
My life in London's houseboat slums (2014) - edward
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/london-houseboat-slum-rents-barge
======
Lazare
Point 1: A lot of people want to live in London. More, in point of fact, than
there's really room for.

Point 2: We, as a society, really dislike the idea of telling people where
they can and cannot live. "Your papers, please" is a punchline, not a
blueprint.

Point 3: Britain, in specific, is very leary about development. Not without
reason, but even though it would be absurdly profitable to build a fuckton of
cheap, efficient, high rise apartments, it is and will remain illegal. (Which
is fine; build the apartments and then you have traffic issues, etc. My point
is that you can't do this, not that you should.)

Combine these three points, and you'll get high rents and frustrated people.
But unless you have a suggestion on how to change one of those points, it's
not going to change, is it? (Well, I guess you could say the high cost of
housing is changing point 1 by making London less desirable, but clearly, it's
not happening quickly.)

Seriously though, it feels like the article is missing a conclusion. "Here's a
thing that sucks, but let's not think about why it exists or how it might be
fixed."

(But maybe I'm just being grumpy, I dunno.)

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
The population of London has been declining for many years, so point #1 is
out.

~~~
m-i-l
According to many sources (e.g. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
london-31082941](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-31082941) ) the
population of London has recently reached a record high and predicted to rise
by 25-30% over the next 35 years.

------
littletimmy
A good partial solution to London's housing problem is to tax the thousands of
empty houses being used as investments.

For example, there's a road in London called Bishops Avenue. The Saudi royal
family owns about 1/3 of the houses on that road. ONE THIRD. Those houses are
completely empty, they are just being used as investment by the Saudi elite
(who can apparently amass as much money as they can because the US protects
their kingdom against any democratic struggle). You can tax these houses (the
Saudis have no objection paying property taxes in the US and they won't have
an objection paying it in the UK) and use the tax money to build cheaper
houses for people who need them.

Get these Arabs, Indians, Russians who are hoarding London property to pay a
tidy sum for being allowed in London. What you've got left is enough of London
that Londoners can share. It is about time society realizes that the right to
life and shelter is more important than property rights for foreigners.

~~~
gadders
Yes, because if this woman in the article wasn't living on a barge she'd have
spent £20m on a 10 bedroom mansion on Bishops Avenue.

~~~
esja
There is an obvious ripple effect here which your comment ignores. Oligarchs
buy in Knightsbridge, pushing aristocrats to Notting Hill. That pushes the
international managerial types to places like Chiswick, which pushes the mere
professionals to Ealing. And so on. If the oligarchs disappear, everyone moves
in one slot, and this woman gets to live in a decent but modest home instead
of a slum.

~~~
notahacker
Someone paying £280/month to live in a boat is playing in a different market
from the professionals and families looking to buy though.

People looking to rent by the room aren't necessarily worse off from the
investment bubble if families are priced into the Home Counties and ordinary
four-bedroom houses tend instead to be owned by absentee landlords
anticipating far too much in the way of capital gains to be worried about
maximizing rental yields (but not quite enough to consider leaving the
properties empty)

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of ratcheting capital gains tax on
properties owned by parties not tax-resident in the UK up to >90%, but the
dynamics of how it'll all play out in the housing market aren't
straightforward and euthanising the rentiers might actually make low-end
rentals harder to come buy - social housing is really the only solution to
that.

~~~
esja
There is no "different market" though. It's all one market for occupation of
land, and one of the least regulated in the world... a place where speculators
compete with residents, where locals compete with foreigners, Panama-
registered limited companies compete with PAYE earners, and so on. That is a
huge part of the problem.

~~~
notahacker
The property speculators don't compete to _occupy_ land though. They purchase
it from existing occupants - a group whose net movement is out of London
altogether - and then compete to _supply_ it to renters.

The separation between the rental-by-the-room and the market to buy freeholds
is well illustrated by the tendency of an influx of property speculators to
increase supply in the former at the same time as they unambiguously decrease
it in the latter.

------
tomelders
I'm giving some light consideration to running for Mayor of London with all my
policies focused on one aim: Hyper-Aggressive Rent Control.

Quite simply, the current situation for renters and first time buyers in
London is unfair and needs to be addressed in a way that restores the balance
between those that live and work in London, and those that just own property
here.

Although it costs £10k to run, because that's the type of democracy we have
here in the UK apparently.

UPDATE: I've not outlined a single policy - and I'm already being told I'm
wrong.

~~~
tormeh
Rent controls don't work. It will just partition the price into over- and
under-table parts.

As I see it, there are three solutions, all of which should be done
simultaneously:

1\. Requiring occupants to live in their housing for a significant portion of
the year's days (a third, for example). Enforcement requires some loss of
privacy, but living in central London is not a human right.

2\. Expanding the city vertically. Encourage high-rise apartment complexes.

3\. Higher speed trains to the suburbs to shorten the time distance.

~~~
pjc50
1) is doable but politically difficult - too much opposition to taxing the
rich (see "mansion tax").

2) is already happening with new build, but requires demolishing existing
buildings to really make a difference. This changes the appearance of London
quite dramatically and encounters architectural preservation resistance.

3) Nowhere to put extra train lines without demolishing some very expensive
property. HS2 is demonstrating this for just a single line. The existing lines
are running at capacity. What _might_ be feasible is going to double-decker
trains in places, which merely requires rebuilding all the bridges and
tunnels.

I would add (4) encourage movement of jobs to other parts of the UK. There are
bits of this happening such as moving the BBC to Manchester. But the way
London works is most of the high-paid jobs are basically standing around with
buckets trying to catch money dripping off the mega-wealthy, and the
associated trickle down around this.

Perhaps plan to move the civil service to Birmingham once HS2 is finished,
giving a Brussels/Strasbourg dynamic to the place.

The US is very fortunate that the seat of government, the financial center,
the commodity wealth center, the media center, and the tech center are in
different cities.

~~~
lmm
Double-decker trains only increase train capacity by ~33% (the stairwells and
so on take up room), and on busy lines like those in central London they can
actually reduce capacity because they increase dwell times at the platform.
What's needed is Crossrail and Crossrail 2, and what's especially needed is to
fund Crossrail 2 _now_ , before the skilled Crossrail workforce goes to
Malaysia or China because that's where the jobs are. But as always, political
shortsightedness rules the day.

You've got to remember that London doesn't just compete with Birmingham; many
of the people and companies moving into London are world citizens who would
otherwise go to Frankfurt / New York / Zurich / etc. Make London worse and
they simply go to another country, which is worse for the entire UK,
Birmingham included.

It would be great if we could build Manchester or Birmingham up to be the
equal of London, to the point where international companies want to put their
headquarters there, but that's going to take decades. And at the end of those
decades, you're going to have a city that has all the same problems London is
currently facing.

------
Doctor_Fegg
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7288085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7288085)

------
tomjen3
Instead of fighting over different ways to tax property, why not try new
methods of housing? Like why not make the housing smaller, with one common
kitchen for an entire appartment where you pick your meals every day (and save
the time to cook, clean and maintain a kitchen?), why not have the old alcove
system where your bed is essentially in a closet so that you can get by with
just one room per family? Would a common shower room (separated by gender,
obviously) really be so bad?

Hacker news is place of thinking new, can we please try that? Admittably not
all ideas are going to be good, but can we please do something new?

~~~
gambiting
Because the last thing I want in my life right now is to go back to living at
a university campus, with shared kitchen and shower.

There will be a lot of people who are alright with this - and there is such
housing available to those people. But generally, people who are done with
education and are "working professionals" would rather not live in a frat
house anymore.

~~~
tomjen3
I was just trying to come up with some suggestions for alternatives, I do not
necessarily support any of them.

Also I didn't intent for that to be a shared kitchen but a kitchen you ordered
from and had others cook your food - it simply makes little sense for me to
have every household spend time every single day to make food for themselves.

~~~
s73v3r
How is that any different than running to the McDonalds for every meal?

------
colechristensen
Here's a solution: a city- or nation-wide graduated tax on per-square-foot
rent applied to the profit above property tax with a fixed allowance for
maintenance. Add in a limited deduction for physical property improvements.

Graduate the tax and put it on owners for several effects:

* Diminishing or negative returns on increasing rent price * Reduced ROI for top priced real estate lowering demand for investment ownership and price * Increased relative ROI for improving lower quality properties & cheap places to live unaffected

------
easytiger
> As more and more areas of London become unaffordable to anyone but wealthy
> professionals,

Is this a joke?

I know some people who live on Barges in London and they are no where near as
shit as those in the article.

~~~
jon-wood
Good for them. That doesn't really change the fact that living in London is
increasingly difficult for anyone who isn't working in finance though.

~~~
easytiger
Or marketing, or law, or biochem, or architecture, or technology, or
recruitment, or property.

Yes apart from those.

------
Joeboy
If anybody's interested, here's a petition against evictions of boat dwellers:

[https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/boats-are-homes-
preve...](https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/boats-are-homes-prevent-the-
eviction-of-boat-dwellers)

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
I used to live on a boat; I still own one; and I don't support that petition.

The Canal & River Trust is an underfunded charity whose aims are to preserve
and maintain Britain's historic waterway network.

They are not funded to provide affordable housing for people. That is, and
should be, the role of local and central Government.

When you buy a boat in the UK (on CRT waterways), there are clear rules, in
force since 1992, that you must either have a permanent mooring for it or
undertake to move on to a different place every 14 days ("continuously
cruising"). Numerous people have tried to avoid the expense of a permanent
mooring by declaring themselves to be "continuously cruising" but actually
staying in the same place. That is what this petition is seeking to legalise.

If it were accepted, CRT would lose out two-fold: it would have greater costs
in providing facilities and maintaining the waterways as more people bought
boats simply to use as cheap houses, and it would have significantly lower
income as people learned that they can get away without paying for a permanent
mooring. Yet even now, CRT doesn't have enough money to maintain its 2,500
miles of waterways to a safe, reliable standard - just look at the recent
breach on the Trent & Mersey Canal as an example.

I feel for the people who can't afford to live in London and have alighted on
boats as a cheap way to do so. I believe the city would be better as a
vibrant, varied community rather than a rich ghetto. But expecting an
underfunded heritage charity to fix London's housing problem is unfair and
unrealistic. Target Whitehall and City Hall, not CRT.

~~~
fab13n
I'm on a French canal, and I wish we had a continuous cruising status. It
would keep canals alive, force boats to be maintained in working condition,
and drive off most people who see liveaboard boats as an alternative to a
flat.

Unfortunately, I'm sure French civil services would fail to enforce it, and
we'd end up with the kind of floating shacks described in the article.
Actually, we already have many of them, and they're already powerless to get
rid of them.

------
jbb555
Article summary : "I can't afford to live in london so I'll live somewhere
terrible instead of living somewhere I can afford and whine about it on the
internet instead"

~~~
vincentkriek
The point is that London is driving it's lower income citizen's to
accommodations like this. And London needs this citizen's just as hard as the
higher paid individuals.

~~~
gadders
London has a pretty decent infrastructure for commuting.
Buses/tubes/trains/light railways etc. Perhaps they just don't want to get up
an hour earlier?

~~~
littletimmy
Yes people don't want to sacrifice their time to account for the failed
policies that led to a housing shortage. What a shocker.

~~~
joshuaheard
If only there was a way they could be productive while riding the train into
town...

------
jhallenworld
I know someone who lived on his boat in Boston Harbor because he did not want
give up collecting rent from his apartments... basically if you have a boat,
this is one way to maximize its value. Even so I think winter living was not
fun.

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omegaham
My girlfriend grew up on a boat in San Diego. Better weather makes it a viable
option.

------
piratebroadcast
I'm a Rails developer in the US and my dream is to live in London and work. I
should forget it, eh?

------
swah
hn could start grouping stories by "hot topics"

(i wish hn would provide competition for custom frontpage algorithms)

~~~
lmm
Use lobste.rs instead and hide tags for things you're not interested in?

~~~
swah
I thought I had a login; but I don't. Can you invite me?

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bonn1
I never understood people complaining about raising rents. If demand is bigger
than supply prices will regulate the market, here: prices will increase.

This is market economy and is there any reason real-estate shouldn't follow
this model in a market economy?

