Our columnist watches the world’s most generous man defeated by the one thing generosity cannot fix: a Crouch End asking price

A Man With Everything Meets the Market With Nothing

I want to tell you about the morning I watched Santa Claus, a man who delivers joy to every child on Earth in a single night, get comprehensively defeated by a two-bedroom flat above a vape shop in Crouch End. I have lived in North London long enough to think nothing could surprise me about the property market. I was wrong. Watching it break Father Christmas was genuinely moving.

It started, as these things do, with the dispatches from the North Pole suggesting Santa fancied a London base, somewhere central-ish, good transport links, a bit of character. I could have told him then. I could have saved everyone the trouble. But you cannot tell Santa anything, because Santa is an optimist, and optimism, in the North London property market, is a pre-existing condition.

The Estate Agent Did Not Blink

The flat was advertised as a charming period conversion with excellent natural light, which in estate-agent dialect means it has a window. The asking price was the kind of number that makes you laugh and then, slowly, stop laughing. Santa, who has never paid for anything in his life and operates entirely outside the cash economy, asked the agent whether he might be able to offer something other than money. The agent, a young man in a suit one size too tight, did not blink. They never do.

I have come to believe that North London estate agents are trained, somewhere, to maintain perfect composure in the face of the absurd. Santa offered to deliver gifts to the agent’s entire family in perpetuity. The agent explained that the vendor was looking for a quick completion, ideally cash buyers, no chain. Santa explained that he was, in a sense, the ultimate no-chain buyer, having no fixed address and no onward purchase. The agent suggested he speak to a mortgage advisor.

The Mortgage Advisor Was Worse

The mortgage advisor wanted to know about Santa’s income. This is where things became genuinely philosophical. Santa does not have an income. Santa has a workshop, recently reorganized as a cooperative, and a magical capacity to produce goods, neither of which appears on the standard affordability calculator. The advisor, consulting guidance from the relevant government information service, explained that without demonstrable income, lending was difficult, regardless of one’s global reputation for generosity.

I sat in the corner of that office, nursing a flat white that had cost me the GDP of a small nation, and I watched the realization settle over Santa’s face. The man who answers to no one, who crosses every border, who bends the laws of physics every December, could not get a mortgage in N8. Housing data I later checked at the Office for National Statistics confirmed what my own rent already screams at me monthly: London housing has become a thing that defeats even saints.

What This Says About All of Us

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The London property market is now so detached from reality that the figure we use to represent boundless abundance, the man whose entire brand is having enough for everyone, cannot participate in it. There is a column in that, and it is not a funny one, however much I dress it up. When Santa cannot afford Crouch End, the rest of us should probably stop pretending we are doing fine. Local listings I browsed via the regional events register only confirmed the despair.

The Grotto Solution

Santa, to his credit, took it well, which is more than I can say for myself after my last rent review. He eventually concluded that he did not, on reflection, need a flat in North London, having a perfectly serviceable workshop at the North Pole and no particular reason to subject himself to the Northern line. I admired his clarity. Most of us, defeated by the market, simply move further out and tell ourselves Walthamstow is the new Islington. Santa simply went home.

But I noticed, as he left, that he looked back at the flat above the vape shop with something like longing, the way we all look at the lives we have been priced out of. He could give every child in London a present, but he could not give himself a London address, and there was a melancholy in that I have not entirely shaken. The most generous man alive, browsing Rightmove, slowly understanding that generosity is not a currency the market accepts.

I have written before about the absurdities of London housing, and I will write about them again, because they are inexhaustible and because rent is due. Useful context for anyone in the same boat can be found through the housing resources society and the listings aggregated at the public registry, though I warn you, reading them will not improve your mood. For a distraction afterward, the games at the diversions index are at least free, which is more than can be said for anything else in this city.

Santa flew north that afternoon, uncharacteristically quiet. I went back to my own overpriced flat and made a cup of tea, which is the only thing in London that still costs roughly what it should. If the housing market can defeat Father Christmas, I thought, it can defeat anyone, and perhaps the only sane response is the one Santa reached: to stop playing a game that was never designed for you to win, and to go home to the place that was already yours.

SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top