A developer planning 19 homes on the site of a former dairy has offered the council money instead of affordable homes.
Superstone Homes, owned by the Taghan family, and Brighton and Hove City Council signed an agreement covering affordable housing in March.
Superstone was due to include two homes to be let for an affordable rent and one for shared ownership at the old Dairy Crest depot, in The Droveway, Hove.
The council’s Planning Committee is being asked to agree to change the terms at a meeting on Wednesday (4 October) to allow an affordable housing contribution – or commuted sum – of £787,300 instead of the three homes.
A report to the committee said that the developer had contacted several registered providers, such as housing associations, but none had been willing to take on just three properties.
The report said: “Smaller numbers of affordable housing such as this are not currently viable for most registered providers (RPs) and the developer has shown that there has been no interest from RPs in purchasing these homes.
“The council also looks at potential purchase of rented homes but faces similar challenges in terms of viability and resources around smaller sites.”
Commuted sums help the council to buy or build affordable housing in other parts of Brighton and Hove.
The Planning Committee is due to meet at Hove Town Hall from 2pm on Wednesday (4 October). The meeting is scheduled to be webcast on the council’s website.
There is nothing wrong pe se with these ‘commuted sums’ bit it seems to take an absolute age for the council to build the homes paid for from these sums.
Increasing supply is a bit of a neverending battle in Brighton. Although they had pretty good numbers last year, it’s still far outstripped by demand. And we currently have a central government that is not interested in social housing. When that changes at the general election, I’m hopeful for a strategy and funding to increase this!
Affordability comes through increased supply, not public bribes.
However Mark, one needs money to increase the supply. There’s a bit of a catch-22 for you. Can the money offered here deliver more than three homes?
Why can’t 2 of the flats be council owed and rented out to council Tennants. Why does it need to be given to a housing association.
Equally, the council could say fine we want to make £20 million from all new developments over the space of a year to build a new block of flats, and just do some developments themselves. Lewes road between moulscoomb library and the rail bridge could easily be bulldozed and redeveloped into a much denser and let’s face it, much nicer half mile of town.
Really expensive and time consuming to be able to develop oneself, without going into the full detail. I’m surprised that our local CLT haven’t had a look into this though, that’s quite within their remit.
“Equally, the council could say fine we want to make £20 million from all new developments over the space of a year to build a new block of flats”
That happens already! What do you think the £780k would be used for?
It even says that in the last sentence of the article.
Yet again I’ll ask the same question of people who apparently want to destroy the Bates Estate and, no doubt replace it with something far uglier.
Where are the thousands of people who live on the estate going to live when you’ve destroyed their homes?
Step 1: Build one new development that adds homes, like this one on the site of an old dairy.
Step 2: Move people from existing housing area to those new homes.
Step 3: Demolish that housing area, and rebuild with twice the homes on the same footprint (i.e. apartments, with additional amenities used on some of the space to cater to increased population).
Step 4: Move people from the next area on the list into these new homes.
Step 5: Demolish and rebuilt again with doubling up density.
The progression, starting from a development like this, would be
19
38
76
152
304
608
1216
2432
4864
9728
And so on. Obviously, I think you’d struggle to find a contiguous area of the city with nine thousand homes suitable for densifying, but that’s beside the point.
I think I remember you mentioned this strategy before. Might look into it more deeply, sounds like an interesting strategy to explored at the very least!
They are talking about the dissuaded diary building. Ain’t “thousands of people” living there, silly.
It is very posh round there. The locals won’t want any riff raff anywsy
Spencer, you are dead right. Next we’ll be having food banks. That’ll be the thin edge of the wedge.
Yet another developer getting out of their commitment to affordable housing
How many times will the inefficient ineffective council bend over for this
Omd now labour are in it’s just has Courrupt
We need social housing or council not bribes for another greedy party to get rich quick
Just look at Madera Terraces
The West pier
Sigh how about reading the article and thinking that maybe this has something to do with the multi milion pound hole in the councils budget and possibly a greedy development team looking to cash in.
Cohesiveness isn’t your strong point. Nothing corrupt about this proposal at all, and if the money can be used to provide more than what would have been on this site, that’s a positive thing, and I would be fully supportive of it.
It’s a strange “bribe” that gets mentioned in official council committee papers and reported here.
These commuted sums are perfectly legal and there is also a scale of them that is applied when a developer would prefer to offer the commuted sum.