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supernova0411's review
4.0
A really insightful look into how the property market in London is biased towards foreign investors and the hyper wealthy allowing them to trample all over the working people who rely on social housing.
Minton looks back at some of the effects of Thatcher's premiership as well as looking at more contemporary policies and their impacts on a range of regular people throughout the city.
Minton looks back at some of the effects of Thatcher's premiership as well as looking at more contemporary policies and their impacts on a range of regular people throughout the city.
qa31's review
5.0
A timely and important account of the housing crisis that is occurring in London. It is hard not to be infuriated as you read this book but it is important that as a society we begin to understand that this wonderful city is being sold from under our feet and faces the prospect of becoming soulless in terms of the way we treat one another and utterly devoid of the diversity that makes it so wonderful.
dansumption's review
4.0
A depressing but important read on how London and the UK's housing stock is being turned into a financial asset rather than places for people to live. Since Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy initiative in the 80s, most council houses in the capital have been sold off, and the estates that many of them are on are being demolished in order to build higher cost housing in their place (with even those who bought their homes now forced out of them so that new investment opportunities can be built for the super-rich). London councils of all political persuasions are conspiring with big developers to sell of their estates, due to huge cuts in council funding. Meanwhile housing benefit, which was intended as a safety net in the age of reduced social housing, is no longer fit for purpose due to sky-high rents and the bedroom tax, and councils are shipping the poor further and further out of London, in some cases half way across the country. The result is a dying city, and the knock on effects mean that the rest of the country is on its way to suffering a similar fate.
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