I think a lot of the complaint I see is people want to have 100% of everything they want, within a 10 minute walk, with zero compromise. I.e. they have unreasonable expectations.
I see people come to London from other parts of the world and ask where they can live that is nice and a 5-10 minute walk from the office and I usually laugh in their faces. If you can afford to live that close in central London (even before you think about "nice"), then you don't need to work. Even single car parking spaces in central London cost more than family houses elsewhere in the UK.
When I got my first place it was on the outskirts of London, cost 20x the average UK salary (and for which I obviously took out a huge mortgage for that basically took 75-80% of my salary at the time to pay), and took over an hour on public transport (which was also not cheap - walking is free but probably about 4 hours each way) to get to central London. And this was just in the 2008-era - it's never been cheap (or even reasonable) to own nice property in the center of a large global metropolis like London where you are 10 minutes walk from your office AND transport AND entertainment AND everything else unless you are ultra wealthy.
People need to lower expectations about locality/proximity and affordability before things become viable. This isn't a new problem.
I see people come to London from other parts of the world and ask where they can live that is nice and a 5-10 minute walk from the office and I usually laugh in their faces. If you can afford to live that close in central London (even before you think about "nice"), then you don't need to work. Even single car parking spaces in central London cost more than family houses elsewhere in the UK.
When I got my first place it was on the outskirts of London, cost 20x the average UK salary (and for which I obviously took out a huge mortgage for that basically took 75-80% of my salary at the time to pay), and took over an hour on public transport (which was also not cheap - walking is free but probably about 4 hours each way) to get to central London. And this was just in the 2008-era - it's never been cheap (or even reasonable) to own nice property in the center of a large global metropolis like London where you are 10 minutes walk from your office AND transport AND entertainment AND everything else unless you are ultra wealthy.
People need to lower expectations about locality/proximity and affordability before things become viable. This isn't a new problem.