Also he's writing about what has pretty much always happened, people move to London when they are young. They get a good career, meet a partner, have children then after trying to live on for a while they move out to the 'sticks' for a better life.
This has been happening for years, only the very rich at the top can afford to live in London for good (while keeping a 2nd home in the country) and those on the lower end of the scale who either never owned, or who can not move to the country as they have service or manual jobs.
There are always a few exceptions, but this is a total non story, I wonder if they wrote another one a few years ago called 'the great wedding and baby boom - how now I've hit 30 I've found all my friends are getting married and having kids, they never did this before it must be part of a wider trend...'
Although you're of course correct that people have always followed this pattern, I think you're missing the fact that there have been genuine shifts in the London property market that are driving this trend to an unusual extreme.
The proportion of foreign buyers of London property has nearly doubled, from 23% in 2005 to 38% in 2012 according to Savilles & I'd guess that it's going to be higher this year. Many of those buyers are looking not for income but simply for places to park capital so they don't rent out the properties which remain empty (this is especially true of Chinese buyers, apparently for cultural reasons). Consequently those people who are living in London (or would like to) are competing over a smaller pool of properties. The net effect on rents and house prices is exactly what you'd expect: both are going up sharply.
Yeah. Last I heard, there were new-build tower blocks full of apartments that sold out rapidly but have remained almost entirely unoccupied because they were bought by foreigners as a safe way of storing their wealth.
(Normally this would cause problems with squatters but the government changed the law to make it a criminal offense to squat in empty buildings and allow the police to forcibly remove them. They were helped with this by a sob story in the Daily Mail about someone who'd gone on holiday and found his house full of squatters; what the Daily Mail didn't mention is that it was a buy to let property and he didn't actually live there.)
Also he's writing about what has pretty much always happened, people move to London when they are young. They get a good career, meet a partner, have children then after trying to live on for a while they move out to the 'sticks' for a better life.
This has been happening for years, only the very rich at the top can afford to live in London for good (while keeping a 2nd home in the country) and those on the lower end of the scale who either never owned, or who can not move to the country as they have service or manual jobs.
There are always a few exceptions, but this is a total non story, I wonder if they wrote another one a few years ago called 'the great wedding and baby boom - how now I've hit 30 I've found all my friends are getting married and having kids, they never did this before it must be part of a wider trend...'