Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

1) You were born there. Your spouse lives there. Etc

2)!london is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules. They'd all need to agree and coordinate. I don't know why it isn't done better.

3) people living in slums ether don't know their rights; or how to enforce those rights. Sometimes their own legal status is dubious and they risk deportation. Even if they do know their rights, and how to enforce their right, and they can get the regulator to take action, and they're totally legal and above board, they may just end up without a home.

Housing in the UK is weird and broken and at the low end there are some strong weirdnesses built into the system.

View on HN

> London is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules [...] I don't know why it isn't done better

Politically, London will never have a unified council because it would wield too much power over the presiding government. This is effectively what led to the downfall of the GLC (Greater London Council) - in the early 1980s the socialist GLC antagonized the Tory government to the point where Thatcher ended up forcing it to be abolished.

London produces so much of the GDP it would be very easy for a centralized London council to hold the national government 'to ransom' (this happens to some degree now with the London Assembly, but since the Assembly has little power over issues such as housing it's not as pronounced as it could be).

The upshot of this is you end up with a pretty crazy system whereby someone at one end of the street could pay twice as much council tax as someone at the other end (in the case of, say, Wandsworth - which has one of the lowest council tax rates in the UK, and Merton - which is more around the average). I would agree having a centralized London council would be far better than the current system, but there's no way it will ever happen.

Couldn't the government pass laws that would give it more power over a unified London council, so that the holding-for-ransom dynamic would be minimized? It seems like that would be preferable to uncoordinated city ordinances. (Here in the States, we've got tons of fragmented municipal governance arrangements, so I know there's no simple fix.)

2) Council tax has all sorts of central govt limits on it, including the banding system. They can't fix the problem of empty property on their own.

3) A houseboat is not a building, and is therefore exempt from all the laws about building minimum standards that were instituted the previous times London had a slum problem. I'm not sure if there even are any standards about living on a boat, only standards about in relation to the river and other water users.

Housing in the UK is weird and broken. This is about 50% due to Right To Buy and the slow abolition of the council house.

Right to Buy is ending in Scotland shortly to protect social housing.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Housing/...

I don't fundamentally disagree with the existence of Right to Buy, but it really required a comprehensive house-building program to back it up. Now we're fucked.

The requirement for all new development over a certain number of units (12? iirc) to provide a perecentage as affordable was supposed to deal with this but the govt has redefined affordable too. Some of my professional colleagues in their 30s not only qualified for these but struggled to afford them. this is where the system really failed IMHO.

> Some of my professional colleagues in their 30s not only qualified for these but struggled to afford them. this is where the system really failed IMHO.

That is bonkers. It's just really weird.

The Tower Hamlets evidence pack has some eye-popping statistics. (Tower Hamlets are building more social housing than anywhere else in the UK)

They have 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing.

48% of those are in category 1 or 2 which means they have medical need, or are homeless or overcrowded.

9500 households are over crowded. 1228 households are under occupied with 271 having 2 or more bedrooms than they need. (I think a bedroom is anyroom that can fit a bed in it.)

3: The Boat Safety Scheme applies to boats on most inland waterways in the UK. There are a couple of things in that article that shouldn't have passed a BSS examination - "drips coming through to the electrics" is the one that leaps out at me. But yes, it's not intended to enforce minimum living standards. The local authority should be doing this and I believe they have the same powers against on-water landlords as they do on-land.

BSS requirements, for reference: http://www.boatsafetyscheme.org/media/194782/2013ecp_private...

I'm not sure no 1 is a good explanation. For 300 you can share a nice house with 2-3 other people in the south west regions. How does being born in London, or (especially this) having a spouse with you explain choosing to live in terrible condition instead of pleasant house in a different city?

It's more complex than that, I think.

People do (understandably) become attached to the area they live in. In particular, being born and growing up in London means that an individual's family and social group is likely to be there. While it's sometimes inevitable that people have to move, it's a bad state of affairs where individuals born in a city are being priced out of it due to broken housing policy.

Spouses can also end up meaning a life in a less desirable place. For example, my partner's in a career that can only really be done on-site and in London. That means I have to live here too. Less of a problem for unskilled workers, maybe.

And it's worth bearing in mind that work is pretty difficult to find in many cases – even inside London. A relatively sleepy town in Cornwall is going to have fewer jobs available, and they'll offer lower incomes.

But I guess the biggest objection is that this doesn't really get to the core of the problem – there is a load of underused housing stock in London, there's insufficient supply of cost-effective housing, and there is consistent government policy in place which encourages people to move to London. That's a really unstable situation and we need to make moves towards fixing it.

There's also the situation of separated parents. The children and one parent may be living comfortably, but the other parent on a low income battles to live close enough to remain a regular part of their children's lives.

>Spouses can also end up meaning a life in a less desirable place. For example, my partner's in a career that can only really be done on-site and in London. That means I have to live here too. Less of a problem for unskilled workers, maybe.

Does your spouse stop you getting a train or a tube to work as well?

Does your spose stop you getting a train or a tube to work as well?

No, but that makes little difference in practice, because savings on property are rapidly eaten up by transport costs and additional commute times.

So because of (1) you make a bad decision? Commute.

Commuting can end up costing the same (or more) than you'd save by moving out of London. Also time consuming and frequently unreliable (eg. Southeastern trains). It's not a simplistic option for most people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com