Be Excellent To Each Other

Grrrr.. Most annoying, to say teh least. The whole idea of these things should have been stopped at the start.



It's a going to be a new Blackbird Leys.

You're saying that cheap homes attract bad people?

Oh dear.

I'm confused, it says they're building 10,000 homes and also work premesis, integrated like. Sounds like exactly what's needed, no?

Is it in your Back Yard, by any chance?

Mali, you're such a NIMBY.

Bicester's a dormitory town. Unless businesses move to it, people are still going to commute from there to Brum, Oxford, or London.

The whole scheme sounds just as ill-conceived as the great 'cities in the sky' of the 1950s. Communities are organic - the way people want to live and work cannot be planned from above.

Also - 'eco-town'. Sounds like a washing powder.

Milton Keynes was, wasn't it?

And Telford, Skelmersdale etc etc.

This is a great idea. It will give all those whingeing Cornishmen somewhere to live.

The estate where I live was planned as a satellite town to Liverpool, but was basically ignored and abandoned by the city for a long time. Despite being a quite attractive area with wide tree lined avenues and lots of space for kids to play, the lack of investment meant that it began to crumble and die through the 70s and 80s. Feeling ignored leads to a decrease in Civic Pride and people stop caring. Gardens grow wild and graffiti appears. Dog owners leave piles of shit everywhere. Thankfully, in the last few years, the area has seen some changes. The old shops have been demolished and replaced with a new sports field, a supermarket stands on the new entrance to the estate. There seems to be a new feeling of pride around the place and everything seems to be getting better. Tell someone from Liverpool you live here though and they pull a funny face, as if you said you lived in Basra.

I did have a point...

Heh. Good points.

I don't know if enough about urban planning to follow through an argument, but just ideas to play with. Perhaps my main view would be to criticise the idea that a place can be built for a purpose, so as 'tackling climate change' or the more utopian ideas of the garden city movements or whatever. How can this be assessed in years to come? What happens if it fails? What's wrong with just saying that we need to build more homes?

We cleared slums after the war, and put people into great skyscrapers. Years of neglect made them hated by their residents.


Christ, I'm turning into Prince Charles.

In a small community with a centralised population? No doubt Mr Lanley is trying again after the Assembly failed to buy one off him for Cardiff Bay.

No, you do have a point, and I agree with it. Assuming your point is that "it's no good making a planned area and then just saying "job done" and leaving it to it". There's something peculiar about "new towns" that means they tend to go badder than any other areas when neglected.

New Towns will work, apart from one, essentially British thing.

We build 'em, and then we ignore 'em. Or cut their funding. Same thing. If anything succinctly describes British government policy over the last 50 years, it is "cutting corners".

Yes.

You end with, on a road of say 20 houses with families in them, 3 houses with Chav McNed from Glasgow, moved down there as the Scots no longer want anything to do with him or his fat, pissed wife and their 3 children whose hobbies include car theft, burglary and racism, mentally ill people from Manhester who refuse to believe that the Hacienda has closed down, and continue to try ans ell their drugs from the house they just got put in and SInglemumChav who spends the morning taking her kids to school, lunchtime in the the pub, and in the afternoon, uses the pub as a creche.

Affordable housing aside, the whole concept is a flawed one and I'm pretty pissy over it, even though I'm from the East side.

I live in a new town (Cwmbran was built from scratch in the 50s). What we've seen here is sharp divides in house prices and other secondary indicators of social quality (crime rates, insurance premiums) between different areas that were all built equal. Croesyceiliog, where I live, is in the catchment (and walking distance) of a number of well-regarded primary and secondary schools, as is Llantarnam. In the 70s the council houses rapidly sold in those areas. Other areas, like Coed Eva, Fairwater, Northville and Southville were less lucky, and many of them still have large numbers of council-owned property, with all the "sink estate" stereotyping you might imagine.

On the other hand, it is a working community, not merely a commuter estate for Bristol/Cardiff. There used to be quite a lot of light industry around here, including two large Lucas factories making car and truck brakes; although that's taken the battering you would expect for British manufacturing in this day and age. Cwmbran Shopping is (I understand) a very lucrative shopping centre that pulls in a lot of trade from the southern valleys, and therefore creates a lot of jobs. There's a lot of IT here too, because Cwmbran is on the edge of an area that qualifies for Objective One funding from the WAG and EU.

Edit -- anyway, the summary is, I think new towns can work.

I still don't understand - you don't want "affordable housing" near you, but you oppose this scheme, the main argument against which seems to be that it doesn't include enough affordable housing?

Surely you'd be for it, compared to the alternative, which would be bunches of poor value slum-to-be housing blocks, which work out expensive to live in because they aren't designed for energy efficiency.

You're forgetting option 3: Build homes somewhere that isn't Bicester.

I think the problem with my particular estate (aw fuck it, it's called Speke, stalker fans) is the distance it sits from Liverpool. It's part of Liverpool City Council, but is effectively in Knowsley. It's much quicker to get to Widnes or Runcorn than it is to get to the city. Scousers tend to not regard Speke as part of the city (calling the locals 'placcy scousers') and if they hadn't built Speke Retail Park close by and redeveloped the airport, I reckon Speke would've had to declare independence.

As Mr Chris said up there, new towns go to shit a helluva lot quicker than others. Especially with such a high concentration of affordable housing. and, as Kern said (also up there) it's going to be hard to assess a metric on which they can say "It's worked!" and stuff. The "EcoTown" thing, talking up energy efficiency is no more than a sop to get it through planning and people who say "This idea is shit and flawed from the off" will get accused of killing polar fucking bears and shit like that, as "Eco" seems to be the new buzzword, but that's another thing. Also, energy efficiency doens't mean shit to poor people, as tehy are all on card meters which are more expensive than other ones, anyway, so it's a non argument for "affordable housing".

Well after a couple of years of petitions and picketing ours has been stopped and won't be going ahead.

Victory for the local masses, hurrah !

It did mean however that Hampshire and Oxford get two, which I was pretty fucking annoyed about. Take two of the most beautiful places in the country and then builds loads of housing association houses on them. Nice

The amount of phlegm they must expectorate just saying that could constitute a health hazard.

Whilst I agree with the "eco" thing being a buzzword, surely the answer to "there aren't enough affordable houses" is to build more houses?

800 Bananas.

"Affordable Houses" means "Council housing" here.

That was going to be my entry to the 'henious gaming sin' thread.

That wasn't the issue here. The issues taken up were as follows.

1. We only have one main road that goes for about eight miles. Any traffic entering or leaving the proposed Eco Town here would have had to use that road and it's barely able to keep up with the traffic it has now. This part of the country simply isn't cut out for city life, including the 10k+ cars it would have brought with it.

We also don't have the needed shops to supply a development so large so no doubt the hidden catch would have been loads of large supermarkets. Completely ruining the aesthetics of the local area.

2. The land they wanted to build it on currently serves about 300 businesses all weekend. We have a massive car boot sale on Saturdays, followed by a enormous market on Sundays. A real market that has local butchers, clothing, everything. If they had gotten their way and used that land loads of local people would have been absolutely screwed as they make most of their money there at the weekends. (It's great too, 'cos our local butcher sells stuff in bulk there at cheaper prices ) Ten lamb chops for a fiver? oh yes oh yes.

3. We have had a problem recently due to the housing association residents of our local area. One house in particular is home to three kids who keep breaking things and causing damage. Bear in mind we're talking about a private development here with houses costing upward of £190k. Imagine what it's like to have a foul mouthed chav from a council estate 30 miles away with a main vocabulary of "cunt, fuck, shit and wank" who breaks into people's garden sheds.

He is one strike away from being forcibly moved on, but it's just major hassle. The main complaint of the Eco Town proposed here was that we would end up with people who caused problems for the local area.

True, that has been the case, especially when they are built purely intended as dormitory areas or left as dumping grounds. This scheme however at least looks like a good attempt at doing things properly (based on a 5 minute glance at the PDFs).



Not at all - making an entire town have net zero carbon emissions is quite a challenge, it's not just a "sop", and it's the way all housing development should be, really.



But on what grounds? So far I'm just hearing that you don't like the idea of it because it's somewhere near you and claims some sort of environmental credentials.
I'd be quite happy to go along with you if you say "it's built below sea level" or "the council intend to entirely populate it with drug addicts bussed in from Manchester". Facts, man!

Well adding ten thousand cars or more isn't very eco friendly is it?

All that cunt ever said was that I had too many roads. I had THE RIGHT NUMBER OF FUCKING ROADS, TWAT, TO MAKE THE CITY DEVELOP. Y'CUNT.

Are you suggesting people will only buy cars once they get a house in this area? I think most of them already own the cars.

You seem to be missing the point. This isn't Sim City.

Or, of course, "have less people who need them". It's time for Craster's means tested parenting licence idea.

It is indeed. That, unfortunately, is strategic rather than tactical, of course.

Right. And cramming them into an area not able to cope with it isn't going to really help is it?

Also, building on fields isn't great, either.

No, you should get some footings down first.

Why wouldn't the area be able to cope with it? It's a new town, planned from scratch to have suitable roads and parking. It'll be much better able to cope with density of traffic than places that were planned and built before cars existed.

Very historical ones at that.

Then they would have to literally dig up the entire area. We have a two lane road here that's no wider than any small road in a city. How is that going to cope with all that extra traffic? Unless of course you start ripping up green belt and laying new roads. And again, that's hardly very eco friendly is it? killing thousands of animals and ruining an eco system for extra roads.

And all this during a recession? /slow claps.

It'd create thousands of short-term jobs.

I'd have thought the biggest demand for affordable housing would be during a recession.

And surely the government's income is one of the least eaffected during a recession. Sure, they lose some tax income from people being out of work and businesses being bust, but surely that drop cannot be as great as for a business facing bankruptcy. This is the foundation of the Keynsian government-spend-out-of-a-recession argument.

Edit -- typo correction.

stabby-stabby-eye-stab.

Oooops. Shit. Now I look like quite the fool.

Fewer.

Ambivalent

Short term. And what happens when you then have 10-20 thousand people all living in the middle of nowhere with no jobs?

Onto the rocker with all them then. Yes that really helps the economy.

Here is a pic of the proposed site. It's either side of Yapton Road and that is the only road that can be considered main. Tell me how all those cars leaving for work are meant to get down there?

The other problem is that whilst Ford airfield may have been considered viable to stick this thing on, nothing around it is. It's all green belt, and it's all protected. So the logistics of all that traffic and it having pretty much nowhere to go were just ridiculous.

The only turn offs of this road for literally 6 miles are private developments full of bungalows and retired people. Who all moved here after busting their asses for 50 years for a bit of peace and quiet.

Are the government paying for the development? Because if they're not, this isn't really going to work - it being a recession, house building companies are loathe to build houses and are just sat on their land portfolios, quietly going bust.



Well, quite. However, regardless of whether the affordable housing's there, there have to be affordable mortgages too, which are in short supply given the current reluctance of banks to lend to anyone with anything less than a 1000% deposit.



Unlike a company, the recession means the government's outlay goes up as well as its income going down. The public finances of most countries are currently comprehensively fscked, mate. And the expensive Keynesian approach has been rejected by a number of European countries, I'd thought. It might have been an idea if we had, too, or at lease spent the money on something less fucking stupid and ineffective than the 2.5% reduction in VAT.