Wrong Move - 2023

Materials: Private Rental Market data of Greater London / Unity / Blender / Clojure, C# & Python


> What is more valuable to the private rental market in Greater London?
Garden, chef, chandeliers, swimmming pool, marble floors, or step free access?

> What does £275,000.00 a month for a private, non-commercial rental property say about this market?

> What value is important to a market driven by money?
Perfect, calm, quiet, peaceful, luxury, exclusive or accessible?

> How much accessible rental property exists in London?
In a market spiralling out of control, information on accessibility (even the lack of it) by the online property platforms, the estate agents and landlords is simply not worth enough money to care. This is what happens without enforced regulation, capital wins over access.

> Has technology improved accessibility or replicated the existing in-equalities?

From a collection of 1 month of rental properties within Greater London in April 2023 a presentation of what private rental markets value.

Video Alt: An angled, downward view on an opaque glass like surface which is shaped like Greater London's perimeter. The River Thames cuts through the middle of the city and spans from the far right to the far left. The surface is floating in a fog and then darkness. Motes of light, a cloudy sky and stars are slightly reflected in the surface in this night scene. Rectangular brick buildings of various proportions cover the surface, with them most dense in Central London, around the River Thames. The video plays through different keywords and grows and shrinks the buildings using lights to reflect which buildings contain those keywords. Some example keywords: Luxury, Personal, Communal, Fashionable, Trendy, Gym, Swimming Pool, Chef & Marble floors. The core point and a returning focus is the comparison with properties that mention accessibility info and everything else. 0.072% of the properties mention anything about accessibility. At one point when showing the keyword “wheelchair access” the camera does a low, flying pass through the city, trying to recreate the oppressive and overwhelming feeling of trying to find somewhere to live in this city as a wheelchair user.

A Bag of words

The analysis of property text does not consider if a property is actually wheelchair accessible or not. It simply looks for presense of the word "accessible" in a bag of words (without context of other words). Since there are only 52 properties with accessible matches its easy to check most contain the text "Not wheelchair accessible". Knowing a property is not accessible is just as valuable as knowing it is. Especially so in London where rental property moves so fast, by the time you find out if a property is accessible through phone or email its already been rented.

Examples of some of the text containing access information:

Stills

An angled view of a glass like surface in the shape of Greater London. 80,000 simple rectangle buildings, of different height are on the surface. 52 of the buildings are giving of an intense, bright, warm, light.
The light of Wheelchair Access
A camera angle situation within the Fog/Smog of London. The night sky with stars and clouds is visible. We look across the small number of light emitting buildings
Wheelchair Access
A top down camera view of Greater London. The light from the few buildings shines over the ground and other buildings. Access is light.
Wheelchair Access
A helicopter height camera shot of Greater London. At this distance the buildings are densly packed.
Wheelchair Access
A helicopter height camera shot of Greater London.
Wheelchair Access
A wide camera shot showing buildings marked with exclusive as light emitting. All other buildings are dark.
Exclusive