A view from the top

Luna Glucksberg

City, 2016, vol. 20, issue 2, 238-255

Abstract: The paper argues that gaining an effective perspective on the London housing crisis requires an understanding of what is happening at the highest levels of the real estate market (£2 million+). It is based on data collected over two and a half years (2013--15) of research amongst the London elites through the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) project ‘Life in the Alpha Territories: London's “Super-Rich” Neighbourhoods’. It unpacks terms such as ‘foreign investor’ and frames the specificity of London as a global city, as well as using ethnographic and interview data to understand how actors who impact upon the city understand their role themselves. Distinctions are drawn between those who buy houses in Mayfair to shore up capital and middle-class Chinese investors, who buy flats to rent them out as investments. It differentiates between different types of ‘empty’ houses, and also considers the impact of ‘old’ elite families selling up and moving out who also purchase properties for their children in areas adjacent to traditional ‘elite’ hotspots, creating further ripples of gentrification, price rises and unaffordability. Eschewing the facile conflations of the populist press, this paper shows how capital flows into London, resulting in a mix of misplaced and mismatched investment—fuelling the building of the wrong types of units at the wrong price points. The paper also examines how the underuse of land deeply affects London well beyond its traditionally elite and ‘prime’ areas.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2016.1143686 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:20:y:2016:i:2:p:238-255

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1143686

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().