We want to legislate to prevent tycoons from buying apartments and leaving them empty
Last modified On Friday, October 23, 2020 BST 10. 01
One of London’s largest real estate tycoons is the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who revealed last week that he owned about 5. 5 billion pounds of genuine properties in the city. of Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Kensington, and would possibly even be more valuable than the London possessions of Grosvenor Estate, surpassed only by the Crown.
For a foreign head of state, secretly owning so many assets in a capital is and most likely a security concern. When his regime is dictatorial and believes in the use of torture, enforced disappearances and imprisonment of government critics, it deserves to be 3 times Imagine the protest if the owner reveals himself as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un.
Needless to say, the accumulation of the domain took a largely out-of-sight position. The houses were bought through ghost corporations in offshore paradises. The explanation for why the sheikh deserves to need as much wealth in London as the monarch of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. it’s a mystery This suggests non-public insecurity.
Khalifa’s ultimate life asset is One Kensington Gardens, near the Royal Albert Hall. The site acquired in 2008 for 320 million pounds from the Candy brothers, who had bought it for 69 million pounds just two years earlier. genuine real estate transaction in London, in which costs are inflated and weak planners fear sacrificing historic neighborhoods in favor of starchitect buildings, here through David Chipperfield. Needless to say, the apartments have remained at most absolutely empty for five years since their completion touch in 2015, an area tee and a monument only to the vanity of a Gulf Autocrat.
Boris Johnson, as mayor of London, was fiercely in favor of all this. He even flew to Kuala Lumpur in 2014 to announce the refurbishment of the Battersea power plant in London. He called foreign funk cash “foreign investment,” he won’t pay dividends in London. In 2016, the Guardian reported that only 30 of the 214 apartments in Vauxhall Tower were on the voters list. The Times found that 99. 3% of the apartments in Manchester’s New Tower were owned by foreign investors.
These acquisitions are not foreign investment at all, unless they are genuine real estate agents. They don’t load anything into the British home inventory because they’re so empty. They could well be garage shelves in a bank. However, they suck the life force of their neighborhoods. They don’t spend anything locally and kill communities. A night walk through London’s new clusters shows the ground through the unwrevered space. A third of Bishops Avenue in Hampstead would be empty, part of which would be half abandoned. Entire streets of Kensington and Chelsea is closed and dark. This deserves to be a paradise for illegal occupiers, and who can complain?
I respect the sanctity of goods, but houses are a type of component property, goods within a network, so a wealth like this must be regulated, taxed and subject to a certain sense of public obligation. the afterlife showed fear for the energy and appearance of its streets. Howard Estate in Walden maintains Marylebone’s identity as the Crown does with the Crown of Regent Street. Owning land in a city means being part of the city’s life cycle. One of the reasons foreign buyers prefer towers is that they don’t raise that fear. They’re locked up, they’re anonymous, the antithesis of what an urban network is.
That the London government to this antisocial behaviour – and even promote it, in Johnson’s case – is outrageous. The retention of blocks of houses off the market for years deserves to be prohibited. London’s leaders claim to favour the structure of more houses, however, they forget about disused houses. When Islington learned that a quarter of his new homes were empty, he tried to enforce the profession or face court orders and imprisonment. Some town halls impose a surcharge on empty houses, but a few hundred additional pounds are negligible. The highest municipal tax section in Kensington and Chelsea, home to one of Khalifa’s luxury buildings, is 2,473. 66 euros, equivalent to the year. in New York.
Few other peoples this nonsense. In New York, cooperatives and maximum condos, which cover most residential homes, require a full-time apartment or face eviction. Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada impose heavy taxes on foreign buyers. New Zealand prohibits non-residents from owning assets. . To acquire an asset in Delhi, a foreigner must dedicate himself to occupying it six months a year.
These are not intolerant controls. Modern London is the Far West of the global asset market and, as a result, parts of it degrade and die. Manchester will actually follow him. If foreign investors are not to be banned, at least occupation or underburring should be imposed.
A town is not an object, let alone a bank account. Those who own it are dedicated to it. To pass on to an unknown and absent owner is unthinkable.
Simon Jenkins is a columnist for The Guardian