enough to go round but enough to make a dent in homelessness but so many places are left uninhabited. Even council properties aren’t utilised and private landlords that have housing that would be ideal as a starter for those getting off the streets are blocked from renting because of the systems in place.

Saying that is what has been always done doesn’t mean it is the right way to do things.