Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
St Ann’s hospital flats
Thanks to a Rightmove alert, I received details of a flat being sold at the St Ann’s hospital site. A one-bed flat is offered off-plan for £410,000 leasehold, so presumably also liable for ground rent and service charges to cover the “concierge service”. As well as claiming in a headline that the site is “8 minutes from King’s Cross” (actually from Seven Sisters station, of course, once you read through the blurb), perhaps predictably the agent’s spiel says “With… a forecast 20.7% rental growth from 2024 to 2028, this address is not only a place to live but also a smart investment opportunity”.
After all the efforts of StArt to ensure as many as possible of the properties would at least be “affordable”, that doesn’t look encouraging at this stage. Does anyone know what the final requirement was for the percentage the developers have to provide of social and/or “affordable” housing, and have they whittled it down since getting final permission?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton
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Don, Can I suggest you make a Freedom of Information Act (FoI] request through the free and independent public website WhatDoTheyKnow.com - That website offers to try to help people make an FOI. The website has sections with helpful information. E.g. One is headed HOW IT WORKS.
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Permalink Reply by Cathy
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60% are "genuinely affordable". The smart investment opportunity surely goes against the ethos of the whole development. I looked at Rightmove and couldn't find that wording. Could you direct me? Surely buy-to-let was discussed early on and was out of the question?
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Cathy — Yes, I completely agree. If it’s still working, try this link (scroll to the bottom of the blurb):
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/167310395#/?channel=RES_BUY
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter
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this address is not only a place to live but also a smart investment opportunity
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Property ownership is not a one-way bet, as our hapless Haringey Council found out to their (our) cost:
Property experts employed at our Local Authority wrote something similar (screenshot below) in respect of their unusual £6,100,000 purchase of a tired old factory in another borough. It had an asbestos roof and since 1960, had been heavily customised to previous owner's needs. The putative occupiers (the Peacock Industrial Estate) were not interested and told the council so.
The council's Enfield factory was empty for four years, but running costs continued:
After hemorrhaging c. £110,000 per annum for four years, the council finally managed to sell it on 22nd January for £4,200,000.
The capital loss to public (our) funds was £1,900,000.
Private buyers are likely to take more care when spending their own money.
This was one of the nine remarkable council property deals that were considered by an external investigator.
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Clive: I know you care passionately about LB Haringey’s past property deals (and that you also appear to think that the borough of culture plan presages a further waste of money), but not every post on here is about the iniquities of council spending. My point here, picked up by Cathy, was that a housing development where the local community put a lot of effort into trying to make sure that ordinary people could get affordable homes appears to be being subverted by estate agents marketing flat(s) as buy-to-let investment properties. Presumably there’s nothing to stop private individuals paying market price and then renting a flat out, but I was calling attention to the way this one was being marketed with an implicit appeal to greed. I think it’s a great shame, and also wondered if the developers had chipped away at the original planning permission and a requirement for “affordable” homes.
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I'm going to investigate. This was really not the intention. it's being marketed by a company that specializes in helping people to find property in London - and has multi-lingual expertise which I take to mean they're aiming at foreign investors.
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Well, Companies House shows the agency as incorporated in the UK a year ago, with one director, who’s resident in Turkey. From a quick look at their website, it seems as though they specialise in off-plan sales in new developments; some are in Dubai, others in London (but I baulked at checking all 92 pages, so they probably operate elsewhere as well). Looks like part of St Ann’s could become another area where no lights show at night because the flats aren’t lived in.
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If we want to have more affordable housing for our families and young people we need to reduce the demand for housing.
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How about scrapping right-to-buy for council homes (or at the very least allowing and compelling councils to reinvest the money directly in new homes) and giving local authorities the additional money to build new social housing themselves, instead of expecting profit-driven developers to create the 1.5 million new homes the government claims it’s “building”? Having more affordable housing means increasing the supply, not reducing demand by pricing people out. If council/social housing stock hadn’t been so devastated since 1979, there’d be a great many more affordable homes available now.
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I'm puzzled about this suggestion by Iris that we: "need to reduce the demand for housing".
Isn't the demand for more affordable housing for our families and young people part and parcel of the total demand for housing?
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