More Social Cleansing from Dave

stator

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35274783

It is time to demolish some of England's worst council estates and "rebuild houses people feel they can have a future in", the PM has said.

There should be both affordable housing for rent and to buy, Mr Cameron said, but "a shift towards more affordable housing to buy" was needed.

ie knock down 100 council flats, replace with 150 privately owned / help to buy / shared ownership flats and 20 "affordable housing" rental units accessible via the "poor door" which will then be subject to right to buy in another few years.

I don't know how he thinks single mums, pensioners and disabled people are going to buy the overpriced flats he builds where the council flats used to be.

Generali

Easy for the person that doesn't have to live among violent thugs to say.

cells

London needs to knock down a lot of the council estates and build 2-4x as dense. To be fair this has been happening for a while but the council's need to be more ambitious with very high density in inner London (remove car parking infrastructure needs to up density and those that rent or buy them will do so knowing that they can't realistically own and run a car while living there)

It would be many positives.

Lots of economic activity and jobs
More energy efficient housing stock
More people closer to work
More badly needed homes
Improved environment

cells

stator wrote: »

I don't know how he thinks single mums, pensioners and disabled people are going to buy the overpriced flats he builds where the council flats used to be.

They aren't just like they didn't buy their council flats even though they had upto 70% off the price. You can't expect disabled pensioner single mums to be buying houses in one of the most expansive cities in the world

Anyway where can you put them? About 5% if the social stock becomes vacant per year so that is over 40,000 units per year in London alone plenty of space to move the displaced due to good needed development

Mistermeaner

Let the workers be near the work and the non productive where it doesn't matter. How fair is it that working tax payers spend 1000s of their wages and 100hrs a year commuting in and out of London just so people who don't even need to be in London can keep their free house in zone2?

It's not social cleansing it's common sense

ThemeOne

I wonder what is proposed for people who've bought their flats in these estates, or even people who've bought from the original RTB tenants.

Generali

ThemeOne wrote: »

I wonder what is proposed for people who've bought their flats in these estates, or even people who've bought from the original RTB tenants.

Compulsory purchase order is normally the way they go AIUI.

Just the same as if you lived in the way of the Edinburgh tram or HS2.

antrobus

Sounds a bit like a revival of ye olde Housing Market Renewal Initiative to me. Otherwise known as Pathfinder, and was Prescott's pet project...

www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn05953.pdf

stator wrote: »

... don't know how he thinks single mums, pensioners and disabled people are going to buy the overpriced flats he builds where the council flats used to be.

... which might well explain why Labour's stated reaction to the announcement was that a "bigger scheme with more investment is required".

mwpt

stator wrote: »

ie knock down 100 council flats, replace with 150 privately owned / help to buy / shared ownership flats and 20 "affordable housing" rental units accessible via the "poor door" which will then be subject to right to buy in another few years.

I don't know how he thinks single mums, pensioners and disabled people are going to buy the overpriced flats he builds where the council flats used to be.

Surely since something like this would add 50 units to the total stock, these people could be rehoused somewhere more efficiently?

I don't really see the point in purposely building smaller, shoddier "low cost" housing. Sounds like backward thinking to me. Just build better and better houses so that people can trade up and the "low cost" housing will be those that become available at the bottom of the ladder.

Generali

I must say, I do find the phrase 'social cleansing' hateful.

It tries to draw some kind of moral equivalence between the 'ethnic cleansing' in Yugoslavia as was or Rwanda and trying to improve state owned housing in London.

There is no link between the things. It isn't, unlike what a lot of people that use this sort of ridiculous hyperbole would have you believe, a small step from knocking over a few tower blocks that have never served the purpose for which they were built to knocking over millions of people because you deem them to belong to the 'wrong' race.

stator

mwpt wrote: »

Surely since something like this would add 50 units to the total stock, these people could be rehoused somewhere more efficiently?

Most private landlords refuse to accept HB. Social housing is being destroyed through RTB and lack of new build letting units to replace.
I don't see where people will live if the private landlords don't want them.