Originally Posted by
Big where it matters
Asking property owners to behave responsibly isn't 'nannying' it's just asking them to put social cohesiveness before profit / self-interest. Anyone who owns property needs to put money aside for its maintenance. Properties don't self-clean or self-renew - they are in a constant process of slow deterioration! Obviously the less financial resources you have the more difficult this will be but maybe if we had an expanded, good quality rental sector people would postpone buying until they were in a position to afford it. Alternatively, they might want to spend their time renting a property and having a life if rents were kept at low enough levels.
I don't know well you know the city but you seem to be unaware of how property owners do let properties become derelict whether its the case of Frenson in Ropewalks (and their portfolio of derelict Georgian properties) or houses in Devonshire / Belvidere Road and around the Sefton Park area that were poorly maintained in order to drive out tenants on low rents. The Georgian property on Everton Road mentioned by Ged is an example of a potentially high value property because of its location. Renovating this property and restoring it to Georgian splendour would be extremely unprofitable and would need to be a very expensive labour of love. Allowing it to fall down and then building 20 units on the site could prove very lucrative. That's how it works nearly every time. Often in Liverpool people own a property (I'm not talking about owner-occupied houses here) in a potentially high value area but don't have the financial resources to develop it, the temptation is to wait until someone will pay a great deal of money for it. Think about how much money the King Edward pub site is now worth.
House prices tend to rise over time unless an area is blighted by being part of a regeneration scheme or becomes a dumping home for problem families. That's why owning a property is still seen as a viable long-term investment.
If LCC hadn't so badly managed the housing stock there wouldn't be the problems that exist today in many parts of the city. If the council builds /commissions low grade housing stock or its policy results in creating ghettos of deprivation within certain parts of the city then maybe it should think about changing what it does and, for once, learning from its mistakes.
You can expect property owners to act in the interests of social cohesion only if it is in their own interests. That is the society we live in. We can ignore that fact and live with the consequences or we can do something positive about it.
I agree that a market at low or even just reasonable levels of rent would halt some of the property speculation that has driven houses out of a lot of our reaches. I can even lean (slightly) to the old 'all property is theft'. As such anyone would welcome a strong (rental) market that placed more value in a home for living in than a pile of bricks and mortar for ripping off a few tenants.
A lot of people overseas are shocked at our house prices and so they should be. How can you possibly be so hard on yourselves? they say. But the answer must be commercially driven to have any chance of happening.
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House prices have tended to rise over a long period but not now. We are in for a very long and very painful period of 'adjustment'. The market is going to have to wait for wages to catch up with prices. Wages are creeping if not flat, if not actually falling (free training *cough* work at Tesco anyone?). House prices must fall if we are not to continue to pump more money than we've got into a bank's mortgage just for somewhere to live.
We haven't got raging negative equity and endemic bank foreclosures now because... nothing is moving. We're all sat still. And those without, carry on being without. And a lot of the market had protection. Just wait until the PPI bubble passes.
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Frenson picked up properties on the cheap when everyone else was looking the other way - couldn’t be bothered (and some were talking about managed decline). He’s held those properties at his cost ever since. However, there would be no commercial or social sense to him ploughing fortunes into them and rushing them onto an empty market.
He’d of lost his shirt and his houses and so would we (as a ‘social resource’). As I said, they’d be sitting in a bank’s portfolio or council holding doing absolutely zilch. And the city as a whole would have been looking even further into the bottom of the barrel.
If he had walked away or not bothered back then, how would all those great warehouses down the bottom look now? Look at the Ropewalks as it is today. Has he really done such a bad job?
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There is no general restriction on demolition of any property that is not either listed or in a conservation area. There is generally no need for subterfuge. But yep, many fell down in the meantime and indeed some may have been pushed but unless it makes economic sense to keep them, that’s how it’s going to be. If people were harassed out of properties in Sefton Park well, there’s laws about that.
As I mentioned earlier, the King Eddies site
is a case in point. An unwanted and derelict pub on an inaccessible site. What else could anyone do with it but wait? Or, commercially and socially sanitise it for
another 60 years with low-grade use (a Costco warehouse for example..?).
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As I’ve also tried to explain, council is between a rock (no funds) and a hard place (high costs of construction AND excessive maintenance bills for want of a bit of responsibility and accountability in some sections of the community).
And in terms of policy (and their obligations under the Housing Acts to house people come what may) what else could they have done but to prioritise the poor into the houses that they could build, cheap as they were. Re-open the workhouses?
If you look at those Hansard reports it’s breathtaking to see government’s persistent abrogation of responsibility to the local authorities. No. No. No, has been their mantra. And, this government started the same way. No funding for houses? Not our problem. Big government? no way. Big Society, no funds? be my guest.
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Shapps is starting to turn. Money is being found. 'Innovative funding' is creeping out of the woodwork. But we can’t expect the old route. The hand-out route (little as it was). This may well turn out to be the biggest U-turn government we've ever had (and what's wrong with that?) but the gimme culture, meagre as it might have been, is over. The 'put us before yourself' culture never started.
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