How do people with normal jobs manage to live in London?

[TimberWolf]

Public sector workers will get Key Worker Accommodation. Hotel and bar work will go to people from poorer parts of the world, who are willing to live miserable lives on almost nothing (come to think of it, it already has).

Then they have kids and get given a council house.

[DodgyAgent]

Why would anyone want live in a city? It sends you psychotic.

Schizophrenia.com - Schizophrenia Cause, Urban vs. City

Explains so much ......

Better than some dull village with people who are all related to each other. Towns are even worse

[d000hg]

What you silly, non-thinking, unimaginative techies don't get is that many people bought properties in London when they were affordable and thus have small mortgages on properties that are valued (rightly or wrongly) very highly.
...
It's only the young who struggle - and they can live in flat shares, shared ownership etc.
What is hard is for someone with a family to move to London who bought elsewhere.

Sure that's true but London is full of young people working in shops or first jobs after graduating, or working in media - research assistants at the BBC, etc.

You make it sound like a 300 mile slog

We lived in zone 4 on the east and from my first house I could make it into London or out to Epping forest In equal time. In fact one of my mates was busting his balls to rent a shoe box in islington, while it took me 15 minutes door to door to get from my house to his local.

Really, that's interesting... I've not been often but it seemed even crossing zone1 took 20+ minutes!

[Sysman]

Police live in Dorset & commute they get free tickets. Yeah I was surprised.

Back in the days of British Rail a lot of their staff lived in Peterborough and at stops in between there and Kings Cross. I assume they got free travel to get to work in the smoke as well.

That probably also explained why an allegedly non-stop train between Peterborough and Kings Cross would actually stop at some of the stations in between.

[Doggy Styles]

Oh please, can we do away with this naive view that rent is "money down the drain" but mortgage repayments are an investment?

View 1: both are money that you pay in order to get something that you want. Is it really what you want, and is the price OK for it?

View 2: rent is money down the drain. Mortgage interest is also money down the drain.
Pay 600 interest and 400 capital, sometime later you will own a house; or pay 600 rent and save 400, sometime later you will have a lot of money saved.
Which one is a better deal is a worthwhile question. What is not useful is to pretend that one of the options is not worth anything.

Rent isn't money down the drain, but...

The majority of people in the UK have little or no private pension provision. Even those who do will have a significant drop in earnings when they retire.

When buyers retire they will have paid off the capital on their house, and so their retirement living costs will be a lot lower than those who rent, who must continue finding the money to rent until they die.

[Ignis Fatuus]

Rent isn't money down the drain, but...

The majority of people in the UK have little or no private pension provision. Even those who do will have a significant drop in earnings when they retire.

When buyers retire they will have paid off the capital on their house, and so their retirement living costs will be a lot lower than those who rent, who must continue finding the money to rent until they die.

Hence the "pay 600 rent and save 400" option.

Whether that saving ends up being better or worse than paying down capital on a house is another question, the point is that to compare apples with apples, you must calculate on the renter saving the difference. If instead they spend it, that's the equivalent of the house-buyer extracting the paid-off capital every month.

But with the correspondences:
rent = mortgage interest;
saving = capital repaid
you could easily run up scenarios where either one or the other turned out better.

[Sysman]

It used to be possible, and probably a lot of people living there have been there long enough to establish themselves. In the 90's you could fairly easily afford to buy a house, but then the prices rocketed. Now it's an impossibility. So probably a lot in their 40's and 50's (teachers nurses etc) doing fine, but not possible now. Flat share for ever or move away.

I had a couple of customers there in the 1980s. At a time when I'd got over the hurdle of buying my first house and could afford to go out whenever I pleased, have holidays abroad etc, many of my counterparts in London were either still flat sharing or married with both partners working and all of one partner's income going to service the mortgage.

I knew that I could have made a good long term investment by relocating and buying a house in London, but I really didn't want to go back to sitting at home eating beans on toast to survive for however long it took.

[BrilloPad]

Back in the days of British Rail a lot of their staff lived in Peterborough and at stops in between there and Kings Cross. I assume they got free travel to get to work in the smoke as well.

That probably also explained why an allegedly non-stop train between Peterborough and Kings Cross would actually stop at some of the stations in between.

On our line there is an early train to take in rail staff. At our local station only underground staff got on. So the train was banned from stoping there!

[sasguru]

Hence the "pay 600 rent and save 400" option.

Whether that saving ends up being better or worse than paying down capital on a house is another question, the point is that to compare apples with apples, you must calculate on the renter saving the difference. If instead they spend it, that's the equivalent of the house-buyer extracting the paid-off capital every month.

But with the correspondences:
rent = mortgage interest;
saving = capital repaid
you could easily run up scenarios where either one or the other turned out better.

Nice in theory - in practice most people wouldn't save the £400, particularly if they were feckless renters
And with investment potential constrained for the next few years, your saved money wouldn't be doing anything at all.
Mortgages are a form of enforced saving for your old age, as OPs have observed.
And as we are all living longer, paying for your accomodation for just 25 years of your life sounds like a better deal.

[Sysman]

Oh please, can we do away with this naive view that rent is "money down the drain" but mortgage repayments are an investment?

View 1: both are money that you pay in order to get something that you want. Is it really what you want, and is the price OK for it?

View 2: rent is money down the drain. Mortgage interest is also money down the drain.
Pay 600 interest and 400 capital, sometime later you will own a house; or pay 600 rent and save 400, sometime later you will have a lot of money saved.
Which one is a better deal is a worthwhile question. What is not useful is to pretend that one of the options is not worth anything.

Very true. Houses are an illiquid investment. If you want mobility and flexibility it can be better to rent.

But it depends where you are in the property boom/bust cycle. In the mid-nineties it was cheaper to buy than to rent in a couple of spots I worked in.