My 8x great grandmother was actually born in 18thC Knightsbridge. She stole some clothes and a spoon (which she tried to dispose of in her "privvy") and was sent as a convict to Australia on the First Fleet in 1788.<p>Ultimately, she would bear children to 3 men across 3 convict colonies - one of the guards on the ship en route to New South Wales, my 8x great grandfather who would become the first hangman of Norfolk Island, and a freed convict in Tasmania.<p>In modern London, as opposed to the London she left, that would probably earn her a reality tv show.
The article link points to the print page, which only displays 1 out of the 5 total pages. (I think qb was trying to spare of us popup & advertising hell which I appreciate, but it looks like it didn't work quite perfectly this time)<p>Here's the default page: <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residents-one-hyde-park-london" rel="nofollow">http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residen...</a><p>(btw this pagination system -- while nice that it doesn't reload pages -- is driving me and my eyes insane!)
The property prices, and thus rents, are why Silicon Roundabout will have a very hard time building a true startup ecosystem in London. Young people just starting out are paying most of their monthly income on rent. How can they be encouraged to take a financial risk when they have such crazy outgoings? How can people from the regions be attracted to London to build businesses when they can't get digs within easy reach of the hacker spaces?<p>The City is a whole separate problem - they pay very <i>very</i> well for good IT talent, siphoning a lot of good people who would otherwise be ideal for the startup market. You could go into finance for a few years, build up some security before starting your business, but who will you be able to hire when you do?
This is what happens in democracies. The local councils and city governments open their doors and drool over anyone willing to buy property. Property price rises and thus increases the revenues they can bring in any play with. There is almost no incentive for a government to keep housing affordable. Then we end up with disenfranchisement on the scale of London's: Londoners and actual British citizens and residents are told kindly to screw off while the billionaires build their playground and stash away their dirty money. You see this in Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York; the list goes on.
As an aside, the article points out how the City of London is a separate entity from greater London, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about it. This video does an effective job in explaining how things work: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?internalcountrycode=NL&v=LrObZ_HZZUc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?internalcountrycode=NL&v=Lr...</a>
I've always wondered how much of this is paid for by oil money. How much of it is the result of middle eastern sheiks needing to find a place to store the oil wealth they've plundered from their countries?
This article is good, but its structure keeps the meat until the end. It's not well-thought out in that respect. The payoff, that it's not the bankers who have the money, but the oligarchs and privatisation thieves and bandits from Russia is surprising. I want more data, more analysis, more stories, more evidence than this, about what ahnd how, and what geosocially this means for the next 30 years. A laundry list of who might actually live in one expensive building is no good unless you tell us who they are and then do some numbers on it, using these statistics to inform us the more. Poor outcome to this article and it missed several tricks, even while mostly still engaging us in the ownership envy that this piece really represents.