Making social housing more luxurious isn’t solving any real problems.
Tax the luxury developments more and spend that money on social housing in a reasonable location instead.
Where you might have two, four or eight units to a floor for private owners, social tenants are usually in much smaller units, 16 or 24 to a floor.
The fit-out and finish tends to be “cheapest available”, and it shows. The layouts are often unbearably cramped, and windows are often smaller.
Corridors are frequently left in an unfinished state - painted breeze-blocks and exposed utilities in the ceiling.
So, to call this luxurious is to call anything above sleeping on a doorstep luxurious.
It is, by the virtue of the location alone
Complaining about the fit and finish just shows the mountain of privilege you’re standing on.
Public transport in London is painfully expensive, and if you are earning minimum wage on a part-time contract, a private tenancy that would be affordable to such a person would be well outside of the city, and their commuting costs would be a substantial portion of their pay - and you would need to subsidise them to a greater degree than you would by simply having them live near their place of work.
So, again, I assume you count having a job and a home as a “mountain of privilege”, and not as a fairly universal underpinning of society.
Society benefits greatly from mixed areas - race, class, etc.
Citation needed. Also If I buy a flat and I have to live with problematic people, how does that benefit me?
We’re talking about the most desirable areas in the world here, trying to force in social housing is just weird.
It’s not like there isn’t a bunch of places within a very reasonable commute where they could put social housing. Fuck, I used to commute from Reading for a while!
It’s almost like they’ve modelled this out before making it policy.
I think we should certainly impose heavier taxes on the luxury developments and the rich living in them.
No spending is avoided here, it’s merely obscured a little.
Taxing the developers for straight cash would at least give the government more control on how it is spend.
And councils have finite budgets so every £ extra spent paying someone's rent is a £ that isn't spent on supporting and caring for the elderly and the disabled and the mentally ill / funding schools / running buses / maintaining cycle paths and parks and play areas and libraries.
Unfortunately there are a number of disadvantages to this:
1. Making affordable housing a condition of planning permission doesn't cost the council anything, whereas houses built in other councils' areas would have to be paid for.
2. The vast majority of social housing users have jobs and loved ones. If someone has to buy a car to get to work, or can no longer get babysitting from their parents while they work, or moves somewhere with lower wages, such a move makes them poorer.
3. Many of the jobs these people are doing need doing anyway, so they'll have to be replaced - possibly with someone with a longer/more expensive commute. Some people have a certain cynicism about capitalism, and are sceptical as to whether these jobs' wages will rise at all, let alone rise enough to cover a more expensive commute.
4. Regeneration often involves demolishing homes poor people live in. As some minorities are richer than others, regeneration that sends poor people out of a city is also regeneration that sends certain minorities out of the city. Some people feel this has shades of "ethnic cleansing".