Comment by jemmyw
18 days ago
Yes, and London is a case point for it: the affordability of housing. Anyway, I don't even need to trawl for links, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_economic_inequali... has plenty.
18 days ago
Yes, and London is a case point for it: the affordability of housing. Anyway, I don't even need to trawl for links, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_economic_inequali... has plenty.
>the affordability of housing
If you're trying to imply the housing shortage only exists because rich people have too much money and are making prices too high for everyone else, that doesn't make much sense. If everyone had the same amount of wealth, you'd still have the same housing crisis. Specifically, there's still going to be the same amount of houses in London, and the same amount of people who want to live there but can't. The problem of housing in London is that there isn't enough for everyone who wants to live there, not that the rich are making prices unaffordable.
> The problem of housing in London is that there isn't enough for everyone who wants to live there, not that the rich are making prices unaffordable.
And why might that be? Could it be that the rich are using their wealth and disproportional influence that wealth gives them to slow down or block new development to keep their property values high, or are we supposed to believe that places where housing is used as an investment vehicle are just naturally incompetent at building more housing?
That's not entirely true. The rich have been buying multiple houses in London, as well as buying rows of housing and joining them internally. Plus if the market is for the wealthy then the prices are controlled by that. You can argue that London has always been a wealthy city, but things have really gone into overdrive over the last 2 decades.
Both of these things are true. London doesn't build enough but rich people are sitting on supply and raising prices. London needs to build more houses as well as prevent people from turning them into Airbnbs or investment properties.