Let\’s create affordable housing by bulldozing affordable houses

Nothing intrinsically wrong with these houses. Exactly the same places sell for a million quid in Fulham.

I owned one of these once, in Manchester, not Liverpool. And I loved it then, but not sure I’d live in it now I am older and wiser . Part of the problem is these estates can go on for miles and miles. And it’s just a fact of life in the UK that people ghettoise themselves. If you get rich and can get out of places like that, you either find somewhere the same size in a better location, or somewhere bigger regardless of location.

So the endless terraced estates end up being populated by a handful of sub-classes, mostly towards the bottom end of the social spectrum, plus a few people who left it too late to move elswhere, then some bohemians and students.

And the fact is, as lovely as those old turn-of-the-century dwellings are, they are small and there is not demand to live in inner-city areas. A few years ago they knocked down perhaps 100 very spacious (and reasonable condition) three-storey terraces in the Langworthy area of Salford. The sort of property urban professionals should find desirable, and which would sell for around a million in the right area of London. Right house, wrong place.

Knock two together, knock down the buildings behind to make a large garden, and you are getting somewhere. Not all of them, just some of them.

We are told, here in Merseyside, that lots of families cannot find suitable affordable housing. We’re told the housing benefit bill to the nation is insustainable and that the money is going into the hands of “rapacious” private landlords. We are told the “bedroom tax” will lead to destitution. Well, here we have a private developer wanting to redevelope affordable housing. You know, affordable housing, the only sustainable long term solution to these problems.
In Merseyside, however, we know that these developers, indeed all private developers, are evil bastards, preying on the homeless masses. Indeed even the bricks they build with are EVIL BRICKS. Oh no, only social housing is good housing. A roof isn’t really over your head if it’s a private roof. This is social and political prejudice, nothing more; nothing less.

JamesV
I appreciate your sensibility. However, the developer here says it has demand. There is nothing more to say.

(continued from last post)

….£200,000 shoeboxes, nicely subsidised for developers and land-hoarders through an assortment of government schemes and market interventions.

(Try again)

Thought it might be worth of enquiring of someone who knows the area & the market. Owning a couple hundred Liverpool properties does indicate skin in the game.

The reply:

“…in certain roads and parts of Liverpool it is simply not worthwhile to renovate, even if you gave the houses away. The two up/two down properties all boarded up are past renovating and they would not command 80k at the end. Entire streets would need to be renovated with infrastructures brought in to support future interested parties.”

And that’s often the problem. It’s not £30K for one house to realise GBP80K. It’s £30M for maybe a thousand properties plus ancillaries. And is there GBP80M+ of buying interest to justify the investment.
GBP30K’s worth of renovation on a GBP50K house gives you a GBP50k house with a nice bathroom.

Obviously high density housing making way for “desirable dwellings” under the name of social or affordable housing is crass.

However, there will be no doubt that these houses need demolishing, and money spent on decommissioning the asbestos, and the recycling of the cleaner rubble.

Without delving into this case, the casual use of all the forms of asbestos was prevalent for a gew decades. The cost of securing it and then storing it always a major factor in deelopment strategy.

To be allowed, however, to reduce 440 into 150, wrt to demand, could be a factor of many things.

That an HA is seeking approval could mean many things, god or bad, but there is no doubt that the quickly built estates around those times would not serve much longer than a couple of lifetimes.
440 into 150 seems ludicrous, nut if the were cheaply built multi-storey necessities for the time, the modern building regs could explain the ratio reduction.

Still I don’t know the background behind Tim’s ill-informed splunge, but he probably doesn’t anywat. As witnessed by most of his posts.

Dave,

The other option is to switch to Citizen’s Income away from various benefits like JSA, Income Support and Housing Benefit. Give people a flat amount of money to live on and let the market sort things out.

Most people have no idea just how huge HB is, and how much of it is spent housing people in London, when in most cases, they don’t need to be. If you’ve got an employer who wants you in London, they can pay for you. If you’re sitting on your arse watching Jeremy Kyle, you can do that in Manchester.

62000 in London are getting over 250/wk in housing benefit at the moment. That compares with 1200 in the North West. To get over 62000 benefit claimants in the North West, you have to get down to 100/wk. So, if we remove geographically-linked benefits and just make it flat, we can see that there’s a huge benefit for people to get out of the city and redistribute themselves more widely across the country.

Tim Almond>

I don’t think 62k makes much difference one way or the other, really. And, if we’re being fair, I’d have thought many or even most of those are in fact working families with three or four kids. It’s nigh-on impossible to find a three bedroom flat for less than

Tim Almond>

I don’t think 62k makes much difference one way or the other, really. And, if we’re being fair, I’d have thought many or even most of those are in fact working families with three or four kids. It`s nigh-on impossible to find a three bedroom flat for less than GBP250 a week. That`s about GBP1100 a month, and you need to add at least another 50% to be able to afford anywhere that`s more than just a roof over your head.

If we`re talking about the feckless long-term unemployed of the popular stereotype, I really think that dealing with the core problem is a better solution than bribing them all to move up North – that`d seem to exacerbate the problem rather than help, even if it cut the total bill by a small amount.

As I`ve said before, there really aren’t many options for London. Either abandon the Green Belt – not something I favour – or demolish (parts of) existing suburbs and replace with higher density housing, or build transport links sufficient to make some other part of the country effectively a suburb of London.

I like the idea of bringing another area closer with transport. Less than a hundred miles away there`s the seventh emptiest county in England – Lincolnshire. (One of the other six is Rutland, which is also in range, but tiny.) The M11 and A1M already go most of the way as road links, and there`s a reasonable route for a dedicated high-speed rail link. As a side bonus, if there`s a ~30 minute express rail link to bring commuters in, there’ll also be a half-hour rail link taking Londoners out of the city for fun – would be nice to have a beach.

Dave,

“I don’t think 62k makes much difference one way or the other, really. And, if we

Tim>

Well, in many cases we are the employer. There must be something like 60,000 NHS nurses in London, just for starters. Other than the public-sector employees, there are also those who are being taxed on the one hand, and given housing benefit on the other; that’s clearly ludicrous, but ought to be taken into account when assessing the housing situation.

Or alternatively try to work out why everything has gone so damn London-centric in the last 50 years and shows no sign of stopping.

Even for stuff that has to be done in a big city, or the kind of thing where the workers want to be in a big city, there is plenty of competition for London within the UK. Why are Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol et al failing to attract business and people away from the capital?

Ian>

Are you talking about the major redevelopment of the tower blocks there? Or are people actually knocking down the little terraces and semis?

JamesV>

It’s gone that way in response to the movement of the population. The vast majority of people in the UK want to live in London because it’s one of the world’s great cities. The UK doesn’t have any other actual cities, rather than large towns, so it’s not surprising that generally all the want-to-be city-dwellers come to London.

They’re going to spend £15m of our money knocking down 440 houses and building 150?

And this improves the supply of housing?

I’ll need to read it again, I must have missed something.

Or perhaps they’re idiots.