Should A London Borough Move Their Poorer Tenants To Towns Up North?

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/10236057.Anger_at_plans_to____off_load____housing_tenants_in_Bradford/

If they can find a plot of land and build a stadium, and living areas for the World's athletes, for just a few weeks, why can't they now build affordable housing in London?

[anotheoldgit]

Affordable housing doesn't necessarily have to be 'subsidised' housing.

How much does it cost to build a basic house? A fraction of the £££££s they charge to buy them.

Tenders should be requested by councils for huge amounts of these 'new builds' and local labour provided to build them, thus creating jobs in a wide variety of skills.

Has already been mentioned, it took place on a vast scale post WW2, why couldn't it happen now?

[sandyRoe]

The cost of the land is probably the biggest expense when building in areas like London.
'The house is a machine for living in,' said Le Corbusier. I wonder what sort of machines he'd think those monstrous estates are.

[EDDIE51]

AOG the Olympic village housing is being sold as private housing at around £375,000 a unit. There is no way 'affordable housing' can be built in London when the price of land is so high , 80% of the cost of a house is the cost of the land it is built on.

[modeller]

em10 I don't want to name the estates I referred to as it wouldn't be fair now but during the 60s to the 80s no businesses would do anything except on a cash basis because of the bad debts, from the milkman to the rentman and the TV companies . The company I worked for had 90% of its bad debts on those estates and eventually we stopped supplying them completely, and it wasn't because the tenants were poor, as at that time there was plenty of work.

When they were first built the whole area looked quite nice, they were mainly semis and there was a nice shopping centre but it rapidly went downhill. Graffitti everywhere . Shops closed through petty pilfering and break-ins, including the GP surgery . The gardens were neglected , old funiture dumped in the road and many of the respectable tenants moved out when they could . The council replaced them with problem families which of course made matters worse.

However as I said earlier things changed dramatically when the right to buy came in. Interpret that as you will but there is a great pride in ownership
and it shows.

[New Judge]

All housing must be affordable, AOG, otherwise it would not be sold or rented. Of course not all of it can be afforded by everybody and that’s where I take issue with the term used by the government and local authorities. In my view they often use the term “affordable” to describe housing which is either sold or rented at a lower price to the rest of the development. Most authorities now insist that a certain percentage of “affordable” housing is provided as a pre-condition of planning permission being granted. This is preposterous as it means that the “affordable” part of it is being subsidised by those buying or renting the (presumably) unaffordable properties. It is clear that financial subsidy is coming from somewhere because, in the case of the Heygate development “only” 25% of the new properties will be “affordable”. Southwark Council says that making 35 per cent of the new homes affordable would not be financially viable.

As far as design and construction goes, if you looked at these buildings:

http://modernarchitecturelondon.com/pages/barbican-estate-slab.php

Without knowing where they were you would see (apart from the pot plants) some similarities with the infamous Heygate Estate. Despite being only a mile or two apart, however, the inhabitants may well be on a different planet. The main difference is, of course, that none of the properties in the Barbican is “affordable”. Residents there have paid (at today’s prices) around half a million for their places, so tend to ensure that their investment does not degenerate into a drug-infested kharzi.

[modeller]

For years I visited big estates and one of the first things I noticed that people , private or rented, don't like open plan front gardens and one of the first things they do , if allowed , is to separate their patch from next door's.
This applies even if it's only a few feet deep. In fact the shorter it is the more it is defended so to speak. If fences are not allowed tall bushes serve as a substitute.
I remember one open plan estate where the rule against fences was lifted and ' overnight' almost everyone had a fenced garden of some sort ,walls, wood, hanging chains, bushes etc.

[emmie]

we have still, though who knows for how long, a mix of privately owned and rented social housing, but NJ is right, it's laughable, affordable housing is a ruse, the private developers are sopping up the land, and indeed any council property that comes vacant, and one doesn't stand a chance of buying, not a cat in hell's chance, when i quoted 2 million for one property, i wasn't kidding, and they look like s hite... more lego than family homes, not exactly sure what the developers, architects think of when setting out their stall, but like the Heygate estate, horrible to live in horrible to look at .

[emmie]

and whilst i am not saying where all these goes on, so many immigrants have been dumped, and i use that word advisedly, in this neck of the woods, it has turned what once was a jolly nice place to live into a ghetto.

[modeller]

One cause of high rents is the council's subsidy. A friend of mine told me he was getting twice the rent by renting it to those on benefits than he could by renting it privately.
I bet those London rents would be lower if the council was not picking up the tab.

[emmie]

and i bet that the rent wouldn't have been so high had not the last government allowed this to happen, don't blame the landlords for grabbing what they can, however this isnt a clear cut case of social housing versus private, i wish that some would get how difficult and expensive no matter what part of the capital you live in. Also council tenants don't get much by way of support, help from the council, it might have been different once, but they do diddly squat for their tenants.

[sandyRoe]

Are there really towns up north sending out the message:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... ?

[emmie]

no, it the local council who have been sending out the message we don't want, need you, find somewhere else to live, as that well worn expression goes, i kid you not.

[anotheoldgit]

/// 80% of the cost of a house is the cost of the land it is built on. ///

Precisely my point the price of land is governed by who owns the land.

If it happens to be the council's land then it would be beneficial for them to have cheap houses built on 'THEIR' land, and then rented out cheaply to couples, instead of paying out vast amounts of money in housing benefits to private landlords.

[sandyRoe]

In order for that to succeed they'd have to rescind the right to buy legislation that Thatcher and her cronies introduced.

[emmie]

this has nothing to do with right to buy, i could link you to the local authority website, and local papers, where they advertise to lease and sell social housing, not on right to buy but because they are offloading their portfolio and have been doing it a long time, to either housing associations, or to private developers. If the cost of housing, private, social goes up any further it will be only the very wealthy who can live here, and if that is the case, where will those who work and are on low incomes go, because it won't be beneficial for them to rent outside London and commute in, as fares are as we all know astronomically high.