Can you imagine paying $30,000 a night for a pad in London? Yes, that’s thirty thousand dollars, in case you thought it was a misprint.

And this is in a city that has its share of homelessness and has had to introduce a 90-night limit on short-term holiday lets to combat the drain on residential properties caused by platforms like Airbnb and their ilk.

Also in Britain, a government survey has revealed how many previously unidentified apartment blocks still have potentially fatal flammable cladding, more than seven years after the Grenfell disaster.

Meanwhile the contrast in Australian political approaches to the housing shortage – lack of supply or excess of demand – was brought into stark relief by the result of the US presidential election. 

One side said it was a failure of investment, the other that it was caused by immigrants. 

Spoiler alert: Donald Trump will be back in the White House until J D Vance slips an overdose of moonshine and opiates into his diet Coke then announces he was secretly a liberal all this time.

Seriously though, as we discover, even a socialist republic has trouble building apartments ordinary people can afford (unless you’re Aussie – then they’re a bargain).

This week’s podcast is the last to be recorded on our travels and is a bit shorter than usual, not least because we were cramming the last of our journalistic tasks in between trying to make the most of our dwindling days in France.

Next week we’ll be back to whatever passes for normal in strata.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.