London's rental market: where $2k a month gets you a bed beside the toilet

If you look at the floorplan[0] shown in the article, it looks like any sane person who lived in the flat would treat it like a normal studio and put their bed in the main room. It's baffling to me why the floorplan shows a sleeping area in the bathroom, but perhaps it's a legal quirk of some kind.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200212132008-04-londo...

Let's find out what you can actually get for $2k (about £1560), in the same area CNN went for:

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?locat...

It doesn't take long to find something better than a "bed beside the toilet".

I live in London. The main reason for this is that government generally doesn't allow buildings higher than 3 stories. Everyone wants to live in central London but there just ain't enough flats. This situation is somewhat similar to the zoning thing in the US. Supply is lower than demand, so prices go up, who would have guessed?

The article mentions Berlin's rent controls. Just going to put it out there that rent controls almost never work, and tend to have the exact opposite effect that they are intended to. Rent control isn't a solution to a housing shortage.

I mean, Camden. Go two or three stops up the northern line, and you can find something much more sensible. The rental market might be insane in certain areas, but this isn’t representative of what 2k dollars a month will get you

I'm not sure what the solution here is... At the end of the day, if your city is nice enough, and demand is high enough, and supply is low enough, you're going to see prices per unit of area rise. And you can do two things, pay more, or accept less space. And in the latter case you run into these ostensibly weird constructions like sleeping in your bathroom.

I don't know what to think of that. On the one hand its inhumane. On the other hand, it's self-inflicted. If you're in the UK, you absolutely don't need to live in London to live a normal life with a decent job, food on the table, good healthcare, good education for your kids etc. The person who rents this place probably is single, late twenties, works in finance, and will likely live here only 2 years before moving to something bigger with a longer commute, but not quite yet before he/she wants to live in the city near the action. Although there's reason to pity, this isn't your stereotypical dystopian pity-case of a family of three menial workers living in a Hong Kong cage.

You can have a discussion about London being a place only for rich people, and that without mitigating measures you get an economic divide between rich and poor, with no socioeconomic mobility. And that's true. In this context I have quite clear opinions on the need to keep neighbourhoods mixed, which requires subsidised social housing (council housing), subsidised private (public) education, subsidised after-school programs etc. But that's a matter of distributing scarce high-value resources to poor people to keep a healthy level-playing field in society. But it does not solve the underlying scarcity. Whatever government system you apply to London, you'll always have this scarcity, and people self-inflicting themselves by choosing to pay 2k for a bed in a bathroom. You can take that choice away through regulation (no beds in bathrooms, minimum unit sizes etc), but it doesn't solve the underlying scarcity issue, just the symptom.

One course of action that I think we should take, is driving centralised decentralisation on a national level as much as possible. Yes we can acknowledge urban centres do wonders as knowledge/financial/cultural hubs. But we can also acknowledge that hyper-concentration in one place, is not preferred to concentration in 5 places. the UK does this very poorly with London taking up a huge part of the national economy. Germany does this much better, with many regional economies which are all very strong and have their own pull.

[The following is a rant] I've been living in London for 2 years now and I find the city dreadful. The quality of housing is usually well below the standards I'm used to from Germany (I won't start on the pricing), but what really bothers me how decrepit everything is. I was looking to rent in the area south of Brixton and frequently felt like I was looking at trash heaps with a roof and flatmates. Sometimes there was a permanent garbage dump on the front porch or something?! I now live in something resembling modern construction, that was however cheaply built and has thin walls and lacks thermal insulation in my bath, so I have to keep the door closed when it's cold outside. I "only" pay 900 GBP to live with two flatmates, which is OK for London I suppose. I have this nagging thought in the back of my mind to brexit at some point...

The first time I moved to the UK from Spain, I was like "hey, rentals are not that expensive. 300, 400, 500... more or less like in my home city".

That was until I realized the "pw" near the prices meant "per week", of course.

I live in London, it is expensive for sure.. I have seen some pretty ridiculous flats for around the same cost as the one in the article, one with a shower cubicle in the bedroom comes to mind... not quite as bad as toilet but still you don’t want a wet bedroom.

Some of the landlords are just taking the piss, there are much better places for better value in decent areas just don’t get tricked by the snakey estate agents like foxtons and look around you can find reasonably good value..

London is an amazing place to live, and (painfully cognisant of how this sounds) if you get a chance to live there for a while, I'd heartily recommend it.

Though of course much of the shine has indubitably disappeared since Brexit.

I was there 2008 through 2013 - and in 2010 we rented a relatively new 1 bedroom flat, on the 2nd floor (of 13), overlooking the Thames, around the Docklands (east London, near the secondary financial sector) on a clean, safe estate with a concierge. This was £280 / week.

A decade later, and doubtless having spent quite some time to find a highly unpleasant flat in a ridiculously inflated part of town (Camden) and TFA are citing £375 / week for a shared bedroom & toilet.

Like any metropolis, London is immense, with huge variations in quality and cost -- everything is a tradeoff against how close you want to be to the center versus how long you want to spend commuting.

FWIW when we moved from London UK to Sydney Australia in 2013 we went from river views, 40 minute commute to city center in London at £280 (~ AUD475) / week , to 60 minute commute to city center, highway views, for AUD500 / week, for the same quality apartment.

Never move to Sydney if you can avoid it.

EDIT: Oh, one of the problems with high-rises around London is the fact the whole place is a few metres above sea level, and the ground water levels are insanely high. I had engineer friends who worked on the underground (tube) extension years earlier, who told me that if the bilge pumps stop working, tracts of the underground lines would be flooded within fifteen minutes. The Thames Barrier (worth a google if you don't know of it) is unlikely to be effective within 10 to 20 years. Plus they've got lots of real estate locked up by investors who simply never occupy it -- all of this does brutally wonky things to real estate pricing there.

I don't know we need to keep using euphemisms like "housing crisis". Just call it what it is; greed and and exploitation. These apartments are usually not fit for living, they're damp, cramped and thats likely to be the least of your concerns.

If you want to support some people working on fixing this situation https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/

I'm a bit confused about the flat they're talking about. I thought that there needs to be 2 doors between the loo and the kitchen, and that you can't have a loo that opens into a kitchen.

Turns out that's probably wrong: http://www.extensionbuild.co.uk/can-door-open-directly-from-...

I recently moved to London and rent in Zone 1. The single bed apartment I live is in pricey but it's a great location and a short commute to my office in central London.

That said, I am in tech and a significant part of my pay goes on rent.

However, from my recent house hunting experience, there's definitely better options for the price mentioned in the article especially in Zone 2.

There used to be a 2 door building reg rule for between toilet and kitchen... I think that was relaxed but I am pretty sure you are not allowed to install toilets in open living spaces. I suppose it wouldn't be surprising to see many regulations broken in London given the opportunity for profit.

This particular flat is quite poorly laid out. I'm presuming it's a subdivided flat.

That's pretty common where I live but usually the internal walls would all be knocked down and placed more sensibly before renting it out. I guess the UK has more strict planning laws which prevent this.

When it comes to housing markets the discussion is usually centered around free market vs. government regulation, but both sides selectively use sources to underline their points.

Viewing the housing market simply as an issue of demand vs. supply is faulty - there are other factors at work that are detrimental for renters. I have terrible internet right now which makes it hard to look up sources, but almost all cities here in Germany have rents rising faster than wages or inflation - even those with decreasing populations.

Even if it was just an issue of demand and supply, housing isn't just any commodity. Cities shouldn't just maximise for supply, they also have to factor in other things, like life quality, availability of services, pollution and more. For example I don't think rent control is an effective tool to be used broadly, but if I look at the district I grew up in in the 90s, almost all the native people were pushed out of it, and the rich people living there now not only fundamentally changed the districts spirit, they also effectively segregated themselves from the poorer segments of society. If this trend continued on a city-wide level, you would have boring rich districts and ghettos, as well as increasing and very visible inequality.

So in the housing market I think capitalism fails quite spectacularly in accounting for very important factors that are only indirectly tied to profit. The few metropolis that have a functioning housing market usually also have massive public-housing companies, and they mix meaningful regulation with fast and easy bureaucracy. - The obvious examples coming to mind would be Singapore and Vienna.