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Comment by buffoon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not super-rich and I'm doing fine in London. So is everyone I know and that includes nurses, programmers, artists and carers perhaps ironically. None of them are moving away.

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.

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Thank you! I can only second what you say.

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.

Financial wit is a killer definitely. A lot of people spend a lot of money on things that they don't need then complain about their life collapsing around them. I've done this before and spent 5 years digging myself out of it. Everything I'm saying is because I've learned about it the hard way.

I'm glad to say that they teach this in secondary schools now. I have hope for the younger generations.

Come back and tell us what you think in 10 years if/when you're married and have a few kids.

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.

4) have three kids, work on crappy enterprise crud apps, live in a house in a nice area near good schools.

It's fine. Seriously.

I don't know if I agree with you that the midwest is a terrible place to be for tech. I'm located in a medium sized midwestern town, working on interesting web applications and using modern technologies. I am paid well. No, I don't make SF money. But my rent is 30% of what I'd pay in SF as well.

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.

Of the millions of people in London, how many of them do you know? Presumably a statistically significant proportion or you wouldn't mention it for risk of appearing blinkered and living in a bubble.

Just because you and everyone in your social group is doing fine, doesn't mean there isn't a problem. See, for example, the massive increase in food bank reliance.

I was brought up on a very rough London housing association estate in the 1970s and 1980s.

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...

Again you can't take your single rags to riches or rags to middle class or whatever anecdotal story as evidence of a larger trend. I feel most sociologist who have looked at the numbers and they'll tell you it's not too pretty (although I agree it is often overblown and there are some obvious benefits for poor people in London who can benefit from a city with tons of solid infrastructure, e.g. in education which can be really beneficial).

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?

If you give things away for free, people will take it and come back for more. That's all you can learn from food banks.

Meanwhile the evil Tory government is capping benefits at more than the national average wage...

Carer is a term defined in law as someone who provides care without being paid for it.

Did you mean carer, or did you mean care worker?

Carer. My neighbor is one for her two disabled children. She sells art and things on ebay to make ends meet.

Can she really make enough on ebay to pay for London rents? Or is she heavily dependent on benefits that are vulnerable to being cut, such as housing benefit and disability benefit?

She has a mortgage that the benefits are paying interest only on and disability benefit as well for her children. She bought the house in 2002 so the mortgage isn't terrible. I think she breaks even every month on a good month.

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.

That is insane. Why are working people paying someone's mortgage? The personal situation this woman finds herself in sounds dire and my sympathies go out to her.

However from a financial point of view this is simply the state preventing mortgages from ever failing. Banks are protected by our taxes.

> Why are working people paying someone's mortgage?

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.

Housing benefit is a major cause of the problems we have.

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.

What problems are caused by housing benefit?

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?

Housing benefit isn't brilliant, but we can't just cut it off without a huge expansion of council house building for people to live in instead.

Sure I'm not proposing a single "solution". However I am saying that housing benefit is a substantial part of the near-enslavement of the UK. It's so bad even "shelter" haven't been calling for it recently as it dawns on them how things actually work and that they've been campaigning for the bankers for years.

The alternative would be to wait for her house to be repossessed and then pay for her rent, which would probably be a greater figure; and in the short term the local authority would have to house her and the children in a hotel until they found a suitable house. Along the way she would lose the vast majority of her personal possessions.

It only pays interest, not principal, and it's conditional on receiving another benefit.

Feels like a safety net for the banks that she happens to benefit from.

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.

No, it really is part of the housing safety net and always has been. And I think it's not all that rare either: people generally only stop paying their mortgages as part of a life collapse (unemployment, divorce, bereavement). If you want to engineer a price crash try realistic property taxes rather than throwing the disabled under a bus again.

Just read something that made me think of this:

    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.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...

Just like tax credits (and housing benefit).

The UK establishment have been "helping" the poor for a long time.

Isn't part of the problem that a high number of council houses got sold into the private market, and haven't truly been replaced?

This is also part of the problem.

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.

Guess what happens when you receive housing benefit while living in rented accomodation.

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...

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