And that’s why London is losing its soul and becoming an uninteresting place to live:
London housing price to earnings ratio
From 2.6 to 9.1.
This is a government choice. It is related to allowing the financial sector to take over London’s economy, with fake profits driving out real profits. It is related to the withdrawal from social housing. It is related to a decision to allow foreigners to buy real-estate they don’t live in most of the year. It is related to tax policy. It is related to the deliberate priming of the mortgage and housing markets by the central bank.
London is where the jobs are in England, but you can’t afford a home there if you’re an ordinary person and not attached to one of the various money hoses.
This same dynamic is playing itself out in world-cities worldwide: from Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, to New York, to Paris, to San Francisco, and so on. There are too many rich people, too many poor people, and too much pump priming from the central monetary authorities. If you live in the “rich sub-economy,” which can just mean being a retainer, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re forced out.
There aren’t that many cities the global rich actually want to live in, play in, have vacation homes in, or retire to. There also aren’t that many financial centers in the world. Those cities that are both (like New York and London) are becoming impossible to afford the fastest, but so are all the “world cities.”
The irony of this is that huge real-estate prices drive up rents for businesses, and the interesting businesses (like book stores and one off retail outlets) are driven out of business. The artists, intellectuals, rebels, and so on that made places like New York, San Francisco, and London interesting are also driven out. The rich, being largely uninteresting and useless at anything but sucking from money-tits, make cities boring and sterile; they destroy much of what attracted them to a city in the first place.
What is left are expensive restaurants and overpriced chain fashion outlets: soulless and boring.
The rich, in numbers, are locusts, destroying what they think they value.