Priced out of Paris

This is a fact stated from a point of view of a clear philosophy - that the powerful/resourceful people have to use their power/resources for the good of humanity. All it takes for her (and alike) is not to share this philosophy and prefer let's say, a more hedonistic one. Let's enjoy the philosophical diversity, shall we? ;)

About scalability, as someone already said, there are so many venues available that pretty much whatever you wanted to do, there was always available seats for you -- just perhaps not in your first choice of venue (even after restricting your ticket price to £15 or less) Heck, as you're already in London and the public transport is free (you've got a travelcard as you have to commute to work anyway), you can go and do/watch/listen to something for free every night of the week.

Point taken about CD's in the library. But somehow even though I had the opportunity to take them out of the library before, I never made use of it. I guess I never knew I'd like classical music. But as the live performance was so cheap, I tried it and found I really liked it.

And now I live on the outskirts of London. I pay about the same in rent (bigger place) but hardly ever go into London. Mainly because I used to live about 12minutes from Waterloo and now it's more like an hour and a half (which means all trips have to be planned for weekends; as I can't really be bothered to head out after a full day's work)

Would I rather still live in London? Possibly not. But I'm definitely happy I lived there for a couple of years.

>>You'd be surprised what a couple extra thousand dollars per month adds up to in the long run

Well, like I said, there really is no change in my rent (but I now have a two bed flat and not a one bed), and I now own a car (additional expense). I've also stopped eating out, as restaurants are nowhere near as cheap as they were in London (expensive restaurants were a lot more expensive, but I've never found places that do £2.50 mains like in Tooting, for example) -- on the flip side I always enjoyed cooking, so this isn't a big deal for me. I am also living closer to work (as I work outside London now), so I guess my quality of life is better & the commute is less stressful (and the pollution is lower).

I'm just not as ready as you are to dismiss all the benefits of living in a city. But hey, we're all different. Just saying that I had a point of view very similar to yours until I was forced (SO's job change) to live in London for awhile. Now I understand the delights of living in London (but I can understand why others may not -- just wish people would give it a try :)

The reason why costs are rising is because of land use restrictions through zoning and building codes that regulate housing and commercial real estate density. In other words, politically induced scarcity benefiting wealthy landowners at the cost to those people wishing to buy housing, to rent an apartment, or to run a business is the cause for rising housing prices.

The answer is deregulating the politically induced scarcity of land use. The politically induced scarcity interferes with the market efficiency that would otherwise allow the housing to be more affordable.

This is a basic principle of microeconomics and was initially explained by David Ricardo when he explained that the Corn Laws that restricted the import of corn into Britain benefited landowners because it artificially increased the cost of corn thus making the cost of land more scarce and expensive.

David Ricardo felt so strongly about this that he joined Parliament to overturn the Corn Laws. Similarly the solution today is to deregulate the overly restrictive zoning and building code regulations that cause the scarcity.

Economist (and FT columnist) Tim Harford explains this in more detail in his book, "The Undercover Economist."

(mind, I'm asking this with the assumption that mental illness is much broader than just homeless schizophrenics, so to speak. I can definitely see why they might gravitate towards heavily populate areas. But they usually don't pay rent.)