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Saturday, August 10, 2013
World Cup 2010: Greece seek big improvement at point of no return
Earthquake damages homes in central Greece
75 Arrested In Human Trafficking Bust
Greece beats budget targets in Jan-July period-deputy finmin
Greece beats budget targets in Jan-July period-deputy finmin Reuters ATHENS Aug 10 (Reuters) - Greece's central government posted a primary budget surplus of "about 2.5 billion euros" in the first seven months of the year, beating an interim target for a deficit of 3.1 billion for the period, the country's deputy ... |
Property bubble drives up prices, forcing families to flee the capital
With British buyers joining foreign investors in London's property frenzy, even outer areas are becoming unaffordable hotspots
Nestling in the shadow of the defunct 1930s leviathan that is Battersea power station, the 1,200 gleaming glass and metal apartments that comprise Chelsea Bridge Wharf in central London could not look more contemporary. Overlooking the Thames, barely a mile from the King's Road, next to a glorious park, it is an enviable location many thrusting professionals would be happy to call home.
But living at such an address carries a hefty price tag. A one-bedroom 463 sq ft (43 sq m) apartment with a small balcony is yours for half a million pounds. Yours, that is, if you move quickly. Such properties tend not to hang around for long, as few come on to the market.
Agents estimate that about 60% of homes in the development were bought by overseas buyers when they came on to the market a few years ago. Of the ones that went to international buyers, three quarters were bought as investments to be rented out.
In the crazy world of London property prices, paying more than £1,000 a square foot barely raises an eyebrow. London's residential property market is booming and prices are now way above where they were before Northern Rock imploded in 2008. It can't continue, say the doom-mongers. Yes it can, reply the bulls.
The boom – some say the "bubble" – has created its own citadel. Estate agents talk enthusiastically about "PCL" – prime central London – those parts of the capital where properties normally sell for more than £1m. Prices in this area are now 18% above where they were before the 2008 pre-crash peak. Buyers are falling over themselves to snap up properties. Viewings in prime central London are up by 15% compared with the previous year. The number of properties sold has increased by more than 8%.
Already in one borough, Kensington and Chelsea, the average price of a home is now above £1m. Several other boroughs, including Hammersmith and Fulham, Westminster and Camden, are not far behind. Figures from the Office for National Statistics, out this week, are expected to confirm that prices continue to rise steadily.
Meanwhile prices in the "super prime" segment of the market – properties valued above £10m – are also sharply increasing. Having fallen 20% after the 2008 crash, they are now 10% above the pre-crash peak. "The higher the value of a property [before the crash] the more it's gone up," said Richard Donnell, director of research at Hometrack, a property analysis company. It's almost as if the Lehman collapse never happened.
The influx of foreign buyers has been a key driver in pushing up prices. Between 2010 and 2011 many overseas investors, fearing the consequences if Greece were to quit the eurozone, bought up prime London real estate as a defensive measure, a hedge against falling prices elsewhere. Research published by upmarket estate agent Knight Frank suggests that 53% of PCL properties that sold for more than £2m in the 12 months to March of this year went to overseas buyers. Residents in the euro area countries accounted for 10% of the purchases. Investors from the "rouble bloc" came in a close second, at 9%.
Further up the value chain, foreign buyers become even more dominant, with the proportion of PCL properties worth more than £5m sold to non-UK nationals now close to 60%.
This "flight to quality" has exacerbated the huge difference in price between London and the rest of the country. Fathom Consulting, which provides economic analysis, estimates that a typical property in prime central London was worth just under £1.5m in the first quarter of 2013, compared with a little over £220,000 elsewhere for the UK as a whole. Unusually, though, the rise in prices since foreign buyers started buying up vast numbers of PCL properties in 2010 had been slow to filter across the rest of London.
"Central London usually leads the UK out of a downturn," said Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank. "There's a ripple effect going outwards. But it didn't happen this time."
Until now. The majority of buyers now entering the London market are no longer from abroad, as confidence returns among British buyers. The relative strength of the share market has brought renewed optimism and there is an emerging view that the capital has emerged from the storm.
Other factors are playing a part. Government initiatives such as Help to Buy, which allows people with deposits of as little as 5% to buy properties worth up to £600,000, are helping to drive prices upwards. So, too, are low interest rates that make the cost of borrowing significantly cheaper. Signals last week from the new Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, that interest rates will continue to remain low until after the 2015 election will do little to dampen the bullish mood. Estate agents have been surprised by the buying frenzy. Knight Frank had forecast that prices in the PCL post codes would remain largely unchanged for 2013. Now it predicts they will grow by 6%.
Significantly, the rate of increase is now rising faster in London's outer boroughs than in the PCL postcodes, where they are showing signs of slowing. Prices in Kensington and Chelsea, for example, rose 12.2% in the 12 months to June 2012, but only by 9.5% in the year to June 2013. In contrast, growth in greater London in the year to June 2013 was 6.9% compared with 6.4% the previous year.
The ripple effect is spreading to some unlikely areas. In the 12 months to June 2012, prices in Dagenham fell 1.1%, according to Land Registry figures. In the 12 months to June this year they have risen 7.5%.
Research by Hometrack shared with the Observer suggests that some outer areas have become hotspots. Top-performing postcodes include the leafy streets of Barnes and Herne Hill, where prices have risen more than 50% since their post-2008 trough. New Cross has also seen prices rise more than 50%, thanks to improved transport links.
Is this a property bubble?
"My own view is that it isn't a bubble," Bailey said. "It's about demand. London is arguably the most dynamic place in Europe and people want to live here. It's an issue of supply. Supply is rising, but London has historically been undersupplied." Analysts at Fathom Consulting are more sceptical. They note that the euro has strengthened in value as fears of the eurozone's imminent implosion have eased. As a result, London's position as a safe haven is no longer so important. "The risk now is that a portion of those safe-haven flows that took place through 2010 and 2011, and were associated with fears about a breakup of the single currency, start to unwind," Fathom says. "In the event that these fears disappear completely, PCL prices could fall by around 10%."
History suggests that this drop would then ripple across the rest of London. But even if such a fall were to happen, it would mean nothing to the millions of people struggling to get on London's property ladder.
In March last year a study by the housing charity Shelter found that 65% of non-home-owning Londoners expected that they would never be able to buy a home in their local area. The typical deposit needed for a first-time buyer in London was estimated at more than £84,000. Nearly a quarter of London households – 700,000 – were renting from private landlords, up from 15% (445,000) a decade ago. Since then, prices in London have continued to soar.
Priced out of central London, many families cannot afford to live anywhere in the capital. Instead they move out, pushing prices up elsewhere.
"Every rise in house prices means thousands of pounds piled on to the cost of the average home, and a generation increasingly stuck in unstable private renting while their dream of home ownership drifts further out of reach," said Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter.
Or, to put it another way: what happens in London doesn't stay in London. The capital's property boom has dire consequences for the whole of the UK.
Greek Orthodox Priest from Nazareth meets PM Netanyahu supporting IDF
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Stournaras eyes debt talks in November
Papandreou Unwanted On Samos
Talk rife China?s Greek coach on way out
Greek team in Poland for Homeless World Cup
A Japanese Crisis Nears
Greece slips further toward debt default as its credit rating is cut again
Ancient Greek statue found in goat pen
Greek consumers feeling more vulnerable as crisis deepens
Kathimerini | Greek consumers feeling more vulnerable as crisis deepens Kathimerini Greeks appear to feel increasingly insecure about their consumer rights and believe they are exposed to a growing number of unfair and abusive commercial practices in the midst of the economic crisis. According to the European Union's latest survey on ... |
Imathia man arrested for owing over 3 mln euros to the state
Minister promises swift compensation for quake damage
RGA files injunction against OPAP privatization
Stricter rules for licensed tour guides
Greece names and prosecutes celebrity tax evaders
Greece nears deal over '?120bn rescue'
75 Arrested In Crackdown On Smuggling Chinese People Into Europe And America
A joint Spanish and French police investigation has busted a gang that allegedly was smuggling Chinese citizens into Europe and the United States. The Associated Press reports.
The Spanish Interior Ministry says 75 people have been arrested, 51 in Spain and 24 in France, noting that some of the people trafficked ended up in the sex trade.
Two of the Barcelona-based are suspected heads of the organization in Europe. The gang's main European hub was Barcelona airport, which served as a stopping-off point for Chinese while false documents were prepared.
The AP reports that the gang allegedly charged up to $66,700 to transport Chinese nationals to the U.S., Britain, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, and Turkey.
People all over the world migrate and seek asylum for various reasons, most of them having to do civil unrest and war.
The Guardian notes that almost 8,000 migrants and asylum seekers, vast majority were from north Africa, landed on the coasts of southern Italy alone in the first half of the year, according to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
On Saturday at dawn he 60-foot-long fishing boat carrying about 120 migrants ran aground about 40 yards from a beach near the city of Catania off Sicily. Six people, who were apparently unable to swim, drowned.
Italian coastguard spokesman Roberto D'Arrigo told Sky Italia television that the 120 migrants were mainly from Syria and Egypt.
The Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim group in Burma, began making the perilous voyage in rickety fishing boats to Indonesia after being systematically attacked by Buddhist monks.
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Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello Di Cintio ? review
A tour of the world's most disputed border areas becomes a forceful study in human suffering
To wall is human and, if the story of the Garden of Eden is true, to exclude is divine. Since the beginning of civilisation, people have built walls to keep things in, or out. The ancient Egyptians constructed massive mudbrick walls around their temples, wavy ones that represented the primeval waters of chaos and served to ensure the purity of their sacred enclaves by keeping out everyone but the priests. The Roman emperor Hadrian, with his usual efficiency, commissioned a wall, backed by a series of defensive forts, to protect his empire's northernmost frontier from a troublesome neighbour. Walls, it would seem, are part of the human story. But there are exceptions: the most unwalled country in our own time, enclosed by water on three sides and the world's longest fenceless border on the fourth, is Canada. What better subject for a Canadian writer, then, than to try to understand what it means to live alongside a wall?
In eight chapters, eight walls, Marcello Di Cintio visits some of the world's most contended regions to witness glaring examples of exclusion. Some are well known because they continue to make headlines – the illegal wall the Israelis have built to keep out Palestinians, for instance; and the barrier the US has constructed along its southern border to exclude Mexican migrants. Others will be less familiar. Who remembers that the Sahrawi people of the Western Sahara are still fighting to liberate their land from Morocco? Their struggle has been going on since 1975, when the late Moroccan King Hassan II led some 350,000 of his subjects to occupy the former Spanish colony. To back up their disputed claim that the land was historically theirs, the Moroccans built a series of walls. By 1991, when a UN-brokered ceasefire stopped most of the killing, the Moroccans had built the world's longest continuous wall, some 2,700km long and, like the shorter Great Wall of China (21,196km), visible from space.
Di Cintio has a good grasp of the specific issues that have led to the building of the Moroccan wall, as of the others he visits, the walls that separate Palestinians and Israelis, Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Indians and Bangladeshis, Africans and Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans, Protestants and Catholics in Belfast, and rich and poor in Montreal. Faced with the reality of each of these barriers – some, in truth, no more than fences – he looks back at history and politics to understand how the need for separation arose and invariably comes up with political or economic reasons.
And then he spends time with people whose lives have been shaped or destroyed by separation and exclusion.
Some of these stories are more immediate than others, the power of the narrative being in direct relation to the level of injustice meted out on people on the wrong side of the wall. It's not hard to empathise with Palestinians whose lives have quite literally been cut by the wall – for many of them, their land lies on one side and their village on the other. Similarly, for those of us inside Europe, it's easy to understand why young Africans would want to run at the border of Spain's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, hands wrapped in cloth to stop the razor wire cutting. Many of them have already made extraordinary journeys across the Sahara to reach the Mediterranean, and this last obstacle is all that stands between them and Europe. These people see the walls as separating them from a better life. "In the imagination of a refugee," Di Cintio writes, having just heard a young Sahrawi describe somewhere she had only dreamed about, "any place on the other side of the Wall, wherever it is, must be beautiful."
Occasionally Di Cintio gets it wrong, as when he describes Palestine as "less a place than it is an idea". Millions of Palestinians would dispute that comment. More often he gets it right, as when he considers the ways people find to subvert walls, from climbing them to cutting through them, tunnelling under them, walking around them, decorating them – Banksy being the most famous of many artists who have decorated Israel's West Bank wall – and even to ignoring them. "An ignored wall ceases to be a barrier at all."
But ignoring barriers that divide your life, your land or your identity is easier said than done, as Walls makes clear. This is not a perfect piece of reportage: I wanted it to look deeper into the intellectual side of the argument surrounding exclusion barriers. Nor does it consider the future consequences for those people who live alongside walls: long after the physical Berlin Wall came down, for instance, the barrier lived on in the minds of Berliners. And nor do I feel Di Cintio justifies his upbeat claim, at the end, that "the urge to tear down barriers is a stronger impulse than the urge to build them". But what he does do, bravely and forcefully, and with impressive commitment, is to bear witness to the pain and suffering of people who live in the shadow of separation barriers.