London’s streets are full of houses - and journalists have invoked a host of labels to caricature the Londoners who live in these homes. We’ve had ‘Yuppies’, ‘Dinkys’, ‘Chavs’ and ‘High Net Worth Individuals’, writes Paul Coleman.

In 2012-13, housing professionals invoked ‘Generation Rent’, a new group of Londoners in their 20s and 30s, enjoying average and even higher incomes, but who still couldn’t can’t raise the average £98,000 deposit needed to buy a decent London family home. On 4 March, London’s 15 biggest housing associations vowed to build 13,000 ‘affordable’ homes by 2015 for ‘Generation Renters’.

   The ‘G15’ housing association group also aims to provide some 5,100 properties for rent at market prices offering secure tenancies. G15 associations say they will use profits from rents to fund more ‘affordable’ homes. A quoted G15 board paper stated: ‘The average home in London costs more than £400,000 and is 15 times the median income for Londoners…Those without access to capital may become lifetime renters.’

Deficit

But forget labels; let’s crunch some numbers to contextualise the G15’s 13,000 new homes. London’s population is expected to grow from its late 2012 level of 7.9 million people to ten million by 2031. That’s an estimated 700,000 additional households.

   It’s reckoned Londoners will need 36,000 new homes a year. But forget the future, for a moment. Public and private sectors have delivered only about 20,000 new homes annually in recent years. That deficit leaves many of London’s current 3.3m householders without a stable, affordable home.

  About 880,000 people sit on council house waiting lists across London’s boroughs. Around 224,000 households live in ‘overcrowded accommodation’. Another 35,000 homeless households struggle in ‘temporary’ accommodation. Westminster City Council, for instance, was spending up to £85,000 per week during late 2012 placing homeless families in ten central London hotels.

Hence, London’s housing problem: so many houses but not enough genuinely affordable homes.

Statistics: Collated in ‘Housing London’: New London Architecture, Q4 2012.

© London Intelligence, March 2013