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I'm giving some light consideration to running for Mayor of London with all my policies focused on one aim: Hyper-Aggressive Rent Control. Quite simply, the cu

I'm giving some light consideration to running for Mayor of London with all my policies focused on one aim: Hyper-Aggressive Rent Control. Quite simply, the current situation for renters and first time buyers in London is unfair and needs to be addressed in a way that restores the balance between those that live and work in London, and those that just own property here. Although it costs £10k to run, because that's the type of democracy we have here in the UK apparently. UPDATE: I've not outlined a single policy - and I'm already being told I'm wrong.

Numberwang 12y ago
Kickstart your campaign. You will get my vote.
- tomelders 12y ago
  I don't think you can kickstart political stuff. But there must be something out there... or I suppose I have the requisite skills to build something. Maybe I will give it a shot. At the very least it force the candidates to address rent control as an issue.
  - anu_gupta 12y ago
    > Maybe I will give it a shot. At the very least it force the candidates to address rent control as an issue. I doubt it will force anyone to do anything, least of all the candidates.
  - jeffbr13 12y ago
    There are a handful of more generic crowd-funding platforms out there, so no need to build your own. A good candidate website would be more than enough to build. As a bonus, crowd-funding your candidacy would give you early validation. And, as a comment below says, you should be able to convince enough people to scrape together £10k, if you expect to run. Fail fast, and all that. You certainly have my donation, and my vote if I can still afford to live in London by election-time! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100275
- esja 12y ago
  And mine.
colechristensen 12y ago
>Although it costs £10k to run, because that's the type of democracy we have here in the UK apparently. This is a good thing, despite how it seems on the surface. If it were free you'd probably have 10,000 candidates. If it were £50, you'd probably have 500. Nobody benefits. The city has to spend lots of money and resources handling large volumes of useless candidates and voters do have any idea of who to pay attention to besides one or two huge names and a mass of idiots. If you can't get 1000 people to give you £10, you don't have any business running anyway. A large entry fee does a great job weeding out wonks, crazies, and jokers. Real candidates will spend a lot more than 10k through the process anyway. In the US I voted during the last election to increase the filing fee from $20 to $500 for mayor of Minneapolis. Obviously a much smaller city but the idea is the same.
- tomelders 12y ago
  Yeah I get that, but I feel there must be better ways to weed out wonks and crazies without putting a monetary roadblock in the way. How about n * 1000 signatures from people on the electoral roll? I think we live in a world where that's a feasible alternative.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    If the people signing for you are not willing to donate even £1, I'm not sure they're very serious about wanting you to run.
  - easytiger 12y ago
    And how do you pay for the collection and verification of those signatures? Prob would cost around £10k ;)
    - tomelders 12y ago
      For the entire system perhaps. Certainly not per person.
- PJDK 12y ago
  Also worth pointing out that the £10k is a deposit, not a payment. If you get 5% of first preferences you get it back.
omegaham 12y ago
Rent control will lead to more slums and more boats like this. American cities have tried rent control, and it simply leads to a shortage of rooms for rent. After all - why would you build apartments or rent out existing rooms if you're not going to make money off of it? If you're looking for a leftist answer that would alleviate some of this, I would suggest running with the platform of subsidized rent. In the US, it's called Section 8, after the section of the 1937 Housing Act that created it. Basically, if you earn less than a certain amount of money, the government will pay for a certain amount of your rent (ranging from a small portion to almost all of it). In turn, landlords are guaranteed tenants and funding as long as they adhere to certain building requirements and responsibilities. Section 8 ends up getting a whole bunch of criticism, as it drives housing prices up further and dicks over the middle class, (if you don't qualify for assistance, you're going to have problems) but if you want to make it a priority to have working-class / poor people live in London, that's probably the way to go. You have to pay for it with increased taxes, though.
- pjc50 12y ago
  We already have this, it's called housing benefit. A cap was recently introduced on the payments to deal with extreme cases (single mother with many children living in Zone 1 getting > national average income). It doesn't actually impose any extra responsibilities on landlords. What we used to have was a national programme of building social housing. This had some high-profile social failures (qv US "housing projects") and the government embarked on a programme of selling it off at a great discount to the current occupiers while demolishing some of the worst tower blocks. What we now have is a massive failure of planning policy. The symbol of this is the derelict for 30 years Battersea power station. It's a huge, useless, architectural treasure that's occupying a lot of land in Zone 1 because nobody can agree what to do with it.
  - jblok 12y ago
    Its quite far into the building process now actually. The whole Power Station/Nine Elms area is getting a huge number of (quite expensive) apartments and 2 extra Northern Line stations.
- 12y ago
tormeh 12y ago
Rent controls don't work. It will just partition the price into over- and under-table parts. As I see it, there are three solutions, all of which should be done simultaneously: 1. Requiring occupants to live in their housing for a significant portion of the year's days (a third, for example). Enforcement requires some loss of privacy, but living in central London is not a human right. 2. Expanding the city vertically. Encourage high-rise apartment complexes. 3. Higher speed trains to the suburbs to shorten the time distance.
- cpursley 12y ago
  #2: Solving housing shortages is all about going up (and perhaps even down) when land economics are in play. That and zoning that allows for smaller units.
- pjc50 12y ago
  1) is doable but politically difficult - too much opposition to taxing the rich (see "mansion tax"). 2) is already happening with new build, but requires demolishing existing buildings to really make a difference. This changes the appearance of London quite dramatically and encounters architectural preservation resistance. 3) Nowhere to put extra train lines without demolishing some very expensive property. HS2 is demonstrating this for just a single line. The existing lines are running at capacity. What might be feasible is going to double-decker trains in places, which merely requires rebuilding all the bridges and tunnels. I would add (4) encourage movement of jobs to other parts of the UK. There are bits of this happening such as moving the BBC to Manchester. But the way London works is most of the high-paid jobs are basically standing around with buckets trying to catch money dripping off the mega-wealthy, and the associated trickle down around this. Perhaps plan to move the civil service to Birmingham once HS2 is finished, giving a Brussels/Strasbourg dynamic to the place. The US is very fortunate that the seat of government, the financial center, the commodity wealth center, the media center, and the tech center are in different cities.
  - sjtgraham 12y ago
    Re 4) At least one major government department is already adopting a policy of remote working and opening smaller regional satellite commuter offices with hot desk facilities.
icebraining 12y ago
UPDATE: I've not outlined a single policy - and I'm already being told I'm wrong. Sure you did - rent control. That's the name of a very specific policy. You might have meant "doing something about rent prices", but then you chose an unfortunate way of expressing it, I must say.
- tomelders 12y ago
  There are different forms of rent control. I've not outlined anything. But I take your point. In reality, I don't have an outline. I've got an idea that "something needs to be done". I don't even want the job but the frustration and despair of renting and buying in London under the current conditions just might be enough for me to put my life on hold for four years. It's clear that no one in the current political class has any real appetite for this issue.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    "something needs to be done" Yep, and forcing people to charge less than a resource is worth really doesn't work. The only real way to get the cost down is to increase the availability of the resource. Everything else is just causing stress on the system and stress leads to no further investments, fraud, and/or spending money on routing around the law.
venomsnake 12y ago
What you need to do is progressive taxation on properties and capital returns.
easytiger 12y ago
> unfair So you want to create a world in which people who need to come and work in London in growth areas cannot because a chosen few are occupying the properties they'd prefer to live in with no economic way to regulate or control. You simply create an unfairness of another kind.
Kurtz79 12y ago
"I've not outlined a single policy - and I'm already being told I'm wrong." Then you are in the same boat (pun intended) of many professional politicians. I lived in London for a while a few years ago, and not only it was crazy expensive (and from my understanding now it is even worse), it was hard finding a a free room in a shared house in the first place.
Ntrails 12y ago
Were I wishing to resolve the issue of property prices, I would do it using two things: The first is to take the pricing system used on London buses (£1.40 per trip, wherever you're going), and apply it nationally (probably a £1) to re-nationalised railways. This would require huge subsidies, though I believe it to be worthwhile. I'd like to see counter arguments though. Secondly I'd probably look at large increases in stamp duty on non-primary homes, and changes to make renting a property less attractive through lending rules/regulation and taxation. The ability to finance rented properties at 90% leverage requires too little capital, and lending rules are too generous to landlords compared to tenants. If rental properties required 50% equity by landlords (as a plucked from the air example) you'd see a rather fewer leveraged to the hilt property "moguls" and less competition. Obviously more building would help, but I think it's only part of the problem.
- tomelders 12y ago
  I'm a big believer in renationalisation of the railways for this very reason. When you look into commuting from outside London, the price of a season ticket scuppers your plans.
  - Ntrails 12y ago
    I looked at commuting from the midlands. £9,000 a year. It's actually a joke. In all seriousness though - very low prices on public transport should incentivise people out of cars. Weekend/day trips around the UK away become significantly more attractive. And above all it moves some of the money out of London. The obvious downside is higher passenger numbers, more capacity required, and no money to fund it. It'd take someone with far more domain specific knowledge to appreciate the complexities - for now it's my go to "one policy to change the country" when asked :)
- lmm 12y ago
  > The first is to take the pricing system used on London buses (£1.40 per trip, wherever you're going), and apply it nationally (probably a £1) to re-nationalised railways. This would require huge subsidies, though I believe it to be worthwhile. I'd like to see counter arguments though. The railway network doesn't have the capacity for the number of people who would use it at those prices. The reason a Virgin ticket from London to Birmingham costs 40 quid and has to be booked months in advance isn't just because beardy Branson likes money, it's also because there are a lot of people who want to travel quickly between London and Birmingham. So unless you want Soviet Union style decade-long waiting lists for season tickets, you'd have to build dozens of new mainlines. Look at how much fuss, public enquiries and so on there have been around HS2 - and that's a single line, being built to relieve what everyone knows is the busiest line in the UK. In China they just build the high-speed lines and citizens know better than to complain, but you'd never get away with that here. And if you were somehow able to make it work, you might make London more attractive to live in, not less. For young people who like to go out in the evening, nothing compares to living in London - the trains are pretty good for commuting to your job, but less so for coming back from a night out (for solid engineering reasons that are hard to overcome, the railway needs a bit of "downtime" once a day or certainly once a week). So you might end up with people who work in e.g. Guildford preferring to live in London and commute out. > Secondly I'd probably look at large increases in stamp duty on non-primary homes, and changes to make renting a property less attractive through lending rules/regulation and taxation. The ability to finance rented properties at 90% leverage requires too little capital, and lending rules are too generous to landlords compared to tenants. If rental properties required 50% equity by landlords (as a plucked from the air example) you'd see a rather fewer leveraged to the hilt property "moguls" and less competition. London contains the world's finest exploiters of financial regulations; you're going to struggle to make assets un-leverable when there are willing buyers and sellers on each side. Most likely you'd end up with a layer of either legal avoidance or outright corruption, with e.g. poor tenants forced to become the "owner of record" of the house they live in, under a contract where the financial benefits still accrue to the rentier. What would help, I think, is to tax income from increased property values exactly like any other income. It's not going to be a popular policy with voters (temporarily embarrassed millionaires), and there would be costs to assessing property values fairly, but it would eliminate a lot of market distortion if you had to pay the same taxes on your housing investments as you do on your stocks or ordinary income. Eliminating tax breaks for charitable foundations would also eliminate a huge class of exploits, but again good luck getting that one past the voters.
ttctciyf 12y ago
Please do it and end the madness! You are assured at least one vote, and if you win I will relish the effect strict enforcement of your policy will have on the insanity[1] that is the London property market.[2] [1] When Eric Schmidt is having trouble finding something in the £50M[3] bracket, that's got to be insane, right? [2] http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-50720618.html http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-507206... or take your pick from the bargains to be found at: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/map.html?locationIdentifier=USERDEFINEDAREA^{%22polylines%22%3A%22{ljyHxtYhFg{AbaAjDbo%40fo%40hH%60iAuGnc%40lXhfDtMre%40whClxBgTg{%40uGomBUo{B%60EagB%22}&minPrice=600000&maxPrice=900000 http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/map.html?locati... [3] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/20/london-property-boom-super-prime-market http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/20/london-prope...
- aet 12y ago
  Try Croydon...
gadders 12y ago
Unfair how? What would your idea of fair look like?
balabaster 12y ago
It is unfair, but eventually anyone in the service industry isn't going to be able to afford to live there, so they'll leave. That will cause one of a few things to happen: 1. Either the wages for those workers will rise to attract them back into the city or there just won't be those workers any more because they won't be able to afford to live there. 2. The workers will all move out of the city, but commute back into the city to work... just like millions of people every day, adding to the already ridiculous London congestion 3. Those jobs just won't exist any more meaning that the city is no longer desirable for people to live there. The funny thing about a free market economy is that it largely regulates itself. People make emotive reasons for being where they want to be - until they don't want to be there any more. Hyper aggressive rent control isn't the solution. More appealing alternatives to living in London for those in lower wage brackets is a solution. If people in that wage bracket no longer want to be in London, the wages in London will have to go up to compensate... or the rich people who live in London will have to do the work themselves... and I don't see that happening. As long as there are people who are willing to put up with the situation - and there are clearly many that put up with it, much as it's shit and much as they hate it, they let it propagate by paying for it, using excuses like "I have no choice", the situation will continue. (I say using excuses, I do understand that many of them are in a position where they genuinely feel they have no choice) "Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want." - Anna Lappe Let that sink in for a minute, because every time you get your wallet out, you should be asking yourself - is this contributing to a world that I want to live in?
- tomelders 12y ago
  You make some interesting points, but I can't agree with any of them. You basiclly lost me at "The funny thing about a free market economy is that it largely regulates itself" That maybe true, but we're not dealing with free market economics. In hundreds of ways, some small, some big, the status quo is maintained by weak-kneed politicians giving into belligerent property developers and land owners who love spending tax-payers money but hate sticking to the deals they signed up to (hence all the ways they avoid building social and affordable housing).
  - 12y ago
CyberDildonics 12y ago
Why not have the city build some high rises and compete with real estate developers?

Numberwang 12y ago

Kickstart your campaign. You will get my vote.

tomelders 12y ago
I don't think you can kickstart political stuff. But there must be something out there... or I suppose I have the requisite skills to build something. Maybe I will give it a shot. At the very least it force the candidates to address rent control as an issue.
- anu_gupta 12y ago
  > Maybe I will give it a shot. At the very least it force the candidates to address rent control as an issue. I doubt it will force anyone to do anything, least of all the candidates.
- jeffbr13 12y ago
  There are a handful of more generic crowd-funding platforms out there, so no need to build your own. A good candidate website would be more than enough to build. As a bonus, crowd-funding your candidacy would give you early validation. And, as a comment below says, you should be able to convince enough people to scrape together £10k, if you expect to run. Fail fast, and all that. You certainly have my donation, and my vote if I can still afford to live in London by election-time! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100275
esja 12y ago
And mine.

colechristensen 12y ago

>Although it costs £10k to run, because that's the type of democracy we have here in the UK apparently. This is a good thing, despite how it seems on the surface. If it were free you'd probably have 10,000 candidates. If it were £50, you'd probably have 500. Nobody benefits. The city has to spend lots of money and resources handling large volumes of useless candidates and voters do have any idea of who to pay attention to besides one or two huge names and a mass of idiots. If you can't get 1000 people to give you £10, you don't have any business running anyway. A large entry fee does a great job weeding out wonks, crazies, and jokers. Real candidates will spend a lot more than 10k through the process anyway. In the US I voted during the last election to increase the filing fee from $20 to $500 for mayor of Minneapolis. Obviously a much smaller city but the idea is the same.

tomelders 12y ago
Yeah I get that, but I feel there must be better ways to weed out wonks and crazies without putting a monetary roadblock in the way. How about n * 1000 signatures from people on the electoral roll? I think we live in a world where that's a feasible alternative.
- icebraining 12y ago
  If the people signing for you are not willing to donate even £1, I'm not sure they're very serious about wanting you to run.
- easytiger 12y ago
  And how do you pay for the collection and verification of those signatures? Prob would cost around £10k ;)
  - tomelders 12y ago
    For the entire system perhaps. Certainly not per person.
PJDK 12y ago
Also worth pointing out that the £10k is a deposit, not a payment. If you get 5% of first preferences you get it back.

omegaham 12y ago

Rent control will lead to more slums and more boats like this. American cities have tried rent control, and it simply leads to a shortage of rooms for rent. After all - why would you build apartments or rent out existing rooms if you're not going to make money off of it? If you're looking for a leftist answer that would alleviate some of this, I would suggest running with the platform of subsidized rent. In the US, it's called Section 8, after the section of the 1937 Housing Act that created it. Basically, if you earn less than a certain amount of money, the government will pay for a certain amount of your rent (ranging from a small portion to almost all of it). In turn, landlords are guaranteed tenants and funding as long as they adhere to certain building requirements and responsibilities. Section 8 ends up getting a whole bunch of criticism, as it drives housing prices up further and dicks over the middle class, (if you don't qualify for assistance, you're going to have problems) but if you want to make it a priority to have working-class / poor people live in London, that's probably the way to go. You have to pay for it with increased taxes, though.

pjc50 12y ago
We already have this, it's called housing benefit. A cap was recently introduced on the payments to deal with extreme cases (single mother with many children living in Zone 1 getting > national average income). It doesn't actually impose any extra responsibilities on landlords. What we used to have was a national programme of building social housing. This had some high-profile social failures (qv US "housing projects") and the government embarked on a programme of selling it off at a great discount to the current occupiers while demolishing some of the worst tower blocks. What we now have is a massive failure of planning policy. The symbol of this is the derelict for 30 years Battersea power station. It's a huge, useless, architectural treasure that's occupying a lot of land in Zone 1 because nobody can agree what to do with it.
- jblok 12y ago
  Its quite far into the building process now actually. The whole Power Station/Nine Elms area is getting a huge number of (quite expensive) apartments and 2 extra Northern Line stations.
12y ago

tormeh 12y ago

Rent controls don't work. It will just partition the price into over- and under-table parts. As I see it, there are three solutions, all of which should be done simultaneously: 1. Requiring occupants to live in their housing for a significant portion of the year's days (a third, for example). Enforcement requires some loss of privacy, but living in central London is not a human right. 2. Expanding the city vertically. Encourage high-rise apartment complexes. 3. Higher speed trains to the suburbs to shorten the time distance.

cpursley 12y ago
#2: Solving housing shortages is all about going up (and perhaps even down) when land economics are in play. That and zoning that allows for smaller units.
pjc50 12y ago
1) is doable but politically difficult - too much opposition to taxing the rich (see "mansion tax"). 2) is already happening with new build, but requires demolishing existing buildings to really make a difference. This changes the appearance of London quite dramatically and encounters architectural preservation resistance. 3) Nowhere to put extra train lines without demolishing some very expensive property. HS2 is demonstrating this for just a single line. The existing lines are running at capacity. What might be feasible is going to double-decker trains in places, which merely requires rebuilding all the bridges and tunnels. I would add (4) encourage movement of jobs to other parts of the UK. There are bits of this happening such as moving the BBC to Manchester. But the way London works is most of the high-paid jobs are basically standing around with buckets trying to catch money dripping off the mega-wealthy, and the associated trickle down around this. Perhaps plan to move the civil service to Birmingham once HS2 is finished, giving a Brussels/Strasbourg dynamic to the place. The US is very fortunate that the seat of government, the financial center, the commodity wealth center, the media center, and the tech center are in different cities.
- sjtgraham 12y ago
  Re 4) At least one major government department is already adopting a policy of remote working and opening smaller regional satellite commuter offices with hot desk facilities.

icebraining 12y ago

UPDATE: I've not outlined a single policy - and I'm already being told I'm wrong. Sure you did - rent control. That's the name of a very specific policy. You might have meant "doing something about rent prices", but then you chose an unfortunate way of expressing it, I must say.

tomelders 12y ago
There are different forms of rent control. I've not outlined anything. But I take your point. In reality, I don't have an outline. I've got an idea that "something needs to be done". I don't even want the job but the frustration and despair of renting and buying in London under the current conditions just might be enough for me to put my life on hold for four years. It's clear that no one in the current political class has any real appetite for this issue.
- protomyth 12y ago
  "something needs to be done" Yep, and forcing people to charge less than a resource is worth really doesn't work. The only real way to get the cost down is to increase the availability of the resource. Everything else is just causing stress on the system and stress leads to no further investments, fraud, and/or spending money on routing around the law.

venomsnake 12y ago

What you need to do is progressive taxation on properties and capital returns.

easytiger 12y ago

> unfair So you want to create a world in which people who need to come and work in London in growth areas cannot because a chosen few are occupying the properties they'd prefer to live in with no economic way to regulate or control. You simply create an unfairness of another kind.

Kurtz79 12y ago

"I've not outlined a single policy - and I'm already being told I'm wrong." Then you are in the same boat (pun intended) of many professional politicians. I lived in London for a while a few years ago, and not only it was crazy expensive (and from my understanding now it is even worse), it was hard finding a a free room in a shared house in the first place.

Ntrails 12y ago

Were I wishing to resolve the issue of property prices, I would do it using two things: The first is to take the pricing system used on London buses (£1.40 per trip, wherever you're going), and apply it nationally (probably a £1) to re-nationalised railways. This would require huge subsidies, though I believe it to be worthwhile. I'd like to see counter arguments though. Secondly I'd probably look at large increases in stamp duty on non-primary homes, and changes to make renting a property less attractive through lending rules/regulation and taxation. The ability to finance rented properties at 90% leverage requires too little capital, and lending rules are too generous to landlords compared to tenants. If rental properties required 50% equity by landlords (as a plucked from the air example) you'd see a rather fewer leveraged to the hilt property "moguls" and less competition. Obviously more building would help, but I think it's only part of the problem.

tomelders 12y ago
I'm a big believer in renationalisation of the railways for this very reason. When you look into commuting from outside London, the price of a season ticket scuppers your plans.
- Ntrails 12y ago
  I looked at commuting from the midlands. £9,000 a year. It's actually a joke. In all seriousness though - very low prices on public transport should incentivise people out of cars. Weekend/day trips around the UK away become significantly more attractive. And above all it moves some of the money out of London. The obvious downside is higher passenger numbers, more capacity required, and no money to fund it. It'd take someone with far more domain specific knowledge to appreciate the complexities - for now it's my go to "one policy to change the country" when asked :)
lmm 12y ago
> The first is to take the pricing system used on London buses (£1.40 per trip, wherever you're going), and apply it nationally (probably a £1) to re-nationalised railways. This would require huge subsidies, though I believe it to be worthwhile. I'd like to see counter arguments though. The railway network doesn't have the capacity for the number of people who would use it at those prices. The reason a Virgin ticket from London to Birmingham costs 40 quid and has to be booked months in advance isn't just because beardy Branson likes money, it's also because there are a lot of people who want to travel quickly between London and Birmingham. So unless you want Soviet Union style decade-long waiting lists for season tickets, you'd have to build dozens of new mainlines. Look at how much fuss, public enquiries and so on there have been around HS2 - and that's a single line, being built to relieve what everyone knows is the busiest line in the UK. In China they just build the high-speed lines and citizens know better than to complain, but you'd never get away with that here. And if you were somehow able to make it work, you might make London more attractive to live in, not less. For young people who like to go out in the evening, nothing compares to living in London - the trains are pretty good for commuting to your job, but less so for coming back from a night out (for solid engineering reasons that are hard to overcome, the railway needs a bit of "downtime" once a day or certainly once a week). So you might end up with people who work in e.g. Guildford preferring to live in London and commute out. > Secondly I'd probably look at large increases in stamp duty on non-primary homes, and changes to make renting a property less attractive through lending rules/regulation and taxation. The ability to finance rented properties at 90% leverage requires too little capital, and lending rules are too generous to landlords compared to tenants. If rental properties required 50% equity by landlords (as a plucked from the air example) you'd see a rather fewer leveraged to the hilt property "moguls" and less competition. London contains the world's finest exploiters of financial regulations; you're going to struggle to make assets un-leverable when there are willing buyers and sellers on each side. Most likely you'd end up with a layer of either legal avoidance or outright corruption, with e.g. poor tenants forced to become the "owner of record" of the house they live in, under a contract where the financial benefits still accrue to the rentier. What would help, I think, is to tax income from increased property values exactly like any other income. It's not going to be a popular policy with voters (temporarily embarrassed millionaires), and there would be costs to assessing property values fairly, but it would eliminate a lot of market distortion if you had to pay the same taxes on your housing investments as you do on your stocks or ordinary income. Eliminating tax breaks for charitable foundations would also eliminate a huge class of exploits, but again good luck getting that one past the voters.

ttctciyf 12y ago

Please do it and end the madness! You are assured at least one vote, and if you win I will relish the effect strict enforcement of your policy will have on the insanity[1] that is the London property market.[2] [1] When Eric Schmidt is having trouble finding something in the £50M[3] bracket, that's got to be insane, right? [2] http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-50720618.html http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-507206... or take your pick from the bargains to be found at: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/map.html?locationIdentifier=USERDEFINEDAREA^{%22polylines%22%3A%22{ljyHxtYhFg{AbaAjDbo%40fo%40hH%60iAuGnc%40lXhfDtMre%40whClxBgTg{%40uGomBUo{B%60EagB%22}&minPrice=600000&maxPrice=900000 http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/map.html?locati... [3] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/20/london-property-boom-super-prime-market http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/20/london-prope...

aet 12y ago
Try Croydon...

gadders 12y ago

Unfair how? What would your idea of fair look like?

balabaster 12y ago

It is unfair, but eventually anyone in the service industry isn't going to be able to afford to live there, so they'll leave. That will cause one of a few things to happen: 1. Either the wages for those workers will rise to attract them back into the city or there just won't be those workers any more because they won't be able to afford to live there. 2. The workers will all move out of the city, but commute back into the city to work... just like millions of people every day, adding to the already ridiculous London congestion 3. Those jobs just won't exist any more meaning that the city is no longer desirable for people to live there. The funny thing about a free market economy is that it largely regulates itself. People make emotive reasons for being where they want to be - until they don't want to be there any more. Hyper aggressive rent control isn't the solution. More appealing alternatives to living in London for those in lower wage brackets is a solution. If people in that wage bracket no longer want to be in London, the wages in London will have to go up to compensate... or the rich people who live in London will have to do the work themselves... and I don't see that happening. As long as there are people who are willing to put up with the situation - and there are clearly many that put up with it, much as it's shit and much as they hate it, they let it propagate by paying for it, using excuses like "I have no choice", the situation will continue. (I say using excuses, I do understand that many of them are in a position where they genuinely feel they have no choice) "Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want." - Anna Lappe Let that sink in for a minute, because every time you get your wallet out, you should be asking yourself - is this contributing to a world that I want to live in?

tomelders 12y ago
You make some interesting points, but I can't agree with any of them. You basiclly lost me at "The funny thing about a free market economy is that it largely regulates itself" That maybe true, but we're not dealing with free market economics. In hundreds of ways, some small, some big, the status quo is maintained by weak-kneed politicians giving into belligerent property developers and land owners who love spending tax-payers money but hate sticking to the deals they signed up to (hence all the ways they avoid building social and affordable housing).
- 12y ago

CyberDildonics 12y ago

Why not have the city build some high rises and compete with real estate developers?