You don’t say. But this guy has such an exemplary record of totally not making up bullshit.

In 2015, Maussan […] revealed a body that he claimed belonged to an alien, but it was later shown to be the remains of a human child.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/alleged-aliens-corpses-displayed-to-mexican-congress-did-not-convince-scientists-180982900/

Return of the Obra Dinn.

Correct. Well, not all the work week. One person will sleep in it Monday-Thursday. Maybe Friday if it’s a heavy one.

ETA: Rest of the family will be living in a separate house outside the Home Counties where the schools are better.

They increase the overall cost of both buying and renting a property within that market, and are a nuisance for existing residents.

Historically – in the UK, at least – the market equilibrium has been that the rich own all the property and the poor pay rent until they die, aware that they can be served an eviction notice at any time.

This has not proven to be a popular policy. In 1918 all British men, regardless of whether they owned property or not, got the vote, and since then politicians have found it useful to not have the majority of voters perpetually furious about it.

Some people own more than one house, and perpetually rent those properties out via sites like Airbnb.

So we have:

• Buying a property that you don’t intend to live in, so that you can rent it out to other people as a short term let.

• Buying a property that you live in, and occasionally renting out a spare room as a short-term let while you continue to occupy the property.

These are not the same.

It goes for £2000 a month ($2500) and is in Zone 1, a 25 minute stroll from the London Stock Exchange. You aren’t going homeless if you have £2000 a month to spend on rent, and Zone 2 is one stop away on the Jubilee line. You’re moving to Zone 2/3, or moving into a flatshare. Or out of London.

Given the location, pricing and finish I suspect it’s more likely to be used as a pied a terre – a second (weekday) home – for someone in the City.

Interesting. Here, when conversions happen to make cellars into self-contained units, I’d argue they are frequently only suitable for short term lets, on the basis that no-one should have to live like that. In converting properties whose lower ground floors were never meant to be used for residential purposes into housing, we get stuff like this.

Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Remodelled Crypt, for Goths Your own windowless basement in London Bridge, for just £2,000 a month.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akz9ze/rental-opportunity-london-bridge-basement

Well on that we are definitely in agreement.

In this specific instance, I suspect it is because there is every indication that the basement room rented by OP was not, in fact, a fully self contained suite within a house, but was a guest room.

How do you physically get into these “basement suites” in your part of the world? When I lived in a townhouse, access to the cellar was via a door in the middle of the property leading off the kitchen. There would be no practical way to split the cellar off from the main property as a separate dwelling. But having guests sleep down there every so often was no big deal.

I understand that. OP expressly described this basement experience as “renting out spare rooms”, though, so I hope you’ll understand why I’m treating this as a spare room being rented out.

I live in London and am very familiar with the issue of affordable self-contained accommodation being flipped into overpriced Airbnb units, and I would agree with you that such units should be retained as residential housing.

I slept on a pull out bed in a mate’s living room once so I guess that should be converted into a separate dwelling.

I don’t see how that matters. A spare room is a spare room whether it’s in the basement, the first floor, or the attic.

You can only starve a government body of funding – making it muddle along depleting its reserves and selling off assets – for so long until a final bill tips it over the edge, so I’d argue that if it wasn’t this bill it would be another bill.

Other councils took risky approaches to replace money cut under Austerity:

Woking said that against its available core funding of £16m in the 2023-24 financial year, the council faced a deficit of £1.2bn.

Racked up to finance the building and acquisition of a vast empire of commercial assets, its investments included a complex of sky-high towers – standing as the tallest buildings outside a big city in England – including a four-star Hilton hotel, public plazas, parking facilities and shops.

Many councils piled into property and other commercial enterprises to raise money to fill gaping holes in their budgets and to undertake regeneration projects after sharp cuts to central government funding introduced under the Conservatives’ austerity drive.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/07/woking-council-declares-bankruptcy-with-12bn-deficit

If the owners are living in it at the same time, and you’re renting out a room, that’s hardly a hotel.

Equal pay is something women have had to fight for.

In this case,

the court found hundreds of mostly female employees working in roles such as teaching assistants, cleaners and catering staff missed out on bonuses which were given to staff in traditionally male-dominated roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners.

Women in the UK only gained the right to equal pay in 1970.

There are typically limits on residential building occupancy. To put the kibosh on things like this, for example:

Landlord who packed 40 tenants in four-bed Wembley home given first ever Brent Council banning order https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-rent-landlord-banned-brent-council-letting-out-properties-b1100768.html

I assume NYC has similar regulations. If the ordinary residents are also in the property, things could get quite snug.

For non-UK readers: UK councils have limited revenue-raising powers compared to local government in other countries, and rely on 3 sources of income:

• Central government grants
• Council tax (on residential properties)
• Business rates (on commercial properties)

This amounts to c. 7% of the total UK tax base, versus c. 32% collected locally in Germany or 50% collected locally in Canada.

Central government grants were cut by 40% in real terms between 09/10 and 19/20 from £46.5bn to £28.0bn.

Council tax has gone up 30% over the same period, but it can’t go up more than 2% annually without passing a referendum (unlikely). Some councils in dire straits have recently been allowed to raise it 5%.

Local authorities have been underfunded for over a decade. Other UK councils which have already declared bankruptcy, either through running out of money, or through losing vast amounts of money in risky schemes attempting to replace missing central funding:

• Northamptonshire
• Hackney
• Slough
• Thurrock
• Croydon
• Woking

Just not nearly so many, and with so little regulation.

“Not having enough money to make what you are renting out safe for occupancy” is not an acceptable defence to renting out something that is unsafe for occupancy.

Fire doors will shortly be compulsory in all AirBnB properties in the UK. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/holiday-let-owners-airbnb-measures-fire-safety-crackdown

Approximately 18,000 Airbnbs in the UK do not have smoke detectors and nearly 65,000 have no carbon monoxide alarms, according to figures from analysts AirDNA.

Shocking. Safety regulations are written in blood.

Evidently AirBnB is not the only problem here, and building more residential homes is needed. But

discouraging using housing as an “investment” which then discourages predatory housing practices

is exactly what is happening here. If you can buy an empty property & rent it out to tourists for a chunk of money – with better returns than you can get on the stock market – people with capital will cheerfully do that. Except now with these rules there’s little point in them trying that in NYC.

Renters are free to continue to use AirBnB to continue to pay their rent (bans on subletting notwithstanding) as long as they’re still living in it at the time.

Long term capital considerations re. investment in real estate are a separate issue. Historically, housing has not performed like this.