Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
I’m going to do nothing about it, personally. What are you going to do about it?
I'm not the one who wants 50-storey Tower blocks all over London.
True. But you are the one who brings non-sequiturs to a pissing match.
If you want high-rises, safety is a paramount, no?
Yes, and?
As Mr Romford points out below (or above), the five or six storey form is probably best for most purposes.
Having said that, I live on Floor 11 of a 16 storey building built in the 1930s, and it’s fab.
I think the UK probably does build too high in places like Ilford and Romford where it’s not strictly necessary or perhaps desirable. You want to keep the highest rises for areas with the highest property prices, or you risk creating slums.
Another example would be Boris overruling the Home Secretary and appointments committee to keep Lord Hogan-Howe in the running for NCA chief.
Boris Johnson is trying to shoehorn in the Scotland Yard chief who presided over the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry as head of the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
The reporting there is jaw dropping in terms of the levels of fraud, and the BBC's equivalence over it. I suspect, like mass street grooming, it will be played down or brushed under the carpet.
Another example would be Boris overruling the Home Secretary and appointments committee to keep Lord Hogan-Howe in the running for NCA chief.
Boris Johnson is trying to shoehorn in the Scotland Yard chief who presided over the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry as head of the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
They have been trying to push back to the 2014 borders since 2014 and failing. That seems a very unlikely prospect. Some semblance of the pre-Feb 2022 borders might be possible but realistically all of the Lugansk oblast and most of Donetsk are gone.
The difference is that now they have more support and better offensive weaponry. It may or may not be possible - none of us are in a position to judge - but it is certainly more likely than previously.
The reporting there is jaw dropping in terms of the levels of fraud, and the BBC's equivalence over it. I suspect, like mass street grooming, it will be played down or brushed under the carpet.
It was last time, which is why it happened again this time. And we should not blame the BBC when it is the government which ignores actual electoral fraud and proposes voter ID instead. Cynics would point out that the losers to Lutfur Rahman are not the Conservatives but Labour (and democracy and the people of Tower Hamlets).
Somewhere beyond Yekaterinburg, 24 hours ago... "Agent Gary, this war is going poorly. There is a place in the west codenamed 'politicalbetting.com' where great intellectuals discuss matters of importance. You must infiltrate it and distract them with exciting new approaches to punctuation - sow division and discord about the nature of the ellipsis,,,"
i would hesitate using the term "great intellectuals"
A PM that doesn’t know who paid for his wallpaper, a PM that doesn’t know who called a meeting with Sue Gray, a PM that can’t recall the detail of his meets with a Russian Peer, a PM that doesn’t know if a party is going on in his own house. Cover up merchant! https://twitter.com/GNev2/status/1528305853983600641
Gary Neville doesn't like the Tory Prime Minister?
If Boris loses other top political commentators like Gary Linekar then how can he survive? 😱
Who do you suppose "the public" (or a greater proportion of it) knows better - Garys Neville and Lineker or Dan Hodges?
No question, Neville and Linekar.
But luvvies or celebrities holding strong political opinions is nothing new and is baked in already.
Neville being against a Tory is about as newsworthy as Morrissey being against the establishment, or a steak.
So hoorah, more Tory governments who increase NI in preference to income tax to retain the elderly (and incidentally nimby) vote, you must be pleased
Not at all.
Not to do a HYUFD but the red lights are flashing that the Tories will lose the next election if they are unable to win back erstwhile Tory voters, of which there are numerous on this site including not just myself.
That doesn't include people like Neville. Neville being against the Tories is as shocking as Corbyn being against them. Nothing he has ever said has ever given the impression that he is a swing voter.
GNev is a Labour member now, so you're right that his political outrage is hardly a surprise.
But look at who he is, who he reaches, and what he is saying. There is harsh reality that the economic condition millions are enduring is increasingly harsh and we haven't even got into the bad stuff yet. GNev is saying what people are experiencing, and the Tories are still either saying "what crisis, here's all we've done for you workshy plebs" or saying "poor people are lazy and stupid, its their own fault".
Either way I can't see where the Swingback comes from once the connection to anything other than their core vote has snapped. We will see next month - when both seats are lost perhaps they will start getting the message that Boris is a shit Marlon Brando and this is Apocalpyse Now.
I doubt he’d have got an end to freedom of movement, but he could have managed a qualification period for benefits
There is no freedom of movement! You cannot move to Spain with no means of supporting yourself - you have to work or have € in the bank. Had we had a clampdown on "benefits tourists" that would have taken a huge amount of the sting away. Besides which the reason we needed such an influx of polish plumbers was because you couldn't get a plumber because proper jobs and training had largely been scrapped.
The issue with the UK was that we had a non contributory welfare system. Maastricht meant all EU citizens had the same rights as UK citizens so effectively they could move without a means to support themselves.
I don’t think a shift to a contributory welfare system for all UK citizens was feasible (I’m sure you, for example, would have bitched about ‘heartless Tories’). But they could have got a system where EU citizens had to be in the UK for say 2 years to be eligible for benefits
Yet the vast majority of EU citizens, who were working, were eligible for tax from day 1.
Of course. That's the nature of a contributory system: you make payments in so that, in time, you can take funds out should you need them.
The reporting there is jaw dropping in terms of the levels of fraud, and the BBC's equivalence over it. I suspect, like mass street grooming, it will be played down or brushed under the carpet.
It was last time, which is why it happened again this time. And we should not blame the BBC when it is the government which ignores actual electoral fraud and proposes voter ID instead. Cynics would point out that the losers to Lutfur Rahman are not the Conservatives but Labour (and democracy and the people of Tower Hamlets).
Real cynics would suggest that any party that goes after actual electoral fraud is too likely to get painted as racist.
Oh and better consumer protection and recourse when buying from developers. Caveat emptor works when buying off Joe Bloggs but not when you’re buying off a whopper house builder.
I therefore conclude that @GaryL is a young gay Russian who hones his English on Twitter
He seems harmless
I mainly wonder why anyone would pay someone for this kind of ineffective shit, and my current hypothesis is that they don't: either this is unpaid intern kinda trolling, or Gazza is working purely independently to construct a trolling portfolio he can take to prospective employers whrn he has built up a substantial body of work.
Yes, pretty harmless
Your guesses look good as well
The alternative is that it lays a trail of breadcrumbs.
Someone on Twitter now says "as the well-known poster, @GaryL, on the respected independent political website said..."
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
Somewhere beyond Yekaterinburg, 24 hours ago... "Agent Gary, this war is going poorly. There is a place in the west codenamed 'politicalbetting.com' where great intellectuals discuss matters of importance. You must infiltrate it and distract them with exciting new approaches to punctuation - sow division and discord about the nature of the ellipsis,,,"
i would hesitate using the term "great intellectuals"
Oh and better consumer protection and recourse when buying from developers. Caveat emptor works when buying off Joe Bloggs but not when you’re buying off a whopper house builder.
You need an insurance-backed guarantee so that you're still covered even if the developer has gone bust.
In principle this should also mean that the insurer has an incentive to check that the houses are being built properly, and so you have regulation from the market.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
I expect it to be "most people would of course resign over it" bad.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
They have been trying to push back to the 2014 borders since 2014 and failing. That seems a very unlikely prospect. Some semblance of the pre-Feb 2022 borders might be possible but realistically all of the Lugansk oblast and most of Donetsk are gone.
The difference is that now they have more support and better offensive weaponry. It may or may not be possible - none of us are in a position to judge - but it is certainly more likely than previously.
I seem to recall discussions here back in February as to the viability and provenance of, and justification for, the pre-2014 borders. There were significant population movements after WWII which suggested those in the West are reasonable but in the far east of Ukraine there's a great deal of mixing between those who consider themselves Ukrainian and those who consider themselves Russian.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Why do you need to? If you build enough homes, the prices come down. Including rents.
Incidentally, there are plenty of lenders who will lend on hi-rise. They won't lend on buildings with dodgy construction - but why is that a problem?
True. Although those with buy to let properties do benefit through leveraging assets. I thought preventing none first time buyers from owning flats in the new blocks my reduce some of the market distortion.
I suppose I think of buy to let as a monopoly esque situation. Those with the largest pockets can distort the rental market by owning significant bits of cheap housing. Effectively locking out specific locations to first time buyers.
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
There has been plenty of briefing from all sources that the report will be catastofuck bad for Number 10. So almost certainly their attempt to portray Gray and the report as a politically-motivated hatchet job.
The Good News for everyone is that they have so enraged the civil service that massive leaks of really really good bad stuff appears to be imminent.
Even if it doesn't immediately remove Bonzo we can all have a laugh. Even if its just at prats like Simon Clarke or Nadim Zahawi being sent onto the media to make a Howard of themselves.
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
I expect it to be "most people would of course resign over it" bad.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
No because 4% and 70% don't add up to 100%. 9.4 + 90.4 + 0.2 OTOH does.
The first set of figures were just housing and farming. 26% of land is used in other means, such as wilderness (undeveloped, unfarmed land) or industrial (developed but not residential).
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Looking at land use in the SE and excluding London is utterly batshit.
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
Boris will brazen it out whatever happens, but I think there's a nervousness in Tory ranks about how it will look if crooked Boris fights the election against an exonerated Sir Keir 'Mr Rules' Starmer. For this reason Boris's people are trying to alter the public psyche into thinking PartyGate never happened - witness the repeated assertions that all Boris did was eat a slice of birthday cake. Painting Sue Gray as some kind of unreliable witness - a lefty show pony overwhelmed by her fifteen minutes of fame - is all part of this.
Somewhere beyond Yekaterinburg, 24 hours ago... "Agent Gary, this war is going poorly. There is a place in the west codenamed 'politicalbetting.com' where great intellectuals discuss matters of importance. You must infiltrate it and distract them with exciting new approaches to punctuation - sow division and discord about the nature of the ellipsis,,,"
i would hesitate using the term "great intellectuals"
Ha, yes, and I smiled at this - but for clarity, and at the risk of killing the joke stone dead by explaining it, I was using irony to be self-deprecating. I like the idea of the Russian secret services monitoring us and assigning great importance to the thoughts of me and HYUFD and malcolmg and so on.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Looking at land use in the SE and excluding London is utterly batshit.
It was HYUFD who insisted that London must be excluded, and then you referenced him.
Include London and the South East has awfully low home ownership rates and needs a solution.
Exclude London and the South East is over 90% undeveloped.
You can't cherry pick to include London in one, but exclude it in the other. I'm fine with either, sort it out with HYUFD.
I therefore conclude that @GaryL is a young gay Russian who hones his English on Twitter
He seems harmless
I mainly wonder why anyone would pay someone for this kind of ineffective shit, and my current hypothesis is that they don't: either this is unpaid intern kinda trolling, or Gazza is working purely independently to construct a trolling portfolio he can take to prospective employers whrn he has built up a substantial body of work.
Yes, pretty harmless
Your guesses look good as well
The alternative is that it lays a trail of breadcrumbs.
Someone on Twitter now says "as the well-known poster, @GaryL, on the respected independent political website said..."
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Rather than fannying around with undermining Gray, surely the single best solution to spiking the Partygate report is for the Mail/Conservatives to give Durham Constabulary the nod, and announce Rayner and Starmer's FPNs on the day of publication.
Starmer and Rayner resign, the Gray Report goes away.
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
I must leap to the PM's defence. Clearly he usually goes in head first.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
There must be a certain level of self awareness or trolling in boasting about their Satan weapons.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Looking at land use in the SE and excluding London is utterly batshit.
It was HYUFD who insisted that London must be excluded, and then you referenced him.
Include London and the South East has awfully low home ownership rates and needs a solution.
Exclude London and the South East is over 90% undeveloped.
You can't cherry pick to include London in one, but exclude it in the other. I'm fine with either, sort it out with HYUFD.
London is not the South East and the South East is not London. It is London which has the lowest home ownership rate of any region in the UK and which needs more high rise in the inner city and semis in the suburbs.
The South East however has the 3rd highest home ownership level of any UK region and already has enough pressure in its countryside and greenbelt spilling over from underdevelopment in London as it is compared to the rest of the UK
"As of 2020, there are 103 buildings or structures that are at least 100 metres (328 ft) tall in the Greater London metropolitan area, with 22 of these being in the City of London and 25 being in the Canary Wharf / Isle of Dogs district. The Greater London metropolitan area contains the second most skyscrapers of a city in Europe. There are 33 skyscrapers in Greater London that reach a roof height of at least 150 metres (492 ft),[1] with 57 in Moscow, 21 in the Paris Metropolitan Area, 17 in Frankfurt, 16 in Warsaw, 6 in Madrid, 5 each in Milan and Rotterdam, and 4 in Manchester."
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
Boris will brazen it out whatever happens, but I think there's a nervousness in Tory ranks about how it will look if crooked Boris fights the election against an exonerated Sir Keir 'Mr Rules' Starmer. For this reason Boris's people are trying to alter the public psyche into thinking PartyGate never happened - witness the repeated assertions that all Boris did was eat a slice of birthday cake. Painting Sue Gray as some kind of unreliable witness - a lefty show pony overwhelmed by her fifteen minutes of fame - is all part of this.
In fairness, officially the worst thing he did was be in a room where birthday cake was present (but not eaten).
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Looking at land use in the SE and excluding London is utterly batshit.
It was HYUFD who insisted that London must be excluded, and then you referenced him.
Include London and the South East has awfully low home ownership rates and needs a solution.
Exclude London and the South East is over 90% undeveloped.
You can't cherry pick to include London in one, but exclude it in the other. I'm fine with either, sort it out with HYUFD.
You’re advancing a dishonest argument (as per usual) and now you’re hiding behind HYUFD?
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
It's not uncommon in the US. And FWIW, ownership with conditions is far from unusual in the US. Want to be a McCarthy & Stone property (from its now deceased owner...), well you will need to be at least 455 years old.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Particularly if 'Putin's space agency chief' is Rogozin, who is an absolute joke. He is well known for (ahem) talking out of his rear end.
(ISTR he once said the US would have to use a trampoline to get its astronauts to the ISS, or somesuch.)
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
It's not uncommon in the US. And FWIW, ownership with conditions is far from unusual in the US. Want to be a McCarthy & Stone property (from its now deceased owner...), well you will need to be at least 455 years old.
Yes, but the US is cursed by the existence of HOAs.
"As of 2020, there are 103 buildings or structures that are at least 100 metres (328 ft) tall in the Greater London metropolitan area, with 22 of these being in the City of London and 25 being in the Canary Wharf / Isle of Dogs district. The Greater London metropolitan area contains the second most skyscrapers of a city in Europe. There are 33 skyscrapers in Greater London that reach a roof height of at least 150 metres (492 ft),[1] with 57 in Moscow, 21 in the Paris Metropolitan Area, 17 in Frankfurt, 16 in Warsaw, 6 in Madrid, 5 each in Milan and Rotterdam, and 4 in Manchester."
Yes but London has the highest gdp of any city in Europe, so is running behind its gdp on skyscrapers still
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Looking at land use in the SE and excluding London is utterly batshit.
It was HYUFD who insisted that London must be excluded, and then you referenced him.
Include London and the South East has awfully low home ownership rates and needs a solution.
Exclude London and the South East is over 90% undeveloped.
You can't cherry pick to include London in one, but exclude it in the other. I'm fine with either, sort it out with HYUFD.
London is not the South East and the South East is not London. It is London which has the lowest home ownership rate of any region in the UK and which needs more high rise in the inner cities and semis in the suburbs.
The South East however has the 3rd highest home ownership level of any UK region and already has enough pressure in its countryside and greenbelt spilling over from underdevelopment in London as it is compared to the rest of the UK
Okay so if you're adamant that London isn't part f the South East then you must accept you can't include London within your development figures. What's source for the goose ...
Which means 9% of the South East is developed of which some is residential, some is commercial or transport, some is industrial and some is other uses. So not far off UK wide figures actually.
And over 90% of the South East, by your own definition of the South East, is undeveloped.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
When I owned a flat (Leasehold) it was a condition of the lease that I couldn't sublet without permission from the Landowner. So I assume it would be something like that.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. London is at risk of ossifying. A city where no-one can any longer afford to live. If we do nothing, we kill our golden-egg laying goose. (I'm not sure that metaphor works - the goose that layed the golden egg should have been left well alone - but still. I'm a busy man and the right metaphor doesn't present itself and I can't be bothered to go looking for it.) It is a problem common to the whole country, and solutions related to the one you propose, adapted for local purposes, could be put forward in other places too - but in London it is at its most acute.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
I'm not saying it's a reason not to do it, but am pointing out an issue they have. And 'So fix the lift' is rather silly thing to say when a) these things take time, and b) the person needs to get out and about in that time. But you evidently don't care about that.
And it's not 'special pleading'. It's a point that needs addressing in a more realistic way than your stupid one-liner.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Ok, but most housing demand is in the South East. So your figures (which contain large areas of wilderness in Scotland) are essentially meaningless.
Even HYUFD understands this.
Actually in the South East the figures are not world's apart from the UK as a whole (since the South East insists upon excluding London from itself as HYUFD was extremely vocal and adamant about).
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So already almost double the percentage of land in the South East is developed compared to the UK as a whole. Even if you exclude London
Looking at land use in the SE and excluding London is utterly batshit.
It was HYUFD who insisted that London must be excluded, and then you referenced him.
Include London and the South East has awfully low home ownership rates and needs a solution.
Exclude London and the South East is over 90% undeveloped.
You can't cherry pick to include London in one, but exclude it in the other. I'm fine with either, sort it out with HYUFD.
London is not the South East and the South East is not London. It is London which has the lowest home ownership rate of any region in the UK and which needs more high rise in the inner cities and semis in the suburbs.
The South East however has the 3rd highest home ownership level of any UK region and already has enough pressure in its countryside and greenbelt spilling over from underdevelopment in London as it is compared to the rest of the UK
Okay so if you're adamant that London isn't part f the South East then you must accept you can't include London within your development figures. What's source for the goose ...
Which means 9% of the South East is developed of which some is residential, some is commercial or transport, some is industrial and some is other uses. So not far off UK wide figures actually.
And over 90% of the South East, by your own definition of the South East, is undeveloped.
So given 4 to 5% only of the UK is developed, even excluding London the South East is far more developed already than the UK overall.
It is London which needs more development to stop further overspill to the South East
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
Boris will brazen it out whatever happens, but I think there's a nervousness in Tory ranks about how it will look if crooked Boris fights the election against an exonerated Sir Keir 'Mr Rules' Starmer. For this reason Boris's people are trying to alter the public psyche into thinking PartyGate never happened - witness the repeated assertions that all Boris did was eat a slice of birthday cake. Painting Sue Gray as some kind of unreliable witness - a lefty show pony overwhelmed by her fifteen minutes of fame - is all part of this.
It's surprising how often, l when something like this comes out, or looks as though it's going to come out. our PM visits a school and paints or draws with the little children. We must be approaching the point where parents send letters to schools saying 'don't allow my child to be photographed with the PM'!
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
I'm not saying it's a reason not to do it, but am pointing out an issue they have. And 'So fix the lift' is rather silly thing to say when a) these things take time, and b) the person needs to get out and about in that time. But you evidently don't care about that.
And it's not 'special pleading'. It's a point that needs addressing in a more realistic way than your stupid one-liner.
It is special pleading.
You were - as an aside - pearl clutching about invalids who might suffer when a lift breaks down.
How old are you, 100?
Many of my neighbours seem to be. And they are not moaning about imaginary lift breakdowns.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
I thought the usual argument was that the MailOnline makes it up?
Somewhat related to the changing ellipsis and punctuation - I remember looking into the phrase 'dash it all!'. Supposedly because publishers couldn't print 'Damn!' and changed it to 'D---!' 'the young set' took to saying the 'dash' literally. Faux politeness and snark in one. Eventually becoming so common it made it's way back into print.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
Well it happened! We welcomed Jennifer Rose to the world last night, will be off PB for quite a while, back in a few weeks!
Hooray! Well done! Advice to a first time Dad - remember to look after yourself over the next few days too. Remember to eat. You are no use to your wife and daughter if you are not properly functioning and you cannot run on empty. It is hard work. But congratulations. Children (though this may take a little while to become apparent) are the best things in the world.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
I thought the usual argument was that the MailOnline makes it up?
Well indeed if we are berating him for quoting the Mail that's entirely understandable. Not sure that is what is happening here, that said.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
"As of 2020, there are 103 buildings or structures that are at least 100 metres (328 ft) tall in the Greater London metropolitan area, with 22 of these being in the City of London and 25 being in the Canary Wharf / Isle of Dogs district. The Greater London metropolitan area contains the second most skyscrapers of a city in Europe. There are 33 skyscrapers in Greater London that reach a roof height of at least 150 metres (492 ft),[1] with 57 in Moscow, 21 in the Paris Metropolitan Area, 17 in Frankfurt, 16 in Warsaw, 6 in Madrid, 5 each in Milan and Rotterdam, and 4 in Manchester."
Those 57 in Moscow, comrade. Looking a bit shaky...with all this talk of firing off nukes. If you get my drift.
Well it happened! We welcomed Jennifer Rose to the world last night, will be off PB for quite a while, back in a few weeks!
Hooray! Well done! Advice to a first time Dad - remember to look after yourself over the next few days too. Remember to eat. You are no use to your wife and daughter if you are not properly functioning and you cannot run on empty. It is hard work. But congratulations. Children (though this may take a little while to become apparent) are the best things in the world.
I'd only add: if either of you worry that you're doing it wrong, well you will be, at least some of the time But worrying about whether you're doing it right, learning from your mistakes, realising the lessons learned don't apply next time round, trying again and again until you find what works for you all, and accepting that sometimes you get it wrong - those are the marks of a good parent. Toughest and most rewarding job in the world.
Thanks everyone, I'm glad that everyone has come through the other side unscathed plus Spurs got Champions League on the same day she arrived which has got to be a good omen of some kind.
I know we're in for a big change to our lives but I'm looking forwards to it!
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
He's just said he lived in a student flat in South Woodford which is on the right hand side of the Central Line and iirc those flats are for Queen Mary College in Mile End, where the Kray twins shot the elephant man, or some such.
These are some of the guys most forcibly arguing abortion bans. This would seem to indicate their utter disregard for women's interests.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says Among the findings was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/22/southern-baptist-sex-abuse-report/
There is nothing new about bad people attaching themselves to a cause. Nor are ad hominem points a novelty.
The interesting discussion, as always, is between decent people, who apply rules to themselves as well as others, think there is a case for both sides on tricky questions, don't demonise others as extremists and are prepared to change their minds.
Religious people who support choice and feminists who are anti abortion are more interesting places to look than narcissistic fundamentalists.
The problem with seeking balance here is there isn't any. The situation is inherently unbalanced because one of the extremes (Abortion = Murder so the unhappily pregnant woman must be completely subjugated to the foetus she carries) has become a realistic legislative target in many parts of the US.
The fact that extreme views exist and are promoted shows the importance of the discussion also taking place between non extremes. The denial of the validity of any view apart from one's own is itself an extreme mindset. I think we are agreed about that in all probability. So I don't really see your point, though I share your angst.
My point is that the debate for all practical purposes is between an extreme position of banning abortion and a moderate nuanced consensus position of not banning it but having some controls. The opposite extreme - abortion totally fine in all circumstances and right up to point of natural delivery - has no real world traction. Hence the equivalence between the 2 extremes is there only in theory. In practice it isn't. The 'Pro Life' extreme is the one to worry about because its proponents are numerous and influential and are hell bent on implementing it. It's an extreme that's gone mainstream in many US states and in one of that country's 2 main political parties.
As many of you have probably guessed, the Elizabeth Line has been rushed into opening in time for the Platinum Jubilee without it all functioning as one cohesive service.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
He's just said he lived in a student flat in South Woodford which is on the right hand side of the Central Line and iirc those flats are for Queen Mary College in Mile End, where the Kray twins shot the elephant man, or some such.
While the jukebox played “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”.
If he’s judging everything by student accommodation in the ?90s, no wonder he’s confused.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
I bought a leasehold flat in London as, at the time, it was all I could afford. It's been a non-stop nightmare of bills, charges and assorted grifters posing as managing agents ever since. If I could do it all over again, I'd simply rent until I could afford to buy a house. Never again.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
I bought a leasehold flat in London as, at the time, it was all I could afford. It's been a non-stop nightmare of bills, charges and assorted grifters posing as managing agents ever since. If I could do it all over again, I'd simply rent until I could afford to buy a house. Never again.
Leasehold, and all that shit, needs proper regulation.
It’s the sort of micro-economic improvement that make everyone’s life easier and indeed help inflation, and in which the government is profoundly uninterested.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
He's quoting Dmitry "Trampoline" Rogozin. Who is always wrong. He pops up from time to time to say some bullshit about Russian space. If it is about capabilities, it never comes to pass. If it is a threat, Russia never follows through with it.
As many of you have probably guessed, the Elizabeth Line has been rushed into opening in time for the Platinum Jubilee without it all functioning as one cohesive service.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
So good to see London get yet another massive transport link while the rest of us make do with crap buses and ancient trains on shit and non-electrified lines.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
As many of you have probably guessed, the Elizabeth Line has been rushed into opening in time for the Platinum Jubilee without it all functioning as one cohesive service.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
So good to see London get yet another massive transport link while the rest of us make do with crap buses and ancient trains on shit and non-electrified lines.
You voted for it (perhaps not you personally), so STFU.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
South Woodford is Zone 4 (and part of Redbridge, administered from Ilford).
Comments
As Mr Romford points out below (or above), the five or six storey form is probably best for most purposes.
Having said that, I live on Floor 11 of a 16 storey building built in the 1930s, and it’s fab.
I think the UK probably does build too high in places like Ilford and Romford where it’s not strictly necessary or perhaps desirable. You want to keep the highest rises for areas with the highest property prices, or you risk creating slums.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8655697.stm
The reporting there is jaw dropping in terms of the levels of fraud, and the BBC's equivalence over it. I suspect, like mass street grooming, it will be played down or brushed under the carpet.
Close call!
Even HYUFD understands this.
Someone on Twitter now says "as the well-known poster, @GaryL, on the respected independent political website said..."
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
For the South East the 2020 figures are 9.4% of land is developed, 90.4% is not developed and 0.2% is vacant.
So that again shows why brownfield talk is bollocks there simply isn't that much vacant land, but nor is there any possibility of a 10-fold increase of development in the South East.
So - https://twitter.com/cyclefree2/status/1528734345032347648?s=21&t=m_Cj7mTjsjU-FC9_RFbQjA
And https://twitter.com/cyclefree2/status/1528736380507017216?s=21&t=m_Cj7mTjsjU-FC9_RFbQjA
And https://twitter.com/cyclefree2/status/1528736676767490048?s=21&t=m_Cj7mTjsjU-FC9_RFbQjA
Flowers, if you were wondering.
In principle this should also mean that the insurer has an incentive to check that the houses are being built properly, and so you have regulation from the market.
Surely that depends on where I’m going NEXT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_structures_in_London
I suppose I think of buy to let as a monopoly esque situation. Those with the largest pockets can distort the rental market by owning significant bits of cheap housing. Effectively locking out specific locations to first time buyers.
The Good News for everyone is that they have so enraged the civil service that massive leaks of really really
goodbad stuff appears to be imminent.Even if it doesn't immediately remove Bonzo we can all have a laugh. Even if its just at prats like Simon Clarke or Nadim Zahawi being sent onto the media to make a Howard of themselves.
The first set of figures were just housing and farming. 26% of land is used in other means, such as wilderness (undeveloped, unfarmed land) or industrial (developed but not residential).
Include London and the South East has awfully low home ownership rates and needs a solution.
Exclude London and the South East is over 90% undeveloped.
You can't cherry pick to include London in one, but exclude it in the other. I'm fine with either, sort it out with HYUFD.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
Starmer and Rayner resign, the Gray Report goes away.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uOivzoRc0I8
https://youtu.be/8JOpPNra4bw
The South East however has the 3rd highest home ownership level of any UK region and already has enough pressure in its countryside and greenbelt spilling over from underdevelopment in London as it is compared to the rest of the UK
"As of 2020, there are 103 buildings or structures that are at least 100 metres (328 ft) tall in the Greater London metropolitan area, with 22 of these being in the City of London and 25 being in the Canary Wharf / Isle of Dogs district. The Greater London metropolitan area contains the second most skyscrapers of a city in Europe. There are 33 skyscrapers in Greater London that reach a roof height of at least 150 metres (492 ft),[1] with 57 in Moscow, 21 in the Paris Metropolitan Area, 17 in Frankfurt, 16 in Warsaw, 6 in Madrid, 5 each in Milan and Rotterdam, and 4 in Manchester."
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Whatever.
(ISTR he once said the US would have to use a trampoline to get its astronauts to the ISS, or somesuch.)
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Welcome to the club.
Which means 9% of the South East is developed of which some is residential, some is commercial or transport, some is industrial and some is other uses. So not far off UK wide figures actually.
And over 90% of the South East, by your own definition of the South East, is undeveloped.
London is at risk of ossifying. A city where no-one can any longer afford to live. If we do nothing, we kill our golden-egg laying goose. (I'm not sure that metaphor works - the goose that layed the golden egg should have been left well alone - but still. I'm a busy man and the right metaphor doesn't present itself and I can't be bothered to go looking for it.)
It is a problem common to the whole country, and solutions related to the one you propose, adapted for local purposes, could be put forward in other places too - but in London it is at its most acute.
And it's not 'special pleading'. It's a point that needs addressing in a more realistic way than your stupid one-liner.
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
It is London which needs more development to stop further overspill to the South East
Best wishes for mother and baby. Good luck getting some sleep.
We must be approaching the point where parents send letters to schools saying 'don't allow my child to be photographed with the PM'!
You were - as an aside - pearl clutching about invalids who might suffer when a lift breaks down.
How old are you, 100?
Many of my neighbours seem to be.
And they are not moaning about imaginary lift breakdowns.
Might not be true - but the idea tickled me.
Advice to a first time Dad - remember to look after yourself over the next few days too. Remember to eat. You are no use to your wife and daughter if you are not properly functioning and you cannot run on empty. It is hard work.
But congratulations. Children (though this may take a little while to become apparent) are the best things in the world.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
My advice is to surrender all hope of a “normal life” until she’s at least 2 and a half. Otherwise you’ll be frustrated.
Secondly, kids seem to have a kind of developmental model. They change at six weeks; then twelve; then twenty-four; then fifty-two.
This is important to remember when you are sick to fuck of trying to get them sleep etc; they do get there eventually.
Oh, and congratulations!
I know we're in for a big change to our lives but I'm looking forwards to it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Dubai
And was there first.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
If he’s judging everything by student accommodation in the ?90s, no wonder he’s confused.
It’s the sort of micro-economic improvement that make everyone’s life easier and indeed help inflation, and in which the government is profoundly uninterested.
Even among Putin's circle, he is a joke.
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
I do vaguely hope that your surname doesn't begin with M.
JRM is not a good look.
A friend of mine says that it was only heroin that got him through the first few months
They are TOUGH
I was off heroin when my turn came, and jeez it was not easy. We all blot out the pain, later
The terror of the first bath!
And yes for 96% of people - not all, but most - it is totally worth it