[jimparkins]

I am British and worked in central London for years. The idea of owning an 800,000 apartment in central London was a ridiculous luxury. Most people that I worked with had to commute like me for 1-1.5 hours a day from outside London commuter towns into work (some way more than this). This was the nature of the beast. Is it "right" no. I just do not see how 800K GBP apartments are a) affordable and b) practical - it would be much better to focus on decent commuter links, subsidies for travel and affordable housing around London - than creating token affordable housing in the centre for the sake of it. If you do not like the commute then move to another city. I did for this exact reason.

[vidarh]

My pet peeve is that I want a total moratorium on infrastructure improvements inside zone 1-2 at least, maybe further out.

Instead, what would be far better for London, would be a 20 year commitment to running commuter level trains services between a ring of zone 4-5 stations and nearby commuter towns even further out. The reason for such a long commitment would be to allow businesses to trust they can move further out and still have access to a decent talen pool in commutable distance, and for people to be able to trust they can move there. [Ideally I'd like to see a focus on investing in clusters outside of London entirely, like Birmingham, and Leeds-Sheffield-Manchester]

The more that gets invested into the centre, the more traffic it encourages, and it's far more expensive to add capacity in the centre than it would be to encourage businesses and people to move further out.

E.g. I live in Croydon. There's relatively direct train tracks between Croydon and Woking and Guildford and further afield, so in many cases you could create far larger commutable areas without even new track, just a commitment to running services at frequent enough intervals. Instead most times it's faster to go in towards the centre of London first.

Then change planning rules to allow dense housing by default surrounding the immediate station areas but tax underutilised plots heavily coupled with guarantees of pouring money into construction until house prices start sloping downwards.

Currently we're in a situation where the prices are exacerbated by developers just sitting on plots knowing prices will go up, and treating actual construction "just" as a final exit. We need to get to a point where developers lose money unless they build quickly, and where people stop seeing their home as a financial investment.

[iamben]

I'm currently living the dream that after the (somewhat) exodus of folks to cheaper, spacier suburbs, the fact that people want to work from home and (as per the article on the front page yesterday) would rather quit than commute again - we might actually get some affordable housing in London. Be that converted offices, new builds, or just availability. Annecdata, but looking at Zoopla the lower priced (ha) places are dropping or not selling as they did... But who knows.

Still blows my mind what the half a million quid you can easily spend on a flat in town will get you pretty much anywhere else.

[vidarh]

When I first moved to the UK I rented a room literally across the road from Marble Arch and Hyde Park, I've since moved progressively further out. Despite 20 years of price increases, my mortgage on a 3 bedroom house with a garden in Croydon costs me about the same as that first room did... It'd take a seismic house price crash to consider moving back in even with a commute.

It's expensive here too, but the differential is staggering given East Croydon is a 15 minute train ride from both London Victoria and London Bridge.

[secondcoming]

Croydon isn't as nice an area as Hyde Park.

[vidarh]

Croydon is extremely diverse. Parts of it are worse. Parts of it I'd much prefer over Hyde Park any day (e.g. parts of Shirley and Purley, which have areas with huge villas set off private roads). Of course it depends on priorities too - if e.g. shopping at Oxford streets or being near Soho or living in a dense city centre is what you want, Croydon can't compete with that. That got old really fast when I lived in the centre, though - even in my mid 20's when I lived there I very quickly preferred more space and actually having money left over.

[ricardobayes]

M commute was almost an hour each way zone 2 from zone 2. It almost doesn't make sense to live in London, if spending the same time means I get to live in a nice house with my own garden instead of a cramped flat.