Coin Street Community Builders has slated the affordable housing proposals laid out in London mayor Ken Livingstone’s draft Spatial development plan, saying they are “significantly wrong”.
Proposals included in the draft London Plan advocate a London-wide target of 50% affordable housing in all residential developments. The GLA is also looking at proposals to force commercial developers to incorporate social housing in their schemes.
In a response to the consultation document, Coin Street – a not-for-profit regeneration company – said that the Mayor’s proposals displayed a “simplistic approach to re-centralisation and over-reliance on commercial development to pay for affordable housing”.
Coin Street argues that “to rely on commercial development to fund the amount of affordable housing and other public investment required is clearly a nonsense”. The response continues: “There is clearly a danger that at all levels of government quite unrealistic expectations are being generated as to what the property market will provide.”
Coin Street also issued a warning to the Mayor about “the unintended consequences of different ‘taxes’ on specific types of commercial development”, saying that it could force developers to switch from residential to office developments.
The mayor’s bid to ‘re-centralise’ the capital was also attacked. “A more logical and sustainable response to the problems identified would be to develop more homes near the centre (where work is concentrated) and to encourage employment uses in the suburbs and town centres (where homes are concentrated).”
EGi News 21/08/01
