"Who is actually eligible for London's 'affordable' homes? Part-buy, part-rent is barred to households earning over £66,000. But some of this ‘affordable’ housing is off limits unless you earn £66,000."
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"... [There is a] problem with affordable housing, though: much of it just isn’t that affordable for many Londoners.
"Affordable housing used to cover social housing and key-worker housing (properties for public-sector workers such as nurses and police officers) but then shared ownership was thrown into the mix. Key-worker deals have gone in many places, so the term “affordable housing” is often now used just to mean homes that first-time buyers can afford.
"For an individual, £66,000 is clearly a high income. According to the Office for National Statistics, the median salary in Britain is £27,000 but London wages are 27 per cent higher than the national median, so average around £34,000. That means you would require two incomes that average out at very close to the capital’s median wage in order to purchase any of these three properties. The average salary of a nurse is £26,158, a prison officer £26,616 and a firefighter £28,183.
"Darren Johnson, the Green Party member in the London Assembly, argues public-sector workers are being priced out of these schemes. He points to the case of a nurse who had been trying to buy a shared-ownership flat in Lewisham — even the properties she could theoretically afford had eligibility demands that she didn’t fit. He also highlights some extreme examples of properties that have still been classed as affordable housing: a £785,000 home in Hoxton, in which you can buy a 30 per cent stake, and a property in Marylebone where the estimated total cost was more than £3,000 a month."
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