This week’s news about the Borough Triangle development will come as little surprise to our readers.
The same developer, Berkeley Homes, that tried to reduce the affordable housing provision from 35% to just 12% on the Aylesham Centre redevelopment in Peckham has now applied to do the same for the Borough Triangle in Elephant & Castle.
Berkeley’s plan is to drop their affordable housing offer to just 10%, going from 230 homes to a mere 60.
It’s a plan that Southwark councillors have been advised to reject and, given the new administration’s commitment to only approve new developments that “work for locals”, it’s hard to see how any homes will get built on the site any time soon.
Berkeley’s argument, and the argument made by most developers, would undoubtedly be that 60 affordable homes is better than none, even if far more will be privately-rented or owned.
There’s no question that both the Borough Triangle and Aylesham Centre represent brilliant opportunities for development, with a chance to build hundreds of homes that might make small inroads into our housing crisis.
But not all homes are created equal.
When so many properties in our borough lie empty, used as investment vehicles by overseas investors, or are now occupied by students who pay no council tax, it would be an abject failure to allow these prime locations to be used in the same way.
As the News reported last month, Southwark is losing thousands of residents a year, many forced out of the borough because of housing costs and moving to cheaper pastures in outer London and the commuter belt.
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To deal with some of that demand, the Mayor of London has proposed to build thousands of homes on the capital’s green belt – a plan which has been widely condemned by the councils and residents who will be impacted.
But it seems nonsensical to begin dismantling the green belt, often called the “lungs of our city”, to build homes for former Southwark and central London residents when they would probably rather stay in their local areas, on a re-developed Aylesham or Borough Triangle. That is, if they could reasonably afford it.
It’s all well and good, as the Centre for Cities think tank suggested this week, to hand control of Network Rail land to Sadiq Khan to build 535,000 homes on transport hubs across inner London.
But if the private developers that are tasked with building that land cannot, in our current economic conditions, deliver housing that locals can afford, those homes will continue to go to waste.
