How is London affordable now?

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If you think finding a decent place in London for not much money was bad if you have a job, it's worse when all you have is the pittance that the government hands out when you don't have a job and the limits put down in both the LHA rates and the benefit cap means that you can't get a box in places where the LHA is around £260/w because of the cap and even in areas where the cap doesn't matter the boxes are even smaller and the landlords won't even accept anyone on benefits and even those that do are either in the high LHA that get nuked by the cap or are once again micro box studios or bedsits.

I've all but given up on remaining in London because of this and I've decided to set my sights on Liverpool since for the LHA rate I can actually get a one bedroom flat or even a two bedroom flat if it weren't for the bedroom tax, and I won't be paying out all my pittance on council tax and other bills, and even then if I do get a 30 hour a week job that pays minimum wage, I'd still be better off then I would be in London or maybe it'd be around the same since I didn't do any calculations with what I'd get in working tax credits and housing benefit (although, I've decided that the move will be more of a fresh start for me finally living on my own, but I'll have to find help to get things done).
 
Soldato
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Unless you have existing family/attachment I don't understand the desirability of such areas.
A few of my friends were FTB'ers in areas such as Worcester park, Hounslow, Kingston after a few years of working in London & settling into career, & it takes them longer to get into Waterloo than it does from Woking! Not sure what you get exactly for the substantially more expensive housing.

It is not more expensive housing - it's far cheaper than where I currently live. Also comparing Hounslow/Worcester Park and Kingston to Richmond is a bit lol :) Perhaps Kingston UT at a push, but the environments are very different.

I work from home 90% of the time, and having Richmond Park and Richmond on the door step is ace. I love the area.
 
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I'm lucky that I earn a good living, I am just in the higher tax band so I cant sniff at the amount I get paid (plus there is scope to earn a lot more over time), though I do pay back approx £7,000 a year in career related debt, which will be clear in a few years now, but it is scary that a person in my position (effectively earning £41-42k PA gross, once debt payments are gone) is struggling to work out where to live, it does make me wonder how lower-paid people get by in this city.

I haven't read this whole thread but in short, London is unaffordable.

However on your salary, there are lots of studios (maybe even 1 bedrooms) around the £1k mark based around the area you work. This would represent around 40% of your net salary however as you have already pointed out, you have potential to reduce this if your partner rents with you.

I am currently in a similar situation but am keeping costs low by renting with my wife and renting the other bedroom to a relative. We are based in Lewisham which is great for transport links into London. Having grown up in west London, I was a bit arrogant and apprehensive about moving to council estate in south east London. However a year on and it's completely changed my opinion and I've realised you cannot be too picky when it comes to renting in London.

Best of luck for your search.
 
Soldato
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Richmond/Twickenham is a beautiful area - spent many years living in St. Margarets. Must admit as soon as my daughter is out the door to Uni I'll be back there from living in the City fairly quickly :)

True - but it is as unaffordable as the rest of London. I'm on a reasonably high salary relative to the London distribution, but I can't get on the property market - even the one-bed flats are >£400k and the competition from buy-to-let is high in this area as we are on one of the main train lines to Waterloo. I'm going to have to move out of London to be able to afford to buy.
 
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I started to read this thread with a fair amount of scepticism, but the more I read, the more I felt empathetic toward those trying to live/work in a city in which I'd always taken living/working as a given.
It really must be a Royal pain to have to fork out 50% of your wages/salary to live close to where you work, or live further away, in a nicer place, and pay 50% to commute.
It dawned on me, just how lucky I had been, in more ways than one, although I am way older than a lot of the people trying to get along in London now.
For a start, at around 25, I finagled my way into a highly paid, (for those times), truck driving job, and gradually discovered, that providing that I was careful, I could skate on very thin ice, and double or more, my wages.
This resulted in my buying an £18,000 house between Woolwich and Welling, Kent, with a £9,000 deposit, when I was in my early 30s.
I sold that for £38,000 some 5 or 6 years later, and bought the house I still live in, for £56,000, having a smaller mortgage which I paid off early, it is now valued at £1.6 million.
18 months after moving in to this house, I completed the Knowledge, and got my London taxi driver's green badge, at a time pre-Uber, when driving a black cab was almost like having a licence to print money, providing you didn't mind going to work at weird hours.
I turned it in maybe 5 years back, when TFL was bending over to Uber, and the writing was on the wall.
I don't spend so much time in pubs any more, but I still take my wife out to good restaurants, and take holidays in Texas and Florida, but I'm starting to think about getting out of Dodge, and moving to somewhere between Bordeaux and Toulouse.
Thank Christ I had the good sense to invest in a couple of good pension plans, so I can spend my days walking around the city for a bit of exercise, but able to stop for a glass of wine if I feel like it.
Good luck to all you youngsters looking for a decent home, I sincerely hope you find what you want.
 
Caporegime
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If you think finding a decent place in London for not much money was bad if you have a job, it's worse when all you have is the pittance that the government hands out when you don't have a job and the limits put down in both the LHA rates and the benefit cap means that you can't get a box in places where the LHA is around £260/w because of the cap and even in areas where the cap doesn't matter the boxes are even smaller and the landlords won't even accept anyone on benefits and even those that do are either in the high LHA that get nuked by the cap or are once again micro box studios or bedsits.

well there are plenty of people who actually work for a living and don't spend £260 a week on accommodation, if anything the cap is pretty generous
 
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I'm in San Francisco now and that's how I feel walking around. By contrast - never really felt unsafe in London. Apart from one night in Peckham.

That city has really gone down hill in my eyes over the last few years. Vagrant central these days and because of the water restrictions impacting street cleaning, dirty and tatty.
 
Soldato
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I'm in San Francisco now and that's how I feel walking around. By contrast - never really felt unsafe in London. Apart from one night in Peckham.
There's plenty of parts of London where you feel at risk of being stabbed at any moment. Tottenham was the worst I've been too personally but northern parts of Croydon or west Croydon aren't far off
 
Soldato
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There's plenty of parts of London where you feel at risk of being stabbed at any moment. Tottenham was the worst I've been too personally but northern parts of Croydon or west Croydon aren't far off
Croydon is horrific in places. I've had the displeasure of being on a tram where it's kicked off between rival groups of yoofs twice :eek:. Now I just get a taxi from the station to where I need to go when I have to visit.
 
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Friends of mine looked round Croydon in a desperate attempt to find somewhere affordable to buy their first flat. (They were renting in Putney).

Some youth threw some KFC chicken at them in the middle of the afternoon. :confused: Needless to say they didn't move there :p
 
Soldato
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Reading this thread is a bit of an eye opener!

I've always liked visiting London and have a few friends there - but spending half of your wages on rent is something I couldn't do.

Can you progress your career up North?
I live in a relatively nice town with excellent road links (basically on the M58 and M6) and rent is £575 a month for a detached bungalow with a huge garden (and garage, driveway, conservatory etc).

Spending £1k a month or more on rent sounds so depressing for a 1 bed flat, here that'd get you a 5 bed detached!
 
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Am I wrong to want North Korea to drop a nuke on London?

Yes you are.

I hate the place, overpriced, dirty horrible city in general. There are a few nice pocket area's however the cost to live there is stupid.

Then don't go there. I'm not a Londoner, but I work in London - it's fine. I'm not a city person, I find it too busy (when I was younger I enjoyed it), but there's nothing "wrong" with it as a place to go, it's just not somewhere I'd want to live. IT's not overpriced, it is priced at the commensurate rate of the area. It's no different to any other country - many capital cities are more expensive. It's just the way it is.

Even visiting the city, I hate it. Too many people who are unfriendly and if you look at somebody you risk being attacked verbally or even physically.

Funny, I've been verbally attacked more in the north than in London. But I also have interacted with some amazing people, and had a lot of kindness shown to me in London. So I think that says a lot about you - but then you do have a particular attitude in general so I'm not surprised by that.
 
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Funny, I've been verbally attacked more in the north than in London. But I also have interacted with some amazing people, and had a lot of kindness shown to me in London. So I think that says a lot about you - but then you do have a particular attitude in general so I'm not surprised by that.

I'm sorry Freefaller, I know everybody experiences things differently. But I don't like London mostly because I do not feel safe. It seems I am not alone this opinion either. See below.

That city has really gone down hill in my eyes over the last few years. Vagrant central these days and because of the water restrictions impacting street cleaning, dirty and tatty.

There's plenty of parts of London where you feel at risk of being stabbed at any moment. Tottenham was the worst I've been too personally but northern parts of Croydon or west Croydon aren't far off

I've had the displeasure of being on a tram where it's kicked off between rival groups of yoofs twice :eek:. Now I just get a taxi from the station to where I need to go when I have to visit.

Some youth threw some KFC chicken at them in the middle of the afternoon. :confused: Needless to say they didn't move there :p

Last time I visited London I stayed in a hotel near the Excel Centre and walking towards the tube/train I saw the most horrific thing in my life (was with my wife too) we heard screams and looked at where they were coming from and there was a girl/woman who I would say was around 20 years old, she was shouting and screaming out of a window, I couldn't make out what she was saying, then her leg was out the window, then half of her body and then realised she was in real danger, somebody was forcing her out of the window - this was 4 or 5 floors up. She was pushed out of the window and she fell two floors and luckily she landed on a small ledge and she ran away around the ledge and dissapeared off. In fact I did a thread about it shortly afterwards on here.

I have never experienced anything like that before. I know violence can happen anywhere, it's just that is the first time I've seen something like this, and this was on a Saturday afternoon around 4pm. Not what I expected to see.
 

TJM

TJM

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I've spent plenty of time there and even in some of the slightly rougher areas I've never felt anymore at risk than any other big town or city and indeed I've never been verbally or physically attacked.
Too right. Central London has absolutely none of the aggro that you get in other British city centres on a Friday or Saturday night. There are some right dumps, of course, but a visitor shouldn't be anywhere near them.
 
Caporegime
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I hate the place, overpriced, dirty horrible city in general. There are a few nice pocket area's however the cost to live there is stupid.

depending on what you do the pay can more than make up for the increased cost of living and so for plenty of people it isn't 'overpriced' - it may however be expensive if you don't earn the sort of income that people working in professional jobs in London earn, just as the rest of the UK is probably expensive to someone earning say Polish wages coming here on holiday

I'm sorry Freefaller, I know everybody experiences things differently. But I don't like London mostly because I do not feel safe. It seems I am not alone this opinion either. See below.

well the first quote is about San Francisco not London and the others are talking specifically about Tottenham and Croydon, Croydon in particular is a bit of a dump, London however is a big place with nice areas too
 
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I'm sorry Freefaller, I know everybody experiences things differently. But I don't like London mostly because I do not feel safe. It seems I am not alone this opinion either. See below.









Last time I visited London I stayed in a hotel near the Excel Centre and walking towards the tube/train I saw the most horrific thing in my life (was with my wife too) we heard screams and looked at where they were coming from and there was a girl/woman who I would say was around 20 years old, she was shouting and screaming out of a window, I couldn't make out what she was saying, then her leg was out the window, then half of her body and then realised she was in real danger, somebody was forcing her out of the window - this was 4 or 5 floors up. She was pushed out of the window and she fell two floors and luckily she landed on a small ledge and she ran away around the ledge and dissapeared off. In fact I did a thread about it shortly afterwards on here.

I have never experienced anything like that before. I know violence can happen anywhere, it's just that is the first time I've seen something like this, and this was on a Saturday afternoon around 4pm. Not what I expected to see.

Housey example was for San Fran. And I can share the same amount of stories of people having a safe time there.

I have felt the same in towns in the north. So it is subjective. Your example could have happened anywhere.

You just don't like London that's fine. I'm not a fan of it either but you're being OTT.
 
Soldato
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I'm don't think I'm being over the top when I don't feel safe. OK, maybe my feelings of unsafeness are personal, justification or not aside, but it doesn't mean I'm over the top with it. It is a genuine feeling and I will give my opinions based on how I feel regarding my safety.

I have already said there are pockets of nice area's but overall my experience is that I am safer somewhere less packed with people. I have never been to any capital city other than London, so maybe it is not JUST London I would dislike, maybe it is ALL capitals. But as I have only been to London currently I can only comment on this city not the others.
 
Soldato
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To be fair I whinge about London but I feel 100 times safer walking around Soho or Hammersmith at 11pm at night than I would in say Reading or Leeds.
 
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