There’s a certain kind of silence on The Bishops Avenue that doesn’t seem right. Not calm-wrong, but creepy-wrong. There are tens of millions of pounds worth of mansions on these streets, but no one lives in them. They are hidden behind high gates and well-kept hedges. The lights are off when you walk by in the winter. Some of them have been off for thirty years.
There’s no doubt about this. According to an investigation by The Guardian, about a third of the mansions on the most prestigious part of this north London street were empty. This is equivalent to about £350 million worth of empty property. Inside some of the ballrooms, water runs down the walls. Worn-out floors are pushed up by ferns. Pigeon bones pile up on rugs that haven’t been walked on in decades. Anil Varma, a developer who owns property on the avenue, said it best: the address is now “one of the most expensive wastelands in the world.”
It gets stranger as you try to figure out who owns what. Ten mansions, worth a total of £73 million, were bought between 1989 and 1993 and haven’t been used much since. It is thought that members of the Saudi royal family paid for them. In 1988, one of those homes was worth a little more than a million pounds. When the portfolio was finally sold, the families almost certainly made a lot of money, even though they had never opened a single suitcase inside those walls. That’s not the same thing as an investment. That’s not what I meant.
Most of the homes on the most expensive part of the avenue are owned by companies based in tax havens like Panama, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and the Channel Islands. The deal lets buyers from other countries avoid paying stamp duty and stay mostly anonymous. This system of laws was made to be invisible, and it works amazingly well. A property analyst who used to work for Westminster Council named Paul Palmer said that foreign investors use London’s most expensive homes as “real-life Monopoly pieces.” The comparison is almost too good. On a Monopoly board, no one really lives in Mayfair either.
The numbers were hard for the Evening Standard to understand when they looked at London as a whole. It was found that more than 700 homes worth £5 million or more were empty all over the city. People called them “ghost mansions.” They are worth about £3.2 billion all together. One guess is that the same amount of money could build more than 10,000 affordable homes in a city where 800,000 people are waiting to get a place to live. Here’s a tension that can’t be fully solved by economic reasoning. A Mayfair mansion is left to fall apart while a family lives in a temporary apartment for years while they wait for a permanent home.
When these investigations came to light, Boris Johnson was Mayor of London. He said the situation made “little sense” and pointed to Camden Council’s policy of charging 150% of the council tax on homes that have been empty for more than two years. He said that even higher multiples might be okay. Kelly Hoppen, an interior designer, and Lord Rogers, an architect, both added to the conversation. Rogers said that property owners have a social responsibility as well as an economic one. That’s hard to argue with, but it’s also hard to see how it would change people’s behavior much without real enforcement.
It’s not really about greed in the simple sense that this picture shows. This story is about how cities like London, New York, and Monaco turn into places to store things rather than live. That big house on The Bishops Avenue isn’t a home for anyone. It’s a number in a portfolio, quietly rising while the ceiling of the ballroom falls in. People who will never walk that street are the ones who are most affected by this. They are the ones who are waiting for housing that won’t come because the money to build it is locked up in a room that smells bad behind a gate that can’t be opened.
There are still no signs that things will change.
