Some splendid Homey whining in a recent Evening Standard:
Houseboat owners on the Thames fear their way of life will be threatened if huge rent increases are imposed on them. About 280 boats moored will be affected, with many facing rises of more than £1,000 [per annum]...
But residents of the Thames marinas and riverside moorings have accused the PLA of cashing in on the increasing popularity of living on the water. They fear the rise in mooring fees - by an average of about a third - will drive out traditional river dwellers, leaving only a "playground for the rich" *...
Alison Barnes, 47, a mother of two, said of the rise in mooring fees: "It's difficult to know what we'll get for the new charges, apart from the mud. They want a portion of our 'notional income' from the mooring, but we don't get any. It's not like we have an income from our boat and that's why people are objecting to these high increases."
Ho hum.
This lady doesn't know much about cost-accounting or economics. Of course she receives "notional income", it's however much she would have to pay for that mooring site on the grey market**. As we know, the best form of rationing is price rationing, and distant second best is the waiting list approach - if the waiting list is too long (which it is***), then the prices are too low. If it's true that the PLA could double or treble their mooring fees and still find tenants, then that shows that the value of those moorings is in fact two or three times what they are currently charging, and that's exactly how much the "notional income" is.
Are social tenants allowed to refuse to pay rent on the basis that they don't get any "notional income" from their home? Or private tenants for that matter? And shouldn't it be illegal for people to sell houses to owner-occupiers for more than a nominal sum, seeing as the new owners will never get any "notional income"; and if a buyer didn't get any "notional income", why would they pay more than a nominal sum anyway?
* You can look at the prices for houseboats in London here, it quickly becomes clear that, just like with houses, you are largely paying for the location.
From Houseboats: A Buyer's Guide:
** "With a mooring you basically get the ability to stay, plus key facilities: mains, gas, sewage, and in more up-market places, broadband and so on. Usually you're all connected up, though a lot still have to pump out sewage into the Thames at high tide. A boat roughly triples in value when you put it on a residential mooring, assuming it's secure in length of time (at least ten years)."
*** in London [mooring] licences are extremely hard to come by. A spokesperson for British Waterways, who control London's canals, says: "We provide permanent residential moorings in places like Bloomfield Road, Little Venice and non-residential sites which allow people to live four nights a week on sites like Lisson Grove. But it's very difficult to get a mooring - we have a waiting list with hundreds of people on it." Demand is also massively in excess of supply on the Thames.
Saturday 15 October 2011
"A playground for the rich"
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11 comments:
Can't wait to see what the person who keeps posting nonsense about Port Solent or whatever will make of this.
You didn't have to wait long.
Come on then MW is the Thames or any river for that matter land or water?
If I fill it with spoil, does it become land or not? - transported land, that is.
RA, as we both well know, land is land is land.
Some has water on the surface, some doesn't. Sometimes you want the water there (river, canal, marina, swimming pool) and sometimes you don't (swamp, flooding etc). Some land is vastly enhanced by being near water (nice view, close to the harbour) and some is less valuable (flood plain).
Similarly, we need to get food from somewhere; most of it is grown on dry land, and some of it is collected from 'land covered in water' i.e. The North Sea. Water is a natural resource just like land.
I think Anon is desperately trying to ignore the fact that the "L" in "LVT" actually stands for location (land itself has little or no inherent value); if you actually look up these houseboats, the mooring fees for posh Chelsea harbour are much, much higher than a not-so-posh canal somewhere else in London with a view over the gasworks. So as ever, it's "location, location, location" which matters - the water is something to put your house(boat) on in the same way as most people prefer dry land to put their house on.
The shade of the late Yasser Arafat still causing chaos, then? Ruddy Palestinians get everywhere.
Or perhaps that would have been the PLO.
Oops.
FT, there's the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, also PA for Pennsylvania, perhaps they've done a corporate merger and bought the Thames? No doubt ably staffed with PAs, and they make their announcements over a PA. And the father figure is referred to as "Pa', who no doubt brandishes a sword made out of protactinium. Or something.
Anon, you may like to reflect on the fact that all land which is covered by water some times and not covered by water at others due to the action of the tide, i.e. between high and low water marks, belongs to the Crown. This covers most moorings on the River Thames in London and all of Port Solent, whose developers must have bought the sometimes-dry land off the Crown to turn it into land that is dry at all times.
PLA is the Phone Losers of America.
B, that's not actually quite true, some beaches are privately owned, some belong to organisations like National Trust, some belong to various government departments, local councils or harbour authorities and so on, and The Duchy or Cornwall is a country unto itself.
I stand corrected: from Wikipedia: Approximately 55% of the UK's foreshore is owned by the Crown Estate; other owners of UK foreshore include the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster. In Orkney and Shetland, the Crown does not claim ownership of foreshore.
Mind you, the DoC and the DoL belong to the royal family, so it comes to the same thing.
I think it'a a bit unfair to call it "Homey whining". These people are, after all, renters, who are complaining about the increasing level of their rents.
Homeys rejoice in increases in the value of the land they own; these people do not own land (or indeed water).
AC, it's all the same, isn't it? Homeowners don't want to pay LVT, council tenants don't want to pay market rents, landlords don't want to pay business rates, and these people don't want to pay market rent either.
As a matter of economics, these people very much do 'own' the location, as they can sublet the boat and pocket the difference, and as the linked article explains, the value of a boat is trebled once you have a mooring. The clue is the long waiting list.
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