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I just got back to the US after two weeks in London, where the property bubble is so hysterical, so much worse than New York's, that people talk about neighbourhoods falling like bits of France in the war. Clapton's gone; King's Cross has gone – even that nasty bit of the Caledonian Road where people used to totter about at 9am sipping White Lightning.
Tottenham (rebranded "South Tottenham"), which just got a Waitrose supermarket, might be reaching a tipping-point. Or it might take another 10 years – who knows in this climate, where anything over one bedroom and under £500,000 is presented as an eye-popping bargain?
It is gross, and it is all-consuming and it is – we are led to believe – driven in part by money flowing into London as a haven from shakier European capitals and by money from Asia. A real estate agent from Winkworth, which has opened a Mandarin language desk (headed up by the brilliantly named Ice Wang, who should moonlight as a superhero), told me he'd just sold a one-bedroom apartment in Chiswick, west London to a 22-year-old Chinese student for £350,000, cash. The homepage of the agency's China desk, meanwhile, advertises a nice terrace house for £22m.
Property acquisition has always traded on fear. Fear that you will miss the boat; that a comfortable old age depends on you owning your own home. For years, my mortgage adviser tried to spook me into buying insurance for my modestly mortgaged one-bedroom flat with various euphemistic scenarios, all of which I resisted until, during our third annual mortgage review, he cracked and blurted out:
What if you get cancer?!
The what-ifs, for some reason, always fall on one side of the fence. "What if the bubble bursts?" seems, even though it burst so recently and spectacularly, to have faded as a fear.
Panic-buying in New York is less frenzied than in London, but the language is similar and the sense of affordability spreading like smallpox in the same way. In what is still considered a dangerous neighbourhood in Brooklyn, two things happened this summer: an artisanal ice cream store, which also sells crepes, opened, and a couple paid over $1m for a two-bed/two-bath apartment.
The effect of all this is to shift to unnatural prominence the place taken up by what was latterly a background condition. As John Lanchester wrote in his excellent novel, Capital, houses used to be the scenery to people's lives:
Now, however, the houses had become so valuable to people who had recently moved into them, that they had become central actors in their own right.
He identifies a sentence ringing through London that will do for our age:
Did you hear what they got for the house down the road?
None of this makes it a bad idea to buy, of course. In the New York Observer this week, a resourceful 22-year-old writes about buying a 418 sq ft apartment in Manhattan that, voices in one's head murmur, will probably be worth three times the amount he paid a year from now. (Make them stop.)
It is also sensible to get a grip and not make it the central topic of your life. At the end of my trip, I went to see friends in Paris for a few days. There are lots of irksome things about the French way of life, but they do, at least, have a natural barrier to property mania: you need a relatively large deposit to buy in Paris and, even if you are a bona fide grownup with a good salary, a guarantor. This is a rule so inflexible that people in their late 40s are to be found chasing down their aged parents to guarantee their loans.
It's absurd, but not as absurd, perhaps, as what's going on in New York and London, but especially London. Like an evil whisper from a Stephen King novel, hear it on the breeze and shudder: Leyton is the new Clapton; get in before it falls.
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