stuff_it
Too skool for cool
6. Let people squat in under-used threads that appear to be abandoned.
The social cleansing of social housing.
- Thread starter Louis MacNeice
- Start date
6. Let people squat in under-used threads that appear to be abandoned.
oryx
Sitting on the bok of the day
7. Penalise owners of properties deliberately left empty over a limited period, without very good reason.
NoXion
his soul is marching on
Well that's a bit worrying, because L&Q are the housing association that owns my flat!
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
They used to be my landlord too. They are in on lots of big new builds and are borrowing money using current housing stock as security, The heygate, Old kent road, to name a few. They have charitable status and are supposed to be social housing. All i see is million pound apartments coming from them. It's worrying that these amateurs have gained so much power and no longer serve there original purpose.Well that's a bit worrying, because L&Q are the housing association that owns my flat!
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friendofdorothy
Solidarity against neoliberalism!
Interesting piece on Inside Out London just now - about the rise of high rise and the effect on local housing
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
A lot of high rise has been flattened in London with Councils saying that it doesn't work and that it created ghetto's.
NoXion
his soul is marching on
Which is bullshit in my view. It's municipal neglect and social atomisation that create "ghettoes".
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
Absolutely.
friendofdorothy
Solidarity against neoliberalism!
Not high rise social housing - high rise skyscraping luxury flats. They wont even be ghettos for the rich - they possibly won't even visit never mind live there - they are an overblown concrete place for the rich to store $millions. There are planning permissions sought for hundreds of this sort of thing. This picture is the only time I've seen it with all the lights on - usually at least three quarters dark.
The Tower, One St George Wharf | New Developments | Harrods Esates (sorry posting that pic didn't work)
the tv programme was about how loads of the developers are negotiating ways to avoid providing social housing in these new glittering towers eg by giving councils money to build housing elsewhere or building schools instead. They don't want poor people cluttering up their clean empty developments.
I'd love to see squatters take them over.
friendofdorothy
Solidarity against neoliberalism!
looking for a pic of that tower - I found this
The London skyscraper that is a stark symbol of the housing crisis
and this London primed for nearly 250 new towers
The London skyscraper that is a stark symbol of the housing crisis
and this London primed for nearly 250 new towers
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
Large scale money laundering it is. A lot of these places are sold (abroad) before the foundations are in the ground. Parts of cental London at night are a ghost town in the shadows of these money stashes. I fear for hard working Londoners and what the future holds in regards to housing and being part of mixed communities.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Yep, and their justification is that the profits allow them to build more social housing - usually somewhere out-of-the-way, where its presence won't upset the arrivistes.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Well that's a bit worrying, because L&Q are the housing association that owns my flat!
Peabody have got massive form for fucking over their tenants too. IIRC nino_savatte 's estate is under threat of "re-development", and the one at Clapham Junction has already seen half the tenants fucked off.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Student accommodation is big business now for developers. There's more money in it for them and this will see even less social/ affordablehousing built.
There's also the added bonus for developers, of there currently being no unitary set of standards for "student accommodation", so the developers can throw any old piece of shit up, as long as it's basically habitable.
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
It is also ridiculously expensive for the students. My son is off to uni in August and is being charged £190 a week for a box room on campus.
Student accommodation is big business now for developers. There's more money in it for them and this will see even less social/ affordable
This filthy scam has been going on for the last decade in Cambridge because calling these shoddy boxes 'student accommodation' removes the usual infrastructure demands (such as parking, access to schools, GPs etc.), allows a large number of 'students' to be squashed into the smallest possible space. Please be aware, these are not 'students' as we know them...but the sons and daughter's of rich Beijing and Saudi captains of industry and minor nobility, enrolled in either one of the many language schools or, in Cambridge, the endless number of 'performing arts academies' for those too thick to do anything other than fill in a bank form - I kid you not, this is one of the key skills on offer...because a 'Cambridge' education, even at our laughably crapulous Anglia Ruskin or one of the many crammers is still Cambridge...right?
One of them - educational institutions (ahem) -has even been caught out (twice) in blatant lying regarding the promised 'educational use' of open parkland gifted to the public a century ago...supposedly Anglia Ruskin, it turns out to be yet another 'performing arts' con with not a single local student served in any way. I am trying hard not to be racist and nationalist but am honestly failing given the egregious abuses of various wealthy Arab countries and, of course, the Chinese - several local estate agents no longer even bother advertising locally...but have plenty offices in Beijing and UAE (while I know not a single person under 25 who is not living with parents, in caravans or sheds, vehicles or couch surfing...and that is not counting the vast number of homeless or those forced into shithole housing for 3/4 of their minimum wage (with no extra weighting despite London levels of rent)...while the privileged nitwits mince about in vast clueless hordes...(I take a certain malicious pleasure in ramming my ancient and heavy bicycle directly at large groups of 'students' who stand about in the middle of the road witlessly.
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sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
It's the same here in Brighton . Language schools all over the shop attended by rich kids dripping with money and exempt from paying council tax. The areas with hmo's are a tip which the council just ignore.
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
They do here but a large percentage of adverts are in chinese or arabic.
seventh bullet
sovietwave
Not as expensive in general but it's similar in Lancaster for the specifically student new-builds, including one that's sprung up next to my block of flats. En-suite bedrooms basically, prices per week are fucked up. Still fairly cheap but grotty digs in the less salubrious parts of town if you can share. The smartly-dressed Chinese students living in my block are nice enough. Same goes for the homeless guy who sneaks into the outside meter room to keep warm.
The huge influx of relatively well-paid transient tech workers has also fuelled a sort of cottage industry in casual buy-to-let home-owners who have watched the property prices rising far faster than any other investment opportunity - I have at least 3 (ex) friends who consider themselves to be impeccably leftwing and liberal but who have gleefully bought in to this horrid business ('Oh, it's our retirement fund' etc.) buying into the rash of cheap new builds which are, if not just investments for non-occupying owners, are short-term lets for workers at the 'science park', AstraZeneca and so forth...which has the immediate effect of increasing rental costs for all of us...while these temporary inhabitants have nothing invested in either the community or area...such intangibles as 'civic pride' have largely vanished (litter dropping is endemic in parts of Cambridge) and the town is, again, riven with division - not 'town vs gown' but a nastily pervasive tech-workers vs menials and service workers...and, as far as I can see, the only game in property is for single people with a high level of disposable income - out of the 1000s of new builds, less than 1/20th are what could be classed as 'family' homes (and all on the outskirts requiring transport)...and are certainly not affordable. In short, there are a few issues which affect housing here...and none of them are positive for the average person, either with children or single. Affordable housing is not only a fantasy, but the demand is such that people wanting to rent anywhere are forced to go through a humiliating disclosure and scrutiny while paying out £££ to rapacious agents. Self-employed, poor credit - forget it....it's a night-shelter for you (if you are lucky). Even the houseboat option has vanished as mooring fees are astronomical (and frequently, berths are taken up by wealthy hobbyists). I have little fantasies of Digger style squatting on Midsummer Common...
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
Lives torn apart and assets lost: this is what a Labour privatisation would mean | Aditya Chakrabortty
Just passing through, having spent the last three months being involved in helping some residents battle a similar thing elsewhere. Keep voting Labour eh?!
Grauniad said:
Just passing through, having spent the last three months being involved in helping some residents battle a similar thing elsewhere. Keep voting Labour eh?!
Libertad
Sparking up a rollie in the Reichstag
Hi Steth *waves* but yeah fuck Labour.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
We've been making a similar argument with regard to who all these new homes are for, in Lambeth. There's a lot of guff about the supposed "1,000 homes for council rent" (which morphed soon after the announcement to "1,000 homes for council-level rent"), but little gets said about the fact that the majority of the homes that will be built under Lambeth's regeneration program will be for sale or for market (or in the case of "affordable" housing, near-market) rent.
Labour? I wouldn't piss on them, especially at local government level.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
There has been some moves towards calling working tax credit a subsidy for low-paying employers, which it often is, but naturally they're responding to that situation in completely the wrong way by fucking with WTC instead of taking action to raise wages
As someone who was involved in NTC right from day one, I can assure you that that sentiment was voiced in the first week. As a colleague put it, 'Tesco isn't going to raise wages, is it? Not when the government is subsidising them'.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
Dogsauce
I’ve got Skol but I’m not a Scholar
Brownfield land has always been defined as 'previously developed land' so any housing site would already have be classed as such. It includes things like airfields and rural hospital sites which are largely vacant of buildings but still seen as having had previous 'use' despite the greenery. I suspect any policy change would have just been including these housing sites within regeneration targets or something like that.
Fwiw, I've seen more wildlife on derelict industrial sites than you'd generally see in cultivated rural land. Some of them need protecting from development!
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
A couple of articles about the dire situation at the Elephant and Castle:
"Every Flat in a New South London Development Has Been Sold to Foreign Investors" (Vice)
"Lendlease banks £113m profit from 'unviable' joint venture with Southwark" (35% Campaign)
The issue in both articles is how the developers commissioned viability assessments to "prove" the scheme could not be built without excluding social housing - then a few months later they report in their Annual accounts to investors that the developments are 100% pre-sold to foreign buyers - before the buildings are even completed.
"Every Flat in a New South London Development Has Been Sold to Foreign Investors" (Vice)
"Lendlease banks £113m profit from 'unviable' joint venture with Southwark" (35% Campaign)
The issue in both articles is how the developers commissioned viability assessments to "prove" the scheme could not be built without excluding social housing - then a few months later they report in their Annual accounts to investors that the developments are 100% pre-sold to foreign buyers - before the buildings are even completed.
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