Cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London (opens in new tab)

Things might be a bit more subtle than that; Barcelona is in catalunya, which is actually doing quite well for itself in spite of the catastrophe in the balance of Spain.

Taking a cursory look at the (current) prices in the area, Chelsea and similar areas look like you might find a single place or perhaps two at those prices, but it won't be terribly appealing - attempting to actually rent for £480/wk looks like it gets you a studio/1bed flat.

Edit: So essentially, £25k/yr will get you almost nothing in upscale areas, a hell of a lot in downscale areas.

3 bedroom place then becomes a 6 rent unit property off the books. That would explain part of the rocketing prices. I've known chinese nationals who stayed 15 to a london property. All cash. Authorities do nothing and some are in on the shuffle taking kickbacks.

So, building lots of co-working spaces in England's market towns and regional cities seems like a sensible move right now.

I don't think such a decline would have any effect on the supply side; it won't suddenly create more houses, or release more houses from ownership to rental.

What effect would it have on the demand side? Well, people in the financial industry who could move to Singapore or Zurich or whatever might well do that, and so stop wanting to rent houses. But there are vanishingly few such people - you're talking about the elite. Their loss (if we call it a loss) wouldn't have much impact on demand. The kinds of stupendous penthouses and townhouses they rent mean they're not even competing in the same market as the normal middle-class mugs. The majority of people in the financial industry - from bank apparatchiks down to post-room clerks - aren't about to up sticks and migrate to a tax haven. If their jobs go away, they will be looking for other jobs in London.

Even if they decide to give up and go and become shepherds in the Dales or something, how many of them are there? Finance is big in London, but it's far from being a dominant employer. There are huge numbers of people working in all the other sectors of a post-industrial economy too - law, media, IT, corporate head offices of all sorts, academia, healthcare, culture, not to mention all those civil service jobs. If we accept the (forecast) 2013 numbers in http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/wp51.pdf then finance employs 357 000 people, out of a total of 4 859 000 - 7.3%. Significant, but not enough that anything short of a collapse of the industry will have a significant effect.

Even with the relative costs of living taken into account, some cities are more expensive that others - London & Sydney are still right up there.

You don't have to live there. You can commute. And if it gets too hard to find good people in London because both the rent and the commute are terrible, companies will eventually open offices in more fertile areas.

Don't forget there are other costs that the OP might have added to equation: water, ec, internet, phone...

Even ignoring north of 96th street (which, check a map, is part of Manhattan) there are plenty of neighborhoods where you can find a two bedroom for $3k or less. Yorkville, Chinatown, far LES, parts of alphabet city, the far west 30s, and probably others I'm not familiar with.

That you could say such a thing says more about you than the rental market.

(Oh! Or are you one of those denialists who thinks rent control isn't actually destructive, and prefers your own vision of reality to what the consensus among economists has to say about the matter? because if so I've got some people you should meet who don't believe climate scientists on global warming, or the medical establishment about things like homeopathy, and i think you can all be friends)

http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap18p1.html

I mean, the point of the article is a little shocking, but it carefully doesn't mention the commute time, which appears to be the thick end of 7-8 hours per day (2h 30 flight each way, and Stansted is not exactly in the heart of London). As a result, there's no shortage of people paying London's high rent prices. I'm one of them, and I wouldn't trade cheaper rents for that kind of commute (or, honestly, even commuting for 1-1.5 hours from the many towns outside London where such a thing is practical). So why does London need rent control?

For example its obvious you don't, otherwise you would realise The Guardian has been banging on about the cost of London for donkey's years (at least 20) and against the bubbles of buy to let. I remember lots of stories flogging against it as the journalists were complaining they couldn't afford to live in London.

Their also complaining against the current schemes the UK Government which Gideon is pushing regarding mortgage guarantees and everybody (whether in the UK or not, whether working in banking or not) is saying will just create another bubble along the lines of buy to let.

The real issue is a lack of properties in the places people want to live.

There are strict rules about over-accommodation too. The bedroom tax has been operating for many years for everyone except those in council houses and housing association properties.

Universal Credit will cause tenants to be paid their housing benefit directly.

http://www.housing.org.uk/policy/welfare-reform/universal-cr...

There are a number of different approaches to addressing the extra risk this will introduce to rents, with things like Jam-Jar accounts, but it's generally expected to introduce more insecurity and thus limit the amount that can be spent on new housing.

The rewards of telecommuting become even more pronounced for those of us who live in expensive cities and are forced to either spend exorbitant amounts of money to live near the office or else waste a lot of our lives commuting in traffic.

Of course, even conference calls suffer from the use of low-quality software and hardware. For some reason companies tend to use $1 microphone and $5 speakers for conference calls.

Some in Congress should probably read this, too...

The job is to write code, which could be done from anywhere (home, coffee shop, on the train, at the beach). The other stuff like collaboration, meetings, architectural discussions, etc., could be done virtually or scheduled for, say once a week. The benefit of a few hallway discussions is far outweighed by the 10+ hours per week spent commuting to the office.

Your most limited resource is time. Money is a distant second. And if those people arent monetizing their commute or taking care of their entertainment, they are wasting time to save some money. It's nearly as stupid as fracking - wasting water to get oil, only to later have a water shortage and a raped environment. And half as stupid as wasting your health for money, then trying to get it back with money.

At my job we all speak english. And sometimes we speak mix english / spanish but its rare.

I assume other cities and countries have similar exceptions in their laws.

Of course that presumes that my sanity has no value, but I'm not certain how much worse it would have been than some people's driving commutes.

Leeds? York? I suspect not.

Bear in mind that single bedroom flats are mainly built in areas where land is expensive, because it is only then that the small space saving over a 2 bed flat outweighs the similar building cost.

Birmingham: 3 bed house commercial, way outside city, is £750 pcm. That will increase when H2S happens (if it does).

As other commenters have commented (in other comments), there are plenty of bits of the UK which are still cheap. And whilst they may be absolutely lovely, they're cheap because they're miles from anywhere that anyone with any money would want to work or go shopping.