Latest for Battersea Power Station

[juliet]

Battersea Power Station to be turned into immensely posh hotel, theatre, more posh hotels, etc etc. (currently awaiting planning permission from the council).

Not sure entirely how I feel about this. On the one hand, it is clearly a good thing that *something*, *anything* be done to stop it from just falling apart altogether (or if no one wants to do anything with the shell as stands, then just knock the damn thing down & use the land - yes it's pretty & yes I would like it preserved, but not at the cost of all that wasted space). On the other hand - immensely posh hotels? Arts & exhibition venue - well, we'll see what exactly that means, I suppose. The last time they did that with an ex-power-station it worked out pretty well. I am politely sceptical about the chances of any of the flats in the surrounding area being remotely affordable (although isn't there some bylaw now that if building flats/houses in London one has to make a certain number of them be social-housing-type-affordable?). I don't know; the whole thing sounds hugely exclusive/rich, & I would have preferred something more inclusive on the site (this is, of course, because I am a big socialist hippy).

I think I come down on the side of 'something, anything', though, currently. And I do like the idea of the new pedestrian bridge, though I hope that it will allow bikes as well. But given that this is about the 3rd or 4th project for the site, it's probably not time to start holding one's breath about it.

Comments

[puffinry.livejournal.com]

Although I'm something of a socialist hippy myself, I do rather like the idea of a single dining table right at the top of one of the chimneys!

[juliet]

I'd like it more if I ever had a hope in hell of getting up there ;-)

[kitty-goth.livejournal.com]

You do.

*something*, *anything* be done to stop it from just falling apart altogether

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Pragmatically, perhaps...but sometimes I enjoy just wandering down to the beach on lunch hours and staring across at the dereliction. I'll miss that.

Re: *something*, *anything* be done to stop it from just falling apart altogether

[juliet]

[nods] I've cycled past it (well, on the other side of the river, or across whichever it is that's the nearest bridge) several times recently, & there is a certain mournful grandeur to it. But it's a *huge* site to be wasting; and I'd also get a lot out of seeing it brought back to the splendour I recall when I used to come past it into Victoria when I was tiny, before it really started collapsing.

I remember a Blue Peter annual where they went in to look at the interior just as it was being closed down, in the mid-1970s. It was *gorgeous*. I don't know how much of that has actually survived.

Re: *something*, *anything* be done to stop it from just falling apart altogether

[rgl.livejournal.com]

Have a look here (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/uk_battersea_power_station/html/1.stm).

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

Affordable housing; there are recommendations rather than rules, I believe (although I could be wrong there), and quite often planning permission is dependent on there being a certain amount of affordable housing included.

[hazyjayne.livejournal.com]

I believe it's meant to be 10-30%, depending on the area...

... can't it all be affordable housing? :/

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

No, because if you make it all affordable housing you're effectively left with a high-rise council estate. Remember them, they're Not A Good Idea.

[(Anonymous)]

This is also wrong: there's nothing necessarily bad about having lots of social housing, except for the lamentable quality of UK councils as landlords. I don't think they were ever incentivised properly, and of course any monopoly has its costs. The high-rise estates were put up by people who thought that anything was better than the slums they were clearing, and didn't feel they had time to listen to what people actually wanted or the money to do a good job---but the country is much richer now.

The Housing Association model of highly devolved provision, with some sort of co-investment between the resident and the owning body (if not necessarily co-ownership of individual properties, since that has horrendous inefficiencies), is probably the way to go.

HTFB

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

There's everything in the world necessarily bad with having lots of social housing in one concentrated block, in that I can't think of a single model of providing it since the war which has had a good outcome. It doesn't have to be tower blocks, they're just the most relevant example to BPS. The 'urban villages' didn't work either, to pick another.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

It's two things, it's a government target, and a thing which councils are allowed to make into a Material Consideration in their Local Plan and can therefore reject planning applications for not having enough of it, if they want. As I recall, anyway.

Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

The whole affordable housing policy is insane. There is no point at all in encouraging people to put up cheap, and therefore poor-quality, houses; that just restricts the builders' investment in the supply of housing, so for a given level of demand prices are higher than they would be without this policy. And we're left with pokey, poorly built homes.

HTFB

Re: Affordable housing

[karen2205]

I think there's a difference between 'affordable' and 'cheap and nasty'. You can build high quality two and three bedroomed houses/flats which will be affordable, rather than building a few luxury five bedroomed houses that will be completely outside the budgets of people living in the area.

Re: Affordable housing

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Size of units = big factor in cost of construction. Cost of land = big factor in cost of construction. Quality of building = pretty small factor in cost of construction.

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

Building firms compete by minimizing the cost of the quality of building. We have building regs to protect the public, and indeed to promote the public interest in the quality of the overall housing stock which isn't properly priced by a private housing market. It's perverse to introduce rules going in the opposite direction.

If you build good quality two bedroom houses they'll be moved into by rich people, leaving their older, less good quality two bedroom houses for someone poorer. Thus you get housing stock renewal, but it's not the new houses that are affordable, it's the old ones. If you build good quality five bedroom houses then everybody can ripple up the chain leaving their older smaller houses for someone poorer. If land is so expensive that not everybody can live on their own in a five bedroom house then rich people need to take poor people as lodgers to cover their expensive mortgages, or there isn't enough demand for five bedroom houses to make it worth a builder's while to put them up instead of smaller ones---at the moment there's a huge boom in two-bedroom unaffordable flats in this country
And they're all being built shoddily. It's enough to make one weep.

HTFB

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I don't follow this. If you build 5-bedroom houses, who gets to live in the older, less good quality two bedroom houses?

If you build a 5-bedroom house rather than two 2-bedroom houses, you get one happier rich family rather than two happier not so rich families surely?

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the problem it seems to me is that there isn't enough space for all the people who want to live in the south east and that lots of houses aren't very densely populated. Building bigger houses for the rich people doesn't strike me as being a sensible solution to this whatever the economics are.

Also, if house prices and rents stay as high as they are at the moment in relation to salaries, then people's prosperity is going to be ridiculously linked to that of their parents which can't be a good thing.

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

There is no problem. It cannot simultaneously be the case that there isn't enough housing and that what housing there is is under-used. Can it?

You're worrying that your parents, who have benefited from a stock bubble in the price of housing, are richer than you, who haven't. The rational response to this is not to seek opportunities to buy at the top of the bubble.

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's perfectly possible that there's not enough housing and that it's under-used in the way you say, because the people under-using it don't think they are under-using it. My parents don't say 'We've got two unused bedrooms, let's take in some lodgers to make some more money, on and let's convert the dining room we hardly use into another room for a lodger too'.

The problem with housing, is that unlike stock options, you can't just wait before deciding to spend money on it like you say. I have to live somewhere, and if you can think of some way I can do that without paying over half my salary in rent, then I'd like to know!

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

Consume less of it, then. I'm sharing.

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I'd like to live in a world where someone who earns an average salary can afford to rent a one bedroom flat (with some money left over to invest for their retirement) rather than one where the rich can live in big houses and everyone else on average salaries rents shared houses. You'd prefer the latter instead which is fair enough, and I think that's where we'll have to decide to disagree!

(And this doesn't come entirely from a personal point of view, as I'll obviously be able to buy a house when I decide it's sensible to).

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I think there's an argument for building more small places to live rather than fewer large places though. I agree you about the quality though.

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what is the current affordable housing policy?

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

It's in Planning Policy Guidance Note PPG 3 available from the Planning directorate of the ODPM. And DETR Circular 6/98 Planning Affordable Housing. Googling for the latter works: it says that "affordable" (my horror-quotes) provision should be enforced on developments of more than 25 dwellings, or 1 hectare, or in London on developments of more than 15 dwellings, etc etc.

Re: Affordable housing

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

If you follow Circular 6/98 then 'Affordable' is usually taken to mean 'for social rent' rather than 'cheap' anyway. Not that I accept your general point, because I think the concept of rich people in big houses with lodgers is a fantasy, and it just makes far more sense to build more smaller units since that's where most of the relevant excess demand is, and if it reduces the price by freeing up other properties rather than directly then so be it - especially if as you claim the new ones are actually shoddy anyway so the rich people are getting conned and the poorer people are snapping up bargains. Still, feel free to amend your Local Plan, I'm sure whereveryoulive will pop in something about more five-bed houses.

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

It's not a con against the rich, since the market matches supply and demand, but it's not in their interest since they're competing for an artificially constrained supply. The bit about lodgers was just thinking about the last large house I was in, yesterday, where my sister lodges---it's scarcely fantasy. If big houses aren't perfect for the families we have these days then they can become multiple smaller houses. It's an example to indicate the mechanisms available to people to make the most of what they've got; you don't need to worry about the mechanism.

But badly built houses remain badly built, and the only way to make good houses available for social rent is to invest in them as a social good. You can't sensibly increase the nation's housing stock on the cheap by requiring people to put up new flats in Central London that you can buy now on a teacher's salary, or on mine. Nobody gets a bargain.

As for my argument tending towards putting 5-bed houses in the Local Plan: if there's a systematic shortage of homes for enormous poor families, it might be necessary. Otherwise let the market provide.

Re: Affordable housing

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I must have missed something. If builders compete, in your view, by reducing build quality on small flats, then why don't they compete in the same way on big houses? And in what world is it more efficient to build big houses then convert them into flats than it is to, er, build flats?

You can't sensibly increase the nation's housing stock on the cheap by requiring people to put up new flats in Central London that you can buy now on a teacher's salary, or on mine. Nobody gets a bargain

People get bargains. Maybe not to that extent, but building houses is profitable, and people want to do it. You can do what you like as long as the profit margin remains acceptable, and as long as you do it to all actors in the market. Call it a tax if you want, call it the purchasers of the luxury developments subsidising the others, I care little, but you can do it.

Your sister, presumably, is a well-spoken white female. With respect, these are not the people who usually find securing housing most challenging, they're the sort of person I might take as a lodger if I had a big house.

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

Your suggestion that you'd take a more challenging tenant than my sister only bolsters my point, that there is only one housing market and it is absurd to restrict the capital invested in it in the name of accessibility.

Builders and renovators are investing capital in housing stock. Everybody else in the market is consuming housing by living in it, or speculating. Making builders build low-quality homes uneconomically in order that people who would otherwise rent can add their mortgages on these tiny ramshackle boxes to the speculative demand, while restricting supply higher up the market, increases costs and reduces living standards for everybody.

There is no shortage of housing in London and the South-East of England. On average we are occupying more space, per person, than ever before. There's a shortage of speculation opportunities for people who can raise an £80,000 mortgage---but this is what you'd expect at the height of a stock bubble.

Re: Affordable housing

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I don't think I did suggest I'd take a more challenging tenant, that was my point. There is a shortage of housing at prices people can pay - to live, not just to invest - and your continued assumption that all 'affordable housing' is for purchase is getting frustrating, as is your refusal to accept that lack of developable space is a factor in price movements - a rather bigger one than builders declining to develop because of constrained returns, in fact.

Re: Affordable housing

[(Anonymous)]

Builders certainly aren't declining to invest. I'm concerned that the constraints cap their investment, make worse use of the developable space, and leave us with poorer housing and lower living standards than we would otherwise have. And higher costs in the future, too.

Lack of space is not the leading factor in the house-price bubble, which is rather excess speculative demand. We're all living in more space than ever before.

Where there is a need for subsidised housing for people who can't afford to rent, then this needs to be invested in as a social good. But this is not the thrust of the affordable housing policy, which is intended to allow nurses and teachers and postdocs to add their speculative demand to the inflated housing market.

Moreover we poorer people must expect to live in older houses. In general refurbishing older houses is cheaper (and a better use of social investment) than building new ones since the refurbisher is not paying the cost of buying land fit for a luxury home and then building something worse.

Re: Affordable housing

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

How is affordable housing defined?

[hatter.livejournal.com]

From the local council newsletter thingie (for it falls under my local council) and if my memory for things I wasn't entirely paying attention to is correct, it's going to have 135 flats, or which 35 are 'affordable'.

Personally, I still reckon they should make it itno one huge lasertag nad paintball arena - no need to even renovate it if they do that.


the hatter