Re your article (We need spaces to live but we also need places to make things, 7 January): twenty years ago Richard Rogers’ Towards an Urban Renaissance put sustainability at the core of a vision of compact cities where people worked, rested and played with minimum car use. Residential densification of central London and other large English cities would be delivered through regeneration and the judicious imposition of tall buildings. The result was a tall building frenzy driven by international capital, with many central London flats used as vacant safety deposit boxes. Meanwhile, a new population was sucked in to join Londoners who no longer wished to leave the thriving capital, and the housing crisis deepened.
In desperation, successive mayors have identified over 40 “opportunity areas” for intensive housebuilding, involving a land grab of thousands of hectares. Unfortunately these are all key industrial areas where the nuts and bolts of the city are manufactured and many thousands of Londoners employed. For example, one company in the Vauxhall “opportunity area” – employing 100 “low skill” workers who live close by and work through the night preparing raw fish to supply many West End restaurants – is threatened with yet another tall speculative residential building. In the name of sustainability, we are building a city where ordinary people have nowhere to live and nowhere to work.
Michael Ball
Reclaim London
• While MPs and peers were away on their Christmas break the Resolution Foundation showed that half the UK population do not own their own homes, when properly counted. The housing crisis festered. Politicians return to parliament with no immediate plans to relieve those renters suffering now from overcrowding, debt, eviction, homelessness, hunger and ill health.
That crisis has grown out of the 30 years’ total failure, both practical and moral, of the market to provide enough affordable homes to rent or to buy. 200,000 new homes in 14 new villages in an unreformed UK housing market will guarantee more and ever bigger housing crises.
Recycling these announcements does not address the immediate crisis. The emergency response now required from government is to freeze all rent increases, prior to reintroducing rent controls, and to tax all unused land, like the 600,000 unused plots owned by the big builders.
Rev Paul Nicolson Taxpayers Against Poverty, Dr Stephen Battersby, Fred Harrison Land Research Trust, Dr Duncan Pickard, Liz Davies
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