Hacker News Reader

Gentrification is a massive problem in Berlin... Mitte -> Prenzlauer Berg -> Kreuzberg -> Neukölln -> Where Next?

It's absolutely not as extreme as London because most people in Berlin rent rather than own, and other costs of living are comparitively far cheaper across the board. The problem is though many people have had your idea, one that I share, and we are "spoiling" it for the locals. (Or the people who were ahead of the curve) Go for a visit, the areas I mentioned, especially the last two, are packed with British, Australian and American twenty somethings looking for that cheaper/creative/hedonistic lifestyle.

To be fair, even the most gentrified areas in Berlin are still affordable compared to Hamburg, Munich or Vienna.

> I'm one of those who is in the middle and work; I rent in an up-and-coming area (i.e. people look down on it until they come here) and rent is going up 8 times salary. We are already at rent being 30% of combined salary.

Ditto (Brixton). Flats in my area are already at the £350k (2 bed) mark, with landlords upping their rent accordingly (having bought the flat for < £200k 9yrs ago). My solution is moving further South (Surrey) near a good train line which gets you into Victoria/London Bridge in 30 mins. The rent on a flat/house out there is ~50% of what it is in London, not to mention cheaper council tax/insurance/etc.

I'm near East Croydon - you can get 2 bed houses in the ~200k range, and 3 bed houses with a garden in the 250k-300k range, and with rents to match. 15 min to Victoria 18-20 min to London Bridge, which frankly means that despite being zone 5 it's still faster to get to the centre than in a lot of places in zone 2/3.

Less desirable areas of Croydon are cheaper (on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can buy 6-8 bedroom mansions in the 800k-1.5m range, still a steal compared to central London)

The price pressure is so high in central London because so many people can afford it, and prefer to pay out ludicrous amounts rather than even consider moving further out - it's the opposite of the trend cited in the article: The prices are skyrocketing not because outsiders use it as investments, but because the demand make the properties a good investment. The outsiders buying explains the high purchase prices in the centre, the demand explains the pressure on rental prices.

I don't want to be mean, but isn't Croydon a generally undesirable area?

The whole of London is an undesirable area in my opinion. Expensive, busy, polluted, full of unfriendly people.

Many people love it however.

I'm right there with you having lived here for 3 years. It seems like you have to be single to enjoy living in London. I just find it crowded, expensive and rammed with traffic!

> The whole of London is an undesirable area in my opinion

Agreed. I think OP was more referring to crime. Ok maybe Chelsea vs Croydon is a bit different, but compared to any of the surrounding areas e.g. Wimbledon and Clapham, it isn't much different.

(I was in South Wimbledon - close to Mitcham and Tooting - for 2 years)

You might be surprised. In the year to date, Kensington & Chelsea have had about 12 crimes per 100 people according to the Met. Croydon have had about 6 crimes per 100 people. K&C does come out better if you look at certain subsets of serious crime, but Croydon is consistently in the "better half" of London Boroughs in terms of crime, often doing very well.

Most of the worst boroughs in London in terms of crime are the inner-city boroughs, regardless of wealth (Westminster in particular is a crime ridden hellhole if you look at the raw numbers by population, due largely to the amount of business and nightlife and low number of people living there; but Croydon city centre suffers from some of the same effect, dragging the overall crime rate for the borough up, even though the totals for the borough still remain better than average for London).

I guess it makes more sense to rob richer people.

There are still areas that area (as with any town), but on the whole I think it's increasingly seen as an option for young professionals working in London who don't want to live there.

Greater London is generally quite homogeneous. Good areas and bad areas are often cheek by jowl. One end of a street can be quite nice, while the other end is much poorer. Obviously there are better & worse areas, but even there there's lots of variability.

So just like everywhere else, Croyden has lots of good, lots of bad, and lots and lots of in-between.

Amongst people who have never visited, yes. Which is presumably one of the reasons it is still so cheap.

The central business district also still suffers from ugly office blocks, as the town centre was bombed out during the war largely due to the proximity to the RAF base at Croydon Airport (which used to be London's main airport until Heathrow - it's been closed since the end of the 50's) and the factories at Purley Way, and most of the rebuilding resulting in massive amounts of large, ugly concrete office buildings mainly used by the home office initially.

As I mentioned, it's below the London average when it comes to crime, quite a bit above the London average in terms of salaries. A lot of good schools, including a handful of expensive high end private schools.

There are a few run down areas though the worst are "hidden away" far outside the main town centre, but also quite a few upscale areas, including Purley (in South Croydon), which is consistently one of the wealthiest post-codes in the UK due to a large number of very spacious estates (we're talking houses that can hardly be seen from the gate facing out to to private roads, forming adorable little seemingly old but entirely fake vestiges of old country villages) dotted around a leafy and generally nice little town centre.

Most of Croydon, though, is covered by mostly firmly middle class neighbourhoods and parks. Lots and lots of parks (120 of them), some of them very substantial. There's of course also the central shopping area, which is one of the largest in England, with two massive shopping centres (which look to be refurbished and combined into one centre as part of a join venture that includes the Westfield operators). Some of the best public transport in London (central choke-point on main lines from Victoria and London Bridge to the South Coast, as well as the tram system).

Part of the reputation problem is probably because most visitors at most see the central business district (which as mentioned still looks ugly), at most, including TV footage of Luna House (immigration processing for the Home Office), and don't even realise that most of the much nicer looking small towns and villages surrounding Croydon town centre are also part of the borough.

The last 5 years or so, we've also had a massive increase in building of upscale housing (highrises with 1m+ penthouses etc...) - they're in the process of putting up another high end 50 floor highrise in the city centre - and upgrades to the town centre, with more underway, so soon it'll even look nice.

I've been there, it seemed quite culturally-diverse. Didn't a lot of the riot happen there with the building burned down etc.?

A little bit of the riot happened within a small part of the shopping area of Croydon town centre, constrained to about half a square mile or so, apart from one or two stores in the Purley Way retail park. The Reeves corner store burning down was the "highlight" yes, and a couple of stores had some broken glass.

I walked through the town centre on the days of the riots, and frankly it was mostly quiet and uneventful - the media coverage was massively overblown.

"My solution is moving further South (Surrey) near a good train line which gets you into Victoria/London Bridge in 30 mins." The sum of your rental and travel expenditure will probably stay constant though? Train fares are quite hight.

Nope, my Oyster travelcard (zones 1-2) is £116/m, the season ticket is £164/m. Just the drop in car/home insurance and council tax makes that up, let alone the £500+ drop in rent!

And the other thing worth noting for people considering this: If you have any way of avoiding zone 1 (if you work near the border to zone 2, and it's viable for you to take a bus, walk or cycle the last bit, for example), zone one makes up for an atrocious amount of the travelcard price in London - getting a travel card that excludes zone 1 can be a major saving.

"The free market is supposed to mean that supply will rise up to meet demand where possible."

The British property market is anything but a free market.

Hm.. Taxi driver I was speaking to, was on the list for social housing for 20 years before getting one. For years, the amount being sold has been much higher than being built (since Thatcher brought in right to buy).

Although most housing developments have to build "affordable housing", in most of london you need to be earning £40-£60 to afford them (IE in the top 10% already).

The poor camp is even smaller. It's not just those who are poor enough to be eligible for social housing, but those who are lucky enough to get it, or unlucky enough to really, really need it.

They don't have to leave in London though, they are not professionals. Plenty of other towns with cheaper property in UK.

And lower salaries and lower employment. And if your social network is in London, many also run into situations where they can't really move. E.g. if you're a parent, living near family that can look after your child part- or full time might mean a difference of hundreds of pounds a month in child care.

You don't make them sound desperate, more like a "nice-to have" zone. Most immigrants loose their social network when moving, yet they still do OK.

1. Not everyone in London is Dick Whittington (and this is also a criticism of other comments in this thread, that seems to assume this), coming for the gold-paved streets. Some people live there because they grew up there, as did their parents and so on. As do their parents still, because 30 or more years ago, it was still possible for normal people to buy a family home.

2. You sound like the Golgafrinchans. If only "professionals" live in London, who cleans up after those professionals, serves them coffee, or does any of the other non-professional tasks that keep a city moving? Do you expect your £18Kpa hairdresser (or the minimum-wage junior that sweeps up the hair) to spend £5Kpa (after tax) getting to work, or would you prefer to have go to Northampton every couple of months to get your hair cut?

> You sound like the Golgafrinchans. If only "professionals" live in London, who cleans up after those professionals, serves them coffee, or does any of the other non-professional tasks that keep a city moving?

Commuters who live outside of London proper and commute in for work?

Cities aren't the same thing as planets.

> Do you expect your £18Kpa hairdresser (or the minimum-wage junior that sweeps up the hair) to spend £5Kpa (after tax) getting to work, or would you prefer to have go to Northampton every couple of months to get your hair cut?

I'd expect the price of the service they are providing to rise until it justified either them commuting into the city or their living in the city. If development in the city is constrained, probably the former.

" I rent in an up-and-coming area (i.e. people look down on it until they come here)" - what area are you renting in?

Stockwell