To ask how you afford to live in London?

[seekinglondonlife]

Name changed regular as my family are on MN and I don't want my posting history linked.
We decided to do Christmas in London this year, we've had a crap year and just wanted to get away. We're staying in a fairly central hotel, have been travelling around and exploring by bus everyday and I feel like I really want to move here. The diversity, having shops open on a Sunday past 5pm, the atmosphere, the ability to choose 5 or 6 different ethnic restaurants on the same street. The public transport is fantastic.

I've been looking in so many estate agents windows and cannot get over the cost of rent/to buy a property. How do 'normal' people live here? I've been friendly with a few of the hotel staff, they've lived and worked in London for 20+ years and have raised their families here, but they are on NMW jobs, so how do they do it? Does everyone get housing benefit?

If you feel inclined please say roughly where you live and how much you pay for rent/mortgage. Also what are the downsides? (Apart from the cost of housing!)

TIA

@Praminthehall Also in zone 3. Have chatted to the office cleaners, they seem to live in Brixton, Harrow or Edgware. Two of those areas are in zone 5. I suspect with remote working, the price pressures will ease on properties in zone 5/6, esp the less leafy parts.Cos it makes less sense to live there, you aren't in the beating heart of the city and you aren't in the countryside either. Many of those areas are not sought after suburbs like Muswell Hill or Richmond where there is the 'lifestyle' factor or posh like Highgate, Hampstead. Many of the houses might get converted to flats and HMOs, and thats where the key workers will live.

Fascinating thread-thanks. Recently returned from a trip to London. Always been quite anti city esp with kids but I was quite jealous of the opportunities available and diversity and had a moment of wishing I could live there. Also spent that time wondering how it was possible with a family!

I live in SW London, zone 4, almost zone 5. Mortgage of £1100 per month. Joint income is approx £60K. I grew up in London. Bought my first flat here 20 years ago with a lot of help from my father. Be wanted me to have some of my inheritance back then as he rightly could see the property market going insane and wanted me in it. Could not have done it without him and am so grateful for having a dad with that foresight.

I work in education & we keep losing young teachers who move away to buy, which isn't good.

Also OP as others have said, forget social housing. My friend is in housing at one of the London boroughs and they have a 25 YEAR waiting list. It’s not going to happen. The only people I know who live in social housing inherited the tenancy from grandparents…don’t even get me started on the corruption of the whole system. I bought my council flat off the previous tenant who did right to buy in the 90s for 20k…he made over 600k…this is why there’s hardly any council property left in the city, because anyone who can scrape together the cash buys their flats. The profits they can make are enormous. I don’t blame them for doing it - I think we all would in the same position. I blame the system that allows it.

Last summer I stayed with an old university friend who'd moved back to London. She'd bought a 3 bed (big double bedrooms) ex-council maisonette in SE London which has its own 90ft garden - which she's just built a garden office / gym at the far end. I couldn't believe how green the area was (lots of parks), and despite there being no tube how easy it was in go in & out of central London in around 25 minutes, also about 10 minutes away from lovely Greenwich. I couldn't believe it when she told me she'd only paid 350K for it. I live in North London and you'd be pushed to find a 1 bedroom flat for that amount!

Something that is worth bearing in mind, if you want to try living here for a little while, is that private rents are effectively a reflection of local salaries so they are do-able. Two teachers could afford to rent a nice garden flat in Shepherd’s Bush easily; it would be about £1800 per month. They wouldn’t be able to buy that flat, which would probably cost about £700000, because they wouldn’t satisfy the bank’s affordability criteria of 6x annual salary.

@Alittlenonsensenowandthen

Fascinating thread-thanks. Recently returned from a trip to London. Always been quite anti city esp with kids but I was quite jealous of the opportunities available and diversity and had a moment of wishing I could live there. Also spent that time wondering how it was possible with a family!

If I had kids I would 100% bring them up in London. I wouldn’t subject anyone to the small-minded, boring, regional semi-rural town I grew up in. I understand moving out of London if you can’t afford enough space for kids but in my opinion a childhood in London would be so much richer and enjoyable than the one I had and that so many people seem to want for their kids

@LondonMummer I apologize if it came across that way. My DH and I had no financial help, just a free place to live for 3 years which was how we saved our deposit. Though financial help to get on the property ladder is a big thing now with 25% of all FTB getting it; probably higher in London too as people of all income groups do need it.

But I do think its easier to get 'help' if your parents live in London or have accumulated equity in London. if your parents are fairly comfortable and live in a charming picturesque village (where house prices are often a fraction of what they would be in London), they still have far less equity and means to help you than someone from a poorer background but with london parents who have both the equity in their house/can provide you with a free place to live while you slog away at your first graduate job. in the 1980s, London was not an attractive place to live and many people moved to the Home Counties which was why so many people from BAME backgrounds managed to buy houses here.

Why do people think you either have to be a high earner to live in London or that if your a lower earner that people must live in overcrowded run down dodgy areas . That's not the case. With help lower earners can live in reasonable homes as well.

Which zone do you mean?
I used to live in zone 2. Was chuffing expensive. Mortgage was ridiculous. But we managed just about.

Then we moved to zone 6 as we wanted more space and urban living but still close to London.
When we lived in zone 2 neither of us had cars (no need for us) small travel costs. No child.

@Londonr

Why do people think you either have to be a high earner to live in London or that if your a lower earner that people must live in overcrowded run down dodgy areas . That's not the case. With help lower earners can live in reasonable homes as well.

What sort of help do you mean @Londonr?

@Charlize43 I honestly think its the schools. I am sure this is changing but when I was looking at catchments, i tried really hard to be open-minded but i found the most number of good/outstanding schools in my part of north london.

Also hearing of FTBers not buying in London with the options there are now for WFH. We need to redistribute work and wealth across the country so I do hope that pattern will sustain.

In the last year so many of my neighbours, dc's school friends have left. Like 15 plus families, I have no local friends anymore!

@onlychildhamster yes my only point was it's still a leg up.

I was left a disgusting flat in Elephant and Castle over 20 years ago.
I can never live in the flat or the area.
It's rented.
The rental income made such a difference to my life until I hit the jackpot with my career.
I honestly don't know why anyone wants to live there and pay crazy rental amounts, but people do and with families.

I just put Central London + 5 miles into RightMove with filters of 3bed house (so no flats) with garden and a price cap of £550k. There were 177 listings, though some might be duplicates. Some were lovely, mostly the ones in South London, some were doer-uppers. Given that 500k is what people seem to pay for a 3 bed almost anywhere in the South east now, I think London is as doable as many other places if you are prepared to hunt around.

The diversity has become a bit of a cliche about London, because it’s not economically diverse at all. The guy who makes your bacon paratha at Dishoom would not be able to afford to eat it at menu cost.

Where the diversity matters is that even the really rich have a pretty good insight into what it’s like to be really poor, because it’s in your face every day. You probably don’t have that experience insulated in your Range Rover in Oxfordshire or Cheshire.

[quote Mufasa1118]@londonr but studio flats are meant to be just one room (with small kitchen in the room) and a bathroom. I have seen similiar studio flats in Barcelona and in Madrid.

The studio flats online in zone 3 look quite nice.[/quote]
Ooh, we're intrigued as that sound suspiciously low - so you have a link?

The diversity has become a bit of a cliche about London, because it’s not economically diverse at all.

True dat!

@BoudecaBains I really don't recognize your experience but am sorry to hear it. I live in north london zone 3 and while i don't have a car, i don't think any cars in my flat's carpark have been stolen! The controversy is usually about parking in my area! Too many huge cars and not enough space! I am not sure about bullying but surely bullying can happen in any setting; but I suppose in a private school as a paying customer, the teachers are more likely to take it seriously

And I don't recognise your experience either. My daughter's state school has a resident Police Office. Her private school has a resident tennis coach, that's the difference in a nut shell. And it was a series of violent attacks that put her in hospital. And the school did nothing, NOTHING !. Her private school, by contrast, has no disciplinary problems what so ever. Also car crime is endemic in London, ask any Police Officer. We have two cars and they are locked away in a garage. That doesn't stop thieves trying to jemmy the garage doors though !!!!!. My son comes home from school on the bus in a group. That is also the advice of the Police. I work in an ICU Red Zone before that I was part of a Trauma Team. I lost count of the number of knife wounds we had to treat. Most of them to the neck. I'm glad your part of London is so nice. Personally I'd pack my bags tomorrow without a second thought. London is not the same place I knew 20 years ago. That's my experience.

@HaveringWavering

For example someone who is a lower earner can get help with the rent. From universal credit /housing benefit.

I live in Shoreditch, it really varies on income and the type of property, when I was in houseshares I was paying around £550 a month, that really isn’t a huge amount, especially as I had a decent wage coming in. That enabled me to save a healthy deposit, I also bought my flat when it was absolutely trashed and only just mortgageable, otherwise there is absolutely no way I could have afforded it, some of the flats in this building go for £6m, mine was was around £240k cheaper than equivalent flats in the building as it needed so much work doing, obviously only cosmetic and nowhere near £240k worth of work.

Even when I was a low earning teenager I could still afford a room in decent houseshares, I’ve only ever lived in one place a bit shit, my room was technically a cupboard as it has no window, but a lack of window saved me about £70 a month in rent, so I didn’t care.

I live here because I’ve been lucky.

I was born here but moved back when I was 18, rented a series of cheap flats and house shares in the late 90s/early 2000s. Became a teacher, joined a housing co-op. Had a one bed flat in Camden for £250 per month. Teachers were eligible for some HA properties then; I moved into a 2 bed garden HA flat in zone 1/2 when I had DC1. Another DC and 10 years later, my mum died unexpectedly and the sale of her house left me enough for a deposit on a 3 bed terrace in zone 3/4. So we got the biggest mortgage we could and here we are.

It’s been luck. We are on good wages but would have had to leave London years ago if it hadn’t been for the security of the HA flat.

[quote BoudecaBains]**@BoudecaBains I really don't recognize your experience but am sorry to hear it. I live in north london zone 3 and while i don't have a car, i don't think any cars in my flat's carpark have been stolen! The controversy is usually about parking in my area! Too many huge cars and not enough space! I am not sure about bullying but surely bullying can happen in any setting; but I suppose in a private school as a paying customer, the teachers are more likely to take it seriously

And I don't recognise your experience either. My daughter's state school has a resident Police Office. Her private school has a resident tennis coach, that's the difference in a nut shell. And it was a series of violent attacks that put her in hospital. And the school did nothing, NOTHING !. Her private school, by contrast, has no disciplinary problems what so ever. Also car crime is endemic in London, ask any Police Officer. We have two cars and they are locked away in a garage. That doesn't stop thieves trying to jemmy the garage doors though !!!!!. My son comes home from school on the bus in a group. That is also the advice of the Police. I work in an ICU Red Zone before that I was part of a Trauma Team. I lost count of the number of knife wounds we had to treat. Most of them to the neck. I'm glad your part of London is so nice. Personally I'd pack my bags tomorrow without a second thought. London is not the same place I knew 20 years ago. That's my experience.[/quote]
Sorry, did you say you live in Richmond? That really is a very different experience to what I know of the area, and genuinely very shocking! The High Street is pretty tatty right now, but you're describing a whole other level of issues.