I'm not sure what the solution here is... At the end of the day, if your city is nice enough, and demand is high enough, and supply is low enough, you're going

I'm not sure what the solution here is... At the end of the day, if your city is nice enough, and demand is high enough, and supply is low enough, you're going to see prices per unit of area rise. And you can do two things, pay more, or accept less space. And in the latter case you run into these ostensibly weird constructions like sleeping in your bathroom. I don't know what to think of that. On the one hand its inhumane. On the other hand, it's self-inflicted. If you're in the UK, you absolutely don't need to live in London to live a normal life with a decent job, food on the table, good healthcare, good education for your kids etc. The person who rents this place probably is single, late twenties, works in finance, and will likely live here only 2 years before moving to something bigger with a longer commute, but not quite yet before he/she wants to live in the city near the action. Although there's reason to pity, this isn't your stereotypical dystopian pity-case of a family of three menial workers living in a Hong Kong cage. You can have a discussion about London being a place only for rich people, and that without mitigating measures you get an economic divide between rich and poor, with no socioeconomic mobility. And that's true. In this context I have quite clear opinions on the need to keep neighbourhoods mixed, which requires subsidised social housing (council housing), subsidised private (public) education, subsidised after-school programs etc. But that's a matter of distributing scarce high-value resources to poor people to keep a healthy level-playing field in society. But it does not solve the underlying scarcity. Whatever government system you apply to London, you'll always have this scarcity, and people self-inflicting themselves by choosing to pay 2k for a bed in a bathroom. You can take that choice away through regulation (no beds in bathrooms, minimum unit sizes etc), but it doesn't solve the underlying scarcity issue, just the symptom. One course of action that I think we should take, is driving centralised decentralisation on a national level as much as possible. Yes we can acknowledge urban centres do wonders as knowledge/financial/cultural hubs. But we can also acknowledge that hyper-concentration in one place, is not preferred to concentration in 5 places. the UK does this very poorly with London taking up a huge part of the national economy. Germany does this much better, with many regional economies which are all very strong and have their own pull.