From The Daily Mail:
A housing estate built at the start of the millennium in the hope it will last 100 years face being demolished after just 13 years due to a new re-forestation plan.
Wessex Investors built 100 traditional English houses in 2000 to provide homes for people who live and work in the ancient Cornish market town. But now the estate, which lines Millennium Avenue could be torn down to make way for forestry.
The plans which have riled many locals, are currently under examination by Cornwall council. Timber conglomerate Launceston Lumber plc, which intends to plant hundreds of slow-growing oak trees to produce high-quality timber in the Pennygillam area of Launceston later this century, insists there is no other option and their plan would provide 4 new jobs to local people.
"This has been on the drawing board for nearly two years and we are trying to accommodate everyone the best we can," managing director Andrew Pegg told The Independent. "'While several dozen families will be made homeless under current plans, we intend to install a couple of mobile homes in the new development to provide living accommodation for the forestry workers."
Wednesday, 29 May 2013
"Houses built to last a century face being demolished after just 13 years to make way for a new forest"
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8 comments:
Meanwhile large areas of forest in the US are being chopped down to provide wood pellets for UK power stations...
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/5/28/environmentalism-brings-you-forest-clear-cutting.html
MD, that's a good post by the Bish as usual, and I liked the lengthy comment by Radical Rodent.
and yet, people in Cornwall continually complain that locals can't afford housing because of people buying 2nd homes. If only there was a way to deal with that "demand" problem...
TS, but do they? Or is it just the priced out generation who complain? Or do they all blame the second homers? Or do they cop out and all blame it on "Labour's mass immigration"?
I like going there on holiday, but we were busy doing touristy stuff, I didn't stop to ask anybody about house prices.
MW,
Oh, it's quite normal for people in Cornwall (along with the Lakes) to complain about how there aren't enough homes. Both blame the people buying up 2nd homes. None of them seem to consider that Cornwall is pretty much empty.
But of course, even homies that want homes for young people would rather they built them somewhere out of range of their house prices.
folks in the Cotswolds always complain about not being able to afford houses...but if they had a plan for a b&b, I am sure they could live in the centre of an historic village with loads of antique shoppes..
There are plenty of 2nd homes here in West Wales, too and it is true to say that the 2nd homers have more buying power than the locals, so that pushes prices up. However it's only in the pretty villages and along the coast that you get this and if all the 2nd homers sold up, the general countrywide price inflation would mean that these houses would still be beyond the reach of first-time buyers. Most people calling for more housing to be built are labouring under the misapprehension that this would bring down prices, when experience shows that it would just result in more houses at prices people cannot afford, even if it means that many of the new houses never sell. There is an excellent example of this in my local town, where a warehouse has been converted into flats which have now been empty for two years or more.
Bayard,
Isn't that partly about what happens to flats after a boom? I've noticed that when a bubble bursts, the first casualties are flats, because no-one is desperate for one any longer.
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