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Heygate Estate redevelopment: just 79 social rented units out of a total 2,535 new homes

stethoscope said:
Whole thing smells less 'council cock up', and more 'co-ordinated cleansing'.
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While not on the scale of Southwark's Heygate, what Lambeth have done with the Myatts Field estate "regeneration" appears to be "the shape of things to come", and we can expect the conditions to which decanted/rehoused tenants are subject to get harsher and harsher - certainly their new tenancies are nowhere near as encompassingly-secure as their old tenancies.
 
SarfLondoner said:
The only people living and working in the "new" area will be rich and not part of the community,never have been and probably never will. Southwark are trying to imply that the new houses and luxury apartments will be for the current and long standing members of the community,there lies and bullshit is quite staggering. You are correct in saying that these units get sold abroad without been put on the market here.
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I'm personally surprised that fewer Southwark tenants caught on to the way Southwark was heading (i.e. interested in gentrification at any price) as far back as the beginning of the '90s, when they pretty much bulldozed swathes of LA housing on the side roads of off the Old Kent Road using the old "slum clearance" schtick (something that IMO would have been better deployed on the North Peckham estate).
 
SarfLondoner said:
The only people living and working in the "new" area will be rich and not part of the community,never have been and probably never will. Southwark are trying to imply that the new houses and luxury apartments will be for the current and long standing members of the community,there lies and bullshit is quite staggering. You are correct in saying that these units get sold abroad without been put on the market here.
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We can only hope that when (not if, when) the same trick is tried with The Aylesbury, that more tenants remember how people on The Heygate got shafted, and organise a more effective resistance to being socially-cleansed.
 
ViolentPanda said:
I'm personally surprised that fewer Southwark tenants caught on to the way Southwark was heading (i.e. interested in gentrification at any price) as far back as the beginning of the '90s, when they pretty much bulldozed swathes of LA housing on the side roads of off the Old Kent Road using the old "slum clearance" schtick (something that IMO would have been better deployed on the North Peckham estate).
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Do you know what they became VP? I used to have quite a few friends including an ex- I stayed very friendly with who lived round there and who all lived on those estates. Have lost touch with them now. Some of the flats were very basic hard-to-lets (gas fires, immersions, really old kitchens) but it was a good place to live - friendly, good for transport and shopping & right next to the market.

I think the context of the 90s was different - people were less aware of gentrification and were less cynical about the so-called 'slum clearance' aspect. There were much higher grant rates for social housing and it was less reliant on the market to subsidise it.
 
Whenever I feel miserable I like to come to this thread just to wallow in it all a bit more. It's so brazen and they've got away with it. Have Private Eye kept plugging away at it? Someone somewhere can go to prison if anyone digs around enough, it's utter filth and someone's filled their boots.
 
has the estate actually been demolished yet? is there any way it could be occupied to stop its destruction?
 
oryx said:
Do you know what they became VP?
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Some HA new-build, more private new-build, and a fair whack of retail sheds.

I used to have quite a few friends including an ex- I stayed very friendly with who lived round there and who all lived on those estates. Have lost touch with them now. Some of the flats were very basic hard-to-lets (gas fires, immersions, really old kitchens) but it was a good place to live - friendly, good for transport and shopping & right next to the market.

I think the context of the 90s was different - people were less aware of gentrification and were less cynical about the so-called 'slum clearance' aspect. There were much higher grant rates for social housing and it was less reliant on the market to subsidise it.
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The problem with what we might call "traditional" gentrification back then, was it affected the bigger private housing first, hence people like Sir Geoffrey Howe buying pied a terre off of the OKR (just after he kebabed Thatcher) for a song (and getting taxpayer assistance to do it up :mad: ), which in turn caused both the local authority and speculators to take a look at their holdings, and how they could benefit.
Of course, few of the locals who got "decanted" from the old street properties and the older estates (many of which were former LCC/GLC low rises), got to live in the new HA properties that were built on clearance sites, most of them got decanted far and wide across the borough - sometimes to places no better than the "slum" they'd been shifted from.
 
Favelado said:
Whenever I feel miserable I like to come to this thread just to wallow in it all a bit more. It's so brazen and they've got away with it. Have Private Eye kept plugging away at it? Someone somewhere can go to prison if anyone digs around enough, it's utter filth and someone's filled their boots.
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Yep, Private Eye keep prodding the hornets' nest, and occasionally turning up another fact or two that indicates the utter wrongness of what has happened with Heygate.
Not that revealing the truth will help those who lost their homes, but it might help those people on the Aylesbury who are being subjected to similar forces, and it does alert the wider social housing populace to what local authorities feel to be an acceptable way to treat social housing tenants.
 
Favelado said:
"Decanted". I love the fact they thought that such a dehumanising word was preferable to the word "moved". Telling really.
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It's more than 'moved' though, because there's an element of compulsion on behalf of the local authority and it's involuntary on the part of tenants. Decanted is a much better word in these circumstances in my opinion because it does capture the inhuman aspect as well as the others.
 
equationgirl said:
It's more than 'moved' though, because there's an element of compulsion on behalf of the local authority and it's involuntary on the part of tenants. Decanted is a much better word in these circumstances in my opinion because it does capture the inhuman aspect as well as the others.
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I think they think it's less loaded though. So it shows what a bunch of dunces they are to employ it as a supposedly less controversial term.
 
I was walking around the Walworth Road and Heygate areas last weekend, when I had a bit of spare time from my own flat clearance work.

I have absolutely nothing positive to report from what I saw, whatsoever :(
 
FWIW 'decanting' is total housing jargon. It should be kept to the confines of lettings teams in council/HA offices and is really not one for the media. I don't mean that in a horrible secretive underhand way, it really is just a term for people moving, perhaps twice (to a temporary property then back again to their old home) due to work to or demolition of houses or flats, as opposed to a 'transfer' or 'new let' (again housing jargon).

I really don't want to sound like I'm defending shark-like property developers etc. but it's a term that's been in use for at least thirty years.
 
SarfLondoner said:
Here is a press release from southwark refuting claims that the land was sold off to cheaply. Its states that future monies will be invested into the NEW community. Well that's fucking okay then for the rich incomers,Not so great for the displaced community scattered around England with fuck all but memories.

http://www.southwark.gov.uk/news/ar...value_of_the_elephant_and_castle_regeneration
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Interesting - assuming this was put out in response to the petition?

In summary, there is more money to come. No one seems to have an idea how much or by when. And the specifics of how the deal is structured seems to be shroweded in secrecy.

It may be that Southwark have played a blinder here but it appears we won't know until a time when anyone accountable is out of office.

The lack of transparency is astounding. I understand that sometimes for commercial reasons some details may need to remain confidential. However as the vendor Southwark holds all the cards in the contract negotiation. The buyer may have threatened to pull out meaning the sale to another party instead on less favorable terms in which case there is a cost that would have come with transparancy. I can't imagine it was *that* important to the buyer that they'd pull put of such a big deal. I would have thought it more useful to those acting on behalf of Southwark who didn't have any financial stake of their own on the line.
 
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Southwark council sold the Heygate Estate for £55m to private developer Lend lease. The cost of evicting tenants from the Heygate is set to be in the region of £65m - meaning the sale (on our behalf) of a 22 acre site, has actually led to around a £10m loss.

Lend Lease meanwhile, are expected to make around £194m profit from the deal, whilst hundreds of families lose their homes.

A number of former council officers involved in the negotiations with developer Lend Lease and are now full-time employees of Lend Lease.

Please join (and share) the campaign for an investigation into allegations of governance failure, poor financial management and potential fraud at the London Borough of Southwark: [www.change.org]
 
Camberwell said:
Southwark council sold the Heygate Estate for £55m to private developer Lend lease. The cost of evicting tenants from the Heygate is set to be in the region of £65m - meaning the sale (on our behalf) of a 22 acre site, has actually led to around a £10m loss.

Lend Lease meanwhile, are expected to make around £194m profit from the deal, whilst hundreds of families lose their homes.

A number of former council officers involved in the negotiations with developer Lend Lease and are now full-time employees of Lend Lease.

Please join (and share) the campaign for an investigation into allegations of governance failure, poor financial management and potential fraud at the London Borough of Southwark: [www.change.org]
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You'll probably get stick for spamming your petition with your first post but it's a worthy cause. Sounds like naked corruption. Disgusting.
 
Camberwell said:
Southwark council sold the Heygate Estate for £55m to private developer Lend lease. The cost of evicting tenants from the Heygate is set to be in the region of £65m - meaning the sale (on our behalf) of a 22 acre site, has actually led to around a £10m loss.

Lend Lease meanwhile, are expected to make around £194m profit from the deal, whilst hundreds of families lose their homes.

A number of former council officers involved in the negotiations with developer Lend Lease and are now full-time employees of Lend Lease.

Please join (and share) the campaign for an investigation into allegations of governance failure, poor financial management and potential fraud at the London Borough of Southwark: [www.change.org]
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Yeah, cunts. They actually sold it for £45m.

There's quite a few threads and posts about this on here - have a search around.

It breaks my heart. I was born there. A community destroyed.
 
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