Homes From Empty Homes

>Policy Exchange is a think tank that is occasionally brilliant but sometimes bonkers. Who can forget their Cities Unlimited report from two years ago which advocated abandoning northern cities. It achieved the remarkable feat of uniting David Cameron and John Prescott in condemnation. Between them they described it as “barmy”, “the most insulting and ignorant policy I’ve ever heard” ,“Insane and complete rubbish”

But their latest report “More Homes Fewer Empty Buildings”  for me falls into the brilliant category. In fact it is one of those ideas that is so simple you wonder why nobody has come up with it before.  Allow people to [...]

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There are places in Liverpool that make your heart leap and others that make you want to weep. These two adjacent roads in Granby manage to do both at the same time. Granby is the very essence of a deprived community, on almost any indicator of poverty it does almost unbelievably badly. 94% of children living in poverty 70% of the resident Somali population are unemployed, cancer and heart disease rates are 250% of the national average. Why you might think would anybody want to live here? With over 11% of [...]

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It’s hard to believe it now, but in the 1970s when I grew up the glamour football team to support was Ipswich town. It happened to be my hometown club, but their support spread far and wide. The team was filled with well-mannered, clean-cut role-models like Paul Mariner, George Burley and Mick Mills. But if you were a bit rebellious and liked your footballers cut a bit rough, there was nobody better than Eric Lazenby Gates; a grizzled and aggressive forward who always managed to look a mess but play with astonishing skill. He was the type of man who [...]

>It doesn’t happen that often, but there are moments when it is possible to really change things for the better. In amongst the bleak public spending news, it may surprise you to hear that one such moment is upon us. Before the politicians go home for the summer we are calling on the government to say what it is going to do to fulfil its commitment on empty homes. And we’re asking you to say what you think too.

In May the coalition government said “We will explore a range of measures to bring empty homes into use.”

We know that [...]

>Three years ago, after a visit to the road I described this as the most dispiriting case the Empty Homes Agency had ever dealt with. Four large and imposing Victorian villas overlooking one of Liverpool’s great parks had been left to rot and deteriorate to the point that they were virtually falling down. What made it so dispiriting, was the owner of the property was the very organisation we expect to look to resolve problems like this: The local council. The houses were purchased by compulsory purchase by the council at the beginning of the decade to improve them. But [...]

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The story of houses being sold for a pound in Newcastle on Tyne has become almost legendry. I couldn’t count the number of people who have asked me whether you can still buy one. You can’t! Or the number of TV producers who think it would make a great subject for a TV programme. It would! So I’m almost ashamed to say that it wasn’t until last week that I actually went to see them. The picture is Mr Naeem the proud [...]

>Being a property anorak I couldn’t stop myself dragging my family around the Peckham House this weekend. It’s not empty, in fact it was full to bursting with visitors for the London open house weekend. Some of you may remember this remarkable house as one of the stars of the Grand Designs tv series. The extraordinary owners managed to create a house in the most unpromising site imaginable, with planning restrictions that would have lead most to think that there was no chance of being allowed to build anything. But not only did they gain permission, they built a house [...]

>The first week of September still has that back-to-school feel, even though it’s more than twenty years since I had any personal experience. It has at least been back to business this week with meetings with the housing minister and both shadow housing ministers. The word that seems to be on the tip of all of their tongues is localism, although strangely none actually dare utter it.

Type Localism into Google news and it will helpfully flash up a timeline chart showing the occurrence of the word over the last 130 years. Remarkably it was common parlance in the 1880s in [...]