Lowri Griffiths on London’s rental market hitting new records, the fire survivor housing crisis as case study, and why she is still here
By Lowri Griffiths, Big Smoke Broke
Zone 2: Where Dreams Go to Be Priced Out
The RentHop data confirms what anyone renting in London already knows from lived experience: rents near transport links are up, rents everywhere else are up but near transport links they are especially up, and the median monthly rent for London is now at levels that would have seemed satirically fictional to me when I moved here five years ago from Cardiff, thinking London was expensive then and discovering that it is more expensive now in ways that statistics describe efficiently but that the experience of paying them accumulates as a kind of financial background noise that never quite goes away.
I pay 2,100 a month for a one-bedroom flat in Kentish Town. This is, by London Zone 2 standards, reasonable. By any other standard on earth, it represents 37 percent of my take-home pay on a salary that most people who are not in London would consider perfectly comfortable. The specific genius of London’s housing market is that it makes middle-income earners feel financially precarious while technically paying them well by national standards, which is a form of economic dissociation that I suspect is unique to a small number of cities globally and that produces the specific London personality trait of simultaneously feeling broke and feeling fortunate.
The North London Rental Ladder: What It Looks Like From Inside
The rental ladder in North London — the theoretical progression from flat-share to studio to one-bedroom to two-bedroom that previous generations completed over a decade and that my generation is discovering is more of a rental plateau with occasional trips to the basement — has been warped by a decade of stagnant wage growth, rising interest rates, and the specific phenomenon of buy-to-let landlords who purchased properties during cheap-money years and are now charging rents that reflect their financing costs rather than any reasonable relationship between the property’s value and a tenant’s income.
The landlord of my current flat bought it in 2019 for 410,000. It is now valued at approximately 520,000. The mortgage on it, under current interest rates, costs him roughly 1,700 per month. He charges me 2,100. The 400 monthly difference represents his profit margin on property he bought with a 25 percent deposit that has appreciated significantly during his ownership. I am, in effect, paying for the appreciation of his asset while being unable to accumulate a similar asset myself because the deposit I would need to buy a comparable property is roughly three times my annual salary and rising.
The Los Angeles Fire Survivors as Case Study in Where This Leads
The Los Angeles wildfire housing crisis — where two out of three fire survivors remain displaced 18 months after the Eaton and Palisades fires — illustrates, at extreme and tragic scale, what happens when housing supply is constrained and a disrupting event reduces it further. London is not experiencing wildfire. It is experiencing a slower version of the same displacement: the gradual pricing out of households that cannot afford the market rate, producing the specific London version of displacement where people move from Zone 2 to Zone 3 to Zone 4 to outside London entirely, each move representing a retreat from the city that gives them their income and their social life and their sense of who they are.
I know people who have made this journey. I know people who are in its middle stages. I am trying not to make it myself, which requires earning more money, spending less of it on discretionary things, and hoping that at some point the housing market does something it has consistently refused to do: produce housing at prices that people who work in London can afford to buy.
The good news, such as it is, is that London is still excellent at being London. The coffee is good. The parks are free. The tube, when it works, is extraordinary. The cultural density — the things you can do in an evening in North London that you cannot do anywhere else in England — remains unmatched. These are the things that make the rent feel, if not worth it, then at least comprehensible as a price for what you receive in exchange. Whether I will still be paying that price in five years is a question I am leaving unanswered for the moment, because the alternative to living in London is a conversation I am not ready to have.
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What North London Requires of Its Representatives
The question that North London voters — in Kentish Town, in Camden, in Islington, in Hornsey — are asking of whoever leads Labour next is not abstract. It is specific to the conditions of life in the part of the city they inhabit: the housing costs that consume above-average proportions of above-average salaries, the public transport that works well enough when it works and is miserable when it doesn’t, the NHS waiting times that feel longer despite the government’s investment narrative, and the specific cost-of-living squeeze that makes a city full of interesting people in stimulating jobs feel, at the monthly bank statement moment, like a question about whether the interesting stimulating life is sustainable at its current price. Burnham’s northern credibility is real. His relevance to North London’s specific concerns remains to be demonstrated. The coffee shop in Kentish Town will be watching. The Northern line will be running, or not, regardless of who leads Labour. Both things will be true simultaneously, as they always are.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
