What have Londoners gained from the London housing bubble?

Now that the middle class squeeze has become my sujet du bore at the fancy north London dinner parties I attend, I was interested in Saturday’s New York Times piece about what foreign billionaires are doing to our insane property prices. One statistic really stuck out: ‘An astonishing £83 billion worth of properties were purchased in 2012 with no financing — all cash purchases. That’s $133 billion.’

Crikey. Author Michael Goldfarb argues:

‘And as for services, the minimal tax paid by those who have made property into money means that a city whose population has increased by 14 percent in the last decade can’t afford to build new schools. There will be a capacity shortfall of an estimated 90,000 places by 2015. Children won’t be turned away from school, but class sizes will grow to untenable proportions.’

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Melanie McDonagh

When will the BBC stop adapting Julia Donaldson books?

And he laments:

‘The delicate social ecology that made London’s transformation into a great world city over the last two decades is past the tipping point, I fear.