"Urban renewal" a cover for windfall development bonanza?

[purpletigron]

"Britain's flagship urban renewal scheme will fail unless it wins the support of local communities, admits the Minister responsible, Lord Rooker. Nine Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder initiatives were launched last year, to renew or replace hundreds of thousands of homes in rundown areas of Northern England and the Midlands.

The government is providing £5-6bn over the next 15 years, with the private sector bringing the total to an estimated £20bn. But plans to demolish the first of up to 400,000 homes between now and 2020 have been met with widespread protests by residents."

revdode comments that the Pathfinder initiative "... fails first time buyers, fails communities, fails the environment and fails any reasonable sanity check..."

Some disturbing claims about demolition as the first, not last, resort are reported by Keith Parkins at Indymedia, along with some more useful links.

Comments

[carandol.livejournal.com]

I heard the Radio 4 program mentioned in the Indymedia article. One of the companies who is doing the urban renewal, Urban Splash, was complaining that the system is weighted against renovation rather than building afresh. A company that builds new houses doesn't have to pay VAT, whereas a company that merely renovates an existing house does. A spokesman for Urban Splash said they had plans to do up some old terraced housing into modern houses, but couldn't afford to do it as they wanted to. Instead they had to knock down everything except the facade and rebuild the houses in order to make the project economically viable. Sounds like a case where the law needs to be changed to promote greener building practices.