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by richliss
1226 days ago
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Unless you live in London or Tokyo, it's hard to understand the situation for most people who do live there - you think "why not move somewhere else?" and the reality is that the entirety of the state has made it a mission to concentrate everything good in London, and businesses as a consequence put a lot of their offices there. An interesting and convenient occurrence turned out that MP's got their London properties effectively for free and also many of them are landlords in addition to being MP's and so they've broken the normal supply and demand system - https://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/yoursay/news/23059207.m.... An outcome of this is that there's a lot of jobs that simply don't exist in any significant numbers outside of Central London and so unless you're happy to travel for many hours in and out of work each day to live somewhere cheaper, you're going to pay a huge premium for it. No one told me this at school or college or university. If they had I might not have ended up in tech. Now for people who have fairly generic roles that are evenly distributed throughout the country, they're absolutely insane to live in London and if they moan then I'm less sympathetic. |
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I'm not from the UK and lack context to understand how this happened, but it's usually the case that the people who make the rules ensure that they're the winners. Personally, I favor free markets so nobody has an unfair advantage over another.
> An outcome of this is that there's a lot of jobs that simply don't exist in any significant numbers outside of Central London and so unless you're happy to travel for many hours in and out of work each day to live somewhere cheaper, you're going to pay a huge premium for it.
I understand that the best jobs are usually going to be in the middle of a city, and workers either have to decide between expensive housing and a short commute, or less expensive housing and a long commute.
But what can you really do to solve this? Pointing out something unpleasant is one thing, but do you have a suggestion as to how to address this?
Say that in one neighborhood in London close to the best jobs and finest restaurants and parks, there's living space for 50,000 people, but 500,000 people want to live there. How do you decide who gets to live there, if not increasing prices?