£1600/mth in Wilts will literally get you a small mansion.
Housing benefit payments are to be limited to £280 a week for a flat and £400 a week for a house.
But, wait a second, until 2008 I was living in London's "(Tube) Area 3" and renting a house for under 1000 pounds a month which I paid out of income with no benefits. And you're telling me there are people on benefits getting 75% more as housing benefits? What!? And that, at the margin, 72% of this is being captured by landlords? By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
£400/wk seems to be a middling kind of rent in central london - central not necessarily meaning 'one of the nice parts.'
Studio flats are around £600-£1200, one beds are £800-£1600, two beds are £1k to £2k.
Add 50-100% for somewhere considered desirable and/or central.
You can pay £50k/week at the very top end - but you probably won't be on benefits.
Of course if councils had been allowed to continue building council housing, rents would be considerably lower. These prices are only possible in a privatised market.
All central boroughs include a sizeable collection of immigrants and low-paid workers, many of whom have precarious job security.
It's not very practical to round them and march them to the nearest tube at gun point whenever they lose their jobs.
I'll say again - the answer is rent control and low cost council housing.
Thatcher didn't approve of either, so here we are.
you couldn't afford to live anywhere better than you did?
there should be council housing throughout the city so that people can afford to live near where they work
I guess nobody lives "near" their place of work in London, Madrid or Paris, then? By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
But I suspect councils are trapped between a requirement to manage homelessness and a requirement to manage budgets. If you live in an area and you become unemployed in that area, you're that area's problem.
If you then become homeless it's that council's job to try to house you. As I understand it, councils must at least attempt to find you somewhere to live, if they possibly can.
If some landlords game the system by charging outrageous rents to benefits claimants, and if banks support them by allowing by advertising buy-to-let mortgages that are only profitable with outrageous rents, that is - indeed - just another example of how private enterprise is infinitely more efficient than public planning.
I'd guess most people live and shop near where they live.
It's 10-15 mins from here for a small shop, and 15-20 mins for a big shop. This probably isn't unusual, but it does assume car ownership.
Some definitive national stats here.
Bingo. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
The point isn't whether or not public transport is available, but how much it costs.
Public transport in London isn't that much more affordable - if at all - than a car is here.
In my case it was about 100 pounds a month per adult. How much do you spend in your car, depreciation, petrol and maintenance included? In London it is a lot cheaper than 100 pounds per adult per month to live in area 3 than in area 1, so given the choice it makes sense to commute. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
Balance that against the extra time required to get in and out of work, which may involve juggling a school run, etc.
If you're in a low-paid job earning around £1k/month after tax, you don't get the choice to decide whether or not to afford it - because clearly, you can't.
Obviously if you can walk to work you're going to do that, because it's going to save you some significant cash.
And conversely if you can't walk to work, certain jobs become unaffordable if you're forced to pay commuting costs.
What these graphs show is that there wasn't much choice in the arbitration - it's simply impossible in France to spend more that a third of income on rent : you won't get a rent or a loan for more than that. Thus, those that have less purchasing power have to move farther away, to cheaper neighbourhoods, and thus spend more of their income, both in relative and absolute, on the housing and transportation budget. And it's not going to get better... Transport fares in Paris are much more expensive the farther you are from the city centre ; and, also quite importantly, whereas Paris intra-muros, the old city, has very good public transportation, it very quickly gets worse the farther one lives from the city centre.
What these graphs show is that there wasn't much choice in the arbitration - it's simply impossible in France to spend more that a third of income on rent : you won't get a rent or a loan for more than that.
Thus, those that have less purchasing power have to move farther away, to cheaper neighbourhoods, and thus spend more of their income, both in relative and absolute, on the housing and transportation budget. And it's not going to get better... Transport fares in Paris are much more expensive the farther you are from the city centre ; and, also quite importantly, whereas Paris intra-muros, the old city, has very good public transportation, it very quickly gets worse the farther one lives from the city centre.
My point is that for the time I lived in London I lived in the borough of Waltham Forest and used services in Newham and Hackney while working in Westminster and later in Hammersmith and Fulham. My wife worked in Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest. Had I become homeless it would have been up to Waltham Forest to house me. The idea that I somehow had a right to expect to live and work in the same borough seems ludicrous to me. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
