Grenfell ex-residents should get a 3-bed house with a garden if that's what they want

[pingodolcepo]

Daily mail outrage that some of the residents are asking for a 3-bed house with a garden. But honestly, they have been through a living hell that was caused by someone else's very bad choices.

There are plenty of people in London that have a 3 bed council house, why can't these people that have dealt with horrors get one also?

I know someone that got a council house in Highgate in the 80s, was a cabbie with a good wage, bought it when offered and sold it a few years ago for over a million and now lives in a fab place with loads of land and a pool in the south of France. If plenty of normal people got houses why can't these poor residents get one? They won't ever be able to afford to buy it due to the high cost of london houses now.

Here's a good one. Best I can tell, local authorities haven't built a home in 27 years.

I sympathise with each and every one of them for the terrible ordeals that they have been through. I don’t think that they all should be given 3 bedroom houses and they should get what is required for them and be given suitable housing. Lots of people suffer horrible experiences, where would you draw the line?

Some definitely are building. (This is like a memory test.) Croydon, Birmingham, Swindon, others....

Thank you FluffyWuffy, didn't want to boast about my children, but OldPony definitely thinks we are all Jeremy Kyle characters intent on screwing the system, and I know I would never get a tenancy now, but what do we do? go back to the days of Rachman in Notting Hill in the fiftes before social housing, I have some wonderful hardworking social housing tenant neighbours here in my area, and I voted Labour of course in this years elections, and we have the first Labour council ever in k&c, but the gap between rich and poor in this borough is getting wider , meanwhile they've just spent millions on renovations to Kensington Palace down the road and no one bats an eyelid.

Some definitely are building. (This is like a memory test.) Croydon, Birmingham, Swindon, others....

Croydon: 101
Birmingham: 110

Drop in the ocean. Less than a drop in the ocean.

Best I can tell, local authorities haven't built a home in 27 years.

But we've just come up with a couple of hundred in seconds and the point is at least some LAs are trying to build again and showing it can be done, which is a start,

Looking again, I am not sure any of those will actually be social housing. Some sort of "affordable housing" it looks like.

Social housing is sometimes called "affordable". It's a subset of affordable.

A quick google says Birmingham and Croydon are housing social tenants in their new builds. Swindon has recently. Lambeth are also proposing to build social rent council housing.

Given these housing conditions, please can one of you people kicking these fire victims tell me what is supposed to happen?

Where the hell are people supposed to live? What do you want to happen to poor and low-waged people?

Tell me what you will do with them?

Eep. That was a sudden swerve

Local Authorities have not been permitted to build housing and certainly could not when Right to Buy was being promoted. They didn’t keep the money from the sales either.

Social housing, as it is now called, is built by housing associations or developers and then rented out by housing associations. Many councils have no Council owned homes at all. The LA I worked for passed all its housing stock over to a housing association in the early 1980s.

If you do not understand the history of social housing, you would not understand the lack of Council house building. Basically, there has not been any for a generation until a few green shoots recently.

Building housing to rent at low rents in mega expensive areas just does not add up. If you can’t charge a commercial rent it is a serious loss. That is why there isn’t enough of it in the mega expensive areas. Plus, the cost of land is huge and because there is a finite and highly controlled supply of it. Even in areas destined for development around the country, no-one wants housing next to them! All the schemes get delayed; many stagnate for years because of planning arguments with the public and interest groups.

If Councils can fast track developments and bypass public consultation, planning appeals and lengthy delays we could get way more houses quickly. There are areas that can see expansion of social housing, but how you do this in K and C is beyond me!

Of course people who lost their homes in the fire must be rehoused and quickly.
I just don't think that's possible to do in the same borough.

Local Authorities have not been permitted to build housing and certainly could not when Right to Buy was being promoted. They didn’t keep the money from the sales either.

I think you're confusing permission to build with the retention of capital receipts.

Social housing, as it is now called, is built by housing associations or developers and then rented out by housing associations. Many councils have no Council owned homes at all. The LA I worked for passed all its housing stock over to a housing association in the early 1980s.

Stock transfer didn't happen everywhere. HA and council housing are BOTH "social housing".

If you do not understand the history of social housing, you would not understand the lack of Council house building. Basically, there has not been any for a generation until a few green shoots recently.

I understand it, you seem confused. You do know that the capital receipts policy was reversed under David Cameron and that's why councils are building again? Because they can use the RTB proceeds? And yes it's the green shoots we're discussing. These tentative steps in renewed council house building show it can be done.

Building housing to rent at low rents in mega expensive areas just does not add up. If you can’t charge a commercial rent it is a serious loss. That is why there isn’t enough of it in the mega expensive areas. Plus, the cost of land is huge and because there is a finite and highly controlled supply of it. Even in areas destined for development around the country, no-one wants housing next to them!

It's perfectly affordable if the local authority already own the land (which is how Lambeth are proposing to do it even with high London land costs). I'm still skimming around for details of Birmingham's efforts but I just saw one medium development was in a green in the middle of an existing suburban council development. So that clearly side steps the "owner occupier neighbour" issue. In London all tenures are jumbled up anyway.

If Councils can fast track developments and bypass public consultation, planning appeals and lengthy delays we could get way more houses quickly.

I disagree, it needs a lot of thought where, how many and what sort of housing to build and then plan the infrastructure to support that housing. Doing it quickly will only result in shoddily built sink estates in a a couple of decades.

Doing it quickly will only result in shoddily built sink estates in a a couple of decades.

Yes, this business of building over the greens on Birmingham council estates seems a bit much.

Wandsworth did something similar about a decade ago by squeezing new units into the semi-basement storage levels of their 1930 low rise blocks, as well as knocking down all the tenant garages for HAs to build on (as was every RSL in the country), which left the tenants very short on storage, parking and common space.

We should be looking to the big building schemes of the depression years for our inspiration and designing in sufficient infrastructure. But all progress feels like good news ATM.

Figures under the "reinvigorated Right to Buy"

2,638 sold in 2011/12
5,944 sold in 2012/13
11,261 sold in 2013/14

473 replacements were provided in 2012/13
961 in 2013/14
1,278 during the first three quarters of 2014/15

They seem to be selling them off much quicker than they are replacing them.

We should be looking to the big building schemes of the depression years for our inspiration and designing in sufficient infrastructure

Agreement here.

Well comveyancing is quick and building projects (including site finding) is slow, so you'd expect a lag. I refuse to have my optimism dented, though

It seems there is a problem from lack of affordable housing in London. I often wonder how the lower paid essential people such as nurses, cleaners, cooks, caters and others ever afford to live and work in the capital city. I can only see this problem getting worse as wealthy investors continue to buy homes there. The monopoly of jobs and facilities that the city offers seems to promote this growth. My answer is to move government to another city. Government Jobs and government investment would be spread elsewhere and the MPs would be more interested in improvements in the provinces. Perhaps.

Council housing should never have been sold off, that’s not what it’s for to make any kind of profit.

Lots of council houses need building. We have over 300k people on the street for starters in a rich society like ours it’s outrageous.

The reality is that highgate was a sh1thole in the 80s and so his council house would have been very cheap. Now in Kensington you are looking at £1.5m at least for a 3 bed house with a garden.

Highgate was definitely not a hole in the 80s! Archway maybe, but it’s always been des res up the hill.
As for the grenfell towers residents. My heart and soul go out to them, too many living in unacceptable accommodation. Somebody much smarter than me needs to sort the craziness of housing in London. Too much fostering of luxury high-rise flats that no one lives in. And too little affordable housing.
Hate what they’ve done to my city. Apparently they’ve done the same to Manhattan.

Pam290358
kittensinmydinner1 - despite having a legitimate, very obvious and very severe disability and being virtually housebound, I do have relatives and friends who will take me out and I find it a bit offensive that you think it’s disproportionately unusual that 8 out 14 families with a disabled member would be out. So close to Christmas ? Really ?

Please don't be so naive. Firstly 8/14 families were not out. Not a single one. All 14 . Had a tenant in them who was listed as on the council tenancy. The flat/houses were being lived in by someone else.
And whilst of course I am not so stupid as to believe that just because someone is disabled, then they may not be at home all the time. I would expect, in your case, that your neighbour , who has apparently lived 6ft away from you for three years, might at least recognise your picture or the question , 'the gentleman in the wheelchair - is he Home ?' Only to be told 4 gentlemen live there, but they don't have a wheel chair.

No I am definitely not jaded. I work in organised crime. I am simply doing a job with this borough at the moment where I happened to be on their visits today looking for associated evidence not actually related to the tenancy. Subletting doesn't even begin to touch the surface of the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night.

I am however extremely bemused by those who would house everyone from Grenfell 'no questions asked' and there complete refusal to even acknowledge that not everyone caught up in the tragedy is as innocent or deserving as they may at first seem. I also sniff a little worrying air that the very mention of race and immigration means that even discussing this issue raises allegations of 'racism' . I hope that this is paranoia on my behalf and no attempt to shut down the conversation .

This conversation needs to be had. It's not racism or xenophobia for inhabitants of a country to be concerned about fairness .

If I have arrived from say Romania 2years ago and sublet a flat with 5 others from a Council tenant but that flat was then subject to a horrendous fire, which I escaped within inches of losing my life - but am then put up in temporary accommodation for 6months and then rehoused (As some on this thread demand - in a three bed house in the same area) . Would the person who is next in line to be housed and who has waited 9 yrs, be pissed off and angry because she's a racist or because it's simply not sodding fair that her long awaited Home has gone to someone who has never even been on the waiting list but is being housed because of political expediency, fear of being called racist and pressure from well meaning people without all the facts ? - (Pressure groups will not know who has a tenancy and who has sublet as this is privy to the council and the person living in the flat.).

Hi Bobbyjim, I don't at all think badly of you and I wish you and your family all the best. I also work in the NHS so I know, how hard you've worked and I truly applaud you for that.
I guess I'm just jealous that I really, really would have loved to afford another child, but I just couldn't. I couldn't afford to move to a bigger flat and everything that goes with it.
I'm really gutted that, if I'd stayed on minimum wage, somehow I could have had 3 children and a home to house them. That's what I always wanted as a little girl.
Instead now, I face old age with fuck all, and it grates that you're whining about a bathroom, when you've practically had my ideal life on minimum wage! I mean FFS. Why do I bother?

I am however extremely bemused by those who would house everyone from Grenfell 'no questions asked' and there complete refusal to even acknowledge that not everyone caught up in the tragedy is as innocent or deserving as they may at first seem. I also sniff a little worrying air that the very mention of race and immigration means that even discussing this issue raises allegations of 'racism'

The two things are conmecte, of course. There's a squeamishness about discussing or studying issues where race comes into it.