Londoners are getting desperate over rising rents, with residents and students taking to the streets and social media over the cramped conditions tenants are forced to accept.
With house-building lagging well behind the population increase in western Europe’s biggest city, prices are soaring beyond anything affordable.
“The situation is becoming untenable,” said retired teacher John Ford, 60, who joined a 2,000-strong protest this month against the government’s new housing bill, which would radically alter public housing and the rights of its tenants.
“My nephew is a young surgeon. He cannot afford, on his salary, to buy a house in London. So this crisis is beginning to eat into the middle class,” he said.
Latest figures show the average London house price was £514,097 (US$745,749) in December last year — a year-on-year rise of 12.4 percent — compared with a 6.4 percent increase to £188,270 across England and Wales.
The London-wide median rent is £122 per week for a room in a shared home; £276 for a one-bedroom property and £402 for a three-bedroom home.
Many “generation rent” young professionals, whose parents bought comfortable homes in their early 20s, have given up on their dream of ever affording a property in London.
Students are also feeling the crisis bite.
At University College London, more than 150 students have gone on a rent strike. One of the university’s dormitories has rooms costing as much as £262 per week.
London’s population is at a record high of 8.6 million and growing at about 100,000 per year.
A total of 25,994 new homes were built in London last year, down 9 percent on the previous year.
“People in the lowest-paid jobs have to live on the outskirts of London,” Green Party leader Natalie Bennett told reporters. “We’re now hearing of junior doctors, nurses and teachers having to commute from outside.”
Commuting from outer London is not without cost in time and stress, let alone money. An annual travel pass from the city limits costs £2,364.
Part of the problem is wealthy foreign buyers snapping up high-end new developments as a safe investment and leaving them empty while they accrue value.
“Buy-to-leave is dreadful, but the real issue is what’s being built: homes designed for just that,” Bennett said. “Let’s provide genuinely affordable, secure homes for people.”
The outrage over rising rent is fed with regular stories in local newspapers about tenants being offered bedrooms in closets under stairs or in corners of living rooms, or matchbox-sized houses selling for astronomical amounts.
A flat dubbed the “least expensive” in London, measuring just 7m2, last month sold for £79,000 in east London’s Clapton.
With the price of the average London property going up by £10,682 in December last year alone, the issue is set to continue to stoke controversy.
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