| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Parking problems and proposed demolition of garages on Brook Road South | |
| Posted by: | Michael Brandt | |
| Date/Time: | 26/01/12 21:38:00 |
| This 'affordable housing' simply doesn't wash. 2 dwellings with off street parking? For less than any other house in the area? Pull the other one. Affordable to whom? A journalist on £23,000p/a, a tube driver on £48,000 pa or a management consultant on £130k? utter nonsense. 25-30 years ago this very neighbourhood was 'affordable housing'. It was where you lived if you could not afford a terraced house in Ealing or Chiswick or larger houses in Osterley. It was where you ended up if you wanted to stay within a few miles of where you grew up but had a lower income. Much of it was run down and neglected by it's owner landlords - Family trusts etc. who only started selling when the law started to enforce habitable standards of repair. It's the efforts of those who bought here that turned the area around and the fact that it was a left out of everything backwater and a dumping ground for Hounslow boroughs problem family that left it with cheap affordable housing. My first home was in Osterley. Tiny , but in a nice well kept neighbourhood. It cost more than the house I now live in in Brentford. I could have bought 2 houses in the street I now live in here for the cost of the Osterley place but then this bit was run down and facing an uncertain future. Most houses had only coal fires, no bathrooms, no insulation, no double glazing, dry rot, damp and this was less than a generation ago. Half of this town is Council and ex council stock. The other half is largely old stock renovated by residents and helped a bit with various grants. But a lot of it was 'affordable housing'. It was where you started or where you headed if you could afford nothing else. Someone has been brave enough to to point out that the real reason there is an imbalance is the excessive amount of people who have been housed without putting into the pot. Charitable, Humanitarian but in the end excessive. The policy is wrong and as someone else quite correctly pointed out, this town has a lot of dereliction. The council should look to use that first and not try to remove facilities which are quite obviously there for good reason. You cannot get a quart into a pint glass and this is exactly what is being proposed. There are now already enough problems. This really will tip the balance. Like most I have a car, but I use it only when necessary.Often costing me dear in time lost. It has to be parked somewhere. |