Turning London into a 3D bank for the global super-rich has also helped Osborneās UK economy statistics look better than they really are.
And, as sorry as I feel for London residents who can no longer afford to remain thereā¦
ā¦welcome to the UK! The people of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds etc feel your pain.
I agree. Itās relatively bizarre that everyone only wants to live in London, although thatās where much of the work is.
Towns like Brighton are becoming more interesting, driven by tech investment, so Iām hoping for more of a dispersal around the country.
Itās really really sad. Iām an IT professional making twice the national average and I canāt afford to even think about buying somewhere to live in London, so Iām stuck paying Ā£1,200 to live in an overly subdivided house and I canāt do it anymore. Going to be leaving as soon as I can work out where the quality of life is going to be the best for me.
And itās not just London that it affects- as London becomes more expensive, so does anywhere within commuting distance of London- i.e. the whole of southeast England- as shown by this map (percent of workers commuting to London in 2011):
And as the dormitory towns price out their working residents, they end up living further out, and commuting in to work where they used to live. Itās like some kind of grotesque commuter pyramid scheme.
I was born in Cambridge (65 miles from London), and thereās no way I could afford to live there now. None of my extended family live there any more either.
Worse, we have become a haven for the Russian oligarchs from whom Putin has been trying to get back stolen money, so our policy on Russia is being dictated by the need to suck up to these people to keep house prices high.
There are about 300 000 Russians living in London; notice how we hear about Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian immigration negatively, but never a hint of criticism of Russian immigrants, even from UKIP. From the Russian government point of view we are like Francoās Spain when it was a haven for British criminals. And we wonder why, when we join in sanctions, we are considered to be hypocrites.
To be fair, thatās a completely different problem caused by the enormous success of Cambridge as a centre of innovation, generating lots of real employment (i.e. jobs that create wealth, not just skim it off other peopleās pension funds). A lot of the London economy is parasitic; Cambridge is crowded and expensive because of real jobs in engineering, technology, medical research and the like. Cambridge could also be on track to have its own underground railway, and has had a policy of creating jobs in the less populated parts of the East. Unlike Johnson trying to keep them in the area for which heās Mayor.
Partly, yes. But thereās still a significant number of people commuting to London- the ONS say it was about 2500 (4% of workers) in 2011; and recent house price increases in Cambridge have been partly explained by a āvery strong ripple from Londonā.
Some of my relatives work in those āreal jobsā, and still have had to move out of Cambridge.
Oscar Wilde said āLondon is a leper wrapped in purple.ā
I kind of wish I could go back and time and tell him, āYou aināt seen nothing yet.ā
Does āprofessionalā not have the same connotation in the U.K. as over here? In a broad sense, anyone with a job is a professional something, but in the context of the hed āprofessionalā means a job that requires an advanced degree and/or official certification and licensure. None of the occupations on the example billboards qualify, except maybe the IT security consultant.
The headline suggests that doctors and lawyers and architects are being squeezed out by cackling foreign kleptocrats, whereas the billboards suggest that itās the same bunch of us that are always getting priced out of our places once those Professionals catch wind of our cool freight elevators and 20ā ceilings and neat little bookstores (which will also be priced out imminently.)
The same thing happened to the small farming town I grew up in. Except the gentrification was caused by middle class Americans rather than Russian new money.
Donāt look at NYC, Boston, DC, SF, or LA then. (Or Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc.)
Itās not just London that has changed.
Not to mention that anyone commuting from the outer reaches of that map is going to have a miserable, very expensive, very long commute.
I never even thought about living in London. There was never a chance of a salary that would given me the same quality of life that living in e.g. Birmingham would.
So youāre saying that that rent is too damn high?
Like @L_Mariachi said, most of these people arenāt professionals. And itās not like they canāt afford to live in Londonālots of people who make less do manage to live thereābut that they have the ability and opportunity to move somewhere that offers better value for them.
Incidentally, some of them probably arenāt too happy about being displaced by rather flush globe-trotting authors from foreign countries who have decided to set up stakes in London.
I would have loved to see a follow-up to this interview with Joe Strummer walking around London. Maybe one of the surviving members of The Clash will chime in about the state of London.
Donāt look at NYC, Boston, DC, SF, or LA then. (Or Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc.)
The tragic thing, in my opinion, is all the homogenization thatās been creeping into other āBā cities which used to be safe havens for some alternative culture and mom-and-pop stores beyond the stranglehold of vanilla, corporate schmucks.
Creatives who arenāt merely consumed with the almighty buck and conforming to mainstream, corporate culture left a lot of the major cities because they simply couldnāt afford to live there anymore. Those who stayed (and werenāt trustifarians) often became corporate worker drones in order to deal with the higher cost of living and replaced their creative endeavors with typical, bland, corporate consumerism instead of creating things locally.
Others got the fuck outā¦.
In the beginning, they moved into the industrial outskirts, but (as others have mentioned here) the corporate types followed them and priced them out of there as well with fancy, expensive lofts so they could come live there ātooā and embrace (to death) the āsexyā counter-culture.
So these creatives finally left major cities and their industrial outskirts due to excessive, toxic gentrification that forced out and bulldozed mom-and-pop shops and built the same, rubber-stamp corporate shit you see in many other locales in the USA.
The creatives left for places like Austin, Seattle, Tempe, Denver, etc. ā But, the problem is the wealthy corporate schmucks chase them (and their culture) everywhere.
The wealthy corporatize, homogenize and strip all local flavor from more expensive cities, then they stupidly wonder what happened to all the neat, local culture.
The wealthy then find out about all the āhipā new cultural shit going on elsewhere in other cities, invade them and destroy the culture there as well. And, later they wonder what happened to all the culture again and go ever searching (like a new, updated iPhone) for more places they can blindly fuck up.
Itās one thing to beautify parts of towns and increase the flow of money into local businesses, etc. and embrace the local flavor with respect ā Itās quite another to simply force out small businesses and put major, corporate chains all over the place and wonder why all the creatives bolt for the outskirts.
Itās about respect, self-reflection and moderation, but a lot of these wealthy, corporate assholes put money ahead of all those things and wonder why their lives and surrounding culture are soā¦ damnā¦ empty.
A fancy, new smartphone can only make one āhappyā for so long before the ānewā wears off and they realize thereās more to life than competing in gadgets, fashion, money, status symbols and shit.
/end bitter rant
In other newsā¦
Paris on the Platte closed recently in Denverā¦
Come to Glasgow. Plenty of good tech jobs. That kind of money would get you a nice tenement flat all to yourself with big old Victorian rooms and big bay windows overlooking the botanic gardens. The razor gangs are long gone and have been replaced by gangs of radicals wanting to build a better city and flummoxed by the way Londoners let themselves be shafted.
Iām just still not sure why some of my friends still live in London, itās a lower quality of life, for much more money.
Plus, if you live in Bristol/Glasgow/Brighton/Leeds/Cambridge/Manchester/Cardiff etc. you get all of the advantages of living in a big city for less money, and people are actually pleasant to each other.
That just crushes me. I miss that place.
