Penthouses and poor doors: how Europe's 'biggest regeneration project' fell flat | Hacker News Reader

Penthouses and poor doors: how Europe's 'biggest regeneration project' fell flat

theguardian.com

44 pointshownottowrite58 comments

“Andrea Franzel lives in an apartment in the Chancery building of Embassy Gardens, a shared ownership block managed by the Peabody housing association.

After months of navigating dense bureaucracy, as chair of the residents’ association, he secured some funding to buy a painting for the building’s bleak communal lobby, along with a mirror and a small console table.

But, after three years, Peabody’s neighbourhood manager ruled that the table was a fire hazard, and had it removed.

“It sounds like a small thing,” said Franzel, “but that little table was part of our community. We used to buy fresh flowers and leave things for each other. Now we have nothing.” “

The face palming stories of heartless bureaucracies using excuses like this to stick it to the little guy.

The interesting thing to me is that it happens in every society. Some humans love wielding power over others.

Human society does not function at scale. When one can ignore the anonymous others' needs, just add population to create tyranny.

There is precious little evidence that it worked better without scale…

Reminds me of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". Highly recommended film.

Definitely, also 12 monkeys, they almost got 2020 right :)

maybe not 2020, but 2030 could be the ticket if governments don't start being serious about bio terror countermeasures. that's about how far we are from desktop sized virus sequencing machines from the looks of it :(

Not familiar with the detail of the incident, but it sounds hyperbolic to me.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 there’s been much greater scrutiny on fire safety in apartment buildings.

Imagine an alternative scenario in which Peabody leave the table in situ, a fire breaks out, and in the rush to escape the building it is knocked over, blocking egress and causing serious injury or death.

I would also point out Peabody are a housing association, not the archetypal faceless international luxury property developer this article is otherwise attempting to vilify.

You solve these problems with buy-ins: either make them see it that way themselves or make them sign an insurance discharge that fire damages wont be covered.

It s fine to die in a fire, what s not fine is to then sue the building manager over a table you refused to remove.

What if just one out of several residents does not consent? What about guests who visit?

It’s far easier just to remove the fire hazard and absolve the housing authority of any liability.

Industry and government love to blame the little guy.

The fact is, the Grenfell disaster wouldn't have happened if the local council had used the proper materials during construction. To conflate this with a table in a lobby is odd.

I don't think it's conflating, so much as increased awareness being inferred.

>Since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 there’s been much greater scrutiny on fire safety in apartment buildings.

I don't know. The subject comes up every now and then on the radio, and i am shocked anew by how little seems to be getting done. The subject of cladding seems to have been relegated to the endless and exhausting realm of Whitehall bureaucracy (the finest in the world), instead of being treated as the national emergency it is. I saw the plume of smoke rising from Grenfell tower, and the criminally sluggish response of our government to adress it seems incredible.

Of course there are tiresome legal and political battles about who will pick up the bill for remediation activities. When the cost for individual buildings is in the millions of pounds, that is to be expected.

But to suggest little has been done is nonsense. Essentially everyone involved in high-rise buildings has been spurred into action in one way or another, from residents to developers, contractors, property managers, insurers, mortgage lenders, etc.

This flurry of activity has also uncovered a raft of other construction defects or fire safety issues in buildings beyond combustible cladding.

Don't see why apartment owners should be forced to carry the buck.

Just exchange the wooden table with a stone table. Problem solved. It was indeed a fire hazard

My UK Housing association sent all residents a harsh letter saying how nothing can be left in the hallway, no posters, notes or anything, as they contravene fire health and safety, so classed as a fire risk.

They then month later put a cork notice board up which they litter with their propaganda (best way to describe the chaff they put on there and more ego promoting themselves type stuff, ergo my go to definition of it), all printed on paper.

I have found many excel at finding excuses to not do something and very professional at shuffling issues about in the hope that they will be forgotten about though done in a way that their bureaucracy can say they did their job. In short many staff excel in such institutions excel at being seen to be doing their job over doing it and you quickly recognise the patterns and language having worked with politicians/Civil servants and know all the tricks - like sending a reply 1 minute before you leave the office and excels at email tennis.

My favourite was them sending a letter saying they would take me to court for access as I had not had a gas safety check. Which given I had one a month ago prior and was still awaiting for a part, all covered and done by one of their contracted out service providers who had informed them and why my gas safety check had not been done. They then just said it was computer error, something which I found even more offensive than spending a month in the middle of winter without any heating.

Heck, I've had two asbestos checks, because they lost the first one, and other silly appointments that needlessly happen. In total I end up taking a week of my year off to accommodate such silly checks, which remarkably can never be done in one day and always spread out over a couple of month on several says. That's in a good year if they all turn up, always one or two missed appointments.

I've realised they only care about the money. Have drug dealers in your flat 24/7 for a month - they don't care. Yet if you are a few pound short on your rent account, they soon get on your case.

Housing associations when you cut thru the PR operate akin to the worst of the corporate World with equally a level of bureaucracy that even Government's aspire too achieve.

> In total I end up taking a week of my year off to accommodate such silly checks, which remarkably can never be done in one day and always spread out over a couple of month on several says.

Did you really need to take those days off? When my apartment management company needs access to my apartment for routine checks and maintenance, they just let me know ahead of time and then let themselves in (they have a key, of course). They come during the work day, when I'm not home. Well, that was true up until COVID anyway; I was actually home for the most recent plumbing adventure they were debugging in the bathroom.

That depends on the country and specifics of housing associations. In my case, I've never lived in an apartment to which a third party had keys[0]. Even when renting, it was always the case that I could change the locks, and the owner / housing association would have to announce their intent to visit beforehand. Them just letting themselves in was unthinkable. Last time the housing association wanted to do something in my basement, they had to ask kindly to be let in[1]. I'm not sure, but this may even be prohibited by regulations at the national level.

[0] - Discounting hotels, hostels, and that one time I interned abroad for a couple months.

[1] - And then the people doing the work - exchanging heat pipes that happen to run by our basement cell - managed to cause theft of some of our items stored there (they probably left the items in question outside, and someone else took them), and then they've lost the keys.

In your gas story, I'm guessing it wasn't even malice, just incompetence. I've learned to be defensive when dealing with HOAs, doctors and other kinds of bureaucracies, because they often make mistakes - which I have to fix, and to which they'll never, ever admit. It's always your fault, or the computer's fault, or someone else's fault - never the organization.

For example, my wife recounts a recent checkup of our doctor in a specialty hospital, in a city 1.5h drive from where we live. In our kids' health card there was a referral document to another specialist in a different facility. The woman processing registration at the hospital just assumed that all papers loose inside the health card must be related to the current visit, and took them without saying anything. Through pure luck, my wife noticed the paper was missing and realized what must have happened - if not for that, we'd have to make another 3 hour round-trip just to get it[0] once we realized it's gone. The receptionist of course denied ever seeing that paper, up until turning around, noticing it on a stack of documents, and saying "ooops!".

Or, the time where our local clinic misplaced half of my wife's medical documentation, and proceeded to claim it never existed in the first place. We had to threaten them with legal action for somebody there to actually look for it, and then they quickly found it in another file (I think in mine).

I have plenty more of such stories - from public and private, big and small bureaucracies alike. Always the same story. The concept of them making a mistake doesn't even compute for them.

I've learned to run my own "post-condition checks" on every bureaucratic interaction. I watch where they put the documents. I ask if the result is in the system. I call to check my request is actually being processed. And for anything done remotely, I try to generate paper trail. Documents go by most expensive tracked postal delivery, with both SMS and paper delivery receipts. Etc.

[0] - Or maybe, after enough begging and praying, someone would give us a duplicate. Who knows. The transition into era of digital referrals in Poland is messy, and hasn't completed yet. Some facilities still insist on original paper documents.

> They then month later put a cork notice board up

Why don't you handle it the same way we did at university?

Make it disappear one night.

And when another takes its place, make that one disappear too.

Or when a table is removed, another one appears.

Who did this? No one knows. When was it done? No one knows. Did anyone see anything? No one ever sees anything.

At the end of the day, you live there 24/7. Management, doesn't.

That's a lot of 3:45am's...

Generally a good idea, however the risk/rewards does not pan out in later life and seen people kicked out of Uni for what was a silly in the spirit of the group moment prank.

So you find a balance, compromise and if any of the drawing pins get knocked due too it's placement and fall upon the floor I remove them for health and safety reasons, Now why don't I pin it back in the board, well that board is not my property and at a structure level of the board, albeit cork, would still leave a trace of sort and would technically be damage towards housing property. So I recycle those health and safety risks and avoid damaging the property of the housing association. Coz eventually there gets a stage in which there are no drawing pins and makes it hard for papers to stay up. This and paper litter in the hallways is dangerous and we had a letter about that, so again, I recycle as I'm a good person.

In short, you can't beat the system, you can sometimes bend it, but you can sure use it's bureaucracy against itself and have a less stressful life. Though the term, spirit of the law and letter of the law can be equally applied to rules.

I am British and worked in central London for years. The idea of owning an 800,000 apartment in central London was a ridiculous luxury. Most people that I worked with had to commute like me for 1-1.5 hours a day from outside London commuter towns into work (some way more than this). This was the nature of the beast. Is it "right" no. I just do not see how 800K GBP apartments are a) affordable and b) practical - it would be much better to focus on decent commuter links, subsidies for travel and affordable housing around London - than creating token affordable housing in the centre for the sake of it. If you do not like the commute then move to another city. I did for this exact reason.

I'm currently living the dream that after the (somewhat) exodus of folks to cheaper, spacier suburbs, the fact that people want to work from home and (as per the article on the front page yesterday) would rather quit than commute again - we might actually get some affordable housing in London. Be that converted offices, new builds, or just availability. Annecdata, but looking at Zoopla the lower priced (ha) places are dropping or not selling as they did... But who knows.

Still blows my mind what the half a million quid you can easily spend on a flat in town will get you pretty much anywhere else.

When I first moved to the UK I rented a room literally across the road from Marble Arch and Hyde Park, I've since moved progressively further out. Despite 20 years of price increases, my mortgage on a 3 bedroom house with a garden in Croydon costs me about the same as that first room did... It'd take a seismic house price crash to consider moving back in even with a commute.

It's expensive here too, but the differential is staggering given East Croydon is a 15 minute train ride from both London Victoria and London Bridge.

Croydon isn't as nice an area as Hyde Park.

Croydon is extremely diverse. Parts of it are worse. Parts of it I'd much prefer over Hyde Park any day (e.g. parts of Shirley and Purley, which have areas with huge villas set off private roads). Of course it depends on priorities too - if e.g. shopping at Oxford streets or being near Soho or living in a dense city centre is what you want, Croydon can't compete with that. That got old really fast when I lived in the centre, though - even in my mid 20's when I lived there I very quickly preferred more space and actually having money left over.

My pet peeve is that I want a total moratorium on infrastructure improvements inside zone 1-2 at least, maybe further out.

Instead, what would be far better for London, would be a 20 year commitment to running commuter level trains services between a ring of zone 4-5 stations and nearby commuter towns even further out. The reason for such a long commitment would be to allow businesses to trust they can move further out and still have access to a decent talen pool in commutable distance, and for people to be able to trust they can move there. [Ideally I'd like to see a focus on investing in clusters outside of London entirely, like Birmingham, and Leeds-Sheffield-Manchester]

The more that gets invested into the centre, the more traffic it encourages, and it's far more expensive to add capacity in the centre than it would be to encourage businesses and people to move further out.

E.g. I live in Croydon. There's relatively direct train tracks between Croydon and Woking and Guildford and further afield, so in many cases you could create far larger commutable areas without even new track, just a commitment to running services at frequent enough intervals. Instead most times it's faster to go in towards the centre of London first.

Then change planning rules to allow dense housing by default surrounding the immediate station areas but tax underutilised plots heavily coupled with guarantees of pouring money into construction until house prices start sloping downwards.

Currently we're in a situation where the prices are exacerbated by developers just sitting on plots knowing prices will go up, and treating actual construction "just" as a final exit. We need to get to a point where developers lose money unless they build quickly, and where people stop seeing their home as a financial investment.

M commute was almost an hour each way zone 2 from zone 2. It almost doesn't make sense to live in London, if spending the same time means I get to live in a nice house with my own garden instead of a cramped flat.

Hmmmm. Am I supposed to sympathize the guy who lives in 1M$ worth apartment and complains his 10M$ neighbors get more of everything?

Tbf, he's a guy that lives in what would probably be a £100k apartment in most UK cities who pays rent on the 75% of his property he doesn't own even after putting down £200k.

I mean, it's not exactly the poverty line, but I can understand him not being delighted the deal includes subsidising the maintenance of facilities for the exclusive use of his wealthy neighbours.

Is it common in the UK to put down large sums of money on real estate you'll never own outright? What sorts of rights does he have to sell, sublet, etc.? What sort of guarantees does he have that his rent will truly be 75% of the market rate and not just increase to 100% over time?

The whole thing sounds about as financially responsible as putting a large down payment on a leased car.

It's relatively new. The basic idea is to bridge the gap between rental and home ownership: you don't need as big a mortgage to buy a share of a property, and you can benefit (proportionately) from any capital gains from the increase in value of the property. In that sense it's potentially more beneficial and opens up access to the property market; in practice it seems to help push up demand and therefore prices.

In recent years it has arguably been too lucrative to be a landlord which has pushed back against home ownership and pushed up values; that's changing a little bit. Shared ownership schemes are a band-aid over a more general problem.

That general problem being financial literacy. These sound like terrible financial deals.

> in practice it seems to help push up demand and therefore prices

All of these schemes do that, because they address the housing market from the government-preserving invariant condition of "We can't ever let the market drop, we'd be voted out in a second"

So they come up with schemes and financial products to allow more people to access home ownership in some form or other without impacting property values. See also stamp-duty holidays. More or less by definition these things increase demand and push house prices up further.

It's insanity. It's also massively to my benefit as a homeowner who is about to leave the UK...

It's worth mentioning the purpose is to provide low income families - there is a limit on how much your family can earn to be eligible - an opportunity to own a property that they otherwise could not afford. That limit is £80k (£90k London) which puts you well into the middle class though. There's no way someone working in a supermarket and supporting a kid on their own would ever be able to afford something like this.

>Is it common in the UK to...

It's not "common", but it's becoming increasingly necessary for some as prices rise far beyond what most people can afford, even on a high-interest mortgage. You're far more likely to see it in Central London than anywhere else in the UK, though.

Do people want to do it? No. It's a situation forced on people by property owners and the housing market. "Financial responsibility" can't be everyone's first priority when talking about housing.

That's not the case. The only people being subsidised in any way, shape or form are the affordable housing people.

FTA:

> They stress that the affordable housing blocks are managed by Peabody and Optivo, which “had the option to choose which facilities they wanted to buy into for their residents”.

> Spokespeople for Peabody, Optivo and L&Q all say that it is never their intention to make any community feel excluded, and that their policies do not include access to the private amenities in order to keep the service charges to a minimum.

The affordable housing units are subsidised by the wealthy neighbours.

He’s also a guy that lives in a relatively fancy area of probably the most desirable city in the world.

I still don't understand why anyone would want to live there. It's an area that - irrespective of price - would end up near the bottom of my list of places in London I'd consider living, alongside far more run down places.

Anticipated price appreciation and a relatively central location. But yeah, "fancy" is really pushing the description of a district composed of council estates, building sites, an industrial-scale wholesale market and rail junctions

“relatively fancy” :)

Embassy gardens is very fancy compared to how most Londoners live.

The buildings are fancy, but there area has no character. I'd pick a much less fancy building most other places in London over living there.

The prices are almost half of what they’d be on the other side of the river for comparable developments, it’s a reasonably short drive to central london.

I'm saying I don't think living there would be worth it for half of areas on the other side of the river with some actual character.

If I had the money for flats there, I'd prefer to spend it almost anywhere else in London - either somewhere smaller somewhere with more character, or something much larger further out. I can't imagine the conditions that'd make me consider living there.

A lot of the developments along the river (both sides) that stretch will end up with significant modifications over the coming decades, as so many of those areas are just soulsuckingly dead and awful.

I understand where you are coming from, but for me the issue is more about affordable housing. It's basically gentrification of an area and forcing poor people out.

I cannot remember by law how much % of a development has to be deemed social housing, but it is generally a requirement now days since councils cannot really purchase or build properties. Now days you will not see any sort of massive council estates being built any more, which is why these developments have to have social housing.

You can trace this all back to the 80s when the government privatised council housing stock and allowed people to buy their social housing.

I grew up on a council estate and it can be hell, it's the same families and group of people which cause most of the issues and it comes in waves as they get rotated around the various council estates in the region. The estates are generally neglected by the council as well.

Near me an ex 3 bed council house, with a dodgy raft foundation, breeze block ends and a timber frame goes for £210,000! You'd be looking at a mortgage of around £800 per month, and if renting it will cost more. You've now also got to deal with the housing benefit (from the government) changes. Before it would be straight up paid by the council or government to the property owner, recent changes means people are given the money to pay for the rent (I think you can opt in for it to go directly to landlord) which has reduced the social housing stock even more as landlords do not want deal with the payment issues. With how bad the benefit system has become and is being run, after reforms, people are often in arrears or not getting the money because the system is just borked.

Poor people are very much getting priced out of areas where they live, with a lack of social housing stock available combined with a chaotic benefit system, they are very much forced out into other areas, if they they do get somewhere, then bare minimum will be done to maintain it.

There's a lot of anti-development NIMBY rhetoric in this article, along with the baseline assumption that more and taller development is a bad thing. Yet the current housing crisis has been caused by an acute lack of development, of decades of not enough housing having been created, with subsequent increases in housing costs.

I suspect part of the problem is simply that they aren't allowing enough development. If it's not easy/possible for a developer to buy existing sparser land in the city, knock down what's there, then replace it with a much denser/taller 10+ floor apartment building of many median market rate rent units, well then there's your problem. We used to do a lot more of that in decades past, and that's what comprises a lot of the more affordable housing inventory on the market today.

1. This is darkly hilarious; it sounds like the market is a mirage of wash sales, same as(?) crypto:

> In 2016, shortly after many of the projects launched off-plan sales, property analytics firm Propcision observed a strange phenomenon. Hundreds of luxury flats in Battersea and Nine Elms were continually being listed for sale on sites such as Rightmove and Zoopla, then taken down and immediately relisted. It was being done at such frequency across so many developments that it distorted the market across the whole area. “It gave the impression that there was not only a lot of activity,” said Propcision’s director, Michelle Ricci-Zak, “but that the average price in that area was going up – when actually we proved it was going down.”

2. Also, whoever wrote this had too much fun:

> a crowd of swollen shafts at this bend in the river

We have dicks and V. S. Naipaul!

> the first of the priapic bunch to smack you in the face

...with a nice visual, in case you missed the first one.

3. Finally, check this phrase out:

> What’s going on in Nine Elms and Battersea has nothing to do with maximising social good or creating mixed communities. It is pure social cleansing.”

It's Yugoslavia all over again!

What surprises me most is that London seemingly has no tow trucks for cars blocking emergency egress from a building for months. Presumably a boot is useless if they aren't going to pay the fines anyway, but it would seem that they probably would want the "supercar" back.

Problem is more that they block a private entrance only, and don't want to enrage the car owner, who might cancel his rent contract. A safety inspector should visit and tow it. Then the rich guy can be angry at the city

One of my favourite things about living in London is that you don’t have to live in constant fear of the tow truck.

The city of westminster does not remove vehicles for parking violations. https://www.westminster.gov.uk/parking/has-your-vehicle-been...

Interestingly even the wealthier residents of this complex have seen huge hikes in the service charges (presumably to pay for the running costs of the sky pool...)

Might be affordable to those with lots of money, but probably a hinderence to those just about getting by with the mortgage payments

https://pastebin.com/PZ5XQkWH (article from the FT)

It could also be foreign investors stuck in an investment they expected to flip ahead of completion, and not paying their share of the service charge (I was in an old building in central london where that was exactly the case). Also a classic of these luxury buildings is the developer extracting revenues through overcharging for property management. There are now legal ways out but it is a painful process.

It’s odd that it seems like all of these ultra-luxury places are so poorly constructed and run. This tower in NYC now has a required $15k annual spend at the restaurant, among other problems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-ri...

Luxury condos as a vehicle for speculators are a dead end. This is the model we should be trying to emulate:

https://citymonitor.ai/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capit...

Just FYI, this article is a few months old.

Have things changed in the last few months?

They've probably got worse :)

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