The very people London needs, nurses, doctors, programmers, firefighters, artists, carers etc are leaving the capital. And not to suburbs, a lot of them to other European cities.
So I think it really depends on what kind of startup your are trying to build. Europe doesn't have much going for it with London ,Berlin and Stockholm as the exceptions.
But just like you can go to LA and pay a third in rent of what they pay in SF doesn't mean that it's advisable.
Again depending on what kind of business you are running.
It's weird how capital is localised to particular cities in an era of air travel and Skype.
Step 2: Go to someplace like Berlin, and invest (wisely) in the startup scene there.
Step 3: Profit!
Unfortunately, I can't get to step 1...
And that's UK prices not London! Please come to the UK and instead of re-investing your profits give them to a rentier.
That's an insane hyperbole.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-234...
A slightly counter view with different numbers: http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/residential---other/spotlight-... : still points out that large amounts of UK assets are held overseas and that in 2013 there was $10bn of office property inward investment.
Gordon Brown (in the treasury) produced a report to see how UK could integrate with the EU. The output was basically that the UK economy is not flexible enough.
A very large portion of the UK's GDP is based on housing and housing services. The amount of debt on UK housing is astronomical.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/europe/03/euro/pdf/fin... Page 55 onwards
"mortgage debt 60% of gdp"
http://www.ft.com/fastft/309012/how-would-uk-housing-correct...
Also, I don't think that yield from real estate is classified under the "trade" item in the Balance of Payments
What is a big problem is hyperbole, media and vocal whiners.
Social mobility is bollocks as well. It's perfectly possible to do it and it is easier than it has ever been due to the sheer piles of education available for little to nothing and the thousands of opportunities. Motivation and time are the only constraints.
Edit: everyone I know has moved up the social ladder, if there is one. We all appear to be in the same shit at the end of the day.
Did you mean carer, or did you mean care worker?
I will add that her husband died from bowel cancer in 2006. If ever you think your life is a bitch, it's a good comparison point.
However from a financial point of view this is simply the state preventing mortgages from ever failing. Banks are protected by our taxes.
They aren't. They only pay the interest. The claimant still has to pay off the capital.
Your lack of understanding of this bit of SMI (previously housing benefit (and this rule has been a rule of HB for very many years)) makes it pretty clear that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
It's "landlord benefit". Rents should not be topped up because landlords want more.
If you don't think housing benefit is a problem we are just wasting time. Your view on market rates, on how land prices are set is just not thought-through.
You don't understand how prices are set and are sadly one of a large bunch of people who want to help but who are making life worse for everyone because you want to get all touchy-feely instead of reading some books.
It's not an unlimited payment. Do you know what a local housing allowance is?
> It's "landlord benefit". Rents should not be topped up because landlords want more.
How else are poor people supposed to pay for accommodation?
It only pays interest, not principal, and it's conditional on receiving another benefit.
We badly need a massive crash in house prices. This woman's case is pretty exceptional and emotive so I don't think it's a great example.
In general we need a huge crash and to hell with the few who bought in near the top. All future generations are facing turning over most of their wages to the banks without a correction.
And yes you correctly point out we need property taxes.
As I said stop using this one person as an example it's not helpful for a discussion of policy. We can all cite disabled people negatively impacted by high prices as a counter-point.
When the workers swelled the ranks of the poor, the government stepped in once more —
this time to assist capitalists who petitioned for tax-funded favors.
As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains,
“England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a system of poor relief supplements
to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve.
The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers
whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages.
Just like tax credits (and housing benefit).
The UK establishment have been "helping" the poor for a long time.
It's of a piece with the other 80s privatisations: rather than provide services by the state, move them into the private sector (but still paid for by the state), guaranteeing profits to the purchasers.
The state pays your landlords mortgage.
Why is it more insane for the state to pay the mortgage of someone who clearly has very little, than for them to pay, via housing benefit, the mortgage of a buy-to-let landlord? Assuming the amounts of money are similar, the former seems preferable to me.
For some reason _noone_ seems to be talking about the fact that the people profiting most off the benefits system are middle class buy-to-let landlords. Housing benefit costs the government £20bn a year and it's just going to go up with house prices.
http://budgetresponsibility.org.uk/wordpress/docs/Welfare_tr...
Most of the people complaining do not know poverty or have anything to compare it to.
Poverty for me was being sent out at the age of 5 to nick milk off people's doorsteps at 6am because the local food canteen was empty the night before and no one would dare kick a child in because the police might actually give a shit then...
Anyway I hear a lot from friends in London that the gap between poor and middle class isn't all that bad. The poor get quite a bit of state support and seem to manage with a whole 'lot of compromise, and benefit from the opportunities of a metropolitan city with lots of talent, good schools etc more than say the poor would do in say Glasgow. But for (upper) middle class in London is where it gets tricky because the pricing is upper class, your income is middle class and state support for the middle class is negligible, and then for upper class it's fine as their income matches the city's pricing, their biggest worry is probably a possible housing bubble popping over the next decade, something the lower and probably much of the middle class too might even benefit from.
This is just what I've heard, can you comment on that from your experience?
Meanwhile the evil Tory government is capping benefits at more than the national average wage...
As a student living off savings from a previous minimum wage job, it is quite possible to live a comfortable life in London. Motivation and time are most certainly part of the few constraints.
I'd like to add financial wit to that. Most people who struggle also struggle to control their finances in any way and spend irresponsively.
I'm glad to say that they teach this in secondary schools now. I have hope for the younger generations.
It is exactly the same with the tech hubs in the US - SF, Seattle, East Coast, etc. I'm from the midwest, which I suppose is the equivalent to North England. Like the author, one here needs to move to a hub to obtain an interesting position and good salary.
The problem is that housing and other costs (tolls, taxes, etc.) have been pumped up so high, it is nearly impossible to live well (past your early 20s) in one of these cities, assuming you'll one day move out of the shared flat with 4 roomies.
I've done the numbers, and the choices are grim:
1) Stay here with a high salary and job prospects but never have kids.
2) Have kids, move hours out of the city, and spend my life commuting.
3) Move back to the sticks, take a huge pay cut, work on crappy Enterprise crud apps, but at least live in something larger than 500 ft^2 studio in the ghetto.
It's fine. Seriously.
If you want to make a living working for trendy unicorn startups, then the midwest certainly doesn't have as many of those. But if you are on top of your career, and are happy to keep your skills up to date, then you can find many interesting opportunities here. And if you don't want to keep your skills up to date, there seem to be plenty of places looking to hire people to maintain old enterprise apps written in VB...
I find this job market to be absolutely fantastic. I have lots of opportunity coming my way on a regular basis. And since there is a lower supply of qualified engineers, I feel as though I could command more salary.
I can make enough money here to live an extremely high quality of life, and raise a family while doing so. For me to go to a tech hub, I would need to receive one hell of an offer.
So that's a weird mix where the rich lives with the poor, but the middle class is excluded. ( well, from time to time, one of the estate flat goes on sale for between 300 and 400K which is somewhat accessible to middle class, but then less than 20% of the housing on an estate are privately owned via right to buy scheme, and most of the time the original owner are still living in as they can't really buy better anywhere else )
edit: note that for nurse, there are help scheme available via key worker shared ownership ( you buy a share and rest the rest ). So you have more chance to find a nurse living in the center than a doctor.
Also note that the problem comes from the price explosion of private housing over the last decade. 10 years ago, where I was looking, there were estate, shared ownership (50% of 200K) and private properties starting 200K and up. Now, you have estate, share ownership (25%!! of 600K) and private for 600K and up. The salaries are about the same and the level of help to access government assistance hasn't changed much either. So you can progress from poor to lower middle class, but then there is huge gap to be able to afford your place.
In my area, the cheapest you can find still in inner London, the average price of a 2 bed is 300K and new flats are 500K and up. All but 1 landlord in my building bought their flat since 2007, all the rest bought them between 60K and 80K when they were built in 2000.
That's the tricky bit when thinking about fixing the problem. Even though only people that can afford 300K and more can move in, the majority of private landlords are of modest means and that's going to be that way for decades.