[beloch]

I really don't understand several things about this story.

1. Why move to London if you're an unskilled worker? Are opportunities elsewhere even bleaker?

2. London has a huge problem with absentee property owners because London real estate is currently a hot investment. It's a feedback loop. The more rapidly London properties appreciate, the more absentee owners there will be, and the more demand will rise. Why haven't bylaws been passed to curb this? For example, why aren't residences that are unoccupied by their owner for a significant portion of the year taxed at much higher rates? It would probably be necessary to offer a renter rebate to compensate for increased rents, but this would discourage the practice of leaving residences vacant. If this doesn't actually drive prices down, at least it would prevent them from continuing to rise.

3. Why aren't the barge-lords being treated like slum-lords when the barges they run are overcrowded, full of mould, etc.? I understand it's hard to legally enforce a tenant-landlord relationship when it's all under the table, but there must be something the police can do to hassle these guys until they improve conditions.

4. Where are the government programs, volunteers, etc. that you usually see in other cities building low-cost housing? e.g. Why isn't anyone building legal barges with decent living conditions to compete with the barge-lords?

[DanBC]

1) You were born there. Your spouse lives there. Etc

2)!london is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules. They'd all need to agree and coordinate. I don't know why it isn't done better.

3) people living in slums ether don't know their rights; or how to enforce those rights. Sometimes their own legal status is dubious and they risk deportation. Even if they do know their rights, and how to enforce their right, and they can get the regulator to take action, and they're totally legal and above board, they may just end up without a home.

Housing in the UK is weird and broken and at the low end there are some strong weirdnesses built into the system.

[objclxt]

> London is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules [...] I don't know why it isn't done better

Politically, London will never have a unified council because it would wield too much power over the presiding government. This is effectively what led to the downfall of the GLC (Greater London Council) - in the early 1980s the socialist GLC antagonized the Tory government to the point where Thatcher ended up forcing it to be abolished.

London produces so much of the GDP it would be very easy for a centralized London council to hold the national government 'to ransom' (this happens to some degree now with the London Assembly, but since the Assembly has little power over issues such as housing it's not as pronounced as it could be).

The upshot of this is you end up with a pretty crazy system whereby someone at one end of the street could pay twice as much council tax as someone at the other end (in the case of, say, Wandsworth - which has one of the lowest council tax rates in the UK, and Merton - which is more around the average). I would agree having a centralized London council would be far better than the current system, but there's no way it will ever happen.

[allochthon]

Couldn't the government pass laws that would give it more power over a unified London council, so that the holding-for-ransom dynamic would be minimized? It seems like that would be preferable to uncoordinated city ordinances. (Here in the States, we've got tons of fragmented municipal governance arrangements, so I know there's no simple fix.)

[pjc50]

2) Council tax has all sorts of central govt limits on it, including the banding system. They can't fix the problem of empty property on their own.

3) A houseboat is not a building, and is therefore exempt from all the laws about building minimum standards that were instituted the previous times London had a slum problem. I'm not sure if there even are any standards about living on a boat, only standards about in relation to the river and other water users.

Housing in the UK is weird and broken. This is about 50% due to Right To Buy and the slow abolition of the council house.

[jamesjguthrie]

Right to Buy is ending in Scotland shortly to protect social housing.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Housing/...

[Doctor_Fegg]

3: The Boat Safety Scheme applies to boats on most inland waterways in the UK. There are a couple of things in that article that shouldn't have passed a BSS examination - "drips coming through to the electrics" is the one that leaps out at me. But yes, it's not intended to enforce minimum living standards. The local authority should be doing this and I believe they have the same powers against on-water landlords as they do on-land.

BSS requirements, for reference: http://www.boatsafetyscheme.org/media/194782/2013ecp_private...

[matthewmacleod]

I don't fundamentally disagree with the existence of Right to Buy, but it really required a comprehensive house-building program to back it up. Now we're fucked.

[twelvechairs]

The requirement for all new development over a certain number of units (12? iirc) to provide a perecentage as affordable was supposed to deal with this but the govt has redefined affordable too. Some of my professional colleagues in their 30s not only qualified for these but struggled to afford them. this is where the system really failed IMHO.

[DanBC]

> Some of my professional colleagues in their 30s not only qualified for these but struggled to afford them. this is where the system really failed IMHO.

That is bonkers. It's just really weird.

The Tower Hamlets evidence pack has some eye-popping statistics. (Tower Hamlets are building more social housing than anywhere else in the UK)

They have 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing.

48% of those are in category 1 or 2 which means they have medical need, or are homeless or overcrowded.

9500 households are over crowded. 1228 households are under occupied with 271 having 2 or more bedrooms than they need. (I think a bedroom is anyroom that can fit a bed in it.)

[viraptor]

I'm not sure no 1 is a good explanation. For 300 you can share a nice house with 2-3 other people in the south west regions. How does being born in London, or (especially this) having a spouse with you explain choosing to live in terrible condition instead of pleasant house in a different city?

[matthewmacleod]

It's more complex than that, I think.

People do (understandably) become attached to the area they live in. In particular, being born and growing up in London means that an individual's family and social group is likely to be there. While it's sometimes inevitable that people have to move, it's a bad state of affairs where individuals born in a city are being priced out of it due to broken housing policy.

Spouses can also end up meaning a life in a less desirable place. For example, my partner's in a career that can only really be done on-site and in London. That means I have to live here too. Less of a problem for unskilled workers, maybe.

And it's worth bearing in mind that work is pretty difficult to find in many cases – even inside London. A relatively sleepy town in Cornwall is going to have fewer jobs available, and they'll offer lower incomes.

But I guess the biggest objection is that this doesn't really get to the core of the problem – there is a load of underused housing stock in London, there's insufficient supply of cost-effective housing, and there is consistent government policy in place which encourages people to move to London. That's a really unstable situation and we need to make moves towards fixing it.

[femto]

There's also the situation of separated parents. The children and one parent may be living comfortably, but the other parent on a low income battles to live close enough to remain a regular part of their children's lives.

[gadders]

>Spouses can also end up meaning a life in a less desirable place. For example, my partner's in a career that can only really be done on-site and in London. That means I have to live here too. Less of a problem for unskilled workers, maybe.

Does your spouse stop you getting a train or a tube to work as well?

[matthewmacleod]

Does your spose stop you getting a train or a tube to work as well?

No, but that makes little difference in practice, because savings on property are rapidly eaten up by transport costs and additional commute times.

[gadders]

So because of (1) you make a bad decision? Commute.

[zimpenfish]

Commuting can end up costing the same (or more) than you'd save by moving out of London. Also time consuming and frequently unreliable (eg. Southeastern trains). It's not a simplistic option for most people.

[rodgerd]

> Why haven't bylaws been passed to curb this?

There were reasonably robust Adverse Possession laws in the UK, but they've been <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_England_and_Wales#... wound back</a> in favour of, surprise, surprise, absentee landlords.

Returning to the situation where owners who simply hoard vacant properties risk losing it to squatters would likely remedy much of the problem.

[Doctor_Fegg]

4: People are building legal barges. You can pay £90k and buy one off the shelf[1]. The difficulty is finding somewhere to moor it: London's waterside is as much in demand as land in the city. You'll have to pay the riparian owner for this. Tidal Thames prices are very high; historically the canals have been lower, but they're largely full up.

In addition, the waterway authorities don't really want more 'liveaboards'; they place a lot of demands on waterway infrastructure yet it's difficult to charge them much (for legislative reasons, and getting legislation changed is a slow and unlikely process).

[1] http://www.newandusedboat.co.uk/new-boats-widebeam.php

[lmm]

> 1. Why move to London if you're an unskilled worker? Are opportunities elsewhere even bleaker?

Sometimes. Sometimes it's the best option available. Sometimes people move to London believing they have a job and it turns out badly. And sometimes people make bad decisions.

> Why haven't bylaws been passed to curb this? For example, why aren't residences that are unoccupied by their owner for a significant portion of the year taxed at much higher rates?

There's little popular support for it, particularly under a conservative government - historically the party of property owners. The English are very protective of their houses and would fight anything that was perceived to reduce the rights of homeowners.

> 3. Why aren't the barge-lords being treated like slum-lords when the barges they run are overcrowded, full of mould, etc.? I understand it's hard to legally enforce a tenant-landlord relationship when it's all under the table, but there must be something the police can do to hassle these guys until they improve conditions.

Hence the eviction in the article. I think it's legally harder to treat something (legally) mobile as a home. And any law to tighten the regulation of mobile homes would probably be opposed by guardian-reading liberals as oppression of the traveller community.

> 4. Where are the government programs, volunteers, etc. that you usually see in other cities building low-cost housing?

Some exist. But their popularity is limited - voters are happy to see their house prices increasing, and no-one wants to live next to people who, as the article admits, party loudly late into the night, use a lot of drugs, and live in unsanitary conditions.

[hmsimha]

Somewhat related to point #2, this article (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230454950...) was shared here a while back that discusses a way in which vacant property is being used to house people at a discount, but it deals more with office buildings. Perhaps they could implement something similar for absentee property.

[bloat]

Why would a poor person move anywhere? The most likely reason is that they had an offer of employment, or maybe the hope of getting one.