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.
Well, in another EU country (Italy) that flat would be against building rules and Laws, not only you cannot call a bathroom "sleeping area"[1] but usually (there are exceptions for historical buldings and handicap toilets) a toilet (where the wc is) cannot be connected directly to a kitchen or more generally where meals are prepared, but long before that the very minimal surface for a flat is 28 sqm (the one in the article is around 26) to be an autonomous unit.
Additionally, from the photo it appears that the WC is connected to an electric sanitary macerator, which is not admissible unless it is for a secondary bathroom.
[1] the area of any room aimed to the permanence of people cannot be less than 9 sqm
I think it's simply that they are trying to market this as a 1 bedroom flat rather than a studio.
It looks that the building was subdivided into several flats. But, from the floor plan, the layout of the flat is impractical with 2 large-ish rooms. It would probably have been too wasteful to have studios with massive bathrooms, so they pass them off as one bedrooms. Ideally it would have been en-suite bathrooms but they probably did not have the space (or did not want to spend more...)
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?
> generally doesn't allow buildings higher than 3 stories.
This seems a strange claim in the city that has the Shard. I doubt London is really constrained by planning permission, just that it seems only to be granted for hyper-luxury flats.
You doubt, but it's the reality. Sure, if you're going to build $600 million in a sky-scrapper you can also spend some more in convincing authorities to get you the legal permissions. But if you're going to try and build a 4 or 6 floors building, that's going to be complicated.
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.
Rent Control isn't an effective tool in fighting housing shortages, it is an effective tool in protecting current renters. The one in Berlin is also set up as a temporary measure to give the government time to introduce more meaningful measures.
Rent control is bad. Rent control does what it’s meant to do. It’s ok here. It’s ruined there.
Housing markets and government intervention seems more complex than any one fact can effectively explain.
I want to see some simulation/model research which we can apply to prediction and verification.
I’m on the fence. And i can’t help thinking all opinions are biased depending on your situation. And let’s face it, when it comes to housing we all have a situation.
There's absolutely no rent control in Sydney, Australia. A city with one of the lowest population/km^2. I can find you a bunch of articles showing the same thing with hundred queuing around the corner. Are you sure rental controls are the problem here?
Given that London has no rental controls already and magically suffers from no one being able to build what would you propose as a solution here other than strawmen?
I had no problem getting an apartment in Berlin, very much had trouble in Sydney. Have you tried any of the cities mentioned in this thread? Because I'm speaking from experience.
Rent control only benefits current tenants who enjoy in effect subsidised rent.
But it does not make easier to find a home, quite the opposite, because the effect is the opposite of what would really help: It increases demand while reducing supply whereas you'd want to increase supply and reduce demand...
Overall, rent control is a knee-jerk political response, but it does not solve anything.
In addition, the reality is that the most desirable cities/areas are going to be expensive, there is simply no way around that. If the legal restrictions diverge too much from what the market wants the result will simply be that the law is no longer respected.
As other Londoners and observers have mentioned here, supply is already constrained regardless. Visiting friends there I'm always shocked at the quality/value of housing in London.
In a city that refuses to increase supply the point seems quite moot about bringing in regulations which stifle supply. The regulators and local communities are already stifling it.
Rent control is in its infancy in Berlin. The long-run effects will begin to emerge at some point.
Also a direct comparison with London is not useful. What matters is the relative change in rent in one place over time. Berlin's rent will increase. You can't outrun the hard reality of economics.
I live in Paris also, and I don't know what you mean by 'damaging effects' in the long run? I don't see any bad effect so far except for the capital income of the landlord that is lower.
Housing prices still increase, there are still a lot of rental offers, nothing bad happened so far.
In Stockholm where they had rent control for decades it is basically impossible to get a rental contract at all (waiting time is several decades). The end result is that people are forced to buy to get a stable place to live.
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...
I lived in London for a few years and your experience mirrors mine exactly – if I never move back there it'll be too soon. I enjoy visiting though, but rarely more than 3-4 days, that's about when I start to cringe and have to get out.
Don’t waste years of your life living in that dump of a city. If you can, get out. Europe is big and there are cities where quality of life is great. Groningen, Skien/Telemark, Turku, Warsaw, Prague...
Note that PJW is perhaps a bit too far right leaning, so take his views and opinions with a grain of salt. A lot of the content is quite true though, and both liberals and conservatives alike ought to be concerned.
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.
Thank you. I'd had in my mind that 2040 was when it approached (effective) EOL, and from the country that had 40 years to plan for the Concorde replacement, I was not overly optimistic.
Seems there has been a general trend of increasing need to use the barrier, though the 2014 'blip' threw this number upwards. I'm seeing some references to 'it's fine until 2050-2070', but OTOH I'm not seeing a lot of 'we've underestimated global warming effects, so sea level won't be as bad as we thought' stories -- so presumably we should be looking towards the lower end of that 2050-2070 range.
I read through the v.interesting link you provided -- it reads very gov.uk.
Sadly, after the past couple of years of gov.uk activity I'm not particularly sanguine that they will actually attend to this work.
I've went from Londons zone 2 street view for 740 GBP pm to Aucklands street view, ensuite and a living room for 650 GBP pm 5 years ago. Commute by walking.
Although more recently I've moved to a farm about 25-50 minutes drive away from downtown. Same cost, 10x quality of life.
After London, I traipsed around APJ for five years with a vendor -- NZ was the only place that I really liked. Absent a hard commit locally it'd be a serious consideration.
Great climate, population, soil, culture, space, costs - I'm wary about recommending it in case people listen to me.
At that commute time and cycle-ability, I'm guessing inner west, Balmain through Homebush area? Either way, I'm very impressed you found a 2b/r at $450, let alone with water views.
I'm in the upper northern suburbs -- between the hills, absence of bike lanes, my general unfitness, and rampantly anti-bicycle mentality of most Sydney drivers, it'd be inviting an early and moderately unpleasant death to consider a bike commute from here, even before considering the 6 months of >30C days.
Never been to Sydney although I have heard good things about Perth. Nice and open, not that I'd consider moving to Australia, but looks like a nice and interesting country for a vacation.
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.
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.
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.
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200212132008-04-londo...