151–160 of 220 posts
The last two decades were a world of low interest rates where people worked in offices and lived in expensive, high density flats. If commercial real estate has already peaked I wonder what the next two decades of development in London will look like?
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Most of the new towers you see in the pictures are flats. For instance, around Wembley Stadium the vast majority are flats. Lots of (fancy) flats on the Isle of Dogs as well. It's mostly offices only in the City and Canary Wharf.
We often hear here (Berlin) that the housing affordability crisis is due to not building enough housing...Yet London apparently built loads in the last 20 years and it's still as unaffordable as ever (or even more than ever)? Is there any data showing that if we let loose and build a ton of housing that purchase prices and (especially) rents will reduce significantly? It's intuitively true but all the cities you can…
London really grew in the Victorian era. E.g. http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm Reading Dickens is one way to get a feel for this. Many locations in his books are not yet part of the London conurbation. IIRC, one book has a character walking over fields to get to Hammersmith, for example. Going back further there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Martin-in-the-Fields
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Let’s cut those “bullshit” jobs and see what happens to these people’s investments.
Unproductive work is a financial drain, wouldn't it help investments to cut it? (We do have the problem of defining what's productive, though)... Economic calculation problem.
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Net migration of 600k/year also affects property prices.
The UK could very well easily up with net emigration and still have rising rents. New York in the 1950s ran a very high level of immigration (GIs returning from the war) and had the strongest rent controls it ever had. Neither property prices nor rents rose very much. London only passed the population threshold it reached in 1939 in 2015 - LONG after rents and property prices had been jacked up to eye watering levels…
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Unfortunatley we are seeing prices like this in the US as well. I live in Denver, CO and a pint here typically runs between $5-$10 depending on the place.
A US pint is 16 fl Oz vs a UK pint which is 20 fl Oz, so add 25% to the US price to do a like-for-like.
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It makes you wonder what it will be like in another few hundred years... When we first moved to London (Zone 2/3) the place we lived in used to be a large apple orchard 100-150 years prior. Where we moved to after was on the grounds of a former nunnery then recouperation hospital. And now the area we're in used to be grazing fields 100 years ago.
It will not continue seeing such rapid growth for another few hundred years, world population will plateau by mid century and even the big cities will at some point stop growing.
It's fascinating how boom and bust this is. You look at the City, or at King's Cross and there's just been a total transformation. Then you look at Nine Elms or Highbury and really very little has changed. You've got Wembley - massively built up, loads of carparks gone and building in it's place. Then you've got the Millenium Dome, one big car park in 2007, one big car park in 2023.
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That hurts to hear. I grew up in Hartlepool (North East of England), moved to Australia when I was 19 and I'm 35 now. I moved because I was stabbed, and can't count on one hand how many times I'd been assaulted and mugged in the 10 years prior. To hear the rest of the country is heading in a similar direction is a horrid reflection on the state of affairs in the UK.
I'm a similar age to you, live in London and I've never been stabbed, mugged or assaulted in the UK. It's not that bad.
Like always, it'll be some where in the middle.