Charlotte Ross: Homeowning the silver lining with clouds

 
London's property trap: we are routinely handing over the bulk of our wages just to stay put
Charlotte Ross2 October 2014
WEST END FINAL

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Who’s the biggest earner in your household? Given that London property prices rose by more than 20 per cent in the past year, chances are it’s your home.

In my N19 dwelling, the income from bricks and mortar long ago outstripped that of any resident flesh-and-blood striver. But I’m not bitter. Well, maybe a bit. After all, the house just sat there eating biscuits and getting a damp problem while I ran myself ragged. But why argue with a soaring house price?

To the rest of the country, where property remains stubbornly in the doldrums, London looks like a gilded city teeming with an elite so wealthy we can lay down a cool half mill for a bog-standard home, unaware of the existence of a three per cent stamp duty bracket because no borough now has an average price below £250,000.

But every silver lining has a cloud. We are all now caught in the city’s property trap. From the twentysomething aspiring to get a foot on the ladder to well-paid professionals with children in a local school, we are routinely handing over the bulk of our wages just to stay put. More of us are hitting housing gridlock, planning a garden office or an extension instead of moving.

Meanwhile, London has become the country’s cash cow, supplying the Treasury with barrowloads of extra stamp duty every year. Anyone who actually managed to buy a home here last year paid more than three times the stamp duty of provincial buyers — who in turn benefit disproportionately from our largesse.

Foreign buyers stoke the situation by driving up prices while cleansing the city’s workers ever further from its centre. For all Boris Johnson’s blah to Conservative conference this week, desperately needed new homes are unlikely to be immune to the advances of wealthy overseas investors.

Labour has its sights set on the capital’s housing wealth too, with the vast bulk of the country’s £2 million-plus properties situated here and vulnerable to Ed Balls’s proposed mansion tax. To tie the millions raised from this levy to an improved NHS is cynically designed to deny public sympathy to the many normal families who will face an unaffordable bill. If prices continue to swell at today’s rate, the mansion tax will force me to consider moving area before my daughter finishes primary school.

The basic affordability of London homes is on a knife edge, but the real test will come when interest rates go up, as the City expects within months. People like me can cash in and carry on somewhere cheaper, smaller or further from town. But recent buyers will be mortgaged to the max without the cushion that comes from a home that’s doubled in value. Boris had better not stand next to those people with his brick.

Amal, a ballet girl’s pin-up

“Wow, mummy, can I have a dress like that?” asked my four-year-old as we ogled Amal Alamuddin-Clooney’s Giambattista Valli creation the day after her wedding. “I can’t wait to be married,” she went on, “because I want there to finally be a Mrs in the family.”

She rounded off with a sympathetic look and the words “I’m sorry you never got to be a wife,” knocking the final nail in the coffin of her gender-neutral upbringing. Only a week earlier I’d felt a prick of pride at a birthday party when she was unable to name the colour most closely associated with Barbie.

Then I enrolled her in a ballet class. Big mistake. Ballet is like a secret cell where girls are gender-radicalised. They go in wearing a yellow T-shirt and come out demanding lace skirts and pink tights, with a head full of fairy dust.

Until feminism can tackle the tyranny of the tutu, the battle is lost.

Scotland needs its Facebook friends back

It didn’t bust up the Union but the Scottish neverendum has done lasting damage to social media. Instead of dividing the UK, Scotland itself was riven by the bitter debate and nowhere more so than on once-friendly Facebook. Happy pictures of kids and kittens have been displaced by images of saltire-waving men, woolly political tracts and “45” badges marking out the vocal Yes voter from their refusenik cousins.

For a while the No voter (or Nory, as some 45-ers unfairly brand them) could only be discerned by their social media silence — most ducked out until after the vote, discouraged by soaring levels of hostility. Now they are creeping back but the atmosphere has changed.

Hostilities may have ceased but battle lines remain drawn and a mass unfriending has taken place. There is only one way to bridge the virtual divide: can someone please bring back the cute kittens?

My vanishing superhighway

Around my eco-conscious, health-aware north London neighbourhood, the cycling conversation goes like this: “I want to get on my bike but will I be maimed by a lorry on Holloway Road?” We’ve all been waiting for the Mayor’s planned cycle superhighway, route CS12, from Archway to Angel, going past my door on the A1. This stretch is a cyclist’s nightmare, so a vehicle-free route to the foot of Upper Street, where Boris lives, would have been a boost to riders and encouraged more to get pedalling.

But last week news came that the cycleway is one of two that have been dropped. There is no safe cycle route from north-east London into town, just traffic congestion and overcrowded Tubes and buses. Cancelling the solution to these problems is what cyclists call a near miss.

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