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At the housing shortage panel, Hilary Burkitt spoke out strongly on the human costs of the soaring rental prices that many at MIPIM were benefiting from. However, she was something of a lone voice. Jon Gooding, the CEO of Dolphin Living, covered some of the same issues: Dolphin Living is a housing association best known for buying up the contested New Era estate in Hackney, and during the panel he proudly announced that rent increases there were being kept below 5 percent, and that the estate was pioneering a new payment system in which residents would be charged rents tailored to their incomes, paying only as much as they could afford. But he had to make a slightly different pitch for why he was doing this, and why the assembled investors shouldn't just dump half of London into the ocean. "It's actually good for the economy to keep lower-paid workers in the city," he said. "We need these people." Whether "these people" need the speculators is a different matter.Still, even if they are (however reluctantly) resigned to keeping us around, some of the property elite seemed to be terrified of what might happen when we turn angry.Despite the small number of demonstrators, a few of MIPIM's guest panelists would almost have you thinking the Bolsheviks were at the gates. Speakers commented on there being a "bunch of crazies" outside, speculated that the much-dreaded idea of rent controls might "become a journalist issue and then a political issue," and grimly warned of "riots on the street." In a discussion over the supposed inefficiencies of local councils, Iain Gilbey, a planning lawyer at Pinsent Masons, warned the assembled delegates not to use their considerable political clout to campaign for a more centralized national planning system, because "we'll see a lot more people standing outside Olympia, and that's not good for London." In response, Peabody CEO Stephen Howlett complained that "it does kind of feel like nobody likes us."Read: It Costs $800 a Month to Live in a Box Inside a London Apartment
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