Is the London dream unaffordable for young people?

[fenika]

Other than London being an exciting place to live for culture, fun, experiences, and the like, it is now completely unaffordable.

We are from a working class family in the north. My brother was a complete swot at school and got a place at Cambridge. He became an accountant in the City of London where he met his wife. They worked their way up in corporate careers and built a huge amount of money in property. They are now retired at 50 and live very very comfortable lives.

My dd went to the same state comp, won her place at Oxford to study economics and is now working in finance. Her boyfriend is also in finance. Between them they earn in the top 1-2% of the UK. Despite this, even if they continue in the long term in their careers, they won’t be able to afford much more than a 2 bedroom flat in a nice area. They work just as if not harder in their careers.

Is the dream of moving to London to move up in the world a dead dream?

It was for us so we moved back north. But we don't earn anything like that.

@rainingsnoring Ah that will be why the bars and clubs of Clapham and Shoreditch are bereft of 20-somethings on a Friday evening and why there are so many vacant flats then. Oh wait…

What has that got to do with what is being discussed?
As I said, you can simply check the figures. The maths doesn't add up anymore.

@rainingsnoring OP asks “is the dream of moving to London to move up in the world a dead dream?” It’s clearly not as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of early-career professionals who do precisely that.

The problem with London now is that this whole huge swathe of it in the middle is basically completely unaffordable to anyone except billionaires, so everyone lives quite far out. When I had just left uni, people were living in shitty flats in places like Clerkenwell and Fitzrovia, which seems completely insane now. It wasn't wildly expensive though - we used to walk home from Soho!! The flats were genuinely shitty - without central heating or anything. Nowadays, people on equivalent salaries (taking the job equivalent) would be in a shared house at the very very end of the tube line if they are lucky. This is just over twenty years ago! The glory of London was that everything was right there, waiting to be explored. Now, it's an hour away on the Overground. It's just not the same.

Yes it's exactly that. You could live very centrally and the social life was there. Now London is like Paris; all old bourgeois and finance bros in the centre, everyone else is in the outer regions. It is not the same.

100%. It is really not a place for the “people” anymore. It’s purely a money machine.
Those with basic sense dip in, dip out and leave ASAP.

So you don't buy your first place in a nice area! My friend's daughter, 28, just bought a two bed flat in Brixton on her own. Needs a bit of work which she'll do slowly as finances allow. She has a lodger to help pay the mortgage. She's a diversity officer and must earn pretty well (I believe she went to Bristol or similar). Should she get married or a partner then there their salary/assets to add to the pot for next step up.
Even back in the day it wasn't uncommon to buy with a friend or a one bed and rent out the bedroom and sleep in the livingroom. Or a friend of mine lived for three years in a bedsit to save enough for a deposit then bought a half share in Newington just above Islington

I'm intrigued how a diversity officer can afford to buy a fiat. Salary is probably sub 40k (most are government sector) plus student loan repayments eat into take home pay. Max lending on 40k is probably 160k, yet bought a 2 bed flat?

This is exactly the argument of this thread though. Bright people on decent salaries can't afford to buy in London without help. So the London dream of going there and getting a good job, renting for a bit, then buying a place and moving up the property later. It doesn't work anymore.

This one on Brixton Water Lane looks good value, not sure what the catch is. Other than that it’s ground floor, and no mention of the lease length, service charge or ground rent.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/142275668#/?channel=RES_BUY

Flat looks ok. Currently the cheapest 2 bed available in Brixton. But that's still 90k above the 160k mortgage in my scenario above. How does someone on 40k bridge that gap?
Someone on 50k could afford to buy it though. So we are in a world where a 50k salary means you could buy the cheapest 2 bed flat available in Brixton (without details on lease length)..

Excluding ex council as pp shared, a 2-bed in Brixton is 500k+ so likely that the diversity officer on 40-50k got BOMAD paying down 250k while borrowing to the hilt with a lodger so she can actually enjoy London rather than spend every penny toward her mortgage. That used to be fine pre 2016 when flat prices were up 10% each year. A lot of people commenting here do not live in London.

I don’t blame you for not reading the 5 pages but you re completely missing the point. No one says London is not attractive for young people in particular, just that the idea/dream that promising young professional can climb the property ladder and end up in a large house in Chiswick on a back of a corporate career is long gone. Reason behind the stratospheric prices versus wages, end of gentrification and continued appeal for old and new (international) money.

Hmmm no work in tech and looking at 100k plus

If you still haven't grasped the points being made by the OP and multiple other posters, then you probably won't. I see that someone else has also replied to your post to try to explain the differences now compared to 30 or 40 years ago.

I honestly think young people need to step away from the property market until it corrects to more historical norms re. price. Lots more young people seem to be staying with or moving back to parents these days, so that is a positive sign that they have finally woken up to how they are being ripped off (or just can`t afford it anymore without the cheap debt?)

But the decent jobs are mostly in London so unless your parents live within commuting distance, you have no choice. Yes, if your parents live close to a handful of other big cities there "may" be decent jobs available for some professions, but out in the regions away from the big cities, "decent" professional jobs are rare. London has sucked the life out of most other areas of the country and the chickens are coming home to roost!

Fair points, but you don`t have to live in London or with parents near London to work in London, you could move from the regions to within commutable distance of London, do a flat share and save money on London rental or flat-share prices.

Commuter fares would erode any savings. I bought a flat in London or would have had to spend £8-10k per annum for both of us to commute from outside London.