Cory Doctorow: How startups of Silicon Roundabout are gradually being flattened

Article was removed - but google is all-seeing:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.the...

Gentrifiers complaining that they've been out-gentrified.

There were people living in Hackney and Dalston before the hipsters moved in and starting pricing them out of the neighbourhoods they grew up in, but what goes around, comes around.

"This article has been removed as it was launched early. It will be reinstated at the correct launch time."

I suppose it pays for me to read beyond the headline!

Nothing in London is quite so profitable as property development. I suppose this is the continuation of the process of sweeping away the derelict bits of Hackney for the 2012 Olympics.

It would be nice if economic activity wasn't quite so concentrated in unaffordable London. But I can feel the wave of money washing over the built environment even out here in Cambridge ("Silicon Fen"); it's just about commutable to North London, so buildings have been going up with the clear aim of selling to middle eastern or Chinese investors. It has its positive aspects - many of the cleared buildings were in terrible condition, ugly, or (as in Hackney) suffering from asbestos. But the new ones are still unaffordable. I'm fleeing to Edinburgh while watching professional couple friends get priced out of buying their first home.

Property booms cannot go on forever: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/28/home-ownership-... but we lack the leadership to resist this or to try and distribute industries more evenly across the country. (Mediacity is a token attempt at building a media cluster in Manchester while kneecapping the BBC and looting its buildings).