London’s housing crisis: By the corporations, for the corporations

Not long ago some budding recruiters from a construction company muscled into my little educational world to promote an apprenticeship programme. Here’s where it goes wrong. This company in question builds luxury apartments, and, as they admitted then and there, they have a big market in China. It doesn’t take long to conclude that this company, like many others, are buying up land in London to build criminally expensive apartments, so they can line their (already sizable) pockets, all while standing idly by as homeless people shelter for warmth in the shadow of these monstrosities. We’re told that we have a housing crisis in this country, and I completely agree; it’s a bloody crisis when huge plots of valuable land are taken up by colossal complexes inhabited by the ghosts of consciences past. The nerve of it is astonishing. 

Tell me if i’ve missed the mighty capitalist bandwagon, but this all seems so absurd. A one-bedroom flat in Kennington now costs over £700,000. That’s a ratio of £700,000 per bed. Unless the widowed market has untapped potential, who can afford these rates – these people go out of their way to grease the rungs of the property ladder, leaving young buyers consigned to a future of basement-living, perpetual rent or (most likely) both. Nobody wins – except the company CEOs of course. If we carry on at this rate, London will end up a tax haven, a mini-Monaco, full of empty apartments used as tools to swindle governments across the world. The dead hand of Mayfair is establishing a chokehold over London, dooming the rest of us to waiting for our parents to die so we can have the house. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

This masks a very real problem in London’ a problem these companies see fit to ignore; Central London has had the highest number of rough sleepers consistently. These people sleep in the shadow of Parliament – a Parliament infested by people with nothing but empty consolations and hollow promises. But it’s ok, because not far away, you can have a 2 bedroom flat for £1.6 million. The longer these companies proceed to shirk responsibility, passing it on like a hot potato to the Government, who see fit to wash their hands of it, the longer people will suffer. It is an embarrassment to us as a city and a nation that we allow this sickening inequality to fester and grow.