London faces housing supply shortage
London will be faced with a shortage of homes unless steps are taken to improve the house building market, a leading developer has warned.
Speaking to Inside Housing at the ground breaking for its Highbury Gardens development in Islington yesterday, First Base managing director Elliot Lipton said there is an ‘urgent need to address the supply of new housing in London’.
Mr Lipton’s company is working on a series of affordable housing developments across the capital, and is a partner in Triathlon Homes, the consortium buying 1,400 affordable units at the Olympic Village after the 2012 games.
‘We are already seeing house prices creep back up and that will continue unless we find a way of addressing the development barriers,’ he said.
David Lunts, the London director for the Homes and Communities Agency, agreed there could be difficult times ahead.
He said he was ‘confident’ that London mayor Boris Johnson’s target to deliver 50,000 affordable homes by 2012 would be met, but added: ‘It is only realistic to say the next year or two are going to be really, really tough. Our budgets are going to decrease, we know that, it is going to stay quite tough.’
He said one key way to get development moving would be to use more public land. Highbury Gardens is being built on one of 16 HCA-owned sites across London. Eight of these have either been developed or are under development, and eight will be taken forward ‘shortly’.
Mr Lunts said the purchase of the 16 sites was a ‘precursor’ to the HCA’s Public Land Initiative, which makes public land available to developers to lower the risk of building projects. In return for the increased security, developers are expected to accept lower profit margins.
See below for a case study of the Highbury Gardens scheme or more on the Public Land Initiative.
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Readers' comments (4)
Sancho | 24/02/2010 2:03 pm
Elliot could probably help deal with this shortage if he got to work developing some of the sites that he and the HCA have been sitting on for the last few years waiting for prices to go back up. This is just marketing; talking about a shortage that he and others are contributing to for the sole purpose of creating panic in the manic to accelerate price inflation.
It's an old trick, but it works every time.
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Harry Lime | 24/02/2010 3:21 pm
It's an absolute non story, it suggests there isn't already a shortage of homes in London and this is something that's just occurred to him. Next he might realise there's a dearth of decent paid jobs as well......
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St Alban | 24/02/2010 11:42 pm
I've heard that the sun may come up tomorrow morning and set in the afternoon - shock and gasp, must be a quiet news day!
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Bannside | 25/02/2010 1:42 pm
Yes a shortage of homes in London and thousands of homes lying empty and wasted. Yet only 4 london Councils have taken action under the Housing Act 2004 Empty Dwelling Management Orders to address this waste. Only one of those four, Bromley, is taking action to make a final management order and bring a home back to use. It seems this waste is acceptable to Local Authorities in London. Why build more when a significant part of what we have is wasted.
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