London housing costs: a symptom of "white flight"

White areas of London

CNN in the UK just ran a piece on television (not currently available online) about how the bottom of the real estate market in London is rapidly dropping out, and most of the larger building projects are having a difficult time finding investors. Most of the remaining investors are foreigners as it is. Similar news already arrived late last year. This is in fact, one symptom of a greater problem.

This isn't a financial blog, so I'll get to the main point. You have affluent white Londoners fleeing the city in droves (even the country's chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, now admits it), replaced with immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile housing prices are the highest in the world. These two conditions simply cannot remain both true at the same time. One or the other has to give. And it looks like it's the price of housing.

Look at this photo I took to the right:

£240,000 ($468,000) for a crappy, small one bedroom apartment?? Or you can live outside of London and pay less than half that much. It's a no brainer, especially when the neighbors you have known for decades are all leaving too.

Why don't people stay put? Why can't they make a better effort to get along with their neighbors? Not many people are asking that question of immigrants, but they are asking white Londoners. Trevor Phillips once blatantly blamed white people for this problem, and asked:

How should Asian families integrate when the first reaction to their arrival in a "white" area is a forest of For Sale signs?

That's certainly a fair question. But let's turn it around. How many "for sale" signs do you think you would see if only one Asian family moved into a single tenement block. How about two? Three? Probably not many at all. But now try 100 families moving in, with reports of crime on the rapid increase. What do you think happens then? White people, like all people around the world, want to live in safety, and generally prefer to live with others of similar interests and cultural background. But why is it only "racist" when whites do it? London was a very crowded city as it is, and as the chart at the top shows, the British have literally been squeezed out of their own capitol.

This week, a schoolgirl in London was raped and maimed for life after her attackers used drain cleaner to destroy DNA evidence. Of course, the mainstream news described her attackers only as "youths". An editorial at the Daily Telegraph this week asks: "Is it any wonder people are fleeing London?"

I'm almost embarrassed to say that the attackers have been described as "five black youths", in case you think I'm being racist in highlighting this crime.

Yes, these are the peculiar times we live in, particularly in a week when Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has pointed out that "white flight is accelerating" as Britain becomes increasingly polarised along ethnic lines.

Following the controversy started by the Bishop of Rochester, who said that some Muslim enclaves were "no-go areas" for Christians, it all seems to suggest a country that is becoming increasingly fragmented; a patchwork of rigidly delineated little pockets of race and religion, knots of unyielding humanity who just can't rub along with each other.

This is not a Britain many of us would care to recognise, or even want to live in, although it is true that certain sectors of the middle class are fleeing from inner London like pashmina-wrapped lemmings, desperate to escape the creeping spread of urban decay.

Last year, nearly a quarter of a million decent, law-abiding citizens packed their bags and left the capital for good, seeking what they hope will be a better life elsewhere.

I'm not trying to fan the flames or discontent or sound racist. It's just that we have to speak about this frankly, because it is the current reality. The chart at the top of this article didn't come from the BNP or some immigrant hate site, but from the Guardian, a socialist newspaper that is greatly sympathetic to immigrants. Truth is, London, like any other large city, has plenty of room for plenty of people of all races to live. But just like any boat at sea, it will overturn and be swamped if too many people take advantage of the opportunity to climb onboard too quickly. Change, particular such drastic change, happens far more responsibly when it is done at a moderate pace.




Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed