North London Rent Girl

Even in this fickop of a city there are soooo many better options than that! And what, you think these places are going to sell for a tenner?! They'll be quarter of a million quid, wait and see - it's Balham, somehow thought of as a great place to live these days. Edit - do you know what 'ideal' means?!

Eeeee, them war the daze. Any time now they're going to invent the kitchen/bathroom combo unit and it will have a single little port-hole window you can peer out of while you're both peeling carrots and crapping into the sink. Three birds with one stone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thinking Agenda 21?! Balaclava emojee, which I can't find and I'm paranoid about that, too...

Can we please put the landlord down and take the tenant and cat to the countryside and set them free?

But it can live that near-standard London cat life of going in and out of the window and hopping down the rooves to a garden, ahh, except there's no window and no garden. OK, they're resourceful creatures - hopping out of the skylight and jumping into a passing digger bucket. Space is not necessarily my strong suit but I think you might have to step into the shower to shut the door behind you every time you need the loo. Well said Julia Park: “Our prisons do better than that.”

I do have to disagree with you there - I reckon it was a grimy little policy, forcing the public to police each other, an unpleasant and un-British business and I'm glad the high court was having no truck with it. Funnily enough, I heard about its demise from my lovely landlady, who was thoroughly offended at the idea of having to check someone's passport. Immigrants, even illegal ones, are by no means the most significant factor in the housing catastrophe, this was typical political nastiness - alongside e.g. the criminalisation of squatting, which the tories made one of their first orders of business when they got in. Tho to be fair, I'm sure there were plenty of tories with libertarian leanings who will have thought right to rent was a bit of authoritarian mank, too.

no it's not

well said

Thanks, nice bit of first-hand info. I've been wondering whether to trust that 'demos have support of 80% of population' figure as don't know where it's from but what you've seen suggests a great deal of popular support. I'm going to go and catch up on fresh footage now, see what's happening.

Oh, goodness, this and reddog's post above it, don't start me off. Am reinforcing me tin foil hat and buying a gas mark, praps in a fetching silver to go with. Whatever happened in Strasbourg, and we'll never know, what's happening on the streets of Paris is mind-blowing enough. It really does look like the start of a revolution. Yikes hurray.

unpleasant comment withdrawn, I wish you well

I see what you're saying but they're not trying to get them to disperse, they're kettling them then dropping tear gas on them from the rooftops and firing rubber bullets into the crowd. Sure the police are scared but at this particular juncture they're not the ones I'm feeling sorry for. In another bit someone was talking about some policemen taking their helmets off to show the crowd they wouldn't hurt them, he was saying the police can see they're mostly ordinary people. Someone also said this thing has 80% of the population on its side. Can that be right? What do you think the outcome of an EU referendum would be here?! Frexitorama.

Brilliant, well done - I've just been watching this and came on here to post it, thought one of you might already have done so. It's extraordinary and we are REALLY not hearing about it. And wearechange are not showing the gory stuff - someone losing an eye, someone losing a hand. This sort of first-hand reportage, there's nothing like it. Am feeling a bit awed that something is actually happening. Not gleeful as I did at first, now concerned but also hopeful.

Yes that's what I gather, too - it was the last straw. I've found it so heartening, magnificent, ALLEZ LES VELOS!!

Bingo! But the things you mention can't be commodified - except to the extent that you need a kagool and the price of a cup of tea and your bus fare. How is that good for our warped nutter of an economy?! People aren't going to get indebted by enjoying nature and that's where we need them, up to their eyeballs in debt from the age of 25 and running as hard as they can for the rest of their miserable lives just to avoid destitution. Put a picture of some grass on the wall and stream some rain sounds, Fahrenheit 451 here we are!

That's my borough so had to look it up - v annoyingly it seems only to be levied against individuals. Poo. http://camden.gov.uk/ccm/content/council-and-democracy/council-tax/discounts-and-exemptions/unoccupied-properties---changes-to-discount/ But also, if Camden is amongst the councils that's still granting permission for vast numbers of luxury apartments, and it surely will be, more luxury flats are just what the borough needs, they will have some hand-down-yer-trousers arrangement with 'investors' so they're not scared to come in and build. That was a reference to this bit in the artice: "In February it was reported that London councils had granted property developers planning permission to build more than 26,000 new luxury flats priced at more than £1m each". No words for how mental it is, everywhere you turn here you see these slums of the future, it's an infestation.

Bloody hell, a three hundred year old trust, isn't that where it's really at?! Old wealth and power reproducing itself largely outside the tax system, their kids have got it made in the shade! But yes, have to give it to them for long-term thinking, that's how you do it, the rest of us can't remember 30 years back.

Absolutely, not news to hpc-ers but great to see msm giving room for crazy notions like house prices going up as well as down and prices being set at the margin!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000182g A little early-winter cheer for hpc-ers in Manchester! And more generally a very interesting programme on R4 on Friday - Manhatten-chester, well worth a listen. It's about high-rise development in the city. Young man who has just bought a 3-bed flat in a block for 240 grand, "I think it's a steal" - not his fault but oh good lord. Prof. Karel Williams of the Manchester Business School: "too much housing of the wrong sort in the wrong place... The capitalists never know when to stop, the problem is the local politicians didn't tell them to stop ... it's a kind of monoculture that's ... for 25-34 year olds and what happens when they grow up and they want to have children?... None of this kind of ecology of the city has been focussed on by the developers or the planners". Then, later: "The BTL landlords, many of them have factored in continuous rises in flat prices into their return. Now, capital appreciation can't go on forever. In the early 90s, if you factor in significant inflation at the time, house property fell by around 25%. Now, the great achievement* after 2008 was the Bank of England cut interest rates towards zero and they essentially prevented a collapse in house property prices, that's the great achievement of economic management. So all these BTL landlords have never been exposed to a downturn in the property market. The typical BTL landlord is someone like a south of England dentist. Most of them have been bought by people whose propsects of retirement are tied up with the idea of investment in house property. Now, if this turns sour, nobody knows exactly how these BTL landlords will behave. They've never been exposed to a serious downturn, they don't remember the events of after 89 when there was a serious downturn in the property market and there's at least the prospect that some of them would panic and start to dump property on the market. And if individual BTL landlords start panicking in large numbers, then of course you get distress auctions and the price of every flat in the block is defined by the price that was reached in the last distress auction..." Presenter: "So buyer beware?!". Prof - "I think BTL landlord certainly beware". * Can't read his tone here, not sure he really means this.

Hahaha, quite. Now there's a good way of pretending to solve a very real problem, how resourceful - the problems of collateral and paperwork dealt with in a oner, two birds with one stone. Am also struck that it's no longer SUBprime lending (frowny worried face), it's just non-prime lending (expansive hand gesture and shrug of shoulders) - that really should be read out loud by Julia Louis Dreyfuss as Elaine from Seinfeld. People have got so hung-up on that 'sub-' prefix, haven't they? Sillies, getting themselves all worried about nothing, everything will be ok, just sign here.

Don't know much about stock markets but early on radio today they were talking about a LOT of volatility on the Japanese stock market on Monday then US yesterday. I'm buried in work at the moment so don't know whether it's being covered widely. Radio (msm) said that it might be about fears of the end of the rise of the tech giants. Whatever. Sounds like the kind of 'excuse' they make up about the housing market, too - taking a relatively small contributing factor and making it The Reason, instead of facing up to the fact that prices have long been disconnected from reality and need to come down. Stock markets have been insanely high and rising for ages, aren't we just looking at the inevitable? Crashy crashy crashola. Who cares? Edit: I don't mean 'who cares'! I think I mean something more like 'bring it on'.

I clicked on the poster and their description on their channel page says: "Carl Gentile is a top producing real estate agent serving Jupiter, Tequesta and the Palm Beaches of South Florida. As seen on HGTV, Top Agent Magazine and the Expert Network." Producing what?!! What estate agent produces anything apart from weird verbal constructions like 'boasts to accomodate' and now, apparently, nonsense videos that try desperately to construct a reality in which we're not already a couple of decades into a housing bubble that's so beyond anything seen before that normal words can't be used to describe it?

I got through the first two, am too upset to read on - one young person who had been in the care system, now trying to raise her baby in a shipping container, another with mental health difficulties being 'no fault' evicted. FFS, why on earth can we not take some money away from the vilers with unspendable quantities of the stuff and take care of these people. What happened to us? 'Although they eventually found another flat, Tom is still angry about it now. “That experience made me feel like our society doesn’t care about the young and the vulnerable," he says.' Such polite understatement.

I agree, we've long been there. I'd say we passed 'crisis' in the early noughties, 'disaster' probably in the late noughties and for the past couple of years I've been dubbing it - for myself and the one friend I have who doesn't go blank, and maybe on here - a "nationally ruinous, personally devastating, decades-long housing catastrophe". Anything much less than that really understates it. It's twisted our economy into a pretzel, we're in a weird economic Wonderland. Also agree that any sensible government* would have seen the problems brewing and done something but I reckon they should have picked it up in 2003, not 2013. It seems to me that there's a conscious or unconscious effort to stop us looking back too far. This has been going on for ages and has its most substantial roots in the turn to neo-liberalism in the 80s - I know I'm not saying anything there that's too new or controversial for this board. *Do we mean a government that actually wishes to govern for the benefit of the populace? I think things have been and are exactly as successive governments have wanted them to be. What we're seeing is a system working - tin foil hat emoticon!

Well found. That show is so chock-full of bs, "reinvigourated parking area", what a load of ar se. Turd-polishing to mood music. On the substance, 73 pwoberdees in a year? I wonder how many of her there are out there, am thinking a lot, all leveraged up to the eyeballs, hurray!

One complaint said "I have to live on my rental income". No you don't, you parasitic scum, go and get a proper job. OK, here she is, Wendy Waring, landlord with 46 properties, having to wait a couple of months for rent. Where's the guy with the little violin, christ, why are they wasting time on "what Wendy has experienced", nobody gives a sh it. Aren't these landlords just industrial-scale benefits claimants? Can you imagine the BBC inviting to their hallowed bloody studios an actual benefits claimant to lament their lot for quarter of an hour? Once you own property, tho, beeb's hand goes straight down your trousers. Puke.