The £1 Houses: Britain's Cheapest Street - Ch4

[dryrot]

Hi

anyone catch this? Its a series on those who took advantage of Liverpool CCs offer of £1 for terraced, abandoned houses in Wavertree. The rebuilding costs were significant, and the area rough. C4 (of course) had'nt the guts to blame John Prescott for the disaster (it was a Pathfinder project to remove all the residents and then let the houses rot) but an interesting prog nonetheless. Again, looking at the 100s of boarded up homes raises an ironic groan when they talk about "the homeless" and "lack of houses".

C4 seemed negative, though perhaps its just the first prog of the telly series and things will get better.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-1-houses-britains-cheapest-street

 

Edited February 15, 2018 by dryrot
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[spyguy]

4 minutes ago, dryrot said:

Hi

anyone catch this? Its a series on those who took advantage of Liverpool CCs offer of £1 for terraced, abandoned houses in Wavertree. The rebuilding costs were significant, and the area rough. C4 (of course) had'nt the guts to blame John Prescott for the disaster (it was a Pathfinder project to remove all the residents and then let the houses rot) but an interesting prog nonetheless. Again, looking at the 100s of boarded up homes raises an ironic groan when they talk about "the homeless" and "lack of houses".

C4 seemed negative, though perhaps its just the first prog of the telly series and things will get better.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-1-houses-britains-cheapest-street

 

Ah, Prescott. A nice bloke but a moron minister.

Given tranpsort and the 'North' to play with.

ASked to be judged on his integrated transport - theresnone, he failed.

Pathfinder - the scheme of knocking down some houses in orught areas to make the remaining ones cost more.

All that happened is thata few houses got down, crashign the price of he others, which then filled up with foegn migrants on tax credits.

Fuxxing idiot.

[burk]

Fair play to the people making a go of it, the build costs didn't seem extreme £60 - 70k iirc but it seemed to me they should of had a dozen families ready to go as having i think one Kenyan family on the corner one end of the street and the young Liverpudlian couple the other didn't make sense (esp at night) and given the crime in the area didn't make alot of sense. Whereas if you had a dozen or so houses coming out the ground at the same time - safety in numbers perhaps, although as highlighted above or just not board up & abandon the houses in the first place.

Given how poor the quality of new builds are these days those houses (suspect Victorian era) are a damn sight more solid in construction than anything new so worth  a tickle with the redevelopment brush.  I just dont know how you would stop the thieving whilst building.

Again another great own-goal by her HM government.......................................... 

Didn't the geordie architect bloke do one a few years ago for about £30k and was angry at street after street of perfectly constructed shells left abandoned.

[spyguy]

You need a brick clenaing robot.

Point it it a crap terrace, eats the bricks away and makes them reusable.

Will save a lot - those terrace bricks will cost ~£2/brick.

With some focused recycling, there's a lot of value rtapped in these abandoned houses.

[stuckmojo]

3 minutes ago, spyguy said:

You need a brick clenaing robot.

Point it it a crap terrace, eats the bricks away and makes them reusable.

Will save a lot - those terrace bricks will cost ~£2/brick.

With some focused recycling, there's a lot of value rtapped in these abandoned houses.

Very good point.

 

[juvenal]

I didn't see the prog but have read about it. Why did the Council not make the £1 a house offer on a whole street, with a covert preference for family units with a fit, local manual worker male present? The type who would confront low-lifers and street dealers, and warn them off in their own language. Even organise  a neighbourhood watch type rota patrol until the scum get the point.

Vulnerable households (single young women etc) can have the cheap housing opportunity on the next tranche of £1 houses - once the 'pioneers' have done the groundwork. 

I'm not suggesting vigilantism, just a determined homegrown attempt to clean up the area.

[John51]

25 minutes ago, juvenal said:

I didn't see the prog but have read about it. Why did the Council not make the £1 a house offer on a whole street, with a covert preference for family units with a fit, local manual worker male present? The type who would confront low-lifers and street dealers, and warn them off in their own language. Even organise  a neighbourhood watch type rota patrol until the scum get the point.

Vulnerable households (single young women etc) can have the cheap housing opportunity on the next tranche of £1 houses - once the 'pioneers' have done the groundwork. 

I'm not suggesting vigilantism, just a determined homegrown attempt to clean up the area.

Not these days. Those sort of men are virtually powerless against young teens.

'Leave me alone or I'm going to say you touched me.'

How's a guy going to deal with that? The usual answer is to move.

 

 

[Errol]

Also they all carry knives now. Having a word with groups of young teens often results in you getting stabbed and left to bleed to death in the street. So unless you are an expert in unarmed combat (krav maga or similar) I would advise against it.

[Andy T]

Those bloody teens eh, murderers the lot of them. None of them innocently hanging around with just a lack of places to go? 

[ebull]

What stood out for me was

1. At the end the council leader claiming it had cost the council nothing and they would gain a new CT income. win-win etc. No-one told us who paid for the CPO and how much the house they sold for 1 pound cost when it was bought. Also why was there no CT when it was empty? Dodgy accounting unquestioned by inadequate snowflake doc-makers because it wasn't on-message to ask the question.

2. The folk willing to roll their sleeves up and spend all their savings, invest their own money when offered the possibility.  Also created a very nice house. A good indication that a lot of "the housing crisis" would be solved by relaxation of planning laws specifically for those wanting to self build, restricted by imposing a tax on stealth-developers who then try to sell or rent in the subsequent 10 [20?] years. Lesson for the politicians.

 

[Dorkins]

1 hour ago, Errol said:

Having a word with groups of young teens often results in you getting stabbed and left to bleed to death in the street.

Think "often" might be overstating the case here. Are you an Express reader?

[malk]

2 minutes ago, Dorkins said:

Think "often" might be overstating the case here. Are you an Express reader?

I don't know about you but I'm always getting stabbed. Nightmare, it's worse than getting crucified!

[janch]

The council owned the houses prior to selling them for £1 so  there wasn't anyone to pay council tax before.  I too wondered how much the council had had to fork out for the houses when they were compulsorarily purchased.  I was also wondering what the previous people who'd owned them (and been forced out) were thinking as they watched their previously much-loved house being done up.

They really were hovels but probably solidly built.  I couldn't help thinking the people taking them on were extremely brave (naive?).  The conditions applied seemed a bit harsh eg only 1 year for them to be "done up" which isn't long if you're working at the same time.  The works had to be approved by the council's surveyor and the houses couldn't be sold for 5 years.  If the conditions weren't met then the purchasers would lose what ever they'd spent on them.

The worst aspect was the random vandalism and worries about safety.  As others have said they should have had many houses being "done-up" at the same time for it to work better and I don't know why they didn't as there were apparently plenty of applicants.

[Dorkins]

3 minutes ago, malk said:

I don't know about you but I'm always getting stabbed. Nightmare, it's worse than getting crucified!

I've taken to wearing a stab vest every time I leave the house, before that I was spending a small fortune in dry cleaning bills to get the blood out.

[malk]

Just now, Dorkins said:

I've taken to wearing a stab vest every time I leave the house, before that I was spending a small fortune in dry cleaning bills to get the blood out.

Good idea, the dry cleaning has been using up all my avo on toast money.

[thewig]

low house prices bad high house prices good?

[Errol]

2 hours ago, Andy T said:

Those bloody teens eh, murderers the lot of them. None of them innocently hanging around with just a lack of places to go? 

Knife crime in London is up massively. Would you approach a group of young men who were loitering around?

Edited February 15, 2018 by Errol

[leonardratso]

17 minutes ago, Errol said:

Knife crime in London is up massively. Would you approach a group of young men who were loitering around?

(wearing assless chaps and studded leather caps outside a gay club)

[Dorkins]

17 minutes ago, Errol said:

Knife crime in London is up massively.

Knife crime in London is teenagers stabbing teenagers.

[leonardratso]

3 minutes ago, Dorkins said:

Knife crime in London is teenagers stabbing teenagers.

i thought acid for scooters was the latest fad, although acid was a victorian weapon previously if im not mistaken.

[Option5]

31 minutes ago, Errol said:

Knife crime in London is up massively. Would you approach a group of young men who were loitering around?

When I was younger I was in a gang and we all carried knives, we even had colours to help us differentiate ourselves from other gangs we went up against.

My gang was the called The Swinton Holyrood Boy Scouts.

" Ging gang gooli gooli gooli watcha, ging gang goo, ging gang goo."

[Noallegiance]

1 hour ago, malk said:

I don't know about you but I'm always getting stabbed. Nightmare, it's worse than getting crucified!

Someone is stabbed every 30 seconds in London. Poor fella.

[Andy T]

18 hours ago, Errol said:

Knife crime in London is up massively. Would you approach a group of young men who were loitering around?

The thread is about Liverpool.

Did you never loiter around with your mates as a teenager? 

[malk]

19 hours ago, Noallegiance said:

Someone is stabbed every 30 seconds in London. Poor fella.

Wow. 1,051,200 stabbings a year! Somebody better tell the Met, they're only recording 50,000 knife offences a year, let alone actual bits of stabbery!

[mattyboy1973]

21 hours ago, ebull said:

1. At the end the council leader claiming it had cost the council nothing and they would gain a new CT income. win-win etc. No-one told us who paid for the CPO and how much the house they sold for 1 pound cost when it was bought. Also why was there no CT when it was empty? Dodgy accounting unquestioned by inadequate snowflake doc-makers because it wasn't on-message to ask the question.

A sunk cost by this stage, I guess - whatever happened there, happened, and the way they tell it is that central govt pulled the funding. What they are doing actually seems like a decent, low-cost way to resolve the situation and should result in them ultimately getting revenue in for the houses rather than a slum that will need to be completely demolished in a few more years.

20 hours ago, janch said:

The worst aspect was the random vandalism and worries about safety.  As others have said they should have had many houses being "done-up" at the same time for it to work better and I don't know why they didn't as there were apparently plenty of applicants.

Quite. I really would not have wanted to be the first family moving in there. If they had got all the houses in that one road being done up at the same time it would have been far better. Not only the safety in numbers aspect, but a real chance for some strong community building with 50 or so groups getting stuck in together and turning the road around - sharing tools, ideas, cups of tea etc as they go.