• Ask Developments’ specialist low-cost apartment arm, Abito, is to develop its first scheme in the capital, having acquired a site in Greenwich. The company is aiming to build several hundred small apartments for first-time homebuyers on the site, selling at prices of around £150,000. Abito managing director Les Lang said: “That might sound expensive, but it is still £30,000 to £40,000 below the market norm.” The company is completing its first scheme in Salford, and has further projects in the pipeline for northern locations. The company achieves low selling prices through compact design and rationalisation of construction (see What’s working, page 36).
  • Making Places, the new joint venture of registered social landlord Places for People and brownfield land specialist Cofton, has spent nearly £70m of its £300m war chest for buying brownfield land just weeks after its formation. The venture has spent the money on two sites that will together produce just over 2000 homes. Under the joint venture, Cofton provides the landbuying expertise, and Places for People the development know-how, but the RSL will not be building all the homes on sites bought. Typically, it will build all the affordable homes and about 30% of private housing. Cofton chief executive Peter Nelson said: “We expect to release parcels of land on our Swindon site by the end of the year.”
  • Ashwell Property Group is hoping to develop 1million ft2 of mixed-use space, including an 18-storey tower, on the former Marconi factory site alongside Chelmsford station in Essex. Architect Richard Rogers Partnership has masterplanned the site, and redevelopment will include the retention of a number of key buildings. Outline planning is scheduled for early summer.
  • Overbids for sites in London of 20% to 30% are now commonplace, according to the latest report, Residential Development in London, published by London Development Research this month. The report says the London market is experiencing an excess of: people wanting to be developers, funding wanting to find its way into development, and confidence in developing in London. As a result, the report cautions: “overly bullish value expectations and overpayment for land mean the market is less stable than it might otherwise be. It is vulnerable to significant short-term losses with the next significant cutback by employers in the financial services sector.”
  • The review of housing supply by Kate Barker has increased the risk of black and minority ethnic communities being exposed to “severe overcrowding” over the next 15 years. This is one of the findings of an unpublished report by consultancy Ecotec commissioned by the West Yorkshire Housing Partnership to examine the housing demands of the region’s BME population.
It finds that “as many as one in ten homes… contain a concealed household made up of a couple with children of their own” and that there is going to be a worsening “pressure cooker effect” as the population ages over next 15 years.

The report’s authors call for an emphasis to be placed on providing a “range of housing options” to meet the needs of often larger Asian families. It points out that of the 141,000 new households to be formed in Bradford by 2021, half will be BME.

Ecotec adds that “in the light of the Barker review, the shifting national policy debate away from market renewal towards…supply and demand equations…poses a risk that the underlying problems of housing market frailty…will not be addressed”.

The study comes hot on the heels of Commission for Racial Equality findings earlier this month which warned that the regeneration industry had a duty to consider “how [it] might effect community cohesion”.

The Ecotec study also found that the targets for processing asylum claims more quickly “pose a risk to neighbourhood stability” due to the likely increased “turnover” of asylum seekers in neighbourhoods.

Source

RegenerateLive