Tuesday 29 July 2014

"There’s room for 10,000 new luxury apartments on spare land in council estates, say London Tories"

From The Evening Standard:

There is enough “redundant” land on London’s council estates to build an extra 10,000 luxury apartments, a report concludes today.

It claims that blocks could be built on swaths of derelict land currently being used for old laundries, garages and housing poor people and calls for “urgent” action to push councils to survey the land and sell it to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.

A spokesman for Mayor Boris Johnson’s office said it had seen the report and was planning to allow the construction of top-end flats for buy-to-leave investors.

The report was released 24 hours after research showed that London’s housing crisis was deepening, with many multi-millionaires locked out of the market, with some oligarchs spending almost half a year's income to snap up a London pad.

Today’s report, Gap In The Top End Of The Market, identifies 4,552 redundant spaces in 13 boroughs. Tory London Assembly members behind the report extrapolated the figures to estimate that 10,000 glittering show homes and penthouses could be built across the city.

Steve O’Connell, report author and Assembly member, said: “We need an urgent, mass-scale, co-ordinated effort to turn the thousands of redundant spaces in blocks and estates into seldom-used housing for our party donors.”

He also highlighted Southwark Council's achievement in rehousing 1,500 social tenants to make way for privately owned flats at Elephant & Castle.

6 comments:

Sackerson said...

So much for the "need" for new housing.

Bayard said...

Of course the councils concerned could sell the land off at undervalue, together with a clawback clause, so that any capital gain on the land over and above the gain to adjacent land, i.e. the difference between the selling price and the market value, has to be paid back to the council on the sale of the property. This would produce what everyone says first time buyers want, truly affordable homes, but of course, that's not what they actually want, because it doesn't get them onto the housing ladder that's propped against the magic money tree. If it did happen there'd soon be lots of wailing about "unfair clawback clauses" and people being "trapped" in their low value homes.

JuliaM said...

In other London-related news:

http://t.co/giFxqTUYLE

Mark Wadsworth said...

JM, thanks. All very worrying.

Kj said...

Bayard: Yup, I know of actual court cases where owners of housing with contract restrictions on resale-prices/clawbacks, has claimed them "unfair", for the reasons you cite. And the f... courts have ruled in favour of them as well.

Derek said...

"the housing ladder that's propped against the magic money tree".

Love it!