*I was there recently. Yeah, the real-estate thing is a problem. It's a problem big enough to crack-up the United Kingdom.
*The moguls from other countries won't save it; they've got the cash to do it, but they don't have the motive. If the place was in flames Great Fire of London style they'd just shrug and buy up someplace else.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157655103061395
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/28/london-the-city-that-ate-itself-rowan-moore
(…)
"He’s right – London has all these qualities. It has parks, museums and nice houses. Its arts of hedonism are reaching unprecedented levels: its restaurants get better or at least more ambitious and its bars offer cocktails previously unknown to man (coconut seviche, for example, where, as its makers put it, “coconut gin is swizzled through crushed ice with yuzu, passion fruit and a dark chocolate liqueur, and served long with an accompanying ‘shot’ of tuna seviche with a tamarind ponzu”). In some ways, the city has never been better. It has a buzz. Its population keeps growing and investment keeps pouring in, both signs of its desirability. As its mayor likes to boast: “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutans. It is their natural habitat.”
"At the same time, to use a commonly heard phrase, the city is eating itself. Most obviously, its provision of housing is failing to keep up with its popularity, with effects on price that breed bizarre reactions at the top end of the market and misery at the bottom. Thousands are being forced to leave London because their local authorities can’t find them homes and people on middle incomes can’t acquire a place where anyone would want to raise a family.
"There are also effects beyond housing, although often driven by residential property prices. The spaces for work that are an essential part of the city’s economy are being squeezed, its high streets diminished, its pubs and other everyday places closing. It is suffering a form of entropy whereby the distinctive or special is converted into property values. Its essential qualities, which are that it was not polarised on the basis of income, and that its best places were common property, are being eroded. It is becoming the case that delights and beauties are available only at a high price.
"This would matter less if the city were making new places with the qualities of those now packaged up and commodified – if the supply of good stuff were expanding – but it is not. Although the cranes swing, much of the new living zones now being created range from the ho-hum to the outright catastrophic. The skyline is being plundered for profit, but without creating towers to be proud of or making new neighbourhoods with any positive qualities whatsoever. If London is an enormous party, millions of people are on the wrong side of its velvet rope.
"In the rest of Britain, a common view of London is that it is a parasitic monster or, as Alex Salmond put it, quoting Tony Travers of the London School of Economics: “The dark star of the economy, inexorably sucking in resources, people and energy. Nobody quite knows how to control it.” Both the SNP and Ukip can be seen as anti-London parties, as expressions of a feeling that national decisions are made in the capital, by the capital, for the capital. Those Scots who want independence are less concerned about being part of the same country as Middlesbrough or Ipswich than they are about London. But these views overlook the extent to which the city is feeding on its own. And, dear readers outside London, who may be reasonably wondering what all this has to do with you, consider that the city is one-seventh of the country as a whole and that what happens there may well, in some form, also come to a place near you…."
