Really!? Gove!? and a sensible suggestion!? Inner city housing

[orangeleavesinautumn]

Gove appears to be making the first sensible suggestion of his career - more housing in inner cities, relaxing planning laws to allow this to happen.

This is desperately needed - we are in a vicious circle of needing parking because people can't live close to where they work, then people not being able to live close to where they work because so much space is needed for parking....

We need to get out of this, we need to put an end to the culture of driving in to work, and get rid of the inner city car parks, and put the land to better use.

We also need to get rid of the on street parking, and the awful concreting over of grass to park on front gardens, and start to scale back on the need and expectations of car ownership altogether.

More housing where it is actually needed is the first steps towards that - decades late, but better than nothing

You need consensus that the work needs to be done, on the budget, on how many quotes you will get and then who will do the work. You need a lengthy process for dealing with leaseholders who refuse to pay their share. All that is significantly more difficult than having control over all those things yourself.

I do live in a city, and it isn't green spaces that these plans are about- it is spaces like empty commercial properties, car parks, etc

and actually, there is often more recreational green space in cities than in the countryside - completely beside the point

Anyone with any sense does not want a leasehold property. Service charges, maintenance rip offs, ground rent, plus often limited outside space.

I can't think of anyone I know, public sector jobs in the main, who works in a city centre. Which city are you thinking of that has lots of workers travelling in to work, other than the very large and richer urban city centres like Leeds, Manchester, London and Birmingham? Which tend to have better transport links in anyway? In my area, the University, main hospitals and the schools moved out of the city centre decade ago. The private sector is relatively limited.

House building shouldn't be allowed unless there are GPs, schools, services available. We are having three hundred houses built around us. I phoned the GP at 8 this morning, it'll be Thursday before I get an appointment for my partner. I've (and my GC) had to attend A&E three times because I needed antibiotics. We've all had to go to the Walk in, a taxi ride away, for things that the GP could deal with. The wait is around three hours, that's about to rise along with the population. The situation is the same in the two other GPs that serve this area. Around five years ago it was decided to move shops, M&S, Smyths, Argos etc onto a retail park served by an hourly bus. If you have to get to work on a bank holiday, Sunday, Christmas Eve etc it's a taxi. We had no arriva buses all last summer because of the strikes, it took every penny of a lot of people's disposable income. They've since awarded Arriva even more routes, so if the same thing happens we'll be even more screwed.

That's true too, lots of new houses are crap as well. And that's an important point to make.

It's just that they're less likely than flats to be leasehold rather than freehold, and people are a bit less vulnerable to the downsides of shit construction standards when the living is less communal. A lot of new builds have tiny gardens, but it's still an outside space. The walls are often paper thin in new build houses too, but you'll share them with fewer/no people. There's also been no house equivalent of the cladding fiasco.

If that’s true, that’s great - is there a link to what spaces the Gove Creature is referring to?
Your reference to not needing inner car parks might be relevant if only people from outside of the inner city didn’t need access to the inner city. And I’d they do, you need an inner city council that isn’t closing down and selling off the park and ride car parks - eg Canterbury under the previous incumbent Ben Fitter-Harding…
Also, inner city building still requires infrastructure in place BEFORE the residential building takes place. There is a former department store in the nearest city to me that has obtained planning permission without any regard for sewerage disposal. Currently - after planning has been granted - the plan is for lorries to remove sewer waste twice a day, through the city streets… unless the Gove Creature is legislating against this kind of bodge, he can fuck off.

other than the very large and richer urban city centres like Leeds, Manchester, London and Birmingham?

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha at the perception that Birmingham is a rich City

Try googling Equal pay Claims.
Or just look up the IMD figures.

But I agree that public sector workers don't travel into the City Centre to work. This is because the Local Council closed the buildings during covid, and realised how much money it saved them, so no longer have them.

Gove's track record on building projects in his own constituency isn't reflecting his statements this morning. Lots of new developments all crammed into one small area, the poorest area, but almost no social housing, prices out of reach for many local families, no infrastructure improvements, not enough parking, bus routes getting cancelled, village amenities collapsing under the weight of extra people (health centre, pharmacy, for example).

I assure you, Birmingham is much more prosperous in many ways than the other city I live in or have lived in - it sustains a major city centre retail market - you will find most other cities outside the ones I mentioned, no longer have that... All the major cities have extreme poverty though.