Divide-and-conquer mentality on redevelopment

Published: 2 December, 2010

• READING the many letters from residents in the Gospel Oak area (Letters, November 25) a word of sympathetic warning.  

We are in the midst of a fairly large regeneration project in the Abbey Area. 

The experience of a substantial number of residents here is one where we feel we are now at the mercy of the agendas of council officers and councillors alike, who appear to want to grossly overdevelop the sites and greatly increase the number of people living in the area, on the premise that the existing wider community will somehow benefit.  

At no stage have we been given enough time to consider and understand redevelopment plans during the design and consultation process or  enough quantifiable information with which to make sensible commentary on proposals. 

Consultation workshops have been on a divide-and-conquer mentality marginalising groups of stakeholders, giving them limited and often vastly differing options designed to create a reaction/ diversion from their preferred scheme, and weighting their views according to an arbitrary scale ranging from “how likely you are to have your home demolished” (important viewpoint), to “lives adjacent to area and cares about its long-term impact on street scape, overshadowing, congestion, local services, environmental impact” (not important). 

This tactic works by essentially enabling the regeneration team to play one group off against another. 

For example, who am I to say that you can’t have your new kitchen because I don’t want a enormous over-scaled building in my locality, because the homes for sale are paying for your kitchen? Why should I be allowed to question reconciling a balance of the obvious dire need for social housing when I feel the huge scheme may cripple our area by attempting to take more people than it can cope with?

We now have to factor in that quite a few other key community facilities in the locality may be sold off and redeveloped to squeeze a bit more out of those sites too. It is true some stakeholders “might” be able to move locally into properties that suit their needs and that some “may” have new kitchens and or bathrooms installed; we “might” get some money given to our local schools for additional places, and businesses “may” be able to stay in the area. The problem is there appears to be no guarantee and the premise of these “might-happen” benefits are on the scheme being substantially larger than what exists at present, with well over half of the new homes built being for sale rather than affordable/social housing.

As more and more benefits are being sought, the scheme bloats and bloats.  

The premise of the scheme is substantially wrong. It works on the basis of liquidating key assets (in our case the land value) and then redeveloping by grouping areas beyond a clear available site into the proposal which destabilises the community and inflates the conflicting interests as well as adding to an already pressured set of public services and community organisations.

The council are clearly in the know about the financial background that is driving their agenda. 

It is unfortunate that they don’t credit the local community with the respect to be fully involved in the process. 

FLO CUBBIN
Against Overdeveloping Abbey, NW8