Cargo Cult Improvement

From The Guardian

Just over a decade ago, Mulhouse, a town of 110,000 people near the German and Swiss borders, was a symbol of the death of the European high street. One of the poorest towns of its size in France, this former hub of the textile industry had long ago been clobbered by factory closures and industrial decline.

...

Today, Mulhouse is known for the staggering transformation of its thriving centre, bucking the national trend for high street closures.

The article goes into all the normal Guardian favourites like independent shops and god help me, f**king trams. These people think that gentrification is all about putting the independent shops there and that makes everyone richer and they spend money. In reality this is a by-product. You get the fancy, overpriced shops when you get the richer people.

What's really happened in the past decade is that a new shiny high speed LGV line was built linking Mulhouse to Dijon, cutting the time from something like 2:30 to more like 1:00, and onwards, Mulhouse to Lyon is down from 4:30 to 3:00. There's also a plan to have a branch going around Dijon to join up with a TGV to Paris, and to extend the line down to Lyon.

As expected.

From the BBC:

The housing market in the UK is "broken", according to the government and more homes are needed to cope with demand.

So why don't we use all those properties lying empty across the UK?

In some places in the UK, whole streets are empty because the area is no longer somewhere people want to live. John Bibby from the charity Shelter explains that this is usually for economic reasons, such as local industries closing down.

The potential council tax on such homes, where the location value is nil, is clearly too high. In marginal cases, an exemption from council tax (and business rates) might be enough to tempt people back.

The key to rejuvenating an area has been observed time and again. Get a load of artists, musicians, craft brewers and specialist shops to open up, tempted by low rents and no taxes, then sit back and wait as it becomes 'cool', then higher earners move in, the little shops get replaced by High Street chains etc ('gentrification'). At this stage, the council can re-impose council tax and business rates, the artists and small shopkeepers are priced out anyway (or cash in and sell up), move somewhere else and start again.

Buy-to-leave is becoming a problem in inner cities, particularly London.

Wealthy investors from outside the UK buy homes in new developments, with no intention of living in them or renting them out, simply as an investment opportunity. The estate agent Savills estimates that two-thirds of foreign buyers are investors.

However some local authorities have attempted to clamp down on this with some success, by charging extra council tax on homes left empty for more than two years. In the borough of Camden in London this tactic has reduced the number of empty properties by 40%.

That statistic seems highly questionable to me, but let's take it at face value. In these areas, council tax is clearly too low. Bump it up and you get fewer vacants.
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If you replaced council tax, business rates and Stamp Duty Land Tax with straight Land Value Tax (just for starters), all this would happen automatically of course. Having a Citizen's Income would give low-earning artists, musicians etc an extra push to move there; they can merrily do their stuff without any hassle from the social.

Simon Jenkins on top form

From the Evening Standard:

I visited Brixton as a young reporter, to witness old residents fighting landlords who were winkling them out in order to turn their terraces over to West Indian multi-occupation. Resistance was so fierce that in the early Seventies Lambeth council went Tory. A local councillor by the name of John Major became housing chairman. Such was the turmoil that by the Eighties Brixton had become synonymous with riots.

The urban wheel keeps turning. Brixton is no different from Islington, North Kensington, Camden or Stoke Newington. Yesterday’s migrant is today’s gentrifier. Inner London has always been a place of change and renewal. When its economy lags, housing tenure tends to stabilise. When the economy booms, “gentrification” sweeps across the city like a hurricane…

Yet it is hard to see what anti-gentrification protesters hope to achieve. Subsidising housing for the genuinely poor is sound welfare. But the idea of “local people” as such being entitled to housing security [in one area] for life was a socialist whitewashing of anti-immigrant prejudice. Romantics may proclaim the need for rural villages to keep out “foreigners” but in a city this makes no sense. It is London’s role as a national melting pot.