Hackney to lose 915 social homes in estate regeneration ‘disaster’
Colville towers: part of the regeneration scheme for the Colville Estate
Government plans for £140 million worth of estate regeneration will mean 915 fewer social homes in Hackney, according to new research.
Under new proposals the borough is set to gain just 15 affordable homes in their place, while 3,343 new homes will be created to be sold at market price.
Assembly Member Darren Johnson compiled the figures using data from the GLA’s London Development Database. They reveal Hackney will be the fourth worst hit borough for loss of social housing, after Southwark, Greenwich and Ealing.
Meanwhile neighbouring boroughs will see an increase in social housing, with 27 new homes in Tower Hamlets and 181 in Islington.
Darren Johnson, chair of the London Assembly’s Housing Committee, who obtained the data, called the plans a “complete disaster” that will “benefit wealthy property developers rather than ordinary Londoners”.
The estate regeneration scheme was announced in January by Prime Minister David Cameron, and will see council estates demolished to make way for new homes, with funds provided for local councils, housing associations and community groups.
‘Sink estates’
Announcing the scheme, Mr Cameron said: “For decades, sink estates – and frankly, sometimes the people who lived in them – had been seen as something simply to be managed. It’s time to be more ambitious at every level.
“The mission here is nothing short of social turnaround, and with massive estate regeneration, tenants protected, and land unlocked for new housing all over Britain, I believe we can tear down anything that stands in our way.”
But Councillor Philip Glanville, Hackney’s cabinet member for housing, has slammed the prime minister’s plans.
“We wholeheartedly disagree with the prime minister’s narrative and use of pejorative language when he talks about so-called ‘sink estates’,” Cllr Glanville said.
“These figures show only limited research into planning restrictions and regeneration – modern planning guidelines require a mix of multi-bedroom homes instead of simply replacing the high numbers of poor quality bedsits and one-bedroom flats that earlier decades built.”
Cllr Glanville pointed to Hackney Council’s estate regeneration and housing supply schemes as better ways to improve areas, by working with residents to “deliver new social rent and shared ownership homes on existing estates”.
Darren Johnson, a former Green Party councillor for Lewisham, has called for an end to estate demolitions, saying community-led renovation plans should be used instead.
“With a few exceptions, estate regeneration has been a complete disaster in London and has made our housing crisis worse.
“We need a focus on improving estates and building additional council housing, rather than flattening them and losing precious social housing.”
The worst affected London borough under the plans would be Southwark, which is set to lose 2051 social rented homes.
This article was amended 13:00 on Friday 26 January 2016. The original article showed a photograph of the Pembury Estate. This has been replaced with an image of the Colville Estate towers. – Ed.
Does anyone know which estates in hackney they plan to develop? How do I find out?
I would like to know, too. I grew up there; on the same estate as Alan Sugar.
It’s easy enough to find the proposed regeneration plans for Hackney on their web site. http://www.hackney.gov.uk/regeneration.htm#.Vr4mnObN2VY (I am assuming this is what the Councillor is referring to.)
But isn’t the point that the Government’s new housing proposal undermine the council’s right to determine the level of social housing to private. ie despite the Tories saying they want local people to determine local agendas the way they are restricting and determing how money is spent means councils have no autonomy and local people even less. https://www.rt.com/uk/330585-housing-bill-crisis-council/
That looks like pembury estate
That is Pembury estate,where I grew up and where my parents still live!! This government is the worst ever!!!!!!! And only look after they’re own pockets!!
That’s the Pembury estate. So sad, saw it going that way years ago. The house prices in Clapton have shot up, the make-up of those blocks have also changed dramatically. Extreamly sad indeed.
This goverment hasn’t a clue as we are lacking social housing at present they now want to make more to be rehoused if they knock pembury down they can’t rehouse the ones on list atoment this will just knock everybody back on the housing list
Melissa – At present Hackney Council is in the process of clearing and intensifying 18 estates, and their details can be found here – http://www.hackney.gov.uk/regeneration.htm. The estates in alphabetical order are:
01 Aikin Court
02 Alexandra National House redeveloped as Finsbury Park Place
03 Bridge House, Brooklime House, and Chervil House
04 Coleville Estate
05 Frampton Park Estate including the Frampton Arms
06 Great Eastern Building
07 Haggerston Estate
08 Holly Street
09 King Edwards Road
10 Kings Crescent Estate
11 Marian Court
12 Nightingale Estate
13 Ottaway Court redeveloped as Dunnock Mews
14 Rendelsham House redeveloped as Goldcrest Mews
15 St Leonards Court
16 Tower Court
17 West Kingsland Estate
18 Woodberry Down
Within this list of 18 estates the “Six Estates” considered as a package by Hackney are 02, 03, 11, 13, 14, and 16.
These have mostly seen their existing tenants and leasehold owner occupiers cleared and face demolition. The next wave of estates that Hackney is planning might be cleared the same way, or might be “intensified” by filling in all the green spaces and retaining the existing stock.
Dear Hackney Citizen – this article is not the whole truth. Councillor Glanville is in charge of the 18 estate clearance programme. Darren Johnson represents the GLA, which is encouraging the clearance programme, that Hackney and Newham are pioneering. The GLA has produced this report: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/up_or_out_report.pdf
Labour’s Nicky Gavron:
‘In the last ten years, 50 estates with over 30,000 homes have undergone regeneration schemes, delivering nearly twice as many new homes on the sites of London’s demolished social housing estates as were there before’.
The doubling of density has been her numbers game. Gavron has a task at the Greater London Authority. It is expected that London will grow by 100,000 people a year over the next decade. Which equates to the GLA’s probable underestimate of 50,000 additional homes needed each year.
That is net additions, not counting demolitions and replacements. The numbers are projected through to 2039 when “compact” London is expected to have a population of 11 million. Quite rightly Gavron wonders where an additional 2.4 million people will live in 24 years. She counts up the land available to the planners she addresses, and knows that London will fall far short on house building UNLESS the GLA can redevelop the existing housing estates in Local Authority ownership.
‘Experts have estimated that 360,000 dwellings across London are in post-war council estates.’
The “experts” Gavron refers to are the Labour authors of City Villages: More homes, better communities, IPPR, March 2015. The Conservatives agreed, and the City Villages author Labour Peer Andrew Adonis found it easy to cross the floor of the House of Lords. Lord Richard Rogers stayed with Labour. This is the culmination of his life’s work.
http://www.ippr.org/publications/city-villages-more-homes-better-communities
Perhaps a million residents will be cleared or built around. Double densify those Local Authority estates and 720,000 households will be involved in the consequent developments. That net addition of 360,000 is just over 7 years worth of the supply needed. Not quite a third of the house building called for over the 24 years to 2039. A trebling of density is plausible, providing over 14 years worth of development, but anything much more intensive might prove difficult. Therefore the GLA will need to look elsewhere for land at the same time as cramming Local Authority estates.
Other land supply is available to Gavron’s planners, in contaminated land, public assets, and the like, but the GLA will mostly rely on the City Villages approach to estates. The development options from the GLA’s point of view include ‘… demolition and comprehensive redevelopment, additions to existing blocks and smaller infill using underused open space or redundant uses such as garage blocks.’
Gavron is not willing to start compulsorily purchasing swathes of privately owned London. She makes a clear summary of why estates offer the easiest approach from the combined view of the GLA, Local Authorities, and developers:
‘London’s housing estates are, for a variety of factors, particularly suitable to bridge the gap between the capital’s housing need and the capacity to deliver new homes and to generate the increased densities needed:
-They are in single ownership;
-Many were built at densities significantly lower than that considered sustainable today;
-Many estates are in highly accessible locations that can support higher densities; and,
-Many estates, due to their age, design and maintenance history, require renewal.’
All true. She might also have added that this only involves taking on a million of the worst paid, out of work and individually powerless people in London. The middle class can relax for a generation at least over her plan. The equity rich and petty landlords can even look on all of this as an investment opportunity.
The politically operative phrase is “considered sustainable today”. Gavron is devoted to sustainability, and her “compact” London protects the countryside from the mass of population. Indeed she could claim much of the credit for the environmentalist vision of a contained future London from Lord Richard Rogers, which turned into New Labour policy after 1999. Gavron has worked consistently to keep London contained, and without seeking the publicity that surrounded the Urban Task Force luminaries. She has a scheme.
Gavron promises to ‘… enable all residents to understand the impacts for them as the scheme progresses and evolves.’ She will be helping hundreds of thousands of residents to understand that the “impacts” are to house hundreds of thousands of others in the next 24 years. The argument will revolve around whether the old SHOULD make way for the new residents, or more accurately the landlords who are renting out most of the new stock, if it all goes to the Gavron plan. City Villages was a prospectus for “good” private landlords, who will be the new leaseholders paying ground rent and licence fees to London’s largely Labour Local Authorities. This is truly audacious.
‘Not all of these sites might come forward for development’, she warns. That is also true. But 2.4 million extra Londoners cannot be crammed into the existing stock without some very serious co-habitation. The Labour activist claim that enough homes are standing empty is nonsense. Many more households will be forced to share houses than happens already if 50,000 homes a year are not built somewhere within reach of employment in London.
‘Nothing is off the table in this report’, says Gavron. That is not the truth. There is no questioning the containment policy. Gavron is adamant:
‘The Green Belt comprises 22 per cent of London’s total area. The London Plan strongly supports the protection, promotion and enhancement of London’s open spaces and protecting the current extent of London’s Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land.’
Green Belts, including London’s, account for 13% of Britain’s area. In contrast the total lived in area is 6%. Containment in 1947 was thought in the 1970s to have stopped London becoming a “megalopolis”. But London as a functioning region is bigger than the Local Authorities that comprised the London County Council and the Greater London Council, the predecessors to the GLA. A more dynamic London is not what Gavron is about. She campaigned against road widening in the 1970s, and is a tireless Green strategist.
‘Abolishing the GLC was such a vindictive measure and it took away London’s ability to be strategic. I set out in my mind to do everything to see London government restored.’
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/jan/04/guardiansocietysupplement2
After the abolition of the GLC in 1986 Gavron stood as a councillor in Archway ward, but had wider environmental ambitions. She became Labour leader and then Chair of the London Planning Advisory Committee, to develop strategies like Congestion Charging. The London Plan was Gavron’s initiative, and she is proud of it. The GLA was created in 2000 with planning powers, and took over where LPAC left off. Containment strengthened by the likes of Gavron after 1999 has been extraordinarily successful at stopping “sprawl”. The charge of “sprawl” is raised when cheap land is accessed so that working people manage to get a house and garden at low cost. That prospect is certainly “off the table”. The eco-containment she has long advocated has caused this unaffordable housing market. The unaffordability spreads far beyond the GLA’s power boundary. Deflating the market is not her strategy.
Gavron’s scheme is to use the inflated housing market to heighten the containment with forced clearance or intensification. She is promising some 10% of Londoners they will be evicted from or asked to live in a building site at some time in the next quarter of a century. Meanwhile the Green Belt, which is only a part of Britain’s protected countryside, is sacrosanct for Gavron. Population growth is good. London has long been a World City, and marvellous because of that. 11 million people can be London. We should be allowed to grow as the region that we are. London’s lowest paid population should not be compacted so that Greenfield land can remain mostly redundant.
To house 2.4 million more people is a great challenge which could be met with a plan to build say 24 New Towns over 24 years in a ring around London’s orbital and radial infrastructure. These might be at an average of 40,000 homes each, with a larger household average, and they would take a quarter of a century to complete. That is not Gavron’s way, and she will not let it be the GLA’s way on her watch either.
She might get her way. After all, who will stop her? Not Labour’s activists, who will hope that intensification means the protection/provision of social housing, missing the fact that New Towns were social housing. Labour’s activists are mostly as Green as Gavron, and they like containment. Not the middle class of (possibly Labour voting) wanna-be landlords either, though they too could buy stock in New Towns. Roger Scruton’s conservatives and the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s 60,000 members will back Gavron’s scheme. If “sprawl” were allowed, or 24 London New Towns planned, then more might be planned in fields within view of their homes. After all, London is one region with population growth. The coming election for London Mayor is a vote about the other regions and their countryside, as much as it is about London.
As Yolande Barnes knows at Savills, it is going to be far easier to sell the infill-with-local-support idea than carry on with a series of complete estate clearances. Gavron needs a democratic story up to May 2016. Barnes seems to be the estate agent who provided it to her in the report Completing London’s Streets. The subtitle is “How the regeneration and intensification of housing estates could increase London’s supply of homes and benefit residents”. Unfortunately developers may prefer to have a cleared site. By saying “developers” I am including the Local Authority landowners themselves, because they may want the profits from building homes for sale to some owner occupiers, a growing class of petty private landlords, and PRS institutions.
http://234.v3.savills-vx.com/research_articles/184932/198087-0
Gavron likes to pose in the GLA as a critic of developers:
‘What we are seeing is developers gaming the system. They inflate the costs and that includes, too, at the point of buying the land. The land value is inflated, too. They inflate the costs and then play down the value of the scheme until it is built out… There is now an industry norm of a 20% to 25% profit margin or rate of return. That is extraordinarily high. There is no other industry that has a profit margin like that, backed by law, because you have a government inspector behind it.’
http://35percent.org/images/GLA_Transcript_ViabilityMQ150715.pdf
No doubt Local Authorities have been duped over the years when it comes to negotiating a share of the planning gain. Yet even in 2011/12, deep in a long construction recession, Local Authorities around England are thought to have extracted £3.7 billion from developers as the aggregate price of residential planning approvals. That is before profits. Not content with a direct take of planning gain, Gavron is planning a steady public land supply to ensure those profits continue for a generation, and in ways that can equally profit Local Authorities as the developer. This is a business backed by the powerful planning law. Gavron holds that power, while pretending planners are being “gamed”. She attempts a deception.
The triptych of City Villages, Completing London’s Streets, and Up or Out provide a briefing to both Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan in the GLA mayoral election, and the authors know it. Both prospective Mayors might continue to plump for the “we will consult the residents” lie in the intensification option. It will make the middle class feel happier about empowering a Mayor to pursue the policy, and will trick enough residents in the impenetrable planning process.
The audacity of the mendacity!
The next Mayor will of course blame existing residents if he doesn’t get his way at every placatory consultation exercise scrutinised by Gavron.
https://www.london.gov.uk/about-us/london-assembly/london-assembly-publications/or-out-false-choice-options-london%E2%80%99s-growth
Regards
Ian Abley
When is this taking place?
A few questions, not sure if anyone knows…
Why are Hackney and Newham pioneers of this approach? Since when??
Also….how many empty properties are there in London?
Isn’t crossrail about making it easier for people to live further out, therefore allowing zones 1=2 to be cleansed of the working class?
thanks for the link Ian
It’s showing Clarence Road! It’s that E8?
See a reply to your comment …Clarence Road
Coalville estate is basically nearly all gone!!
The building shown here is on Morning Lane .
Interesting that so much can be said about the regeneration plans when the advisory panel only met for the first time last week and has yet to publish a report.
Despite local Councillors finding it convenient to blame the Government to a local audience, Councils will continue to be the main drivers in how much social housing they provide.
I’m assuming that Darren Johnson would have preferred to leave the old Holly Street intact?
I’m not sure the current residents of the development would have agreed.
About time they got rid of these estates and started building proper apartments, ones that people like me can invest in.
It has been much reported that £140 million across London council housing stock is peanuts, thus the government narrative is only an attention grabber.
You make the Local Authority sound like the casualty of government policy, rather than the municipal means by which it is carried out. Sure Parliament sets rules (and there are plenty of draconian ones in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 that all parties have amended in parts to their liking) but that does not mean every elected Councillor has to do as they are told. Hackney as a Local Authority chose to clear 18 estates. Councillors are choosing to expand the redevelopment programme and use all the powers in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 at their disposal. The council will attack a few “rogue landlords” in the glare of publicity while accepting fees from “good landlords” and helping the expansion of private rental in the Borough. Councillors in Hackney are innovating ways in which they can turn the freehold estate land they control into more of an asset for the Municipal Corporation.
There are very few empty homes in London compared to the growth of the population, and it is a good thing London is growing. There may be a small percentage of owners who do not live in their homes or rent out. There is always a turnover of empties by the Local Authority or Housing Associations. But they are not numerous. Danny Dorling sought to prove statistically that the population could be fitted into the empty bedrooms of Britain, but that is a silly exercise. There is certainly not enough housing to accommodate London growing from 8.6 to 11.0 million. But that does not mean the existing residents (tenants and leaseholders) have to make way for the widespread redevelopments of Local Authority freehold that the next London Mayor will champion. Nor does it explain why there is no plan to build housing at low rents, even at the far end of the commuter rail connections radiating and orbiting around London. There is no housing policy. There is only a policy to establish the private rental sector as a relief to the public rental sector.
I realise I have come back to this discussion late, but let me build on what has been said above.
The list of the 18 sites is correct, but what is missing is that residents both tenants and leaseholders have a right to return to their estates or one of the other estates in the programme. Indeed, nearly all the regeneration schemes are partially managed by resident steering groups that sign off the plans and are involved in procuring contractors. All new social rented homes and shared ownership homes built remain with the council. Any private homes built and sold are purely there to fund the regeneration schemes and in many cases these new buyers will effectively become council leaseholders meaning the council retains ownership and management of these renewed estates. Across the programme it will deliver 2,760 homes 52% or which will be genuinely affordable.
Beyond the existing estate regeneration programme there are no plans to expand the programme to include any more estates, and let me be clear there are no sink estates in Hackney. The Tory plans for so called ‘sink estates’ are ill thought out and the £140m worth of flexible loans they are offering private developers dwarfs the £440m that Hackney is investing in new homes. The Council will resist any attempt by the Government to impose estate regeneration on any new estates in Hackney. One of the many reasons we also oppose the policy is that contrary to Cameron saying estates have been neglected for decades, in Hackney we have invested over £300m over the past 10 years to bring them up to a modern standard and we will be continuing that programme next year with a further £70m of modernisation.
Going forward the Council will continue to deliver the Estate Regeneration Programme, but has also agreed last Monday at Cabinet to a new Housing Supply Programme that will look at ‘grey sites’ existing estates that could be used for new homes. Unlike previous infill schemes this will be Council led delivering new council homes, shared ownership and private sale to pay for the programme. You can find out more here: http://mginternet.hackney.gov.uk/documents/s47794/hs%20k57_HSP_Cabinet_Report_FINAL.pdf It involves no demolition of existing homes and also outlines how the new council homes will be let to local families in housing need. The tenure mix across this new programme will be: 35% council rent, 35% council shared ownership and 30% private sale – a 70/30 split in favour of genuinely affordable homes for local people. Hackney unlike the Government is committed to building genuinely affordable homes in the borough, proving that where there is the political will to do so it can be done.
The idea of a “Right to Return” from Councillor Glanville is an empty promise. How will residents return? Former residents, both tenants and leaseholders, will not be able to afford to return. The rents go up, and those forced to sell up to Compulsory Purchase Orders will not be paid the price of a new home in the redevelopment. That is myth number one in Councillor Glanville’s rhetoric.
Myth number two is that there is a 70/30 split. Council Shared Ownership is still a sale. That means there is a 65/35 split between sales (whole or in part) and rental redevelopment. The Local Authority gets the revenue from the Council Shared Ownership. Nor is there any commitment to keep the prices of purchase or the rents low.
In fact the Local Authority WANTS the revenue from sales, and will maximise it. Just as it wants the maximum rent. In reality the Local Authority would probably rather be a developer than a direct landlord, making more revenue from sales. Councillor Glanville makes no secret about that in print. It seems that like Newham, Hackney is quite willing to reduce its tenants (while giving an empty promise of a return) and increase its stock of leaseholders who have paid handsomely to get in on the redevelopments. The sales in large part go to private landlords, who then take over charging private rents, and paying a Ground Rent under council licence as a landlord.
The aristocratic “Great Estates” live off their freehold in this way. Local Authorities can reduce their direct landlord function, and maximise their returns as the freeholder. It is as old as the hills.
Councillor Glanville is promising not to redevelop further than the 18 estates. He may be telling a partial truth if he follows the advice of Yolande Barnes at Savills and Anne Power at the London School of Economics. They advise not to demolish entire estates. They advise INTENSIFICATION while leaving existing residents on site, and building in between on gap sites. I am sure the Local Authority will be coming up with all sorts of schemes that might look different to a complete CLEARANCE. If the Local Authority is the developer as well as the planning authority and the freeholder they can pretty much do what they like, unopposed as they are.
But let us be clear. It is the Local Authority that Councillor Glanville represents which is choosing to force up rents and cash in on inflating house prices within their own boundary. They will maximise their returns on redevelopment, even if Councillor Glanville has to mythologise what his council is doing to make it seem “fair”. People know better. There is no “Right to Return” you can take to the bank as an existing resident on council owned land. Fairness has very little to do with major development finance.
To compare to the idea of 70%(public) and 30%(private) the split proposed by the latest Hackney (HSP not ERP) development package is 35%(higher rent) and 65%(full or part sale) with no proposal to keep either rents or sale prices low. This is a far cry from a time when a Local Authority would borrow cheaply over 60 years to build on their own land to establish themselves as a public landlord with a stock of housing that was low cost. That was always a subsidy to local employers, able to pay lower wages, but when low wages was all there was, it meant low housing costs for working class families. Today Hackney council is the developer, and their clientèle are middle class private landlords, not the voting (and no better paid) tenants. There is a huge need for rental housing for all generations. But what Hackney is building is high rent housing let by the room to the young. Then, when the Housing and Planning Bill becomes an Act, Hackney will licence their client landlords.
It is win-win for the likes of Councillor Glanville as the inflating housing market disconnects further from the reality of wages.
They fail to tell you about the tenants with MHI they conned out of their new homes so they have a property yo sell off at top price, they fail to tell you how the decant officers put pressure on you making you so stressed you think and believe you could end up any where ,they also fail to tell you how corrupt the tenants association are , they are also failing to tell you how we was conned into signing away our right to return , Councillor Glanville shame on you for dressing up another disaster
I am returning my inconvenience cheque £4750 as this is a corruption payment , after being conned out of a new home , all I want is 20 Harwood court back , even the stench ,at least you knew your worth
Steve West and Steve Johnson both speak the truth. The tricks and pressures that Hackney Council use to “winkle” out their tenants and leaseholders are a disgrace, but nothing new. Every devious landlord employs these measures to get their properties back when they can make more money from another deal. Private and public landlords are no different. It is a myth that the Council is a benevolence rather than a Municipal Corporation run for the benefit of its members and commercial constituency of businesses. Empty promises like the “Right to Return” are a lie. The sad thing is that Glanville and his cronies have only just started to become developers.
But, but, but Glanville wants homes! Or at least that’s what he’s claimed. http://www.philipglanville.london/about-me
This guy Glanville is running for Mayor of Hackney. Ain’t got my vote. This is a joke. New properties? Hackney has mainly been knocking places down because they refuse the upkeep costs and blame tenants instead. Tenants become discouraged when all they see is the builds being run into the ground, how do you make a home when the council, tenants associations, housing associations don’t do their jobs?! It’s all corrupt. They build family flats, so that single occupants are pushed out of the borough, and that means elderly and people who have family or carers in the borough are forced to leave their support networks. When they build single occupant dwellings they’re priced out because the rent goes up. No wonder Hackney is becoming overcrowded! You can’t walk down Mare street without people pushing into you anymore.
This guy Glanville is in it for the money and game like the rest of them. How is this guy any different than the Tories making sure their banking friends get kick backs from the taxpayers? He writes ” £300m over the past 10 years to bring them up to a modern standard and we will be continuing that programme next year with a further £70m of modernisation”, where is he talking about? Maybe the New Era estate, and a few of the posh ones they like to use for stock photos but £300m? My estate has constant problems with plumbing, leaks, drainage because they brought in cheap, smaller pipes for draining…clever! So our rates go up because of this. What does modern standard even mean? Is he referring to CCTV? Working elevators? Double glazed windows and insulation? Or people walking around with megaphones telling tenants how great their estate is because this happens on my estate! What does he mean and where, where has this money gone? Because that’s a lot of money and if you look around Hackney you can see a lot of estates are being run into the ground. No elevators, no double glazed windows, damp, rats, bad plumbing, no insulation, only a few problems of non-modernised buildings.
Politicians are public servants who serve themselves and themselves only. I’m sure this guy thinks he’s doing a great job and he’s super committed and different than the last mayor but how? It’s the same message being spouted over and over again and yet the poor, working classes, single and families who are Hackney residents continue to get pushed out to make room for super-mega stores and fashion districts, wealthy investment properties and million pound properties being let out at way too much. Maybe he means well but it looks like a lot of people are going to be homeless because of the lack of investment, and selfish people making a lot of money off the back of the poor and Glanville doesn’t seem to be honest enough to admit it.
Already there’s places popping up near some of the estates which are being knocked down by Homerton, called Pocket dwelling. The properties are so small, like how some Japanese are forced to live. It’s sickening. I think the land there belongs to network rail, but I could be wrong. But this is how the council will move forward for single occupants, small tiny dwellings. And all the time they’re building more and more on the marshes which is meant to be protected from build. Instead, they could just invest in what they already have and build on available land, put rent caps in place, there’s so many options and they only choose to push people out because they want the money. That’s what it always comes down to, lining their pockets. Families, elderly, single working class people who contribute to Hackney’s variety will be priced out.
People will eventually see this for it is, the LA pushing prices up to push the poor out and make Hackney look like a shiny dump and in turn look like they’ve improved the borough.
Government plans for £140 million worth of estate regeneration will mean 915 fewer social homes in Hackney, according to new research.
Under new proposals the borough is set to gain just 15 affordable homes in their place, while 3,343 new homes will be created to be sold at market price.
Mayor Glanville – show some muscle