London, it’s over, and it’s not me, it’s you | Hacker News Reader

London, it’s over, and it’s not me, it’s you

i-d.vice.com

81 pointsSandB0x171 comments

Good god, what a bitchy article - and quite sad to see that most of the response here is equally whiny.

London is one of the world's top cities. That presents some substantial upsides, in terms of things like night-life, art, business activity, employment, diversity of the population, and, least tangible but most important, the general vibe of frenetic activity and constant renewal and change that a place like this has.

It also presents substantial downsides, in terms of things like cost of living, noise, pollution, transport congestion, and of course, the general vibe of frenetic activity and constant stress and change.

If you choose to move away from London, fine, go forth and be happy in New Whatevershire in the county of Who Cares... but don't write epic rants about how London's no longer to your taste and therefore it's somehow London's fault.

This irks me even more than anti-gentrification obsessives, who seem to believe that because a family has lived somewhere for a couple generations they should be somehow insulated from the consequences of rapid change and economic growth impacting a whole country.

Life is change. Change impacts everything, including your environment. If a place changes in such a way that you don't like it anymore, you're free to move somewhere else. Do so, and even write a blog post explaining why you moved, if you feel so inclined, but please bottle up the "my viewpoint is the only important viewpoint, and all change I don't like is bad" crap and keep it to yourself.

Yes places change and become world cities. However the problem is the people that made it interesting gave the culture, night-life and art can no longer live there or have a reasonable existance.

You kind of at that point end up with really coorporate art and culture as everything has to be high value and you notice the quality really starts to suffer.

Also the people who attend these things find they cannot live there either and it all dies.

The difference is the cost of land. If you are in London and given a big deposit from parents to keep your mortgage payments down they you benefit from appreciating asset prices and have disposable income. Life is good (for you).

However the cost of appreciating land (in real terms) is that younger people have to pledge more and more of their life to live in the same pile of bricks.

It's clearly now reached the point where it's untenable, it's simply a speculative bubble now. All the UK banks are tied up in it, the UK itself is overly reliant on the financial sector, which lends heavily into housing which shows up as "growth" in GDP stats. They will fight hard to prop it up as long as possible. So far we've seen the UK artificially suppressing interest rates and also directly underwriting mortgage risk because even the crazy UK banks won't do it.

Whatever goes up must come down. And it'll probably go back up again some time later. And then come back down. And back up. And so on, until we finally figure out how to genocide ourselves. Until then, what do you want to do? Freeze everything into your ideal version of the world?

When London sucks for you, move out. When it doesn't, move in. If London sucks for enough people, they will leave, prices will collapse, and the penniless Sitar players will move in again. At the moment, it's not looking like it's going in that direction, so I'd say we have a good while to go before the Doom of London.

Yes, I said something to a similar effect in my other comment.

My problem with it is there are a lot of people that get shafted as things change and really get hit hard by it, and the government are to blame for that.

Other cities in Europe manage to get a balance between capital investment and tearing the heart out of the city.

Exactly.

Also, when it is cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London, you know something is wrong [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617319

Only if you're not taking into account the calue of your time.

At the time, it was extremely cheap to fly between the two cities (~40USD roundtrip). I just checked the same airline, same airports and the cheapest, midweek flights are about 200USD roundtrip.

It's not about "tastes".

What you're missing is the fact that the prices of real estate in world cities are no longer being influenced by actual, RESIDENTIAL demand. The foreign investment aspect is horrific in London, and then throw in the governmental aspects which favor large, corporate development conglomerates over smaller developments with lower price points.

But there is load of residential demand. The population living in London is increasing all the time [1]. Certainly, there's also speculation, but the speculation is not unfounded, like those empty cities in China. People do want to live in London, even at the current prices - more and more people every year.

* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a55f7d74-51f0-11e3-8c42-00144feabd...

Indeed, and that has long been the case. For a very very long time, people have been talking about unaffordability for ordinary workers leading to a price crash - but this has never happened due to insatiable demand coupled with low interest rates.

Of course London is expensive but equivalent accommodation in places like Paris, New York, SF, and Singapore isn't that far south per sq meter, especially as a percentage of salaries.

Unaffordability is also a red herring - when prices became unaffordable in Japan, lenders just introduced longer multi-generational mortgages. While that is obviously distasteful, it illustrates that demand is sufficient for even those kind of deals to get taken up.

This isn't to defend political inaction on the issue, but many people protesting don't seem to have a sufficient grasp of the fundamentals to make cogent proposals that could improve the situation. I believe the foreign investment market is already slowing but if you wanted to make a dent in it, you could introduce duties or prohibitions on foreign owners and/or vacancy.

We are starting to experience this in Toronto. For perspective, housing is considered fairly expensive in this city, and a 1 bedroom apartment will cost approximately 1000 CAD here. Per the article, it would cost 2300, and foreign investment will assuredly take the price there within a few years at the rate things are going now. It's absolutely terrifying.

>If you choose to move away from London, fine, go forth and be happy in New Whatevershire in the county of Who Cares..

Your comment's attitude reminds me of those AirBnB / DropBox soccer players kicking the kids out of Mission field. When prices inflate, it sometimes removes the 'choice' to move away. So no, not "Choosing to live in New Whatevershire in the county of Who Cares". Choosing had nothing to do with it.

How much do you make in London?

I've lived in London since 2003. When I first came here, I was making £22k pa. I am making quite a bit more now after working for 12 years, but before my last business took off (in 2010) I was living just fine on about £1500/m after tax for a year and a half, which works out as about £28k/y before tax, which is not a particularly high wage in London. Yes, I wasn't living in luxury, but I wasn't living in poverty either.

I went to see a real estate agent for a crappy 1 bedroom place in Kentish Town, where there is no kitchen and living room and denied contract because I don't earn more than £45k. I wouldn't praise quality of life you can get in London for a £28k/y salary.

Kentish Town. Ugh.

And that!

It's amazing what you get used to in London. How you justify living in such a polluted messy place for so little return.

Once you walk away you just wonder why you didn't do it sooner. The world is a big place.

but please bottle up the "my viewpoint is the only important viewpoint, and all change I don't like is bad" crap and keep it to yourself.

You are projecting a lot onto the article that isn't there.

> london, it’s over, and it’s not me, it’s you

(the title itself)

> At what point do we say enough's enough and actually realise we'd rather live in affordable cities?

> But in 2011 I had to say 'fuck you London, our 30 year relationship is over. And for the record, it's not me, it's you.'

> London is quite simply taking the fucking piss.

> That's like being recommended a restaurant where the food is expensive but really good, and the recommender also notes that the food will make you ill.

This last one is a great example of a crappy "my viewpoint is the only one that matters" generalisation... anyway, I'll stop now, the article is littered with these. You can find them yourself.

London is an overpriced shithole. Admit it and don't take it so personally.

None of those are "my viewpoint is the only important viewpoint" nor "all change I don't like is bad".

Lmao, so you live in London I take it?

This article perfectly matched living in San Francisco for me (and why I got the fuck out).

Absolutely. I'm sick of reading these whiny, entitled, rants. London does not owe anybody a place to live within its borders. London has not done something wrong just because you cannot afford to live there.

London is perhaps the greatest city in the world. It's certainly in the top 3 or 4. Surprisingly, it's expensive. That's because lots of people want to buy property there.

If you want to leave because it's too expensive, I can completely understand that. It's a rational choice. But it's not London's fault. It's not the fault of people living in London. It's nobody's fault.

A city can be great and unaffordable simultaneously.

That's because lots of people want to buy property there.

That's part of the problem. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just lots people wanting to live there, but it's not; there are people who do simply want to buy property there as some kind of capital parking. That's damaging to the city.

Is it? By what measure?

What makes a city such as London valuable is the high density of people (or rather, the high density of opportunity created by having so many people in a suitable regulatory environment; the regulatory environment is essential but fixed - the population density changes). It lowers the costs of a great many things (including more nebulous things like simply meeting people and interacting with them) and increases opportunities for creation enormously.

There is a negative feedback loop in action as increased population causes the price of things we cannot simply create as much as we like of (such as places to live) to increase, reducing the attractiveness of the city. Actions that jack up prices push people away, reducing the value of the city. Buying property as a capital park and leaving it empty is one such action.

People aren't buying things and leaving them empty. That would have zero financial sense. They're renting them out.

London's resident population is not going down; it's going up.

So, I see no evidence that the city is being harmed. It's thriving.

People aren't buying things and leaving them empty.

Yes they are. I'm not going to do your google searching for you.

So, I see no evidence that the city is being harmed. It's thriving.

You have made a fundamental logical error. Your error is that you equate "thriving" with "not being damaged". This is incorrect. It is possible to have something that is thriving and would be thriving even more if only it were not being damaged in some way.

You've also taken what you see and decided that that's all there is, without bothering to look further. Your laziness is common but no less sickening.

Don't bother answering to explain to me how you actually don't even need to look at google because you know everything, or how actually London is currently the best possible London it could possibly be; I'm too old to try to explain things to you more than once. If you think I'm being dismissive and not very nice, you're right. Fortunately, I'm just a line of text on a screen, so if this makes you feel bad, or angry, or frustrated, why not take a look at yourself in the mirror and wonder just how you've reached the point where a line of text on a screen can do that do you.

The article style isn't good, here I agree. However I disagree that people are "whiny". This is simply dismissing potentially valid complaints people have about the way housing in the UK is being financialised in order to extract the maximum possible economic rent over an individual's lifetime.

This is not about supply and demand, this is about the creation of money to drive up land costs. And it's not unique to London, as others have pointed out many parts of the UK are very expensive.

Life is change. This is a bad change and we should resist.

>please bottle up the "my viewpoint is the only important viewpoint, and all change I don't like is bad" crap

I'd like to know where you see the author expressing anything remotely like "my viewpoint is the only important viewpoint, and all change I don't like is bad".

He expressed his views and nothing more. You seem to be the one who's inordinately irritated by viewpoints you don't agree with.

You are infuriating! One person's crap is another person's interesting read. I enjoyed it and suggest you might want to perform your very own 'keep it to yourself' by the simple device of not reading such a piece instead of taking time off to diss it. Don't like it? Don't read it. The crap/bitchyness comes from you.

How is "diversity of population" automatically a good thing? Pirates from Somalia, mafia from Italy, wannabe ISIL, ... that's diverse. I find these lefty statements clumsy. As it happens, I do vote UKIP, which you'll love and jump at, but I do it for no reason other than to stop the population increasing, because London is quite simply completely and utterly failing, and unable, to deal with it. Last I saw 15 000 properties being built p/a; and population growth: "London had the highest growth, with population in the capital up 1.45%, a result of 82,400 more births than deaths and the highest net international migration of all regions at 107,400."[0] Enough building? Schools can't cope, ambulances can't cope, police can't cope, hospitals can't cope, the tube is a disgrace, housing is out of control and worsening, and as mentioned the air quality is unacceptable. The quality of life is poor, and deteriorating. Quality of life is important, unless you're the frog in a pot, and only realise its effects too late. London, quite simply, is broken.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/25/uk-population...

and yet, unlike you, all these people want to live there

This is a joke right? Positive population growth = broken?Millions of people live in London despite these negative factors, so only parts of it are broken, other parts are so attractive as to draw in vast numbers in spite of the problems you list. So it's not 'simply' broken, there are parts of it that are clearly working .

Stop the population increasing? You are aware that our entire economic system is built on the assumption it'll keep increasing?

The reason people think racists are idiots is because racists are idiots. "no other reason than to stop the population increasing"! Ha!

Apt timing. I'm in the process of bailing out of London and heading about 200 miles west.

Honestly I earn a shit ton of cash but I can't actually find anywhere that I can actually face putting the cash down on. I looked at a new development 3 bedroom flat last week for £419k that was made of the cheapest possible construction and you could hear your neighbours farting through the walls. The view was another new development block, some office buildings, the M4 flyover and a ton of haze in the atmosphere.

So I'm bailing out west a long way. Half the salary but there is less disparity in quality of life and property prices.

You are not paying for the building it's the land cost.

Good for you, get out. Even better if you can leave the UK and starve out the UK treasury.

Also the quality of life is better. Shorter hours as less wage slaves terrified of loosing their job as they live hand to mouth. Less busy. Easier to get out into nature.

Yep.

Particularly notable for me in the article:

" Because of this, London is becoming like Washington DC in the USA, where I used to live. DC is dived with poverty at one end serving the wealth at the other, and the wealth doesn't hang around. DC is a place where people go to further their careers before moving on to settle down because it's too expensive to stay."

I bailed out of Washington, DC 11 months ago. Got so sick of trying to grind out a basic quality of life.

I ended up moving to "flyover country", and I love it. Trees, fresh air, good jobs, and a house in a great neighborhood. The people are nice, and I have this crazy thing that some people refer to as liquid assets, others call it disposable income. It's nice.

My brother, who remained behind in DC with his family, has a house that is less than half the square footage of my modestly sized country house. It's cramped, even by urban standards, and majorly in need of repairs. It is also a duplex, and the neighbors sharing the structure are rather snooty and unfriendly. He paid over $500K US for it. Did I mention the schools are so bad he'll have to send his son to private school?

Yeah, I'll take the affordable cities any day over that crap. Unlike my brother, my house isn't making decisions for me, like "can one of us stay home with the new baby instead of putting her in daycare?" (His mortgage had a firm answer of no to their bank account.)

I'm living and working in DC now, and this is so true. If I worked here for the next three decades, I could barely afford a one bedroom condo. A family and a house are out of the question. I love the work I do here, but I could easily learn to love other work in a cheaper state.

I'm thinking of doing the same. I make more money than I ever imagined I would but the quality of life is crap. Shit properties, polluted, unfriendly people, overpriced...

I'm thinking I might do another year then bail.

All I want is a place where people are actually friendly, not too busy to care about each other, somewhere with a garage for my motorbikes and a garden for barbecues. Not much to ask, but can't see London being the place.

I'm literally only in London now for the money.

> I'm literally only in London now for the money.

Me too, but isn't it true for many people in top metropolies? People live there because it's great for their careers, not because they're nice places.

There's one thing somewhere being good for your career, another feeling like you're living to work because you can't afford the money or time to do the things you want to do.

In my case I'm aggressively saving. I feel for people in professions which don't allow for that though. At the same time, I choose the software profession in part for the insane salaries we can command.

It's hard to convey how bad the housing situation is in London to people that have not lived there. Starting income is much lower than Silicon Valley (a very, very good pay for your first job is around ~40,000 pounds/year), housing costs are insanely high, and public transport is crazy expensive.

It's possible to live there as a young person with multiple room-mates, living far away from the city center, but as you get older and want things like privacy or, god forbid, enough space to live with a family, it becomes completely unaffordable. The city center has gotten so expensive that even bankers and russian millionaires cannot live there - it basically exists now to cater to Middle Eastern billionaires: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-17/russians-q...

London is an awesome city, I'm glad I lived there during my undergrad, but there's no way I could go back there as a 30 year old. The city will constantly be appealing to the young, who don't mind squeezing with three other people into a small apartment in zone 4, or the extremely rich, but for everyone else, move far, far away and you'll be a lot happier, even with everything (and, it's really a lot) that London has to offer.

The UK is just getting worse and worse. It's a rear-guard action. They are printing (desperately) via land prices. Without this there is no "growth".

Given that the young have no savings, no security (job or home) and no hope, what will the UK be like in 15 years time? My guess is it's going to be worse than now.

London really is soul-crushing. I doubled my salary then doubled it again starting out working from 1998 and all the time housing costs stayed ahead of me.

The UK is not for workers. You are always working for the landed classes, not for yourself. It's the new serfdom.

The US is going down this same path. It's why every apartment complex in my town sells for 50-100% more than it did 5-7 years ago. We don't tax the wealthy so they're finding ways to park it in real estate.

The problem is the poor (working or not) keep voting for this trickle up policy. It's like Americans never learned from the history of the UK.

just to compare, what a salary of a 30yo working in tech would be?

Probably £55 - £80k a year, depending on how 'hot' the stack you're on is and how willing you are to work for hedge funds / banks.

Multiply by ~1.2-1.5 for contracting rates (but then good luck getting a mortgage)

This is me. £150K p/a, > 3 years of accounts but banks can't understand low salary and high dividends so won't give me a decent mortgage. Plus my credit rating is fucked from moving to a different rental place each year. I'm looking at auctions instead.

I've heard a rumour Halifax might give mortgages to contractors based on a pro-rated day rate...

I've also heard this.

There are also specialist contractor brokers, and I got a mortgage approval for a decent amount through one of them last year, they offered me way more than I could afford.

HSBC don't understand contractors completely but they have offered me a reasonable amount of lending (I make about half what you do, but then I choose to live elsewhere). HSBC seem to have about the best rates at the moment.

Thanks i had thought about a loan but didn't follow up.

Not 100% sure this is unbiased but from what I see, £50k is good for a 30-years-old and £60k very good I would say. (Permanent employees of course.)

>> (a very, very good pay for your first job is around ~40,000 pounds/year)

In the city maybe!

Yeah, in other places I'd be surprised if it's much more than half that... salaries here in the UK are bad...

I've left London. I went to Canada, Quebec. If I come back I'll go up North.

I'll never work in a "world city" again. It's a waste of time. Over time I grew to hate London and I have zero regrets about leaving. My biggest fear is having to go back.

It's not as much of a world city as London or New York but we quite like Berlin (moved there from cities smaller, more expensive and with worse career prospect).

It's not for everyone but if you're in tech or media it can be quite attractive.

Germany is different because of the way they make land available for people to build. The UK is all about only letting big builders put up housing and taking a huge cut. This keeps prices nice and high so people have to borrow their lifetime income. This way the maximum economic rent is extracted from workers.

The UK is totally anti-worker. It's a rentier paradise run for the benefit of The City.

Click on Germany and the UK on this and see:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-hou...

Ask yourself with 3/4 of new money created via domestic mortgage lending where would UK "growth" be without pulling forward "earnings" through debt?

Wow. This looks a lot like a political issue, why do people put up with this?

No idea. I honestly think we will get to the stage where boomers are riding the young around and shouting "giddy up!". And the kids will just shrug. There is just something about Brits that makes them so exploitable. Like domesticated animals they just line up.

It might be the same reason that explains why poor Americans oppose taxing the rich. The population in general don't have a good idea about the big picture trends that affect them. They accept higher house prices and think that they need to get into the game asap rather than try to change the rules of the game.

Berlin is rapidly becoming more expensive, too. So don't wait too long.

Average Monthly Rent in Europe http://i.imgur.com/RKfucgp.gif

Average % Income Spent on Rent in Europe http://i.imgur.com/himm8Ur.gif

The reason the UK is so high is because London literally drags the whole country up to the top of the ranking (not necessarily good) - Ireland would have vaguely similar rents to the UK discounting London and these two images help show that London is a bit rent mad.

Whilst London is quite apart from the rest of the UK. It isn't the only place in the UK with disproprtionately high rents. Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, anywhere with a bouyant jobs market you pay over the odds for compared to Europe.

Granted not as high as London, but as a % of income not dissimilar at the end of the month.

Ireland has large variances in its rent as well. Dublin is substantially higher than the rest of the country. London is just beyond this normal deviation though. The rent between Oxford and Dublin for instance would be very comparable.

If you compare local earnings to house prices, London is, in fact is only #2, behind Oxford.[1] The problem with Oxford and Cambridge (as well as a place like Reading) is that they are still within commutable distance from London (Oxford and Reading slightly more so than Cambridge), which means you get people who earn well even for London standards who live in those cities and commute, in turn making those places more expensive. Some of the other cities, like Edinburgh, Manchester (in parts) and Aberdeen (oil) are certainly pricey as well, but they are not nearly as expensive as the South of England.

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/house-prices/114...

Oxford is indeed pretty bad. I have to live ~20 miles from the centre, and even then it's not cheap.

> Ireland would have vaguely similar rents to the UK discounting London

At first, this seemed wildly implausible. But back of the envelope, it requires house prices to be about 3x higher in London (15% of the UK) than elsewhere. That seems a little high to me, but the right sort of ballpark.

(Calculation: start with 100 houses at 679pcm. Increase 15 of them in price until the average is 902pcm. Those 15 houses now cost 2165pcm.)

He's got some good points. I lived in London for a long time, but never bought because it just seemed so insane.

When you're young it just about works, though: you want to have friends around, so why not share a house with them? That way it's still expensive, but you have someone to hang out with. And your expenses as a single guy are not exactly high. You don't need a car as it's just you and your bag on the tube. You're drinking anyway, so it's either tube or cab. What you care about is seeing loads of other young people, and London is great for that.

When you get a family, everything turns against living there. You can barely stand on most tube trains, so good luck getting the pram on board (and god help you if you need a wheelchair). You want to take the kid out of town? There's a traffic jam in every direction. Want to find a school for the kids? Good luck getting in the catchment. Some of them are actually less than a literal stone's throw. Private school? Sure, but school's have to pay rent too. It's not the teachers taking home all those fees.

IMO the best compromise is one of the commuter towns. Some of them have fast trains. They are still expensive, and the train itself isn't cheap either. But you get a little more space, a decent selection of things parents want, and the schools are not bad. Even better, live in a commuter town but work remotely. Then you can network, see people now and again, but not have to get in the sardine can each morning.

You've clearly never experienced the traffic in Mumbai, Bangkok, or Moscow. London isn't exceptional.

Totally irrelevant. London traffic is bad. Who cares that it may be worse elsewhere?

Point being that it is a normal expectation for a large populous city anywhere and says nothing whatsoever about London (other than London may actually be doing quite well as far as traffic goes).

It's why I left too, pretty much.

On the + side, London and its surroundings has a zillion jobs, some of them interesting. Out in the provinces, the job market for devs tends to be for plodders.

I was going to be very sarcastic here but decided to improve my tone.

While a lot of the non-London jobs are of the plodding type, there are many that aren't, and there are areas of concentrated, cutting edge tech work outside of London. Cambridge, for example.

I was going to be very sarcastic here and decided not to change my tone. That introduction was pointless.

Property in Cambridge is also very expensive.

The other option is commuting.

I'm trading an interesting job for plodding as you put it.

The positive thing about plodding when you're experienced is that it doesn't kill you so you can do more interesting things.

This is what happened with me a few years back. Was there nearly ten years. Five years in I would have laughed in your face at the idea of leaving, but the expense, the cramped conditions and crowded feel, the bad air... all eventually got to me.

I now live an hour and a half away by train. It's nice here. And I can still come to visit some of my friends in London quicker than they can visit each other.

Yeah - it's about the same amount of time from my local station (east Greenwich) to Euston as from e.g. Milton Keynes to Euston.

the issue with the travel from milton keynes to euston is that the peak hours virgin trains are completely packed and will struggle to find space in there.

A fair point. Although I'd be happy with the Midland Mainline trains that take ~50m (IIRC) since I can work on the train.

Plus my plan is no more than two days a week actually commuting since there's zero requirement for me to be in the office as a developer.

niicee ! Yeah apparently midland trains are quite empty. Maybe I l do that as well !

I live about 40 miles from London in the middle of kent. It takes me only 10 mins or so longer to get in than people in Richmond on the District line.

HS1 with the £6600 per annum travel card? :)

This would be great, except if the rent doesn't get you, the train fare will. Coming from the U.S., I had to pick my jaw off the floor when I saw what they charge, it's obscene. Say what you will about U.S. public transportation, at least it's cheap. Here in the UK if you so much as glance sideways at a city bus, it'll be five-pounds-change.

That's a london thing, it's (approximately) only a pound or two in a lot of other places.

>>if the rent doesn't get you, the train fare will.

Hence why I only go there visit friends, I don't work there.

Well, I did for a while last year, but the rate on offer was large enough to offset the cost. It wasn't large enough to offset the 3+ hours a day spent in a train though, so I don't do it any more.

Eh, all bus journeys in London cost exactly 1.50

Outside of London we were gifted the 'marvels' of deregulation in the 80's though and the prices & service are now pretty bad. I remember watching the minister responsible at the time espousing how marvellous deregulation was going to be and how he'd been inspired after seeing two empty buses going over Tower Bridge - yet London largely escaped despite being the inspiration. Count yourselves lucky ;-)

This Guardian piece has some numbers : http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/26/bus-deregulat...

The underground is £4.80 for a single fare in zones 1-3, £2.30 if you use the oyster; double for return ticket.

Yes, but rarely anyone pays that. Mostly because there's a daily cap of less than £10 (depending on which zones you traveled during the day).

Not sure about cheap. I spend about $350/month for the Metro North train ride from Connecticut into NYC, and half the time am riding in the 40-year old cars with dilapidated, uncomfortable seats. The NYC subway just bumped up its rates to $2.75/ride, which means I'm spending around $115/month for the subway. All that, and it takes me two hours door-to-door.

I live in Connecticut because the houses are slightly more affordable and my kids can go to decent public schools. As soon as they're out of high school in a few years we're considering moving, but all my contacts and the interesting, well-paying jobs are in NYC.

Steep, but it's about half what I'd pay to go a much shorter distance into London (if I actually went 5 days a week). Replace 'half' with '25%' if we're accounting for exchange rates...

I intend to leave Paris for the same reasons.. but I don't know where to go :). All the reasonable dev jobs seem to be in expensive, crowded and polluted places these days..

Well, when I left, I went to Australia. Perth is expensive, not crowded and extremely clean :)

But after a few years I ended up back in the UK, on the south coast. It's nice here, and I have friends (unlike there!)

Where to start?

>> "as someone whose salary is only five figured"

That's a pretty huge range from very poor to quite well off, without being more specific it's hard to judge any of the claims the author makes.

>> "I don't think I'm asking for much, I only want a secure family home with a garden, enough money saved for a good pension, access to fresh air, and some peace and quiet."

That's actually asking quite a lot from a city especially a huge capital city. Pretty hard to find peace and quiet in capital city - there's usually a lot going on. But to be fair in London you actually can find it in one of the many parks. Also, there aren't enough apartments/houses (hence high rents) yet you think asking for one with a garden isn't asking a lot.

>> "zone 4 paying out a minimum of £1200 pcm for a 1 bed flat"

Doesn't sound accurate to me. I've been looking at 1 bed flats recently in zone 2 and there are decent places going for £1300 so I'd expect zone 4 to be a lot less expensive.

>> That's a pretty huge range from very poor to quite well off, without being more specific it's hard to judge any of the claims the author makes.

Not really, unless you're very high earning then getting what he wanted, a three+ bed house with a garden, and not so far away as to make life difficult for commuting, is very very expensive.

>> That's actually asking quite a lot from a city especially a huge capital city. Pretty hard to find peace and quiet in capital city - there's usually a lot going on. But to be fair in London you actually can find it in one of the many parks. Also, there aren't enough apartments/houses (hence high rents) yet you think asking for one with a garden isn't asking a lot.

That's exactly the point, in most of the country and most of the world it's not asking that much.

He's reached a state where the benefits of 'city' do not outweigh the compromises one has to make to live there.

If that balance is not something that's tipped for you (yet?) then cool. For many, many of us it has.

>> "He's reached a state where the benefits of 'city' do not outweigh the compromises one has to make to live there."

But it's like complaining water is wet. That's just the way it is. There are things cities have that smaller towns don't a vice versa.

Part of the problem highlighted here is that it wasn't 'just the way it is' until about 15 years ago. Before that, much of London was relatively affordable to live in, for a couple of middle class professionals. Now, it's not.

And compared to 15 years previously that was also 'unaffordable' (even with the crash in the 90s)

Yeah, but in one of the world's top cities, asking for a 3-bed house with garden and fresh air - wtf, why not ask for a hunting forest while you're at it?

Do you ask for a 3-bed house with garden in Manhattan? Do you think a 3-bed house with garden in downtown Tokyo is just a reasonable expectation for the average person? I'd love my 3-bed house with garden just off the Champs Elysés, too, why not. Perhaps one on the space station too.

London is one of the world's top cities. If you don't want to live there, fine - but don't bitch about how unfair it is that you can't get some kind of dream property in one of the most desirable places in the world, where tens if not hundreds of millions of people want to live in a space that only supports a fraction of that...

If you don't think a 3 bed house (parents and two kids) and some trivial exposure to nature is a reasonable expectation for a normal worker/employee, that says something sad about this over-urbanization trend.

You have to be reasonable about commute times of course. What's reasonable is dependent on the city size, but a 1hr commute in either end of the work day is probably reasonable in big cities, in the biggest ones such as London, Paris or Tokyo you probably have to accept 2h (And if that isn't reasonable to you, you have to move. I could never do a 1.5 or 2h commute).

I can only assume that what he meant was that it wasn't reasonable to find a 3bedroom house with a small guarden within reasonable commute distance and reasonable budget.

When moving in stockholm I looked for just this, (sub 1h commute, 3bedrooms) and had to make a heatmap for public transit times in order to find the good spots. Needed to be in the orange (40minute travel) to have <1h door-to-door with a 10minute walk to/from public transport. http://commutemap.azurewebsites.net/

I think you've missed the point, entirely.

If the city living, for you, outweighs the cramped conditions, poor air and general crowding, then you go for it you urbanite.

A lot of people realise after a while that what London has to offer doesn't seem like a good value proposition. That's what the article is about.

Good luck getting a house with garden in Paris, New York, Barcelona etc

I'd have probably started with "The London Underground advertises a seven-day service, but this is a fallacy. It is effectively out of service on weekends and bank holidays"...

London has 99 problems, but absence of daytime transport at weekends ain't one.

Very true. If a routes closed for maintenance there's always an alternative.

Spent 3 days in London a while back and at one point I felt as though I was inhaling airborne bits of glass.

Also that feeling when you blow your nose after having traveled around on the tube for the day. Black snot. Nice.

Kept getting stuff in my eyes there.

Air pollution in some parts of London is severe. Life-limiting -- people die because of it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20664807

> The paper, Air Pollution in London, produced by the Assembly's Health and Environment Committee, reports 8.3% of deaths in Westminster are attributable to man-made airborne particles.

> In Kensington and Chelsea it is 8.3% and in Tower Hamlets 8.1%.

> Bromley and Havering have the lowest proportion of pollution-related deaths in London, both 6.3%, but are still above the England average of 5.6%.

I'm from Portugal and have lived as a working adult in Lisbon, Barcelona and London. Even though I was earning more than the average salary in both Lisbon and Barcelona it would impossible to be able to buy decent property in the nice parts of these cities as they are as out of reach as the nice areas of London for normal people. I just bought a garden flat with a garage in zone 4 and my commute is so relaxed I can even code on the train. And, I don't need to worry about the lack of interesting and well paid jobs as I used to in Portugal and Spain. Personally I have done well by moving to London, and I know a lot of others with similar stories coming from countries with "low rent".

What on earth is “pcm”? Do you apply pulse code modulation to money in the UK?

Per calendar month.

'per calendar month' - in the UK there's a bit of a tradition of quoting rental prices (and footballers' wages) per week, so it's best to specify which you mean.

Per calendar month. It is used very often in rental adverts.

I can see London begining to hollow out at some point like it has before. Slums will begin to rise again (if some areas aren't already close to being that already).

Vast wealth will be left in pockets and as all the mid earners leave to try have a better life in the countryside and elsewhere the reason London was successful in the first place, the culture and those that create it will be in deficit. Then the rich will see they've paid over the top for property and they too will leave.

Then London will begin again. Like it has multiple times.

Are you sure? Looks like the last stage of failure post-empire to me. I guess China did come back, but it took a while...

I got bored of London, worked in SF for a while and enjoyed it there, but had no chance getting a visa.

I got back to London (could never really afford to live in the city centre) and then moved to Berlin and loved it. But, you can get too comfortable in some places, so I'm back in London again, but I miss Berlin.

Never go back though, if I had the chance I'd move on to somewhere new in Europe for sure. London's great though, more diversity than many, many places, and that's a huge reason to stay.

As someone who lives in London, this is fake.

>> small flat in zone 4 paying out a minimum of £1200 pcm for a 1 bed flat,

Mate, I pay 1600 for a two bedroom big flat with an awesome view (zone 2). Prices didn't get that ridiculous yet.

>>> I was recently charged nine quid for two pints of ale and I took offence.

Fuck you, that's bullshit. If you actually paid that, you've been robbed.

>>>It is effectively out of service on weekends and bank holidays

Yeah, they need to do maintenance regularly, idiot. There's more than one way to get somewhere, you know? It's not like they close the city down.

TLDR this guy may have valid reasons to leave London and the article is well written, but a lot of "facts" are just plain made up or exaggerated.

EDIT

I misread as 9 quid for one pint. 9 for two pints is most definitely correct.

I don't agree with his negative attitude, but I don't think he's far off in terms of his facts:

- I think nine pounds for two pints of ale is about right anywhere in London. Go somewhere a bit cool and it's easily over ten

- I pay £1400 for a two bed in zone 2 which is cheap, I think the average is around £1600. I recently started looking at one beds in the same area and they are around £1200

- nine pounds a pint is excessive. Even at Hawksmoor it's half that. Wetherspoons a third that. Simply not true.

- yes, zone 2. He talks about zone 4.

He says 9 pounds for two pints. £4.50 a pint sounds about right for London.

Oh ouch, that was my incredibly dumb mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.

I used to live in Chelsea (zone 1) in 1 bedroom flat and was paying 1300. This was last year.

Barcelona manages to keep its metro service running way more hours than London, and the tickets are a fraction of the price.

Barcelona doesn't have to support the number of people that the London underground does.

Barcelona has a population of about 1.6million. London has a population of about 8.5 million.

The London underground does have some problems - confusing fare structure; confusing Oyster cards; high levels of fake coins in the ticket machines; old tunnels and trains; very busy at some times, etc.

But it does pretty well considering.

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/what-we-do/london-und...

> Annual passenger numbers: 1.265 billion

Not many places have higher prices for beer than London.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandcon...

I went to University in London and lived there for 10 years. I loved the city to death. Back then in the mid-90s we thought property was over valued, but in truth a 2 bedroom flat at around 80k in zone 2/3 was affordable on a modest income. I liked the culture, the people and walking around the city which was always so alive.

Despite all that when I decided to get married and have a family I looked elsewhere. Perhaps ironically I settled in Vancouver which is suffering a lot of the same issues as London as so many others had the same idea.

Good article but it's really just a fact of life that if you live somewhere that many people want to live, you must compete with them for rental and real estate.

Completely echo this article except I'm working on moving from 5 figure to 6 figures in order to get the life I want. I doubt the article writer can get 6 figures in Cupar.

That is what I and other people I know did - work up to a better salary.

If you don't mind living in an area without the Tube you can find some really nice leafy places with a great lifestyle.

Where I live now it doesn't even feel like a big city and I am 20 minutes by train to the center.

Yep, I couldn't agree more... I used to be slightly out of the M25 in a nice area but my partner wanted to move closer to her work and so (sadly) we in zone 6.

I get 6 figures (contracting, and this one is only just) and London is still too expensive for me.

IMHO find an IFA and work out a holistic financial plan.

With 6 figures you should be getting ahead.

If you do take this advice make sure:

1) They are regulated (obvious) and check the FCA register to see if they have any complaints

2) You like them and think you can get along, don't just settle for a 'cheap' proposition

3) Make sure they use lifetime cash flow modelling

4) Make sure they use scholastic modelling, and

5) Be prepared to pay for the advice and implement it.

TBH right from the outset it sounds like you might have to make lifestyle choices around spending habits.

Also just guessing here but if you are in that tax bracket you should have several tax mitigation options that will help you.

I guess when I say that "London is too expensive", I don't mean "within the scope of my financial reach" as much as "based on what I'm willing to sacrifice for living here".

I could be getting 50-75% more than I'm getting now if I went into Rails consultancy or moved to a bank doing sysadmin work but for me those would be a net negative on my quality of life. Or I could move into a shared house and save a couple of hundred a month on rent but again quality of life concerns prevent that.

> you should have several tax mitigation options

I have a moral / ethical stance about tax optimisation - I won't do it, however legal it may currently be.

>Make sure they use scholastic modelling

Yes, and more specifically, make sure that they're a Thomist. You don't want to be taking finical advice from Averroists or Ockhamists!

And San Francisco is even more expensive...

This is just supply and demand - there are a lot of people who want to live in world cities like London, but a limited supply of housing.

Do you really know about this or is this just middle-school economics? Do you know about the London mkt?

Lots of the more expensive parts of London are empty at night. London is open season for money laundering through housing. Also do you know how money is created? How is it that people can suddenly pay $600k on a modest salary?

I think this is the housing bubble correcting itself. Good.

Nope the UK establishment will double down on it again as the UK is using land to print money. Without this reality catches up with UK living standards.

It will crash but they won't just let it happen.

They can't let it happen. They are propping up the house of cards with more cards.

If the bubble pops, then Thatcher's children and children's children will be proper screwed.

No, it's a capital being emptied from its center and people moving away from their birthplace/families so they can have a decent life, due to real estate speculation and money laundering through mass property acquisition.

Good point. The amount of money laundered through London is unbelievable.

The UK's unique selling point: nobody gets charged for finance crime*

* unless it's defrauding a bank

Several traders have been prosecuted for libor-rigging.

I recently visited London from the US and stayed at my aunt and uncles house on the south coast. Their old little house in is worth £600,000 which is insane (12X what they paid for it), simply because it's a hour or so by train to London! The price inflation of real estate anywhere near London is worse than SF. Compared to that in D/FW area my modern 2000sf house is $180,000.

The Brits won't know what you mean by D/FW.

(Dallas/Fort Worth metro area in Texas)

To be fair, Texas real-estate is super cheap because there's tons of land that doesn't have many trees on it. It makes building new housing stock super quick, easy, and cheap. But to your point, D/FW is an awesome part of the country. Plenty of culture, plenty to do, plenty of jobs. (I'd be lying if I said I like it better than Austin though)

omg... i am close to making this decision myself ! just sick and tired of the soaring house prices in london.

I'm not bothered about the house prices but the incessant apartmentisation of every bit of land (e.g. Thames Path, east of Greenwich) and general shitness of the city (e.g. Greenwich, weekend) has brought me to the same decision.

Depending on job and other situations, I'm hoping to be out of London this time next year - probably somewhere like Milton Keynes.

tbh the prices in Milton Keynes have gone up as well. (P.S i am looking for houses there too !)

Yeah but I can get a one bed flat there for less or the same as I'm paying for a studio now. Plus the environment is just a lot nicer (I was there last weekend walking down the canal and it was LOVELY.)

True... you get a lot for the price of a studio in London really. lol. I was there too ! although it was rainy in MK when i reached there. I liked the place too. Its not rich in heritage so to speak. But for a decent middle class living with family and kids I think its a nice place.

Also not to mention you could commute to Birmingham should you get a good offer from there.

I enjoyed* the Saturday afternoon rain as I walked back from the centre to Caldecotte Lake. Took my shoes a day to dry out. Most damp. (But still a lot nicer than London canal walks.)

Same here. Been in London for 15 years, but rent's just going up and up and the idea of buying a place here is beyond laughable. Crappy little houses down the street here (Haringey) easily cost £300k+ (for a one bed flat, divided from what once was a single, real house). I suppose we could get a mortgage for that... but I can think of lots of better things to spend that much money on.

Sadly for me, my partner's Italian and working in an industry wedded to London (as does mine, to a degree), and for her the thought of moving to the suburbs or beyond is just not possible, so...

Yeah.

I don't particularly want to move to Italy either.

Doomed.

Strange article. I moved out of London to a house with a garden that would be affordable to a couple on the average salary [edit: to a couple both earning the average UK salary]. I am 20 miles as the crow flies from the centre of London.

Where do you live?

Currently live in Wimbledon, and I want to move.

About 5 miles north west of Watford. There are dozens of small villages round here. If you look hard you'll find cheap old ex-council houses built in the 1920s which were well made and come with loads of land (ours has 2800 sq ft of land). The catch is you won't have any public transport and will have to cycle or drive everywhere (I recommend an e-bike).

And yes really I am 20 miles as the crow flies from Charing Cross station. All I need now is a flying car :-)

> 2800 sq ft

I'm hoping you mean sq.m there since unless I'm mistaken, 2800 sq.ft isn't that much (unless that's distinct from the house but still...)

I meant 2800 sq ft of grounds. In the UK that's a generous but not enormous garden. If the garden was any bigger it would take too much time to do the gardening - as it is I have to devote a day or more per month just keeping it under control.

The garden is big enough that I built an office in the garden which didn't appreciably make the garden feel any smaller: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/garden-office-most-mos...

That's a nice garden office!

Nice, thanks!

I bought a motorcycle the moment I moved to London, couldn't commute without it. I'd go insane...

My neighbour has a motorbike. That's also a very practical option for commuting/shopping here. The reason I like the e-bike is there is no licensing and it goes up and down hills nearly as well as a motorbike (it's very hilly round here).

What e-bike do you have?

The B52 Stealth Bomber ebike looks awesome.

Woosh Krieger. Cheap [relative to e-bikes] and cheerful. http://www.wooshbikes.co.uk/?krieger

Edit: OK I see you're talking about e-(motor)bikes vs electric bicycles (pedelecs).

Thanks for the link, I didn't realise they came this cheap.

Yes the B52 is a bit more "motorbikey" but it has pedals and falls back to being a regular bicycle too. :) It looks like a lot of fun!

As a matter of interest, what do you think an average salary is? It's a year old now, but the Guardian had an article detailing average UK salaries[1] and the median average household income for a couple in the UK is £44,200. That's not each, that's their total income. Do you really think a couple earning that much can afford a house 20 miles from the center of London? That's barely outside of the M25.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-...

Average UK salary is £26K according to Google, so I just doubled that. So OK, I meant a couple who between them earn in total around £52K p.a. and can bring along a deposit of £50K (reduce the deposit by £3.50 for every £1 extra that they earn above £50K). That'll bring you to near enough £240K which is what I paid for a 2 bed house with a large garden.

Note the article is claiming you need to be on a six figure salary to live anywhere near London, which is a load of tosh.

Average UK salary is £26K according to Google

That's the mean average though, and it assumes a standard Bell curve distribution - it's completely wrong and obfuscates the truth horribly. There are a lot more low income earners than high income earners. If you look at the Guardian article I linked to you'll see that ~70% of people in the UK earn less than £25k or less (all the adults in the seventh decile and below).

Note the article is claiming you need to be on a six figure salary to live anywhere near London, which is a load of tosh.

If you're not in a relationship where you can buy a house together I'd say you certainly need to be in at least the top 10% of earners (>£60,500). Sure, that's not a six-figure salary, but it indicates that the over-whelming majority of people have been priced out of London, which is the spirit of the article.

No, it is not the mean average, it is the median. You are quoting the wrong statistics - you are including part-timers, but he is talking of the median full-time earnings, which are actually 27.2k on average nationwide according to the ASHE. The median full-time salary in Greater London is 32.8k, and still 29.9k in the outer South East.

Of course your broader point still stands - in London you can only own a house if you earn in the top deciles, or if you inherit a house or get gifted a deposit by parents/grandparents who got lucky in the house price boom. The latter is the default way.

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