Saturday, July 5, 2008
Won’t happen here. We are different!
US housing slump creating 'ghost towns'
nothing else to say other than GB says we will be okay.
Posted by who stole my pension? @ 06:39 AM (865 views)
12 thoughts on “Won’t happen here. We are different!”
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musn't grumble says:
Maybe we should move to these nice new houses in the US – if they will have us. At least they would be of a decent size internally, and we could buy a gun to protect ourselves from any feral pack of youths that happen to wander by.
drewster says:
There already are ghost streets in the UK if not whole ghost towns. I’ve seen rows of boarded-up houses in the rougher suburbs of Liverpool and Manchester. They are basically abandoned – it’s very hard to sell your house when the one next door is boarded-up, and when chavs, offspring of unemployed nearby residents, roam the streets.
Liverpool:
Burnley:
who stole my pension? says:
How do you put pictures in to the blog?
inbreda says:
I like that! Everyhouse boarded up. Every house with a sky dish!
str 2007 says:
I know you can’t do much about your neighbours but I can’t help thinking that if those terraced houses were refurbed and 2 knocked into 1 with an integral garage they’d make really quite nice homes.
Clearly you’d needs gates and gun turrets at the end of the street.
Seriously though, done up enmass they shouldn’t cost more than 20-30k to turn a pair into 1 house. Got to be a far cheaper way of producing livable houses for the tax payer than buying up unsold Barratt/Wimpey houses.
drewster says:
who stole my pension,
You can post images with HTML code like this:
<img src=”http://www.somewhere.com/mypicture.jpg” />
You’ll need to find the address of the picture first, you can do that by clicking the right mouse button over the picture, then selecting “Properties” from the menu, then copying the address from the popup window.
drewster says:
str 2007,
If you converted two of those houses into one nice house, you’d still be stuck with all those boarded up neighbours. If you converted the whole street, you’d have a shiny new street in the middle of a rough estate. I’m beginning to understand why developers prefer to build on greenfield sites rather than brownfield!
str 2007 says:
I know drewster, you have to see the whole big picture and I can’t rfom those images.
But what I do see is that a slum tends to get treated like one. Bad deisign encourages bad behaviour.
IMO give someone a freebie and they don’t appreciate it, make them work for it and own it and they then treat it with pride.
Do up a few houses in the middle of a dump and it will soon revert back as you say.
You have to deal with the whole issue, I’m not a politician so can’t and I know a few families are beyond help but I feel the majority of families would be happy to work hard to own their own home.
We have to compete with the rest of the world and if 10% of our residents are sitting on their ar5ses claiming benefits while their ferrel kids are out causing trouble and making other lives a misery something has to be done. This government has had one of the best chances in history to address this problem and in my opinion have failed.
I hate to see this waste ( I don’t know how old these pictures are). We all have one life to live and within reason should make the most of it.
We have effectively given China the chance to establish themselves as good and competative manufacturers. While we sat back shuffled paper and sold one another more expensive houses. The UK I believe are now very much on the back foot and to a large extent at the mercy of the rest of the world.
A great opportunity to better ourselves has I think been wated. It’s never too late but will be harder now. A recession will increase areas like the above and poor behaviour. It’s an uphill battle from here.
mark wadsworth says:
Re vacant properties, that’s argument number 237 for Land Value Tax.
If the tax is due whether a home is occupied or vacant, then abandoning one home in the middle of an otherwise occupied street would be too expensive, so the owners would sell it or do it up and let it out. Which is vitally important, because once one house is vacant, it drags down the rest of the street.
Assuming that all houses in a street had been abandoned, sure the location and land value goes down, so the tax goes down, to the stage where a developer or a group of like minded individuals can snap up a whole street for cheap and start again.
plato says:
Is there a shortage of property or a shortage of civilized social behaviour ?
waiting patiently says:
These images are probably from John Prescots ill concieved Pathfinder Project. Large areas of such properties are being compulsory purchased, demolished and having rabbit hutches built on them. The houses are fundamentally sound although some undoubtably need refurbishing. They are often far bigger and better built than the houses that will replace them. Urban Splash are doing the opposite in Manchester. They are buying up similar streets and inverting the living accomodation with living space in the roof / 1st floor and bedrooms on the ground floor.
I was in Spain recently and stayed in an area suffering the same problems being experienced in USA. The accommodation / complex was great (hardly anyone there) but the roads / paths were literally overgrown with vegetation. It looked just like a ghost town – tumble weed and all!
who stole my pension? says:
drewster, thanks for the info on the pictures. Perhaps we ought to start a wiki.