The truth of renting in London shines through: it is nothing but enslavement | Hacker News Reader

The truth of renting in London shines through: it is nothing but enslavement

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2 pointskugutsumen4 comments

This person literally says in the 2nd tweet of the thread that people offer 60-70% of their income to landlords, decides to grace us with the source in the last tweet of the thread, and his own article that he links:

https://www.cityam.com/londoners-spend-up-to-72-per-cent-of-...

states that this 60-70% figure is inclusive of utilities, transport, food and clothes, and that for London the rent figure is more like 40-45%(dunno about utility costs in UK).

What did the author mean by renters should get land titles? Is this person saying that renters are entitled to suddenly own what they rent? I'm not getting what they meant with that point or how that would work.

Look, I love a good rant as much as the next bloke, but renters are not forced to pay X% of their income. The word force has a specific meaning, and somebody choosing to rent a specific flat isn't force. Renters choose to pay large amounts in order to live in a particular area. The reason that rates are so high is that there's many, many people that want to live there. There's certainly less expensive housing than a desirable apartment in the best London areas. What's a fair way to determine who gets to live in a nice place in the most desirable areas?

Prices are based on supply and demand. Everybody, in every market, charges about as much as they can get. If your supermarket could sell a big bag of rice for $9,000, they would. If you could charge your employer $9,000 per hour for your services, you would. The reason that prices don't inflate like this is that there's always competition. If somebody tried to charge $9,000 for a bag of rice, the next person could charge $5,000, or $1,000, or so on and so on until the price that meets demand is found. If you tried to charge $9,000 per hour as your wage, your employer could find somebody else to do it for less too. This is how prices work. Landlords only manage to get $XXXX because there's many people willing to pay that.

So if we're complaining about rental prices, what's wrong with supply and demand in cities? Many things, but in many cities, they do their damnedest to both reduce housing supply (stuff like price controls or building regulations that prevent new construction) at the same time as they're increasing housing demand (the big cities where housing is most pricey are always filled with politicians trying their hardest to agitate for mass migration and bring in more economic migrants. Nothing wrong with people trying to better their situation, but this demand for housing necessarily puts pressure on housing prices).

Strictly as far as housing prices go, unless something is worked on with either the supply or the demand, I don't see how any substantially better result emerges.

Unless you live in London or Tokyo, it's hard to understand the situation for most people who do live there - you think "why not move somewhere else?" and the reality is that the entirety of the state has made it a mission to concentrate everything good in London, and businesses as a consequence put a lot of their offices there. An interesting and convenient occurrence turned out that MP's got their London properties effectively for free and also many of them are landlords in addition to being MP's and so they've broken the normal supply and demand system - https://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/yoursay/news/23059207.m....

An outcome of this is that there's a lot of jobs that simply don't exist in any significant numbers outside of Central London and so unless you're happy to travel for many hours in and out of work each day to live somewhere cheaper, you're going to pay a huge premium for it.

No one told me this at school or college or university. If they had I might not have ended up in tech.

Now for people who have fairly generic roles that are evenly distributed throughout the country, they're absolutely insane to live in London and if they moan then I'm less sympathetic.

> An interesting and convenient occurrence turned out that MP's got their London properties effectively for free

I'm not from the UK and lack context to understand how this happened, but it's usually the case that the people who make the rules ensure that they're the winners. Personally, I favor free markets so nobody has an unfair advantage over another.

> An outcome of this is that there's a lot of jobs that simply don't exist in any significant numbers outside of Central London and so unless you're happy to travel for many hours in and out of work each day to live somewhere cheaper, you're going to pay a huge premium for it.

I understand that the best jobs are usually going to be in the middle of a city, and workers either have to decide between expensive housing and a short commute, or less expensive housing and a long commute.

But what can you really do to solve this? Pointing out something unpleasant is one thing, but do you have a suggestion as to how to address this?

Say that in one neighborhood in London close to the best jobs and finest restaurants and parks, there's living space for 50,000 people, but 500,000 people want to live there. How do you decide who gets to live there, if not increasing prices?

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