![]() Over the past three years ASH has designed alternatives to demolition up to feasibility study not only for Central Hill – the subject of our case study – but also for the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates (top left), and as options for Knight’s Walk (top right), the Northwold estate (bottom left) and the Patmore estate (bottom right). It stands to reason that during such a crisis of affordability, which is pushing increasing numbers of Londoners into housing poverty and homelessness, the last thing we should be doing is demolishing the city’s dwindling number of council estates. ![]() And despite a demand for 20,000 homes for social rent in London, not a single such home was built in the capital in the year up to October 2017, and a mere 5,700 are planned to replace the tens of thousands that are being demolished. As of January this year, only 900 of these prime properties had been sold and there were an additional 14,000 unsold lower-prime properties on the market for between £1,000-£1,500 per square foot. Instead, in 2017 builders started work on 1,900 properties in London priced at more than £1,500 per square foot – over three times as much. ![]() According to research by Savills real estate firm into housing provision in London between 20, 58 per cent of demand in London is for homes for sub-market rent and lower-mainstream properties priced below £450 per square foot (the conversion to Euros is currently 1.16) yet only a quarter of the approximately 38,500 properties set to be built over the next five years will be available at this price. London’s housing crisis is a crisis of affordability, not of supply, with the numbers of unaffordable, uninhabited prime and sub-prime properties far outstripping demand. The effect of this programme, which every council in London is implementing on their housing stock, has been described with a term that still causes anger and furious denials in those carrying it out, but which has been universally adopted by both residents and campaigners resisting it: social cleansing.ĪSH was set up in March 2015 to offer an architectural alternative to this estate regeneration programme, one that addresses London’s need not only for low-cost housing to buy, but also for more – not less – homes for council and social rent. Few if any homes for social rent, fixed at 30 per cent of market rate, are being built to replace the thousands being lost. Only a small percentage of the new-builds end up as so-called ‘affordable’ housing, and this newly designated category increasingly means shared-ownership properties, rent-to-buy products or affordable rents set at 80 per cent of market rate. In practice, if not in name, the estate ‘regeneration’ programme means the demolition and redevelopment of housing estates for capital investment by offshore companies, buy-to-let landlords and home ownership. These have been laid out in such policy-defining publications as City Villages: More homes, better communities (published in March 2015), which recommended reclassifying existing council estates as ‘brownfield land’ – a term usually applied to ex-industrial or commercial land that requires decontamination before use and the report to the Government’s Cabinet Office titled Completing London’s Streets: How the regeneration and intensification of housing estates could increase London’s supply of homes and benefit residents (January 2016), which recommended demolishing the council homes of over 400,000 Londoners. These figures are not anomalies, but accord with the targets of estate regeneration. ![]() In one borough alone, no less than 9,500 such homes are being lost to Southwark council’s estate regeneration programme. Our research identified 237 housing estates that have recently undergone, are currently undergoing, or are threatened with regeneration, demolition or privatisation with the resulting loss of homes for council or social rent. ![]() In September 2017, as part of our residency at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Architects for Social Housing (ASH) mapped out London’s estate regeneration programme. ![]()
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