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The upper-middle class poverty line
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article1719509.ece
The author borders on insufferably self-involved, but the core point is worth discussing... I know plenty of fairly 'well paid' professionals, mostly geeks, who are living in grotty shared housing and/or still sliding into debt. Why? Because housing is so stupidly expensive that just 'well paid' isn't enough any more... if you want to live 'comfortably' in London, you either have to be paid in the sort of brackets the financial sector waves around, or you simply don't make the grade.
I'm bemused by the article's conclusion that this is all due to 'globalisation'. I'd have pinned the blame squarely on a combination of city bonuses driving the housing prices in London up at a stupid rate, and buy-to-fucking-rent doing the same thing across the whole country (albeit somewhat more slowly).
If you can't afford to rent or buy somewhere halfway nice to live, everything else you can do about your quality of life is pretty much window-dressing.
Discuss?
The author borders on insufferably self-involved, but the core point is worth discussing... I know plenty of fairly 'well paid' professionals, mostly geeks, who are living in grotty shared housing and/or still sliding into debt. Why? Because housing is so stupidly expensive that just 'well paid' isn't enough any more... if you want to live 'comfortably' in London, you either have to be paid in the sort of brackets the financial sector waves around, or you simply don't make the grade.
I'm bemused by the article's conclusion that this is all due to 'globalisation'. I'd have pinned the blame squarely on a combination of city bonuses driving the housing prices in London up at a stupid rate, and buy-to-fucking-rent doing the same thing across the whole country (albeit somewhat more slowly).
If you can't afford to rent or buy somewhere halfway nice to live, everything else you can do about your quality of life is pretty much window-dressing.
Discuss?
no subject
- We are all living in smaller and more expensive houses than the previous generation. Some of this is housing going up, some is that there are just more people around. In fact housing has gone up at the rate it has because of supply and demand. True, not many people can afford to buy a house in London/South East, but you can still get a decent rental property (although yes you will most likely have to share - see expanding population point).
- People who are still sliding into debt: the housing market I don't think is to blame here (at least not in it's entirety), I think it's lifestyle. We live in a 24/7 kind of lifestyle in london where we can do pretty much anything we want, when we want if we can afford it. There are lots of cool expensive gadgets around to spend money on and is much easier to get into debt. In our parents day, there were less disirable expensive things available to tempt us. And of these, less were advertised as there was less pervasive advertising.
- the fact that it's up to globalisation? Bullshit, it's because we want to live harder and faster than the previous generation. We were born at a relatively untroubled time. No big war or any great thing to worry about, a generation without too much of an identity, apart from excess. It's only now that we're starting to realise the issues that define our time period. The main ones being Enviromenalism, Terrorism & globalisation.