Sir Richard Leese, the leader of Manchester city council, must be a happy man this week. He has just signed the authority's biggest housing deal for a generation.
On 24 June, Leese announced a £1bn deal to build up to 6,000 homes on the eastern side of the city, close to the Etihad home of Manchester City football club, whose owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group, is making good on a promise to put money into the community.
It's a coup for Leese, a vindication of his long-term plans for the city and a rebuttal of those who have argued that previous regeneration plans have focused too much on the city centre, on retail and expensive loft-style apartments and have left out poorer neighbourhoods. This latest deal adds the housing element to existing investment in the eastern edge of the city and will be for private rent – another fillip for the private rented sector, already gaining momentum.
Neat timing, too, in a week when the country's housing professionals are in Manchester for the annual conference run by the Chartered Institute for Housing (CIH), and when the affordability crisis has been glaringly highlighted in Shelter's report on house prices, which shows that fewer than two in 10 houses for sale in England could be bought by families on average wages.
A housing conference like this is a telling blend of the practical, the tactical and the strategic. Delegates stroll past exhibition stands extolling radiators, showers or insurance, on their way to the conference speeches, over which hang, inevitably, the prospect of the general election next May.
The shadow housing minister, Emma Reynolds, laid out Labour's stall on the first day, saying the party would bring in mandatory guidelines for councils to determine local housing need, while Grainia Long, chief executive of the CIH, called on the government to set a national target for housebuilding.
The housing professionals at this conference want politicians, both national and local, to get the message. Housing is at a crisis point and action is needed. That means big policy ideas, but it means remembering the nitty-gritty, too.
Politicians' interests wax and wane and they need evidence to focus their minds. Neighbourhood renewal, for instance, hasn't been politically trendy in the life of this government, and even the Labour government, initially supportive, ended up "bottling it", according to Ed Cox, of IPPR North, despite such schemes being excellent value for money in preventing poor neighbourhoods from declining further.
Some politicians may have lost interest, but as Carol Matthews, chief executive of Riverside Housing, put it during a session organised by Orbit Group on investing in local communities, "Neighbourhoods never went away for us." They didn't go away for Leese, either.
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