I live in Northern England, and this disparity has long been a source of irritation to me.
In the 19th century there was a reasonable balance between north and south, mainly due to the wool and cotton industries in the North.
At some point in the last century that parity ended and moving to London to pursue ones interest was the only way to further ones career. This created a virtuous circle as far as London is concerned and a brain drain for the rest of the country. The BBC's Evan Davies touches on some of these points in his TV programme 'Mind the Gap'.
If you want to work at a decent tech company and work with like minded folk in an inspiring environment, London is really the only answer.
The friends and family I have in London who have a similar education / skills / upbringing to me generally earn more and work for better companies but their quality of life is nowhere near as good as mine with respect to general living. The main trade off is the paucity of like minded friends who live near me.
The price of property in this country is absurd and I find it very difficult to see how the situation has not been gamed by the land owning moneyed / political elite over the last 20 years or so.
From personal experience there was a 4 fold increase in property prices between 1997 and 2005. There was not a corresponding increase in wages. Who does this benefit?
We're doing it to ourselves. We have an effectively fixed stock of housing, but everyone wants to live in a better house. So we're continuously bidding against each other, driving up the cost of houses trying to move up the ladder. Government subsidies intended to make cheaper houses more affordable, to help people get on to the property ladder, just mean that new entrants into the housing market can afford to bid even more against each other for those houses than they would otherwise. That just drives the cost of low-end housing up even more.
It's the fixed stock of housing thing that bugs me. There is no shortage of space in this country. There are ineffective planning laws and most of the land is owned by offshore trust funds controlled by the wealthy few. /rant.
Plus, volume house builders have in interest in maintaining the status quo.
I think what's needed is for builders to switch from a 'build to sell' to a 'build to rent' business model but this needs long term finance to more readily available and, of course, a willingness to embrace new ideas.
The same thing is happening in the USA. It definitely feels like you must be in one of around 5-10 cities or you don't exist. If you don't go to one of them for at least part of your career, you go nowhere and command half or less the pay. The rest of America is "flyover country" where people supposedly live but nothing happens.
This effect has always existed to some extent, but the "alpha cities" phenomenon is definitely something I've watched intensify as I've grown up. I've asked older people about this and they've agreed: in the past 15-ish years the prestige value of where you live has exploded in relevance.
Here are some examples from the tech field:
- The first true "PC" by most accounts, the Altair, came from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
- The BBS phenomenon was largely decentralized, with major BBS efforts all of the world.
- The Commodore 64, the biggest selling PC in the early-mid 80s, was from West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Can you imagine that today?
Now almost everything happens in SF, a notable but much smaller number of things happen in NYC, Boston, and LA/OC, and nothing happens anywhere else (or so it seems).
I'm not sure exactly why this is. It could be a side-effect of increasing wealth disparity: the alpha cities are where the rich live, and the rich are increasingly richer than everyone else. Another factor could be the Internet. The net was supposed to decentralized, but as we've seen in other areas this has not always been the case. The net has been a powerful centralizing force.
Moved from Cambridge (which is starting to have London house prices) to Edinburgh and it's worked out very well: affordable, less crowded, more friendly, enough of a tech cluster, lots of culture.
In re wages, I know at least one person in London whose house earns more in tax-free annual value appreciation than their salary.
Exactly my experience (apart from living up north, which I'm considering).
So far I've gotten round it by living an hour and a bit out of London, and going in every so often to meet likeminded people and enjoy the capital, knowing that the cost of travelling there / eating out / staying is _far_ less than I'd pay if I lived there.
It's funny how the article considers overpriced housing, zero social mobility and a conversion of once a great city into a luxury den for super rich a success.
The very people London needs, nurses, doctors, programmers, firefighters, artists, carers etc are leaving the capital. And not to suburbs, a lot of them to other European cities.
I'm an American entrepreneur who has started two companies in London. My most recent startup was recently accepted into an accelerator in Berlin. Like-for-like, the real estate in Berlin is cheaper by a factor of roughly 6. The overall quality-of-life multiplier is roughly similar. It is definitely making me reconsider my long-term commitment to the UK.
Berlin has the culture and the cheaper prices and def some interesting companies but it still doesn't have the capital and proper access to the things that make London (and SV and New York) great cities for startups.
So I think it really depends on what kind of startup your are trying to build. Europe doesn't have much going for it with London ,Berlin and Stockholm as the exceptions.
But just like you can go to LA and pay a third in rent of what they pay in SF doesn't mean that it's advisable.
Again depending on what kind of business you are running.
The UK has effectively decided to run the country as a property export operation: selling real estate to the global rich. This is setting up a future where we pay a significant fraction of our trade balance in rent to overseas landlords. Is this really politically sustainable? It'll require a lot of funding of newspaper propaganda to keep it that way.
There is an element of truth in what you call hyperbole.
Gordon Brown (in the treasury) produced a report to see how UK could integrate with the EU. The output was basically that the UK economy is not flexible enough.
A very large portion of the UK's GDP is based on housing and housing services. The amount of debt on UK housing is astronomical.
Table 1.5 line "Mortgage equity withdrawal" is particularly revealing: in the other countries it's negative, indicating that people are building up home equity, whereas in the UK it's positive, indicating that people are turning house price rises into spending money through financialisation.
Because we have a single-generation home ownership culture. In Germany and France, most people rent their whole lives and never own. In Switzerland (not EU I know but just for example) you get a 100-year mortgage and pay it off over 3 generations. This is NOTHING to do with an oil sheik buying a £10M mansion - he is not even in the same property market as you are.
What makes yield collected from real estate properties any different from yield collected from bank deposits or dividends from shares on the stock market?
Also, I don't think that yield from real estate is classified under the "trade" item in the Balance of Payments
I'm not super-rich and I'm doing fine in London. So is everyone I know and that includes nurses, programmers, artists and carers perhaps ironically. None of them are moving away.
What is a big problem is hyperbole, media and vocal whiners.
Social mobility is bollocks as well. It's perfectly possible to do it and it is easier than it has ever been due to the sheer piles of education available for little to nothing and the thousands of opportunities. Motivation and time are the only constraints.
Edit: everyone I know has moved up the social ladder, if there is one. We all appear to be in the same shit at the end of the day.
As a student living off savings from a previous minimum wage job, it is quite possible to live a comfortable life in London. Motivation and time are most certainly part of the few constraints.
I'd like to add financial wit to that. Most people who struggle also struggle to control their finances in any way and spend irresponsively.
Come back and tell us what you think in 10 years if/when you're married and have a few kids.
It is exactly the same with the tech hubs in the US - SF, Seattle, East Coast, etc. I'm from the midwest, which I suppose is the equivalent to North England. Like the author, one here needs to move to a hub to obtain an interesting position and good salary.
The problem is that housing and other costs (tolls, taxes, etc.) have been pumped up so high, it is nearly impossible to live well (past your early 20s) in one of these cities, assuming you'll one day move out of the shared flat with 4 roomies.
I've done the numbers, and the choices are grim:
1) Stay here with a high salary and job prospects but never have kids.
2) Have kids, move hours out of the city, and spend my life commuting.
3) Move back to the sticks, take a huge pay cut, work on crappy Enterprise crud apps, but at least live in something larger than 500 ft^2 studio in the ghetto.
I don't know if I agree with you that the midwest is a terrible place to be for tech. I'm located in a medium sized midwestern town, working on interesting web applications and using modern technologies. I am paid well. No, I don't make SF money. But my rent is 30% of what I'd pay in SF as well.
If you want to make a living working for trendy unicorn startups, then the midwest certainly doesn't have as many of those. But if you are on top of your career, and are happy to keep your skills up to date, then you can find many interesting opportunities here. And if you don't want to keep your skills up to date, there seem to be plenty of places looking to hire people to maintain old enterprise apps written in VB...
I find this job market to be absolutely fantastic. I have lots of opportunity coming my way on a regular basis. And since there is a lower supply of qualified engineers, I feel as though I could command more salary.
I can make enough money here to live an extremely high quality of life, and raise a family while doing so. For me to go to a tech hub, I would need to receive one hell of an offer.
Financial wit is a killer definitely. A lot of people spend a lot of money on things that they don't need then complain about their life collapsing around them. I've done this before and spent 5 years digging myself out of it. Everything I'm saying is because I've learned about it the hard way.
I'm glad to say that they teach this in secondary schools now. I have hope for the younger generations.
Of the millions of people in London, how many of them do you know? Presumably a statistically significant proportion or you wouldn't mention it for risk of appearing blinkered and living in a bubble.
Just because you and everyone in your social group is doing fine, doesn't mean there isn't a problem. See, for example, the massive increase in food bank reliance.
I was brought up on a very rough London housing association estate in the 1970s and 1980s.
Most of the people complaining do not know poverty or have anything to compare it to.
Poverty for me was being sent out at the age of 5 to nick milk off people's doorsteps at 6am because the local food canteen was empty the night before and no one would dare kick a child in because the police might actually give a shit then...
Again you can't take your single rags to riches or rags to middle class or whatever anecdotal story as evidence of a larger trend. I feel most sociologist who have looked at the numbers and they'll tell you it's not too pretty (although I agree it is often overblown and there are some obvious benefits for poor people in London who can benefit from a city with tons of solid infrastructure, e.g. in education which can be really beneficial).
Anyway I hear a lot from friends in London that the gap between poor and middle class isn't all that bad. The poor get quite a bit of state support and seem to manage with a whole 'lot of compromise, and benefit from the opportunities of a metropolitan city with lots of talent, good schools etc more than say the poor would do in say Glasgow. But for (upper) middle class in London is where it gets tricky because the pricing is upper class, your income is middle class and state support for the middle class is negligible, and then for upper class it's fine as their income matches the city's pricing, their biggest worry is probably a possible housing bubble popping over the next decade, something the lower and probably much of the middle class too might even benefit from.
This is just what I've heard, can you comment on that from your experience?
Can she really make enough on ebay to pay for London rents? Or is she heavily dependent on benefits that are vulnerable to being cut, such as housing benefit and disability benefit?
She has a mortgage that the benefits are paying interest only on and disability benefit as well for her children. She bought the house in 2002 so the mortgage isn't terrible. I think she breaks even every month on a good month.
I will add that her husband died from bowel cancer in 2006. If ever you think your life is a bitch, it's a good comparison point.
That is insane. Why are working people paying someone's mortgage? The personal situation this woman finds herself in sounds dire and my sympathies go out to her.
However from a financial point of view this is simply the state preventing mortgages from ever failing. Banks are protected by our taxes.
Guess what happens when you receive housing benefit while living in rented accomodation.
The state pays your landlords mortgage.
Why is it more insane for the state to pay the mortgage of someone who clearly has very little, than for them to pay, via housing benefit, the mortgage of a buy-to-let landlord? Assuming the amounts of money are similar, the former seems preferable to me.
For some reason _noone_ seems to be talking about the fact that the people profiting most off the benefits system are middle class buy-to-let landlords. Housing benefit costs the government £20bn a year and it's just going to go up with house prices.
The alternative would be to wait for her house to be repossessed and then pay for her rent, which would probably be a greater figure; and in the short term the local authority would have to house her and the children in a hotel until they found a suitable house. Along the way she would lose the vast majority of her personal possessions.
It only pays interest, not principal, and it's conditional on receiving another benefit.
Feels like a safety net for the banks that she happens to benefit from.
We badly need a massive crash in house prices. This woman's case is pretty exceptional and emotive so I don't think it's a great example.
In general we need a huge crash and to hell with the few who bought in near the top. All future generations are facing turning over most of their wages to the banks without a correction.
And yes you correctly point out we need property taxes.
As I said stop using this one person as an example it's not helpful for a discussion of policy. We can all cite disabled people negatively impacted by high prices as a counter-point.
No, it really is part of the housing safety net and always has been. And I think it's not all that rare either: people generally only stop paying their mortgages as part of a life collapse (unemployment, divorce, bereavement). If you want to engineer a price crash try realistic property taxes rather than throwing the disabled under a bus again.
When the workers swelled the ranks of the poor, the government stepped in once more —
this time to assist capitalists who petitioned for tax-funded favors.
As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains,
“England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a system of poor relief supplements
to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve.
The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers
whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages.
It's of a piece with the other 80s privatisations: rather than provide services by the state, move them into the private sector (but still paid for by the state), guaranteeing profits to the purchasers.
> Why are working people paying someone's mortgage?
They aren't. They only pay the interest. The claimant still has to pay off the capital.
Your lack of understanding of this bit of SMI (previously housing benefit (and this rule has been a rule of HB for very many years)) makes it pretty clear that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Housing benefit is a major cause of the problems we have.
It's "landlord benefit". Rents should not be topped up because landlords want more.
If you don't think housing benefit is a problem we are just wasting time. Your view on market rates, on how land prices are set is just not thought-through.
You don't understand how prices are set and are sadly one of a large bunch of people who want to help but who are making life worse for everyone because you want to get all touchy-feely instead of reading some books.
Sure I'm not proposing a single "solution". However I am saying that housing benefit is a substantial part of the near-enslavement of the UK. It's so bad even "shelter" haven't been calling for it recently as it dawns on them how things actually work and that they've been campaigning for the bankers for years.
There is a lot of social estates in London. There are area like East Dulwich where you are either living in the estate and pay fuck all (while you qualify), or you can afford 1 million+ to buy a place.
So that's a weird mix where the rich lives with the poor, but the middle class is excluded. ( well, from time to time, one of the estate flat goes on sale for between 300 and 400K which is somewhat accessible to middle class, but then less than 20% of the housing on an estate are privately owned via right to buy scheme, and most of the time the original owner are still living in as they can't really buy better anywhere else )
edit: note that for nurse, there are help scheme available via key worker shared ownership ( you buy a share and rest the rest ). So you have more chance to find a nurse living in the center than a doctor.
Also note that the problem comes from the price explosion of private housing over the last decade. 10 years ago, where I was looking, there were estate, shared ownership (50% of 200K) and private properties starting 200K and up. Now, you have estate, share ownership (25%!! of 600K) and private for 600K and up. The salaries are about the same and the level of help to access government assistance hasn't changed much either. So you can progress from poor to lower middle class, but then there is huge gap to be able to afford your place.
Strictly speaking the middle class aren't excluded so much as expected to follow the young professional norm of sharing a property with other renters, paying a little more per month for their bedroom than they would to rent whole house in most other UK cities. So the students and junior doctors are fine, but doctors contemplating starting a family are probably looking to commute in from somewhat less expensive towns on rail lines into London.
In my area, the cheapest you can find still in inner London, the average price of a 2 bed is 300K and new flats are 500K and up. All but 1 landlord in my building bought their flat since 2007, all the rest bought them between 60K and 80K when they were built in 2000.
That's the tricky bit when thinking about fixing the problem. Even though only people that can afford 300K and more can move in, the majority of private landlords are of modest means and that's going to be that way for decades.
Very weak. Briefly touched on something of substance here:
> Financial regulation in New York was far stricter than in London, where the relatively light-touch oversight regime proved attractive to investors.
The UK is playing regulatory arbitrage. They let banks come and do whatever they want because the UK is going down and they are desperate (and corrupt).
London is controlling the rest of the UK because the banks are there and it is the banks, not our government, who decide how much money is issued. They are drug pushers and The City is a cancer.
I don't think you understand how finance work, the UK has one of the best financial regulatory regimes in the world, market participants want to be in London not because it's unregulated but because it's well regulated.
If you have too much regulation you stiffle innovation and development, but too little means that investors don't trust institutions with their money. So it's a trade-off between the two factors.
Yet other countries avoided the bad deals, how did they manage to do that?
There are a number of countries that experienced no recession after the subprime crisis... Australia, Brazil, China, India, Poland, etc... If the UK's financial markets were well run, why did they suffer?
They where well run from the point of view that they made finance fast, simple and safe for a regulatory stand point for the companies involved. This has nothing to to do with insulating the wider economy from the folly of those financial institutions.
It is more desirable because the UK is having a big fire sale to try and stay afloat. Got your money running drugs? From a corrupt regime? No problem - the UK won't check. Plus all the UK population are busy working hard paying taxes to pay the police to protect your property.
I actually do understand that. That doesn't make it a fire sale, though. In particular, a fire sale doesn't just mean "selling at a fast pace". It means selling at a fast pace due to a discounted price. That's where the term fails to match land sales in the UK.
I've worked in it for a long time and read many books plus lived in London for 12 years.
The UK was known to be "light touch" that's why all the banks locate there. No criminal prosecutions were brought from 2008. Lots of US banks put their bad deals through London.
The main two by far are the US and the UK. The US didn't bring much but it has pursued banks more when it comes to fining them (I'd agree it's a poor second but better than the UK).
The US also let Lehman go under and let their housing market crash. The UK has done all it possibly can to wind the clock back to 2007 so they can set The City running again like it never happened.
The UK FSA has come up with nothing and since the crash we've had more state guarantees for the banks than before.
For an entertaining view of the issue, there's Yes, Prime Minister - A Conflict of Interests. An excerpt:
- Yes, well, they lent a bit of money to the wrong chaps. Could happen
to anyone.
- You haven't heard rumours?
- There are always rumours.
- Of bribery? Embezzlement? Misappropriation? Insider dealing?
- Dear lady, those are strong words.
- So they're not true?
- Well, er, there are different... er... different ways of looking at things.
- What's a different way of looking at embezzlement?
- If a chap embezzles, you have to do something.
- Have a serious word with him?
- Absolutely. Usually it's just a chap who's advanced himself a short-term,
unauthorised, unsecured temporary loan from the company's account and
invested it unluckily.
If you include commuters, London's population is much larger than 12.5%: approximately 14 million people live in the "commuter belt" [1], which would put it at 21% (and a lot more people commute from even further, myself included).
Still, London has nothing on Seoul, whose metro area encompasses 49% of South Korea's population.
tl;dr: We may never know as the article doesn't address the question, choosing instead to list the author's favourite reasons why London is so awesome. I beg to differ, personally. Poor air quality, overcrowding and hopeless mobile infrastructure put it low on my list of desirable places. If your idea of 'culture' is state subsidised opera and looting then maybe London is for you, but there are superior and more diverse cultural offers around the UK. YMMV.
Anyhoo, a more cogent statement of the question the article poses might be 'London has recently greatly benefited from globalisation in ways the rest of the U.K. has yet to duplicate, why ?
London extracts money from globalization through the financial services industry, which has to be in one place because it's dependent on all going to the same pubs. (The back office work is a bit more distributed across the country, but none of the high-value jobs).
Agree that the article doesn't actually answer the question. I love London but the article is poorly reasoned.
Additionally a lot of it is focused on the post-2008 recession period which is ludicrous. London's dominance is a century old, it has nothing to do with "London bankers".
"32,000 businesses were created in one modish postcode, EC1V"
I suspect a big part of this is businesses being registered to accountants' addresses, and people registering as self-employed many of whom work for a single 'customer'.
Yes correct, I actully lived in EC1V, there are not a lot of businesses there. But there a whole lot of businesses all over the UK registered with a 'registered office address' with https://www.yourvirtualofficelondon.co.uk/ . Including me when I was running my own company (contracting business, rental agreement where I lived forbade using address as registered office address).
In many ways London isn't just a centre for the UK, it's also a centre for Europe. i.e. if we assume a natural tendency for most young people who are able to want to move to a more metropolitan area, then London is pretty much in the list of destinations for all European countries in a way that virtually no other city is to that extent, and it has to do with language.
For example I'm in the Netherlands in my early twenties. I know pretty much 3-4 people whose German or French is good enough to consider studying or working in say Paris or Berlin. Compared to that I can easily name 100 of my peers whose English is good enough to study or work in the UK. So if they list their destination choices, it's basically Amsterdam & London miles ahead of anything else, and then come some Dutch cities like Utrecht or Rotterdam or Haarlem. Paris and Berlin are sort of on the list, but with the caveat of either 1) having to take a job that's way below what you could have had in the Netherlands or UK, a job where language isn't important, e.g. waiting tables when you have a Master's in marketing, because landing a marketing job on your level in German or Spanish or Italian or French is just not doable without knowing the language very well. 2) investing a few years into mastering the language, a significant (opportunity) cost.
Of course there are exceptions, like international English-speaking companies/jobs in France, but you'll find most jobs in Germany require German, in France requires French, in Spain requires Spanish, same for university education (although English programmes are rapidly on the rise, particularly at the Master's level and in certain fields like business schools), and obviously not everyone in Europe speaks fluent English, but if you look at the ratios, language should play a major factor.
Either way, at the end of the day young people in say Spain either choose Madrid or Barcelona or a few other cities like Sevilla/Valencia, or London. In the Netherlands they choose Amsterdam, a few smaller cities, and London. In France they choose Paris, maybe Marseille or Lyon, and London. etc etc.
In effect, London is the top destination city for the EU, a union of 500 million people who require no visa or permission or anything like that to move and work anywhere else in the EU including London, and 40% of them speak English as a second language. Every other city is either not the top dog (e.g. Liverpool), or excludes hundreds of other millions of Europeans straight away on the basis of language (e.g. any city in the Netherlands (99% of EU doesn't know Dutch as 2nd language), Germany (86% of EU doesn't speak German as 2nd language), Spain (93%), France (86%), Italy (97%) etc). Then add to that a similar language-driven attraction from the US, Asia, middle east, who must all be rich as they'd need a visa, and you get this ridiculous demand for London fuelling network effects and feedback loops. The demand has led to some pretty perverse mass-gentrification as of late and to a large extent it's from natural (language, in particular) causes I think rather than very specific British policies which obviously also play a role but not a dominating one I think (outside of course the concept of the EU which plays a huge role in not discriminating between any member of the EU and prevents the UK from just having to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the UK and forces it to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the EU, but that's an EU policy not a UK or London policy).
This is an excellent post, but in the experience of colleagues I've had in the EU doing software development, BA, management etc is that for most jobs with international companies in whichever city they are able to work in English. It does happen that a lot of the jobs are in London, but also Switzerland (banking), Brussels (EU admin), and quite a bit in Scandinavia also (generally not EU I know).
I agree, there's a fair bit. It's tricky to find numbers, and it's definitely really in flux, offices that speak English today would sometimes have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Fun story, worked at foreign affairs as an intern some years ago and due to the nature of our work being international and so much of our communication with partners etc, our papers, presentations and research etc was English, it was proposed to start having meetings in English, too, so we wouldn't have to translate any English documentation we might be discussing. Again, foreign affairs, a job you can only get if you're a national of the country, that requires you to sign documents you won't disclose state secrets etc, obviously it's by its nature a pretty chauvinistic affair so I thought that was funny. Another interesting remark is that they used to require you to speak French, too, to work at foreign affairs, for decades and decades this was THE diplomatic language of the world and you couldn't get a job unless you spoke it fluently. (same thing for the UN for example, Ban Ki Moon had to take intense classes in French to get his job although somehow he got a pass as his French is beyond horrible), but at foreign affairs they also let go of this French requirement. It's still beneficial but it's no longer mandatory. How times have changed.
Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority) was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling 50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian first.
Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking, there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go, Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the difference is pretty big.
In Latin American countries, 1/3 of respective country's population live in or near the capital. The countries in question are already pretty sparse by european standards - doesn't prevent population from skipping home even more and coming to capital, both best and worst.
Except London is surrounded by very nice commuter suburbs with very good, comfortable rail where you can get large houses near a train station.
In cities with significant commuter infrastructure, like NY and London you can always find cheap places to live. Plenty of affordable rents in Staten island and NJ. That's why I ignore all the media whining about prices in NY, they just mean buying a place in Manhattan or northern Brooklyn.
It should be even worse in London, where outside of the very center most buildings are single family houses (with garden!), unlike most other European capitals, where the most common living spaces are flats in high rise buildings.
I'm an european citizen who just moved to London and I can attest that is insane trying to find a room in London. A room! I'm not even talking about a house.
It's so complicated that there are flatmatting speed dating events. I've been to 5 or 6 now and the ratio is like 15:1.
There are even ads on the tube for websites with that purpose.
I've spent more than 2 weeks as a full time job! trying to find a place is at walking distance (0-15m) from a tube station. Any! tube station. And there are a lot of them.
Finally settled with long term Airbnb room. Which was what I should have done in the first place!
750£ for a room, which is on par with what is being offered in non-Airbnb sites.
To put it in perspective the average salary in London is £35k, which gives ~ £2,240 liquid per month. A studio costs you between 1k and 1.5k. Add bills, council tax, transportation (which is quite expensive), and you don't end up with much at the end of the month.
If you're emigrating to London and don't have a job and no friend to help you – despite having money – go with Airbnb.
If you insist on ignoring that advice, then please avoid agents like the plague! They'll ditch appointments making you waste 2h, ask for 12 months upfront, and leech their 250£ commission from you for basically doing nothing.
In the recent years there has been more people moving into London and fewer houses being built. London has a housing problem and the Mayor should fix it.
Right now we have a generation of young people in their 20s to early 30s living in houses of 3 to 6 people. This is just nonsensical to me.
If you are unable to have your own life in order then how are you supposed to go further and do things like constitute a family. Hence the birth rate decline and the need for a crazy influx of immigrants. In the name of what? Banks and real estate?
35k average salary might not tell the whole story. e.g. the median figure for inner London is about 34k, bit below the average, but for outer London it's 24k. Then consider that inner London is about 3 of 8.5 million people, and 12 of 32 boroughs, so I wouldn't be surprised if the median salary for all of London was below 30k.
Of course salary doesn't truly matter much in the city of finance, a huge chunk of the city's income is not linked to wages or derived from wage labor.
Anyone considering moving to London has to appreciate that the city is partially tuned for a group of people for whom a base salary isn't the main source of income, and if that's not you then it's a bit like living in a giant auction house full of millionaires and they're auctioning off everything you need, from sandwiches, a home to live in to a public transport card, and the rich guys keep bidding 5x the national average on any item and more rich people enter the auction house every day, buying anything becomes a struggle.
I assume that you mean any tube station within Zone 1 because otherwise this is just not true. For 1.5k you can rent a 2 bed flat in Zones 2-3 and get much more than this further away if you're willing to flatshare. I have a friend who shares a 4 bed in Morden and pays something like 650pcm all in.
That seems a bit high to me. I pay £650/month all-in for a room in a three-bed just around the corner from Stockwell station.
Granted, my room is small, and the only real common area is the kitchen. But the only thing I need in London is a bed and a shower, I'm spending most of my time not-at-the-flat. So it feels like the inflection point between location and price.
1) Forgot to add the zone but it's a room in zones 2 or 3.
2) Mind that I was searching for a room, so I haven't looked much into studios, but I haven't been able to find a studio for less than 1000£ for a short let.
Note that there are "studios" which are in fact shared with other people in the same house, so not really a studio.
What a beautifully presented article. So beautiful, in fact, that I didn't feel like reading the text.... I just wanted to move on to the next picture.
Interesting, I'm on the exact same version of Chrome on Yosemite and it's rendering fine. I wonder what the difference is? (unless they've just fixed it in the last 20 mins!)
A success that is based on basically gambling and helping super-rich people to avoid taxes, is moral bankruptcy.
Even without believing in a universal power, one can only hope, that such an endeavor (of the British government since Thatcher) will ultimately collapse.
Can't believe this is down-voted. Clearly by people who are not in London having the life squeezed out of them as they toil for usurers who are in complete control of the money supply.
To those that downvote my post without reading it: You can downvote this post, but not the truth -- because one day it will stand behind your own neck!
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The problem, IMHO is, that many educated people still don't see what is happening in real life. They dream the capitalistic dream of never ending wealth -- but capitalism never was crafted to make all people happy and it was even not crafted to make the diligent people happy, but it was crafted to make a few random people happy by taking from the rest.
Capitalism might be the best system crafted by humankind, but it is still a system, that is not sustainable and in today's form it brings us sooner or later back to the dark ages of industrialization.
You can see it first in the developing countries, where communities exist, where big corporations come, take the water sources away from the people and sell the water with big profits to the better of people in the big cities.
Days will come and have already come, that also in the western countries, many people (will) see, how capitalism is destroying those which created the wealth to give even more to those which own the wealth.
I've noticed that there are two groups that downvote posts like this on both tech forums and in general:
1) 25 year old software guys making $100K while their friends are at half that, possibly living at home.
2) Older people (i.e. Boomer generation).
The software guys in their 20's are doing alright - for the moment. In 10 years, they'll have hit the glass ceiling due to offshoring and H1Bs, while they're friends in marketing and business will have caught up in pay, and won't be nearly as disposable due to globalization in tech. Living in a shared apartment with the bro's won't work either, when kids, wife, etc. are taken into account.
The boomers, OTOH, really don't understand how things are much more difficult for younger generations. They had it made, and anyone who doesn't have what they got must be lazy and entitled.
You are very likely right in my opinion. There are still very many people, where the arguments that where spread from the Reagan/Thatcher era on, stick.
It is a seducing thinking, to have a simple explanation for the difficult questions in life, eg.: Why do people earn differently? It is so simple and seducing to be just able to say: "Hey, the others are just not diligent enough or not smart enough. The African/South-American people are just to corrupt and that is the reason, most of them live in poverty!"
Once I also belonged to those people that would have downvoted my posts, because I believed in the system. Today, several years later, I see the outcomes and also where this is leading us to. I also see, that there are no such simple answers to the questions and that exist.
The problem is, that I get the impression that humanity might not learn in the long term. We already had the industrialization era, where we thought, industry will make the world a better world, but it made the world a horror for so many people. We already had all these simple explanations -- but education does not stick, not more than 50 years.
What really haunts me, is that those politicians that harmed their countries most, are often those which are still the most popular ones. Those that really made a difference (or tried to) are forgotten much to fast.
Really I thought you where describing the main Chinese stock exchange there.
Compared to other exchanges the LSE is well regulated - even the USA's exchanges get away with stuff (doddgy share classes with different voating ) that woudl get you kicked out of the indexes here.
Realy? there's more red tape and regulation post big bang before that it was the old boys club and chaps sorted out issues in private over drinks at their club.
At some point in the last century that parity ended and moving to London to pursue ones interest was the only way to further ones career. This created a virtuous circle as far as London is concerned and a brain drain for the rest of the country. The BBC's Evan Davies touches on some of these points in his TV programme 'Mind the Gap'.
If you want to work at a decent tech company and work with like minded folk in an inspiring environment, London is really the only answer.
The friends and family I have in London who have a similar education / skills / upbringing to me generally earn more and work for better companies but their quality of life is nowhere near as good as mine with respect to general living. The main trade off is the paucity of like minded friends who live near me.
The price of property in this country is absurd and I find it very difficult to see how the situation has not been gamed by the land owning moneyed / political elite over the last 20 years or so. From personal experience there was a 4 fold increase in property prices between 1997 and 2005. There was not a corresponding increase in wages. Who does this benefit?
I'll end with a joke: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/northerner-terror...