
London's rental market: where $2k a month gets you a bed beside the toilet - onetimemanytime
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/29/uk/london-renting-compared-berlin-gbr-grm-intl/index.html
======
strken
If you look at the floorplan[0] shown in the article, it looks like any sane
person who lived in the flat would treat it like a normal studio and put their
bed in the main room. It's baffling to me why the floorplan shows a sleeping
area in the bathroom, but perhaps it's a legal quirk of some kind.

[https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200212132008-04-londo...](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200212132008-04-london-
rental-market-intl-exlarge-169.jpg)

~~~
jaclaz
Well, in another EU country (Italy) that flat would be against building rules
and Laws, not only you cannot call a bathroom "sleeping area"[1] but usually
(there are exceptions for historical buldings and handicap toilets) a toilet
(where the wc is) cannot be connected _directly_ to a kitchen or more
generally where meals are prepared, but long before that the very minimal
surface for a flat is 28 sqm (the one in the article is around 26) to be an
autonomous unit.

Additionally, from the photo it appears that the WC is connected to an
electric sanitary macerator, which is not admissible unless it is for a
secondary bathroom.

[1] the area of any room aimed to the permanence of people cannot be less than
9 sqm

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FartyMcFarter
Let's find out what you can actually get for $2k (about £1560), in the same
area CNN went for:

[https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-
rent/find.html?locat...](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-
rent/find.html?locationIdentifier=STATION%5E1712&maxPrice=1750&minPrice=1400&radius=0.5&propertyTypes=&mustHave=&dontShow=&furnishTypes=&keywords=)

It doesn't take long to find something better than a "bed beside the toilet".

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Findeton
I live in London. The main reason for this is that government generally
doesn't allow buildings higher than 3 stories. Everyone wants to live in
central London but there just ain't enough flats. This situation is somewhat
similar to the zoning thing in the US. Supply is lower than demand, so prices
go up, who would have guessed?

~~~
pjc50
> generally doesn't allow buildings higher than 3 stories.

This seems a strange claim in the city that has the Shard. I doubt London is
really constrained by planning permission, just that it seems only to be
granted for hyper-luxury flats.

~~~
Findeton
You doubt, but it's the reality. Sure, if you're going to build $600 million
in a sky-scrapper you can also spend some more in convincing authorities to
get you the legal permissions. But if you're going to try and build a 4 or 6
floors building, that's going to be complicated.

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jpxw
The article mentions Berlin's rent controls. Just going to put it out there
that rent controls almost never work, and tend to have the exact opposite
effect that they are intended to. Rent control isn't a solution to a housing
shortage.

~~~
ShorsHammer
> rent controls almost never work

So what's the average rent in Berlin for comparison?

Edit: From here I'm getting 50% lower rents.

[https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&country2=Germany&city1=London&city2=Berlin&tracking=getDispatchComparison)

~~~
DangerousPie
The rent is low, sure, but good luck finding a flat to begin with:
[https://www.thelocal.de/20191125/nearly-1800-people-turn-
up-...](https://www.thelocal.de/20191125/nearly-1800-people-turn-up-for-flat-
viewing-in-berlin)

~~~
mytailorisrich
That's exactly the expected result of rent control!

~~~
leereeves
To benefit current renters who never want to move again, and no one else?

~~~
mytailorisrich
Yes. It increases demand while reducing supply and the expected result is
exactly what is illustrated in the article posted above.

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lclarkmichalek
I mean, Camden. Go two or three stops up the northern line, and you can find
something much more sensible. The rental market might be insane in certain
areas, but this isn’t representative of what 2k dollars a month will get you

------
IkmoIkmo
I'm not sure what the solution here is... At the end of the day, if your city
is nice enough, and demand is high enough, and supply is low enough, you're
going to see prices per unit of area rise. And you can do two things, pay
more, or accept less space. And in the latter case you run into these
ostensibly weird constructions like sleeping in your bathroom.

I don't know what to think of that. On the one hand its inhumane. On the other
hand, it's self-inflicted. If you're in the UK, you absolutely don't need to
live in London to live a normal life with a decent job, food on the table,
good healthcare, good education for your kids etc. The person who rents this
place probably is single, late twenties, works in finance, and will likely
live here only 2 years before moving to something bigger with a longer
commute, but not quite yet before he/she wants to live in the city near the
action. Although there's reason to pity, this isn't your stereotypical
dystopian pity-case of a family of three menial workers living in a Hong Kong
cage.

You can have a discussion about London being a place only for rich people, and
that without mitigating measures you get an economic divide between rich and
poor, with no socioeconomic mobility. And that's true. In this context I have
quite clear opinions on the need to keep neighbourhoods mixed, which requires
subsidised social housing (council housing), subsidised private (public)
education, subsidised after-school programs etc. But that's a matter of
distributing scarce high-value resources to poor people to keep a healthy
level-playing field in society. But it does not solve the underlying scarcity.
Whatever government system you apply to London, you'll always have this
scarcity, and people self-inflicting themselves by choosing to pay 2k for a
bed in a bathroom. You can take that choice away through regulation (no beds
in bathrooms, minimum unit sizes etc), but it doesn't solve the underlying
scarcity issue, just the symptom.

One course of action that I think we should take, is driving centralised
decentralisation on a national level as much as possible. Yes we can
acknowledge urban centres do wonders as knowledge/financial/cultural hubs. But
we can also acknowledge that hyper-concentration in one place, is not
preferred to concentration in 5 places. the UK does this very poorly with
London taking up a huge part of the national economy. Germany does this much
better, with many regional economies which are all very strong and have their
own pull.

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mmmrk
[The following is a rant] I've been living in London for 2 years now and I
find the city dreadful. The quality of housing is usually well below the
standards I'm used to from Germany (I won't start on the pricing), but what
really bothers me how decrepit everything is. I was looking to rent in the
area south of Brixton and frequently felt like I was looking at trash heaps
with a roof and flatmates. Sometimes there was a permanent garbage dump on the
front porch or something?! I now live in something resembling modern
construction, that was however cheaply built and has thin walls and lacks
thermal insulation in my bath, so I have to keep the door closed when it's
cold outside. I "only" pay 900 GBP to live with two flatmates, which is OK for
London I suppose. I have this nagging thought in the back of my mind to brexit
at some point...

~~~
sgt
This video comes to mind:
[https://youtu.be/gzVJw1-YrkM](https://youtu.be/gzVJw1-YrkM)

Note that PJW is perhaps a bit too far right leaning, so take his views and
opinions with a grain of salt. A lot of the content is quite true though, and
both liberals and conservatives alike ought to be concerned.

~~~
jpxw
I've been living in London for three years now, after living in the
countryside. This video is correct.

------
Al-Khwarizmi
The first time I moved to the UK from Spain, I was like "hey, rentals are not
_that_ expensive. 300, 400, 500... more or less like in my home city".

That was until I realized the "pw" near the prices meant "per week", of
course.

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polymonster
I live in London, it is expensive for sure.. I have seen some pretty
ridiculous flats for around the same cost as the one in the article, one with
a shower cubicle in the bedroom comes to mind... not quite as bad as toilet
but still you don’t want a wet bedroom.

Some of the landlords are just taking the piss, there are much better places
for better value in decent areas just don’t get tricked by the snakey estate
agents like foxtons and look around you can find reasonably good value..

------
Jedd
London is an amazing place to live, and (painfully cognisant of how this
sounds) if you get a chance to live there for a while, I'd heartily recommend
it.

Though of course much of the shine has indubitably disappeared since Brexit.

I was there 2008 through 2013 - and in 2010 we rented a relatively new 1
bedroom flat, on the 2nd floor (of 13), overlooking the Thames, around the
Docklands (east London, near the secondary financial sector) on a clean, safe
estate with a concierge. This was £280 / week.

A decade later, and doubtless having spent quite some time to find a highly
unpleasant flat in a ridiculously inflated part of town (Camden) and TFA are
citing £375 / week for a shared bedroom & toilet.

Like any metropolis, London is immense, with huge variations in quality and
cost -- everything is a tradeoff against how close you want to be to the
center versus how long you want to spend commuting.

FWIW when we moved from London UK to Sydney Australia in 2013 we went from
river views, 40 minute commute to city center in London at £280 (~ AUD475) /
week , to 60 minute commute to city center, highway views, for AUD500 / week,
for the same quality apartment.

Never move to Sydney if you can avoid it.

EDIT: Oh, one of the problems with high-rises around London is the fact the
whole place is a few metres above sea level, and the ground water levels are
insanely high. I had engineer friends who worked on the underground (tube)
extension years earlier, who told me that if the bilge pumps stop working,
tracts of the underground lines would be flooded within fifteen minutes. The
Thames Barrier (worth a google if you don't know of it) is unlikely to be
effective within 10 to 20 years. Plus they've got lots of real estate locked
up by investors who simply never occupy it -- all of this does brutally wonky
things to real estate pricing there.

~~~
avianlyric
> The Thames Barrier (worth a google if you don't know of it) is unlikely to
> be effective within 10 to 20 years.

Not quite true. The Thames Barrier is expected to remain effective for the
next 70 years (till 2070).

There’s a plan to figure out it’s replacement sometime around 2050.

You read more about it here if you’re interested:

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thames-
estuary-21...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thames-
estuary-2100-te2100/thames-estuary-2100-te2100)

~~~
Jedd
Thank you. I'd had in my mind that 2040 was when it approached (effective)
EOL, and from the country that had 40 years to plan for the Concorde
replacement, I was not overly optimistic.

Seems there has been a general trend of increasing need to use the barrier,
though the 2014 'blip' threw this number upwards. I'm seeing some references
to 'it's fine until 2050-2070', but OTOH I'm not seeing a lot of 'we've
underestimated global warming effects, so sea level won't be as bad as we
thought' stories -- so presumably we should be looking towards the lower end
of that 2050-2070 range.

I read through the v.interesting link you provided -- it reads very gov.uk.

Sadly, after the past couple of years of gov.uk activity I'm not particularly
sanguine that they will actually attend to this work.

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mouzogu
I don't know we need to keep using euphemisms like "housing crisis". Just call
it what it is; greed and and exploitation. These apartments are usually not
fit for living, they're damp, cramped and thats likely to be the least of your
concerns.

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nonsince
If you want to support some people working on fixing this situation
[https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/](https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/)

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DanBC
I'm a bit confused about the flat they're talking about. I thought that there
needs to be 2 doors between the loo and the kitchen, and that you can't have a
loo that opens into a kitchen.

Turns out that's probably wrong: [http://www.extensionbuild.co.uk/can-door-
open-directly-from-...](http://www.extensionbuild.co.uk/can-door-open-
directly-from-bathroom-kitchen.html)

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zabil
I recently moved to London and rent in Zone 1. The single bed apartment I live
is in pricey but it's a great location and a short commute to my office in
central London.

That said, I am in tech and a significant part of my pay goes on rent.

However, from my recent house hunting experience, there's definitely better
options for the price mentioned in the article especially in Zone 2.

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tomxor
There used to be a 2 door building reg rule for between toilet and kitchen...
I think that was relaxed but I am pretty sure you are not allowed to install
toilets in open living spaces. I suppose it wouldn't be surprising to see many
regulations broken in London given the opportunity for profit.

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robjan
This particular flat is quite poorly laid out. I'm presuming it's a subdivided
flat.

That's pretty common where I live but usually the internal walls would all be
knocked down and placed more sensibly before renting it out. I guess the UK
has more strict planning laws which prevent this.

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bakuninsbart
When it comes to housing markets the discussion is usually centered around
free market vs. government regulation, but both sides selectively use sources
to underline their points.

Viewing the housing market simply as an issue of demand vs. supply is faulty -
there are other factors at work that are detrimental for renters. I have
terrible internet right now which makes it hard to look up sources, but almost
all cities here in Germany have rents rising faster than wages or inflation -
even those with decreasing populations.

Even if it was just an issue of demand and supply, housing isn't just any
commodity. Cities shouldn't just maximise for supply, they also have to factor
in other things, like life quality, availability of services, pollution and
more. For example I don't think rent control is an effective tool to be used
broadly, but if I look at the district I grew up in in the 90s, almost all the
native people were pushed out of it, and the rich people living there now not
only fundamentally changed the districts spirit, they also effectively
segregated themselves from the poorer segments of society. If this trend
continued on a city-wide level, you would have boring rich districts and
ghettos, as well as increasing and very visible inequality.

So in the housing market I think capitalism fails quite spectacularly in
accounting for very important factors that are only indirectly tied to profit.
The few metropolis that have a functioning housing market _usually_ also have
massive public-housing companies, and they mix meaningful regulation with fast
and easy bureaucracy. - The obvious examples coming to mind would be Singapore
and Vienna.

