Each trip around Manchester’s inner ring-road seems to reveal more cranes, more hoardings, more concrete skyscraper frames steadily creeping into the city centre skies.

Sunny images of private gyms and artisanal living have become part of the roadside furniture, a high-rise future imagined by developers.

As London’s housing market flatlines, Manchester’s is booming. Its economic growth is starting to outstrip the capital’s and hundreds of millions of pounds are flooding into the city from all over the world, investment that would have been unimaginable even five years ago.

For Manchester’s leaders, this has been a long time coming. It is an economic moment they have worked towards ever since heavy industry shut its doors in the 1970s and 1980s. They have pushed for decades to build up the city centre’s profile and finally make it punch its weight.

Yet the rising cranes have also brought unease in a climate of growing angst over economic inequality.

Many Mancunians look on in bafflement as thousands of upmarket apartments shoot up, taking rents skyward along with returns for overseas investors. For every willing young professional tenant, there is also a willing first-time buyer barred from buying homes marked ‘investor-only’.

Behind the scenes, the region’s ruling Labour figures are divided on the best path to take, while in Westminster housing has jumped to the top of the agenda as furious younger voters start to vent their frustration.

Against that fraught backdrop, city centre development continues apace. So who is reaping the rewards?

One thing is certain: this wave is big. And it’s set to surge even higher.

Up to 10,000 apartments are either being built or are in the pipeline in Manchester city centre at present, as young professionals flock to the city. Prices are rocketing - up 15pc in the last year, according to research from global property consultants Jones Lang LaSalle. Rents rose 6.5pc in the same period.

Ultimately demand will carry on outstripping supply for several years, according to JLL, making Manchester ‘one of the hottest residential markets in the UK’ for investors.

“Despite there being a large number of homes in the planning process there is likely to be an undersupply in the next three to five years, due to the strong economic performance of the city centre continuing to create significant population growth,” according to its latest forecast, which predicts ‘strong price growth’.

There is clearly a generation of young professionals currently willing to pay the going rate. Two-bed apartments now go for an average £1,100 a month, compared to £883 in Didsbury and £572 in Blackley - but they continue to fly off the market, more affordable than London to young professionals attracted by what Manchester has to offer.

(Image: Mark Waugh)

“I like that it’s cheaper here than London and I’ve never really lived in a city growing up, so I didn’t want to be too intimidated by London,” points out 23-year-old language graduate Rebecca Allan.

“It’s more manageable as a city and there are also lots of parks and the countryside is really close too which I am used to back home - you can breathe.”

The boom in that kind of demand can be heard all the way to China, where a nervy middle class is seeking safe places to put its cash lest the country has its own economic wobble. Impressive returns are being advertised by developers in the pages of Far Eastern property magazines, sucking cash away from London.

As a result investors are undoubtedly benefiting, says property journalist David Thame, who has been covering Manchester’s housing market since the 1980s.

‘Amazing’ amounts of money are now coming into the city in quantities that are ‘very, very rare’, he points out, but with rents predicted to rise by up to 4.5pc every year between now and 2021, investors are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

“If you’re chasing income, you get out of London and into Manchester,” he says.

“Why buy a declining asset at an expensive price in London when for a much lower price you can buy a rising income in Manchester?

“They are not investing to provide cheaper space, it’s to push house prices up as close as they can get to London prices. At which point, when it reaches its peak, they will move on somewhere else.”

If that bubble bursts, he fears the city centre will be left with ‘an enormous bedsit land’ of poorly-maintained high-rises, sold on multiple times.

He is not alone in questioning the kind of city centre such a rampant market could be creating.

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Rent rises are far outstripping wage growth and tenants on short-term contracts can do little to stop them being hiked year after year. Flats can end up feeling less like homes and more like someone else’s savings account.

The council’s city centre spokesman Pat Karney has found himself hit with a £50 a month rent increase two years in a row. He believes stronger public policy is needed - in his view by giving Greater Manchester’s mayor more power over the sector, European-style - to stop rents rising out of control and ensure more stable tenancies.

Otherwise, he says, Manchester could repeat the mistakes of London and American cities.

“I’m totally convinced you can’t leave the growth of the city centre to the market,” he says, a concern that is taking hold within the city’s Labour party.

“You’ve got to make an intervention about the rights of tenants. We don’t want an American-style city model of gross inequality. We’ve got to make sure Mancunians can live in the city centre.”

Rent controls also reared their head in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour conference when he pointed out the housing costs of the younger generation are now three times those of their grandparents. Despite many economists - and the housing charity Shelter - harbouring doubts about the effectiveness of controls, Corbyn’s suggestion may well touch a nerve with a generation struggling to keep pace with prices.

Nevertheless Manchester council is absolutely clear on the need for more upmarket housing in the city centre - reiterating JLL’s point that even now, construction is still not keeping pace with demand.

“I think it would be easy to overstate the amount of activity, as the expected completions for the whole city centre this year is 3,000,” says council leader Sir Richard Leese, adding that half of it is in fact ‘affordable’. Manchester council’s definition of affordable, announced last year, says rents or mortgages should be no more than 30pc of average income.

“Our research shows that over the next five years there’s likely to be enough supply at the lower end of the market and not enough at the upper end.

“The notion this is all being built for rich people isn’t borne out.”

While the rental market surges, however, the investment model fuelling Manchester’s boom means many first time buyers - including those armed with decent deposits - are locked out of it altogether, even where prices remain affordable.

Around two thirds of the city centre flats currently on Rightmove for under £150,000 are either being heavily marketed at buy-to-let investors or are labelled ‘investor only’. This may work for developers - for whom chunky downpayments cut their own financial risk - but for those looking to buy a home, it is both incomprehensible and infuriating.

Richard Flackett, 36, tried to buy a one-bed apartment in Ancoats in 2015 for around £90,000, having signed up to the government’s Help to Buy scheme after scraping together a small deposit.

“I called up the agent and the lady was really friendly. Then she said ‘are you buying this to live in or to rent out?’,” he says.

“When I told her, she said ‘oh no, this property is for investors only’.

“I went away and thought about it. Then I rang back and asked: ‘Why is my money any different?’ I was advised it was part of the deal with the agent and the builder, and it was only for investor-purchasers.

“It was so frustrating, because I’d done everything right. I was going to use the government equity scheme and had worked hard, saved up and there were properties perfect for first-time buyers. But then it turns out that if you don’t already own a house, you can’t buy one.

“Which was ludicrous - and contrary to everything I’d been told.”

That was two years ago, but since then that trend has only become more pronounced.

Harriet Andrews started house-hunting in Ancoats 12 months ago, having rented there for several years. She had a chunky deposit, but quickly found herself in the same position.

“You go on Rightmove and see there’s a new-build near you and you call up the number for a brochure. Sometimes you don’t know it’s for investment only,” she says.

“I spoke to a firm in that area a couple of times and got told you had to have at least a 50pc deposit to even be considered.

“Nobody can do that. Who has a spare £100,000 lying around? It was nuts. It really does feel like your money isn’t good enough.”

Some developers have spotted the demand from owner-occupiers and have swung away from overseas sales.

Local firm Capital and Centric has entirely side-stepped the prospect of huge up-front deposits and is instead marketing its Crusader Mill conversion in Piccadilly entirely to owner occupiers with 5pc deposits. An open day over the summer saw queues snaking down the street.

But developing this way is ‘bloody difficult’, says the firm’s founder Tim Heatley, adding that it is not the model banks or council officials are used to seeing.

“It’s bizarre that a movement towards owner-occupation should be radical,” he says.

“All of a sudden selling apartments to people to live in is seen as unusual. Everyone is used to dealing with it being built primarily for invest to rent.”

Yet for all those fearing foreign investment will never reach those who need it, there are plenty who point out Manchester has long sought to be a global city - and should celebrate that it is now happening.

Gary Neville, who is hoping to get permission for his St Michael’s development on Jackson’s Row later this year, warns that shunning overseas cash sends a ‘dangerous’ message, particularly in the current political climate.

“Manchester is positioning itself as a major international city, so it must allow growth and opportunity through foreign investment as it unlocks strategic regeneration,” he says.

“Sport and the arts is a big part of that as it puts the city in the spotlight all over the world.

“If people are investing in the city for one reason or another you could say ‘the city is being absolutely flooded and it takes Manchester from its soul.

“Or you could look at it as ‘that person could have invested in any city in the world, and they chose Manchester’.

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“We are seeing more and more foreign purchasers investing in apartments for their children to live in whilst they’re at university in Manchester and we want to encourage people from all over to come and study, live and work in the city.

“Of course we all want more owner-occupiers. The challenge is about balance and I’d like to achieve that.”

It is ‘not enforceable’ to insist apartments are only sold to Mancunians who want to live in them, as opposed to investors, he adds.

“It’s the idea of proving you are from the local area and saying you are going to live there in the next two or three years.”

While debate rages over the pros and cons of foreign money, one fact is incontrovertible: no large city centre scheme in recent memory has been forced by planners to provide affordable housing - in other words, homes priced at below market rate. Developers argue they would not break even were they to do so and the council appears happy to accept that argument, despite pressure from its own backbenches to bear down harder on them.

As a result thousands of luxury city centre apartments have been rubber-stamped over the last couple of years without any affordable housing contributions, some eventually marketed at £1,600 or even £1,800 a month.

Many of those have also been propped up by the taxpayer.

Greater Manchester’s ‘housing investment fund’ - the £300m recyclable loan fund handed to leaders in 2014 as part of their devolution deal with George Osborne - was designed to ‘kickstart’ housing on former industrial land across the region, helping developers make their finances stack up at a time when borrowing was tricky.

At the time of writing £268m of it had gone to large city centre apartment schemes, many branded ‘luxury’ and none featuring affordable housing. Beneficiaries have included some big names in the property world, including development giant Renaker, whose luxury Owen Street skyscrapers at the end of Deansgate are among those to have received a chunky loan.

Some schemes to have received taxpayer’s support have then been marketed directly to Far Eastern investors.

Urban & Civic, whose Manchester New Square development on the corner of Princess Street was granted a £43m loan by council leaders, has been marketing its ‘exclusive’ apartments in the pages of the South China Post at ‘early bird rates’.

Fred Done’s Trinity Way scheme - which was given a £22m loan until that was cancelled a few weeks ago, when the project was restructured - was being actively promoted in Hong Kong over the summer.

Many politicians and officers have privately raised concerns about the ethics of the fund, with one official fuming that the fruits of taxpayer loans are now ‘being hawked around the Far East as a dead cert’. Andy Burnham made it a key campaigning issue in his mayoral campaign.

Sir Richard Leese explains the region’s leaders have had little choice in how to spend the pot, however, and no control over how they are sold on. The Tory government’s rules over it were so strict, he stresses, that had the region not given it out to developers queuing up with schemes ready to go, they would have had to give it back to the Treasury.

“If the money had not been allocated to these larger projects - which are in or around the city centre - there were no alternative projects coming forward that that money could have been allocated to,” he says.

“The strategy has been ‘let’s get the return, and use that return to fund riskier projects where it’s more difficult’.”

The combined authority - which is now overseen by Burnham - insists its housing investment fund is helping ‘stalled’ projects such as the one on Princess Street, at a site which had been standing empty for years. “The GMCA is responsible for the issuing of financing through the housing fund loans and has no remit in determining the marketing of developments,” adds a spokesman.

Urban & Civic told the M.E.N. that ‘early sales often come from overseas investors, because the completion date is too far off to appeal to owner occupiers’, but stressed more of its units are now going on sale to Manchester buyers. A show-room is now up and running on Princess Street, it points out, adding that it is now heavily promoting the apartments to first time buyers with a 5pc deposit.

“This offer is not available to overseas purchasers and will, we hope, encourage owner occupiers to purchase an apartment at Manchester New Square,” it adds.

Fred Done’s firm Salboy did not comment.

Both the local and national political landscape is shifting, however, and along with it the prevailing mood on housing and capitalism. As Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May try to out-bid each other on housing pledges, divisions within the local Labour party are also becoming increasingly defined.

Salford mayor Paul Dennett referenced Communist heroes Marx and Engels in a speech on housing and homelessness over the summer, slamming ‘soaring’ rents.

“The theory is, that you reduce obstacles for developers and in turn, they build the homes you need. But that simply isn’t happening,” he said.

“The pipeline of housing developments in Greater Manchester, and elsewhere in the country, is stacked full with luxury flats and accommodation for wealthy young professionals.”

Earlier this year Andy Burnham made affordable city centre housing a central strand of both his mayoral campaign and his Labour selection race, tapping into the unease.

Speaking to the M.E.N. last month he promised to change not only the investment fund but the region’s overall housing policy, with Paul Dennett leading the review.

“It’s not been sufficiently focused on affordable housing and there are schemes that are being funded through the fund that the government set up - as part of the devolution deal - that I think have failed to include sufficient numbers of affordable homes within them,” he said.

“So I am looking to refocus housing policy.”

Sir Richard’s response is a testament to the town hall’s confidence that its existing approach works, however. “If it’s a Greater Manchester housing strategy, as long as it’s based on what we are doing, that’s fine,” he says.

Nevertheless some Manchester Labour councillors - galvanised by Andy Burnham and Paul Dennett’s public pronouncements - mutter that for poorer constituents from Harpurhey to Gorton to Moss Side, this boom might as well be on the moon for all they will get out of it.

“You don’t have to travel far out of the city centre to see that the investment boom isn’t really benefiting people,” says one.

“You might be able to see the latest skyscraper from the end of your road, but your access to jobs, training or childcare is no better than it was before. If you live in Gorton, you are six minutes from Piccadilly on the train, but at night they turn hourly and then finish altogether at 11.30pm.

“Somewhere that should be well connected to the kind of new service jobs in the city centre just isn’t. If Manchester is such a great place to invest, I’m not sure why priority and so much public support and investment is being given to largely outside investors after a short-term capital gain.”

Such arguments also point to a long-running frustration - particularly in outlying parts of Greater Manchester - that a Manchester council-driven investment strategy has overly funnelled cash into the city centre, to the detriment of other areas, a theme Burnham also tapped into during his election campaign.

Neil McInroy, of the Manchester-based think-tank Centre for Local Economic Strategy, believes local politicians need a re-think.

“There is a problem, because the return on the city centre’s housing investment is extracted by investors - and more often, not local investors,” he says.

“This is not an inclusive model and it’s doing nothing to solve our housing problem.

“There is much we could do about it, though. For a start, we could ensure the criteria used when we decide what housing to invest in includes wider social value and need, rather than just financial return.

“We should be pushing government to lift its borrowing cap so that Greater Manchester can build council housing. We could force all developments to provide contributions towards affordable housing.

“And we could look to coerce developers - using Greater Manchester’s housing investment fund - to build outside the city centre.”

Those at the top of the town hall are getting increasingly frustrated with criticisms of its housing policy, adamant that their approach will bring in the jobs and economic growth the city has long cried out for, money that can then be redistributed.

They point out a quarter of the affordable homes built in the region since 2010 have been in Manchester, while the city council’s partnership with Abu Dhabi investors - Manchester Life - is not only building hundreds of flats at market rent, but is promoting secure three-year tenancies, improving the experience of renters.

And if the boom means higher skilled, better-off professionals moving in, they believe then that can only be a good thing.

“Who is the housing for, is the first question - and the housing around the city centre is workers’ housing, principally for people working in the city centre,” says Sir Richard Leese, pointing out the town hall is - at the same time - also working with landlords in other parts of the city to bring forward social housing.

It would make ‘no financial sense’ for the council to subsidise cheap city centre homes, he adds.

“Could we use some of our city centre land to build affordable housing? Well, yes.

“But as a consequence of that being affordable, it would reduce the quantity of affordable housing being built in the city and would be impossible to justify. It would basically be tokenism.”

Nevertheless against a backdrop of rising left-wing populism - and particularly the city’s homelessness problem - the city’s approach is becoming a tougher sell.

And while the Conservatives may ultimately find themselves kicked out of office on the back of younger voters’ fury over housing and inequality, local policy will continue to be led by Labour. The city region’s leaders may well be judged harshly if, in the coming years, Mancunians are locked out of the city centre in the way Londoners have been in recent decades.

For David Thame, there is no question the boom is already benefiting developers and investors. Who it benefits in the long term now depends on how it is handled.

“It’s very rare a city has such benevolent economic circumstances, very rare that such a very, very high level of overseas investment is coming in,” he says.

“This is the kind of combination people pray for. And it’s what you do with it that matters.”