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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe for a second that the reduced emissions are enough for these kids to actually notice. ULEZ is a tax on being poor, nothing more.

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Vehicle ownership in London has always been expensive. Poor people have never driven in London, poor people use public transport. For all London's faults (of which there are many) the high population density makes public transport useful. Please share evidence for your assertion that the "ULEZ is a tax on being poor". Only half of households in London have a vehicle.

They're probably referring to poor (working class really) people living in outer London who have cars and are now basically frozen out of central London unless they use mass transit or pay for entry. There are also legacy car owners who are poor (rent stabilized, etc...). Anyway, the car has a major negative externality on the city's residents and usage should be taxed to reduce the over-usage of the roads regardless of whether the owner is poor or rich.

Congestion charge and parking availability would have already frozen out most lower owners driving into Central London (zone 1 and 2). What does rent stabilised mean here? Not a phrase I've ever heard regarding council housing in the UK.

Probably council housing or housing association tenants. My guess is that the person who said "rent stabilised" is American, as it is an American term - I know new yorkers in rent stabilised housing.

One of the many problems with the internet is the export of American culture.

Given the time of day it’s likely OP was just repeating YouTube talking points from outrage bait videos, rather than being an actual American, but the infection remains regardless, the whole “hands up don’t shoot” nonsense where people in the U.K. acted like the police were armed for example

The following is not a class bound remark: some people don't have culture, so they absorb americanisms more easily. Hands down, worst bit of the Internet is that it provides those americanisms.

> usage should be taxed to reduce the over-usage of the roads regardless of whether the owner is poor or rich.

For the tax to be equally effective on rich as poor, the tax might need to be means tested. A £100 tax disproportionately affects poor people over rich people.

ULEZ compliant cars are dirt cheap - there's a scrappage sceheme as well that will give more than a ULEZ compliant car costs.

It's a non issue turned into one by the "culture warriors" on the right.

Hold on, where were these working class Londoners parking when they drove into central London? As far as I know, _that’s_ normally extremely expensive. Like, I’m not convinced commuting by _car_ from outer London to inner London has been a particularly common mode of transport for a long time.

> where were these working class Londoners parking when they drove into central London

They were paying £20 an hour on parking meters in Mayfair while all the Hedge Fund managers took the bus into work.

Have you ever paid for parking in central London?

Where are these poor people who drive to central London parking their car?

> Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect.

I had the same interpretation of the headline as you. But, based on the quote, I think the change is that their parents stopped driving them to school.

Like, at all? pictures of LA smog in the 80's, or Beijing air pollution now should be enough to convince you that the problem is real, even if you don't believe in the latest round of it.

The article never claims that the children notice the emission decrease. The claim is simply that more of them use active transport to school.

Why do you think emissions levels are what the kids detected that changed their behavior? I would posit reducing emissions levels had a knock-on effect that had some other effect, etc. until the last effect in the chain was what made the kids change their behavior.

Despite "emission" being in the name of the ULEZ, I don't think the article is necessarily implying that the mechanism is specifically that kids were more willing to go outside because there was less pollution.

There are various other possible mechanisms: parents decided not to drive their kids based on the fees, there were fewer cars on the road which made it more pleasant for kids to walk to school, etc.

I don’t know if kids notice, but I can smell the air pollution every time I drive into outer London from outside London. It’s how I know I’m entering London.

The poor do not live in the center of London. It’s one of the most expensive places in the world.

London, like most major cities, has significant wealth disparity: central London is filled with high-earning transplants living side by side with impoverished locals. Southwark is the London borough containing The Shard, Tate Modern, Borough Market, Tower Bridge yet almost 30% of children in Southwark live in poverty. Poverty touches every part of London. Even the City of London has housing estates.

Living in an apartment rather than a house is a strange definition of poverty.

some people don’t know poverty and equate not being rich to being poor

Its common in British cities for most owners/renters to have terraced or detached housing while council houses (public housing) are in tower blocks or smaller apartment buildings.

I'm pretty sure anyone around there who owns his apartment does not fit the definition of poor - in fact most of the so-called rich would take more than a decade of saving up just so that they could own the same property.

The great tragedy of Europe is that asset wealth has far outpaced the earnings potential of the population.

Thanks to right to buy starting in the 80s plenty of economically inefficient people with shit jobs bought their houses in London for a tiny amount. Those are now worth a fortune.

They then rented them out and made even more money p

Strivers who actually pay market rates for rent see all their money drain away, often to “poor working class” people who now complain they can’t heat their £1m houses because we aren’t given them even more free money. Meanwhile those strivers who have a pension are about to have that ransacked to give a triple locked pay rise to those poor millionaires.

A lot of older council apartments in the UK seem to be a bit grim. There's some skepticism against apartment blocks and a lot of newer ones seem to have odd pricing.

I live in a nice apartment in Austria but I'd be a lot more critical looking for one to live in the UK.

> A lot of older council apartments in the UK seem to be a bit grim.

Living on a 1960s council estate (in a non-council apartment) with several low-rise blocks and some high-rise, yeah, it's mildly grim.

> a lot of newer ones seem to have odd pricing.

as in, they cost as much as freeholds, despite being leaseholds, That scam has yet to become apparent, but I'm sure it will eventually.

Also, the liability of having to depend on a management company, and rising fees..

Yeah, that and a lot seem kinda small while being a bit lower than the prices of some houses(but still too much imo). Been a long time since I dreamed of home ownership admittedly.

I thought grenfell pushed the leaseholder vs freehold pricing out in the open. I've seen stuff about leaseholders effectively in negative equity because of the cost of cladding and a previous government dropped a bill or amendment changing who had to pay for such things or the existence of leasehold.

> high-earning transplants living side by side with impoverished locals.

Hilarious take, honestly. Can you point me to some evidence, maps, tables, or discussions about the impoverished London-born living cheek-by-jowl with fancy Nigerians? This is the first I am hearing about the disadvantaged natives of London.

I'm thinking about the people I know who got booted to the kerb due to the London Olympics redevelopment.

I'm also thinking about Grenfell.

The first time I read the comment I thought it was making an aggregate claim about newcomers being richer than natives, which struck me as obviously, spectacularly incorrect. Why else would a speaker say "high-earning transplants" specifically? If I had to point out an example of unequal wealth in London I am sure my example would be their monarch, not a vague implication of Johnny-come-lately bankers or lawyers.

I am certain that in the aggregate the relationship between wealth or income and length of tenure in London is positive.

The King isn't anywhere near being the richest person living in London. It's also a strange example to choose. I mean Joe Biden is richer than the average DC native, but what does that tell you exactly?

London is a very international city, and the wealthy people who own property in the central areas come from all over the place.

> The King isn't anywhere near being the richest person living in London.

I think he's arguing that Charlie counts in the "native Londoner" bucket.

BTW, don't trust the Sunday Times Rich List estimates of the Monarch's wealth. They changed their methodology after the first list when the palace complained that the Queen came out on top.

A lot depends on how much you value some very illiquid assets. But there's no doubt that London is full of people (both British and not) who have more money to throw around than the King. He is not 'even' a billionaire in terms of his personal wealth.

I read it as "native Londoners" vs "everybody else". Eg "born within the sound of Bow Bells" vs. "graduated from UEA with a 2:1 in Accounting and Finance and moved into a flatshare just behind Upper St".

> I am certain that in the aggregate the relationship between wealth or income and length of tenure in London is positive.

I reckon people who were born there and didn't get a London-appropriate degree are unlikely to have amassed wealth. (Excepting Right To Buy, I suppose, but that's more Right Time than Right Place).

OP's point (which I parapharase as "there are two Londons") strikes me as blatantly true, and I've got the impression from art that 'twas ever thus.

> their monarch

You're not British, maybe? Have you spent much time in London? (I was in the "graduated from UEA" bucket above - I've left now, as people like me tend to do as they get older).

The physical presence of Social Housing Estates is the evidence - the occupants are those that aren't otherwise able to afford housing or pay rent. As the commentator says, even the City has Housing Estates.

Majority of people who can’t afford rent in London don’t live in London. The massive subsidies that certain people get, which leads to massive opportunities for their kids and their future career, are all because of where they were born

I think you're thinking of immigrants as the people coming to the UK from poor countries. Most of those people don't go to London, they move to regional towns and cities.

The people who move into central London from overseas are rich emigrants (Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, etc).

There is significant social housing in London, where the local council provides housing for people of limited means. This is a historical leftover from more enlightened times (and one that Thatcher tried to eliminate). But the amount of churn in this housing, as you can imagine, is very low - once you have a council house, you never leave it because all the other options are waaaay out of your price range. So there are whole families who have been living in poverty for generations in the centre of London.

You're not even trying are you?

- city of london official site with housing estates https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/housing/housing-est...

- city of london location map https://www.google.com/maps/place/City+of+London,+London,+UK...

And this is _just_ the "city".

Now why not try and learn something about somewhere and figure out _why_ there are so many housing estates scattered throughout London. It's actually quite interesting.

City of London only has 9k inhabitants. It's very atypical. That's not a good example to draw conslusions about London proper from.

Thats kinda the point.

It's atypical, yet it is abundantly clear that "poor" is closely mixed in with "rich".

Are you suggesting that the majority of other affluent boroughs in London and Greater London are exempt from containing Council Estates? Islington, Putney, Wimbledon, Chelsea...

London is exceptionally economically polarised because of our housing policy. About 40% of people in inner London live in some form of subsidised social housing. This creates a "hollow middle" in the income distribution - people who are priced out of London because they can't afford market rents, but earn too much to qualify for social housing. You can't really be too poor to live in London, but you can be too average.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth/housing/tenure...

Reality doesn’t care about your beliefs

And is car dependency not a tax on the poor as well? If the government only builds car-based infrastructure that requires a car then that is a tax on everyone is it not?

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