The upper-middle class poverty line
Apr. 30th, 2007 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dennyhttp://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?
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-30 01:38 pm (UTC), who are living in grotty shared housing
It's quite a big difference I've noticed since coming to London - that just about eveyone in their late 20s / early 30s is still living in shared houses.
In Edinburgh, quite a few of my friends rented places on their own (not in the plushest of locales, but certainly quite ok) and were prepared to pay a high % of their salaries to do this (e.g. rent of £350 - £425pcm when on £15 - 18k pa gross), not necessarily expecting that they would be buying in a few years' time whether they shared or not. They always seemed to feel as if they had a higher quality of life than people in flatshares, even if they didn't spend as much on some other things.
Whereas here, pretty much everyone I know, many of them with significantly higher salaries than the friends in Edinburgh, is living in a shared house and paying a rent which could get a studio or small 1-bed flat in another part of town. (I've recently seen several ads for rooms in the NWs at the same price as my whole flat.)
I'm not arguing for one way or the other being better (after all, communal living is better for the environment, it might be nice having people around, and I'm wondering about sharing again). But I do wonder about this difference, especially whenever someone says that they wish they had a flat to themselves.
Is it habit? Do people want to have more money for all the things there are to do in London?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-30 01:46 pm (UTC)I vaguely recall my dad telling me that a good rule of thumb for reasonable quality of life is that you shouldn't spend more than 1/3 of your monthly wages on your rent. I'm a fair bit over that line since I got promoted, and I was a long way over it before that.