‘I’m very fortunate’: meet the Londoner who lives among billionaires for £200 a week

theguardian.com:

Every time Kwame Agyekum’s mother comes to visit him at his flat she asks him: “You’re sure this is really your place and not a luxury hotel?”

“When she first came over she was like: ‘This does not feel like someone’s house. Are you sure it’s not a hotel?”’ Agyekum, 34, said. “I can see why she thought that with the concierge and the general ambience.”

Agyekum’s flat is within a new luxury development “in the shadow of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament” in central London. Apartments within the Millbank Quarter project are being marketed at overseas billionaires for as much as £35m.

The cheapest one-bedroom flats in the development – which is across the street from parliament and has views of the Thames – are on sale for £1.75m.

Studio apartments (estate agents’ new term for bedsits) that are significantly smaller than Agyekum’s one-bedroom flat are advertised to rent for more than £3,600 a month.

Agyekum’s rent is £862.42 a month. That’s because his flat is one of 13 “affordable homes” that Westminster city council required the developer, Berkeley Group, to provide for working Londoners under a section 106 agreement as condition of granting the planning application. There are nearly 200 apartments in total at the scheme.

Section 106 agreements, which are designed to force property developers to provide more affordable housing and other benefits for local communities, have proved highly controversial as developers have avoided meeting the commitments claiming that doing so would make the projects financially unviable. Recent examples include:

The billionaire developers of the nearby Old War Office being allowed to avoid providing 98 affordable flats in their £1.2bn development of 85 luxury apartments and 120- five-star