Here’s something nice, from architect Peter Barber: Council housing which we just finished for London Borough of Enfield… YIPEEE pic.twitter.com/jIWHO5yQn9 — Peter barber (@PpeterPeter) April 19, 2018 Barber’s practice designed the Ordnance Road project for Enfield. Like all architectural practices its website is completely incomprehensible, but I found information at the builders’. Neilcott Group say…
Read More Simple planningNow if you read this blog, you probably know I was briefly known for proposing that councils borrow against the stream of Local Housing Allowance payments and use this to buy up a lot of rental property. I called it the Simple Plan; it would simultaneously do something for the housing crisis, let the buy-to-let…
Read More A simple, terrible planIt looks like everyone’s favourite Tory thinktank has a plan to solve the housing crisis, and it’s pretty simple! It said acquisition of the land would be financed by a private-public joint venture, with the government contributing 49 per cent – about £3.1bn a year – alongside institutional investors. It would represent the largest government…
Read More Policy Exchange plagiarised me…and I loved itWhat do we make of this, rantosphere? ICYMI – Since '05 rents in Eng (exc London) rose slower than earnings but in London they decoupled in 2011 #ukhousing pic.twitter.com/BoBZHCZwgy — Joe Sarling (@joesarling) August 3, 2015
Read More RentEveryone’s waiting for something to happen about Greece. If you think the suspense is bad, imagine what it’s like if you have a pan-European politics column to fill and you have undertaken a public commitment not to fill it with speculation, gossip, or bullshit that you can’t substantiate with data. At the moment, there is…
Read More All politics is eventually about the whipsOK so, we’ve had the Tories’ big idea, Right to Buy in clown shoes, denounced at the same time by the Southwark Renters’ Maoist reading group and the Confederation of British Industry. Truly, the coalition was the golden era of the harebrained scheme and the half-baked thinktank. But let’s try to keep a straight face.…
Read More so who is meant to be getting the extra £3.9bn in LHA?So, I was out on the #labourdoorstep. And I had an interesting insight. We live in Doorbell Britain, which is divided into two tribes, the Friedlands and the Knockers. The Friedlands have evidently spent a lot of money on the technology of being alerted to visitors at their front door. Sometimes the bell is slickly…
Read More I invent a tiresome electoral marketing conceptA bit of Simple Plan news. I was out on the March for Homes at the weekend, and I’m afraid nobody had a SIMPLE PLAN NOW banner, mainly because I didn’t make one, although some Germans did ask me if I was an “expert on the housing crisis”. That said, it was a pretty decent…
Read More #simpleplan: two news itemsAditya Chakrabortty reports on the London Borough of Enfield’s housing department, under siege by the forces of Iain Duncan Smith. It looks like everything the bedroom tax critics thought might happen is happening, with the exception of the buy-to-let bandits going over the edge. Actually, that might be happening as well, but it’s hard to…
Read More The simple plan goes into actionLook at this pitiful mess. People signed up for the shared ownership option on a block of flats in Streatham and paid deposits. Then the developer couldn’t get it built, so they were left waiting. Now, it’s finished, but the developer now wants twice as much money because, supposedly, the block doubled in value during…
Read More Every little helps, so we’re helping ourselves to every little we can