The woman who lives in a shed: How London landlords are cashing in.

[Ryoko]

Article from the Guardian HERE

I'd just like to say it's all very well and good the councils moaning but what they are going to do other then put people out on the streets?, these people would be homeless or stuck in bedsits and B&Bs for years on end while languishing on the council housing lists.

My former flat was a studio one in a converted Victorian house, 22 flats some with there own shower/toilet others shared one on the ground floor, bed bugs, mice and carpet beetles, faulty fire alarm system that the fire brigade threatened legal action over several times and no lock on the main door, next door to me lived a family of 4 who washed their baby bottles in the communal washing machine, a man died after falling thru the banisters on the 2nd floor when drunk. Yet the council thought the place was fine, they inspected it several times, by the time I moved out about a quarter of the residents where put there by Ealing council while they wanted for a council place.

We need change, I see "Luxury apartments" springing up everywhere, yet years down the line these places still have the sales suite open, I see so called affordable housing being built that isn't affordable for those earning less then 30k a year (the national average is 24k) and even if they could afford them they are unsuitable for a family with young children as they have open plan kitchen and living room areas (what idiots design these things?). We need real affordable homes and a massive increase in council and HA places, we need to shake off the obsession with dolls house style homes and embrace the fact we are a massive city and the only way we can build is up with more high rise buildings.

Just because people are entitled to NMW doesn't mean they get it even if they should. People don't always know their rights especially if they are new to a country.

Also the amount of money these workers are sending home may not be that large so they could be low paid here but still able to send meaningful amounts home. In my DH's home country the NMW is set at around £125 per Month so £10-20 pw sent home would make quite a difference. That £10 or £20 would not cover the cost of supporting a family here.

It is more of an enforcement problem than a regulation problem.

There are lots of immigrants with families in Ealing! Again the government likes to perpetuate a stereotype of a migrant as a single healthy male working and sending money home. There are people like that but the problem with housing stems from many people with families needing homes. There are just too many people chasing too few affordable homes. Homes that are privately owned stand empty while people live in sheds. I used to live in Westminster and in my block of flats some flats were only occupied 3 weeks of the year, and stood empty the rest of the time.

I can easily see a scenario where someone arrives in this country legitimately, doesn't speak a lot of English, gravitates to their "home" community within the UK and someone who knows someone fixes them up with a job. If the wages they are getting a substantially higher than the wages back home then they may not realise they are being underpaid because the amount feels very large to them.

It took my DH quite some time to stop relating the cost of things back to the cost of things in his home country.

I've just been looking at Gransnet on the House and Home section - "I bought my house in 1963 for £1500 on a mortgage of £8.50 a month".

How can things have become SO different now? I don't think immigration caused this that's for sure.

House prices have risen for several reasons but immigration is an important one. Look at the last 10 years. We've had 3 million people (net) come to the UK. 90% of the have stayed in the SE. 70% have stayed in London. It is impossible to claim that this can have no influence on house prices.

The UK's offical population has risen by 9637000 since 1963. It's the basic law of supply and demand. People have to live somewhere.

I don't think this is an immigrant problem.
it does play a role, but other factors (many many examples in this thread) play a role, too.

Feminism plays a role - the number of women working has increased the amount of mortgage families are prepared to pay for the same property. This has probably had a bigger effect on the economy than immigration.

flatpack I wonder how much direct impact immigration has on house prices as I would have thought that many of the immigrants from less well off countries / or who are here for a few years wouldn't be buying houses.

There may be an indirect effect in the rise of the buy to let landlord but BTL grew out of speculation rather than as a response to immigration.

In fact research shows that in some areas immigration brings down house prices!
www.econ.cam.ac.uk/teach/filipasa/wp/dp5893.pdf

That's v. interesting Chaz, love the mathematical equations!

The article is based on these factors:
"First, there is some evidence that immigration reduces native wages at the lower end of the wage distribution. Second, natives who move to a di§erent local authority tend to be at the higher end of the wage distribution"

So it is only where native wages are reduced that the house price factor becomes a problem. Tighter regulation on wages is therefore essential.

I think in London immigration has had an impact at the top end. Bearing in mind that the pound has been weak and London is still a very attractive city to live in, there has been a lot of competition for London houses either from foreign nationals living here and working in the financial sector or just as second homes and investments. The effect trickles down from the 100 million Mayfair palaces down to 1 million quid terraces in Wandsworth, and maybe even further - everyone's budget buys them just a little less.

ChazsBrilliantAttitude

They won't be buying houses but they'll be renting.

BTL wasn't a response to immigration, no. It was a consequence of Evil Brown's moronic clunking fist economic policies. Firstly he cheapened the cost of credit. Then he decided to scrap the tax relief on private sector pensions, which at a stroke destroyed the retirement plans of 1/4 of the population. Institutional investors and private citizens were forced to buy property to provide them with a secure return.

That would have inflated house prices anyway, but thanks to Evil Brown and Evil Blair's "open door" policy on immigration, a policy they adopted because they despise anyone who isn't them, the effect was exacerbated.

The people who benefit from unlimited immigration are the wealthy upper-middle-class, who get their nannies and cleaners cheap and a range of exotic places to eat dinner and shop and look at this ethnic basketwork, daaahling, picked it up for a song.

The people who lose most are unskilled and low-skilled native workers, who find their earnings depressed, their opportunities reduced and their housing costs spiralling. All of which makes me wonder how a Labour voter can possibly ever support Labour's unlimited immigration policy.

I benefited from immigration - I married one

I love the way when immigration is mentioned people lose all ability to do simple maths. We are talking about shanty towns in Southall in Ealing.

Have you ever been there????

55% of the population are from black and ethnic minority groups, 5% from white migrant groups and particularly in Southall only 12% of the population are White British. People are creating homes at the bottom of their gardens to house relatives and friends from their old countries within the community.

Oh lost the point of what I what saying.....oh yes...maths.....

We have 6 places at the dinner table but 12 guests arrive, we manage to find a stool and two chairs for 3 of them and the other 3 have to sit on the sofa.

I don't have time or money or space to go out and buy another table and six more chairs.

What is the difference then in 1200 people arriving in Southall. 600 live with friends and family or rent or buy their homes. There are spaces for 300 of them in council housing but the other 300 end up in sheds at the bottom of the garden or other dubious accommodation.

The government doesn't have time, space or money to go and build 1200 new homes.....

Do you see where I'm coming from....

Indeed, the people who lose most from immigration are the unskilled, or those on lower wages but it has nothing to do with 'Evil' Brown or even Blair. Thatcher freed the banks and set them onto their route to destroy this country, she her tory cronies are the evil ones. Brown as chancellor tried to bring in tighter regulations on the banks but his policy was voted down in the house, of which a large number were tories at that time.

Brown's quantitative easing policy is simply brought about by desperation.

But what's all that got to do with housing needs? This is not about immigration. The population is going up, with or without immigration and we need either an economic miracle, or better quality low cost housing.

Shanty towns in Southall are to do with immigration. Horsetowater, have you ever been there??? Alot of the BAEM people in Southall think that there is too much uncontrolled immigration placing too many demands on community resources.

Not sure if I've been there, I've driven through it often enough, but yes, you are right, it is about immigration.

Horsewater

In 1997 Brown scrapped the rules on separation of retail and investment banking (in the US, known as Glass-Steagal) which resulted from the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
He also removed regulatory oversight of banks from the Bank of England and transferred it to his new quango, the Financial Services Authority.

Those two acts condemned us to the credit bubble and the 2nd Great Depression we're about to head in to.

Hmm I'd have to look into that further, it started with Thatcher when she deregulated the mortgage market and banks become public limted companies, but really I don't know the whys and wherefores. This wasn't a Brown-invented policy but may well have been the Blairites - Brown was dead against deregulation of banks. Sadly he didn't have the power to make decisions on the nation's behalf alone and it had to be put to the vote.

As far as I remember the FSA was cobbled together as Brown's last ditch attempt to control the banks as the Bank of England was not impartial enough.

Another thing people are not seeing is the speed at which places go from being shitholes to the high of fashion.

Why should someone from say Sheperds Bush who's lived there all their life be forced out because of the trend of the middle classes is to live there?.

My aunts place 18k 15-20 years ago, got to be worth at least 80k with the trends of the area, it happens fast, she's just up the road from Camden when she got that place, Camden was a shithole a poor area with a market now it's market is treated like the new Carnaby street, realising how close it is to central London the middle class have moved in pushing up the prices )place still looks like a shit hole), same thing happened to Ladbroke Grove.

once poor areas are being re-branded as trendy multi-culture areas (Brick lane for another example).

it's not as simple as the poor should all move out, the majority of workers are poor, for every boss of a bank or company there are hundreds of people below them earning normal wages (not to mention the shop staff, street cleaners, office staff etc) you can't expect them all to commute in thats impossible, even if you moved all the big company HQs out, fact is it's the most densely populated city in this country.

You could go someway to helping by stopping the immigrates and migrants from settling there, make them settle elsewhere but then you have the problem with building, it's an endless cycle to just create jobs by endlessly building instead of renovating regardless of it the places get sold.

The population forecast is a growth of 4 million every five years, so I think we need to brace ourselves for even worse than what we have now. I think that London will keep growing, spreading and getting more dense but unless money is pumped into services, roads, transport and housing it will just turn into an enormous slum.

You can always leave. Would much prefer to be living in a van, travelling around the country picking up what work I could, than live in a rat/ roach infested hellhole and pay through the nose for the privilege.