UK: The historical costs of non-affordable affordable housing.

 Isn’t it amazing that apparently someone important has just noticed not enough affordable housing is being built? (really?) Who would’ve thought it, lowering the number of affordable homes that must be supplied with each development of open market developments lowers the amount of affordable housing built. Doesn’t it sound like developers just want to build the most expensive homes possible, maybe the companies have shareholders or bosses to pay? So since we’ve built these expensive open market homes on most of the land available, any idea’s where the affordable homes might be built? Anyone might think the developers lobby Governments to have more homes built, nothing illegal in that mind you. Ok we’ll build 10 affordable homes, just let us build 1000 open markets homes. Ok deal. Hey lets build on those mines created centuries ago, we’ll just obliterate everything there, shafts, foundations, the lot. Weird how in the Cornish Mining World Heritage site the actual mines are earmarked for development. Still, plenty of greenfiled land left out there for the affordable housing which might have its turn one day, although the myth of Government not wanting to build on greenfeild land is just that, a myth. My local MP is against greenfield development except he’s never spoke out about the greenfield developments in his constituency. Apparently he’s always out of town and doesn’t know what goes on in the area he should be representing. Looks like being an MP is his second job, his first is serving his Tory party.

Now we’re talking about affordable housing, what is affordable when the area has no jobs available? The famous Holman Brothers foundry that was sited in my town employed almost the whole town, over 2000 people. So what happened to it? Government did. In the 1960′s Government decided the amount of compressed air tool factories was just to high to be competetive with the foreign market, the solution was therefore to combine all the companies together, thus forming Compair Holman. Holmans, as we locals call it, wasn’t even a compressed air company, it was a mining machinary company. Soon after, the company left the town, thank you Government, mission complete, lets rewrite history.  South Crofty tin mine, the last tin mine in Cornwall and Europe, shut down when the Government refused its applications for loans. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t too long ago Cornwall Council submitted a Compulsary Purchase Order on that mine, doesn’t matter if theres plans to reopen it, housing is more important than jobs and heritage, obviously. Guess they wanted to do the same thing that happened to the Holman Brothers foundries, obliberate every existance of the industry. Mining and foundaries, such dirty work, best to erase any evidence that they ever existed and replace it with a supermarket or housing. I think this was after buildings kept getting accidently demolished, the Camborne School of Mines building, accidently demolished by a careless digger driver when being converted to a supermarket, or the chimney stacks left over from the days of mining, demolished by another careless digger driver. Not that you’d see many mining remains anyway, since mining apparently destroyed such a big amount of the landscape, some mines are deliberately bulldozed to make way for playgrounds, the others the remains are left for nature to reclaim. Until people forget theres remains there and a developer pops his head up and decides to plant a few new homes there. Nothing said about housing destroying the landscape, destroyed more than mining ever did.

So housing has always been the agenda, since people started buying it as an investment. Housing prices always go up, if they go down then world is about to end. So how to handle the problem of housing? Stop investors buying the new homes and root out the corruption between Westminster, the Planning Officers and the developers. Did I mention a Planning Officer in my town owns property and is actually quite rich? Then we come to the issue of why area’s in the coutryside seem to be favoured for more housing. Could it be because rural area’s pay more in tax but recieve less funding from Government? So therefore, does the Government deliberately favour mass rural development over urban development and what does the Government do with the surplus amount it recieves in taxes?