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Worth reading!!! https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/02/penthouses-poor-doors-nine-elms-battersea-london-luxury-housing-development When Lefties collaborate with Righty Global developers all is lost!!!
NZ currently making exactly the same mistakes (but without even the affordable housing component in the luxury developments in London).
It’s not just the righties making major errors with Housing, the lefties around the world are leading the destruction.
“The turbo-charged speculative development along the river has its origins in an unlikely place. It was the socialist mayor of London Ken Livingstone who first designated this part of the capital as one of his 28 “opportunity areas” in the 2004 London Plan, along with places such as King’s Cross, Elephant and Castle, the Greenwich peninsula and Paddington. The strategy was for a Robin Hood model of regeneration: a tidal wave of foreign investment would be actively encouraged, and tall buildings welcomed, in the belief that a large bounty could be creamed off for the public good. The target was for half of the housing to be affordable. If developers couldn’t meet this target, they would have to produce a financial viability assessment to prove why it wasn’t possible.
But it didn’t quite go according to plan. Rather than being an exception, viability became used as a regular get-out clause. Each time, it was a similar story: having paid so much for the land, and expecting costly construction fees, while forecasting low sales prices, the developers could make it look like they simply wouldn’t have any money left to pay for affordable housing. Meanwhile, the viability assessment allowed their 20% profit margin to be safely preserved.
In 2012, just as the plan for the VNEB area was being drawn up in City Hall, the Conservative-led coalition government accelerated this trend by placing viability at the very core of national planning policy: the ability of the developer to make a profit would trump everything else. They then watered down the definition of “affordable” housing to mean up to 80% of market rate – hardly affordable for many in London. With David Cameron in No 10, Boris Johnson in City Hall, Wandsworth council’s former leader Edward Lister as Johnson’s deputy mayor for planning, and Ravi Govindia at Wandsworth town hall, the VNEB opportunity area became the ultimate testing ground for this mighty engine of deregulation, a developer free-for-all where anything would go.”
“There was once a world where you could build riverside council homes,” said Dikerdem. “We’ve gone backwards since then. That’s why what has happened here is so upsetting. We are never again going to have all this abandoned industrial space on the river, which could have really transformed the lives of people in a borough in which thousands of people are statutorily homeless, and tons of professionals are spending all their income on private rent. It was a historic opportunity, but we’ve ended up with loads more luxury skyscrapers, which is not what the city needed.”
australia should be more than willing to compromise on their deportation policy
a course of events over at least the last 2 years have seen nz become alot more valuable as trading partners and allies
it’s not nz’s responsibility for australian underbelly turning people to crime
ejecting them from their home of many years is part of the problem not the solution
like here , theres is much need for better prison reform and social welfare services in australia
Also worth a read:
http://www.kiwipolitico.com/2021/02/another-note-on-academic-decline/
The disease pervades other institutions in lil’ ole NuZul that punches above its weight too – such as various government social agencies (MSD, OT, etc.) Generic neo-liberal Managerialism.
And you can be sure the Masters-of-the Universe, PS spin merchants and their enterage of bullshit artists have all the answers ready to push back when there is any criticism. In this case – it’d be something like accusing teaching staff of elitism or academic snobbery.
I hope the TEU know (and other unions for that matter) that Labour is no longer your friend – maybe just the best of a captured bunch being constantly fed the Koolaid.
The market the market, growth growth, it’s the economy stupid in this space going forward
+1OnceWasTim
love the phrase “People with research and teaching talent began to leave and boot-licking academic driftwood began to pile up.”
The driftwood circle the wagons too @SaveNZ. I ‘spose you can’t blame them really. They’ve got their mortgages to pay, and lifestyles to maintain. Not that all that is going to matter much when it all turns to shit and it comes time to cash up.
Some of them will get a gig on The Spinoff maybe for a while. And there’s always a Labour Party candidacy to aspire to.
I hope some of them never come near me though moaning about how mean Guilford has been to them – they should’ve been smart enough to have seen what was coming earlier on.
Gaming the system
I recently reviewed the salaries of Public Sector CEOs (Taxpayers Union, n.d.) and came to the following conclusion: the people running our public agencies are just one in a million. Of the 140 CEOs listed (2019 data), 53 earned more than our Prime Minister in one year (PM salary $471,049; RNZ, n.d.) and combined, these corporate elites took home $62 million that year. This is an average of $442,921 per CEO. For comparison, in the last year first division Lotto NZ winners (101 draws) collected on average $427,524. Now either our public service remuneration is the equivalent of a life changing event in that executives get paid every year the same as an unlikely lotto win, or Lotto tickets aren’t worth the paper they are written on. In either case, at least a couple of hundred New Zealander public servants take home a Lotto win every year for the privilege of working for us the people, while most New Zealanders will never win first division or ‘earn’ this kind of money in their lifetime. The annual median income of the average Kiwi, $33,904 (Stats NZ, 2020), probably wouldn’t cover their travel expenses to ugly town. I actually wonder if there would be any difference to these agencies if the CEOs weren’t even there. Seriously, stay home, save lots. It’s a big club and there’s no chance of you being in it.
RNZ. (n.d.). Prime Minister and MP salaries capped for three years. Retrieved from
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/433200/prime-minister-and-mp-salaries-capped-for-three-years
Stats NZ. (2020). Labour market statistics (income): June 2020 quarter. Retrieved from
https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/labour-market-statistics-income-june-2020-quarter#:~:text=Comparing%20the%20June%202020%20quarter,%2423%20(6.7%20percent)%20to%20%24364
Tax Payers Union. (n.d.) Revealed: the public sector CEO rich list. Retrieved from
https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/ceo_rich_list
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