Reply to The Guardian article. Is DC immune to this London market phenomenon?

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm a Londoner who now lives here so I know both markets. I don't know DC as well so I don't know whether DC is immune to this, but there are a lot of reasons I can think of why London is very different and the same issues may well not arise here. First, London (including the suburbs) is huge, and the way the city works has always been that there is much less residential space in the centre. There are flats and some huge expensive houses, but this is not at all where families live. That is not the same in DC - many families here choose to live in the suburbs but it is affordable (for those who would otherwise live in, say, Bethesda) to live in Capitol Hill, or Dupont Circle - they would just have a smaller house or apartment. In London that has never really been true. So the areas in which foreign buyers are buying are not really the family areas. That said, property prices in London are crazy and the fact that it has been a desirable place for foreign buyers has not helped that at all. My house is close to the centre but not right in the centre (think zone 2, if you know the Tube system) and prices there have soared in the last 5-10 years, meaning that there are very few young families now buying in the area, and instead it is becoming more of  place for wealthy empty-nesters, a few very high earners and some foreign buyers (usually they live there, though, not just investors). 
Also, when the article talks about not contributing to the local community, they don't mean through taxes or school involvement because we don't have high property taxes in the UK as that is not how schools are funded, and nobody with a home of that value in those areas would be sending their children to the local public schools. Again, another thing that is different about London is how economically diverse every area in the city is, because there are council-owned and low-income housing in all areas, so you will have low-income housing in the same apartment building or next to apartments worth millions. That mix does not seem to be the same here in DC. [/quote]

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