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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps true of fashionable London, but hey, that's supply and demand. Tax the Russians and Chinese more, and those addresses would come down in price.

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London, Manchester, Edinburgh, [add your location here] and all surrounding areas.

The UK is expensive. Also from today's Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/16/cost-of-...

with people in the comments claiming a nursery place is 1000 pounds a month which sounds right based on what friends tell me, compared to out capped ~£250 a month in Norway where everyone screams about high taxation but where the cost of living and quality of life are (probably) much higher.

Agreed, cost of living in the UK (not just London) is steadily climbing while quality-of-life is dropping through the floor.

Interestingly that's not the cases everywhere in the UK. for example Dumfries and Galloway saw a 10% drop in property prices last year...

Presumably because no one wants to live in Dumfries and Galloway. That's not meant to be a slant against the place -- I don't think I've ever been there -- but the price will drop if there's a decrease in demand with flat/rising supply.

I live in Aberdeen, and you can definitely add Aberdeen and the surrouding -shire to that list. With the ongoing and very deep cutbacks happening in the oil industry, the prices have stabilised a little, but don't appear to have dropped any.

From speaking with friends and acquaintances with whom I went to Uni, it appears there's a pretty predictable pattern to housing costs: anywhere there's reasonably plentiful work, prices are very high. It's cheap to live in Stoke-on-Trent or Ayr, but good luck getting a job that pays much more than minimum, if you can find even that.

Whilst other areas are expensive London it totally in a league of it's own.

Edinburgh (most expensive part of scotland) average property price £234k. London, average property price £642k

Also people in Scotland and areas like Manchester can more easily get on the property ladder by buying in cheaper nearby areas. for Edinburgh places like West Lothian (average price £164K) make a much easier starting point.

Heck with improving internet access, if you can do your job remotely the western isles are nice and cheap (average price around £100k)

For me the UKs property market is heavily split between London and the south east and "the rest of the country", a lot of the stories about expensive UK property don't seem to cover those aspects.

its own!

Prices in many parts of the UK have been more or less static since 2008, and in some cities they've actually fallen.

The hot spots are all "capital" cities for their catchment areas.

>if you can do your job remotely the western isles are nice and cheap

I've considered this, but I decided that moving to Europe is a better idea, for cultural and political reasons.

Also, it doesn't rain nearly as much; climate change is going to flood/rot a lot of the UK's housing stock and infrastructure over the next few decades, and I'd rather be somewhere hotter and drier.

It is an average of £28,000 per year to send two children to nursery in London [0]. In stark contrast, the cheapest house in central Bradford was £29,000 [1], and last year 120 homes in Liverpool were sold (with conditions attached) for £1 each [2].

[0] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-2385465/How...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/02/housing-marke...

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-34474378

> that's supply and demand.

It's not just supply and demand. The government is heavily subsidising house purchasing. This essentially means that I'm paying (through high taxes) for homes that I don't live, for people who can't afford them.

> The government is heavily subsidising house purchasing... I'm paying (through high taxes) for homes that I don't live

How so? Taxes on property purchases, especially in London, generate significant income for the government - according to http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/stamp-duty-burden-on-l..., London house buyers paid more than £3 billion in stamp duty in 2014, with one London borough (Westminster) contributing more than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together, and the most expensive London property (in Belgravia) raising more than the whole of Liverpool.

I would assume that most of the subsidies are for properties that have very low stamp duty.

However, if it's true that the subsidy exactly offsets the stamp duty, then I agree that this would be amazing - basically a tax subsidy for the poor.

The government (with Right to Buy, Help to Buy, Help to Buy ISAs etc) is subsidising house purchases, but only for first-time buyers.

So it is skewing the market in their favour as opposed to landlords and speculators.

That's a good thing in my opinion.

Not really, as I wrote above, it's using my money to pay for other people's homes. It's also increasing the demand for housing, which in turn pushes the prices higher, encouraging speculators and helping them.

It is helping existing speculators, indirectly, but it's altering the balance of who's in the market.

Well, it's also using your money to pay for roads you don't use. That's like the concept of taxes.

But it also allows "normal" people to buy houses apposed to just rich foreign people.

The roads are for everyone to use. The houses aren't.

Why would a government discourage transactions? Shouldn't we encourage people to move closer to work/school?

Property transaction taxes are taxes on the precariously employed.

No, they'll just pay the tax while making even more money. For a lot of rich in totalitarian countries the UK, and the US, is their bolthole.

Why will taxing them mean they make more money? And also why is that a problem? Even if it doesn't improve the housing situation it makes sense to maximise tax income from rich foreign investors.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about anything and it probably isn't that simple.

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