All yuppie apartments and no family homes – a risk for central Croydon?
Photo by Alvin Shivmangal, used with permission.
‘If councils no longer play a significant role as housing providers, they surely have a duty of care to ensure rogue landlords do not exploit the market’. (Property Week magazine, 26th September 2014.)
The significance of Croydon Council as a housing provider has of course declined steeply, and the growth of the private rented sector can be seen nowhere more clearly than in Croydon town centre. Hoardings have now been erected around Delta Point, the former British Telecom building at 32 Wellesley Road. It’s part of the preparation by its owner to convert it into approximately 350 one and two bedroom apartments with new cladding following its purchase for £5million.
In Norbury, meanwhile, Criterion is planning to convert the former Age Concern UK HQ building, Astral House, into approximately 49 residential one and two bed apartments and is seeking permission to add an additional floor. This application is being considered by the council planning officers.
The investment in private sector rented apartments is growing apace in Croydon through the conversion of empty office blocks. This is allowed under national planning permitted development rules. While the council’s exempts the town centre from this ruling so that all future proposals will have to seek planning permission, it still applies elsewhere, posing a threat to potential office jobs in district centres like Norbury where conversions are still permitted without lengthy processes of application.
There’s a strong case that families should not be housed in multistorey blocks, and an emerging danger of over provision of one and two bedroom apartments in Croydon. The council’s planning policy seeks to ensure that a choice of homes of different sizes is available in the borough, and goes further, actually setting a target that 60% of all new homes outside of the should have three or more bedrooms, to accommodate larger families.
So when Norbury’s Astral House development recently failed to meet this 60% target, this became one of the grounds for objections to it by the . They are also concerned about the way council planners find it difficult to prevent the conversion of family-sized houses with gardens into flats, thereby removing them permanently from local stocks of suitable family accommodation.
Criterion Capital is an interesting company. It is proud of its support for a number of charities both in the UK and overseas. In 2005 a company called purchased the Trocadero, in Central London, and the St Nicholas Shopping Centre in Sutton. Both are now part of Criterion Capital’s portfolio. While Golfrate does not seem to have been busy in Croydon in terms of planning applications, it does now own or manage a lot of property in the borough: following its applications to develop 19 High Street, South Norwood, in 2005 and 75-77 Whitehorse Road in 2007, these locations are no longer on the council’s planning register. Golfrate lost its appeal on the development of 417-421 Brighton Road in 2007.
Then in 2012 the council refused it permission to replace the Selhurst Arms pub with houses on the grounds that their siting and the massing of buildings would leave the site over-developed and create a cramped and overcrowded layout to the detriment of adjoining property. Last year it was given approval to turn the pub into a retail store and flats.
In the light of Croydon Council’s consultation on bringing in a , it is both interesting and encouraging to note that Asif Aziz, Criterion Capital’s CEO, is firmly in favour of action against rogue landlords. According to a press release issued by the company on 16th October 2014: ‘Additional proposals for local authorities to adopt (and enforce) licensing schemes are also to be encouraged in terms of raising standards across the sector as a whole and in ensuring the private rental sector comes of age as an asset class.’
The boom in private rental sector activity is no panacea for the economic, political and social issues posed by London’s runaway housing market. As long, however, as the sector exists, it needs to be responsibly managed.
Stephen Giles says: In Croydon there seems to be an obsession with creating family dwellings in the centre area – quite unlike any other town or city I have visited!
-
John Gass says:
Dwellings, yes, but family dwellings? How are you defining a family dwelling? What defining features do they have? What separates them from ‘executive apartments’?
-
It would be interesting to see a study on this first, then perhaps one might might be in a position to make a more informed guess.
-
I too worry about the skew in new housing provision and the impact it might have on Croydon in general. Specifically, that we might end up with a destabilising excess of young singles and couples who reside in Croydon but spend no time or money here. We need a diversified population and that requires a diversified provision of homes.
I’ve wondered whether there are any studies or guidelines which address the issue of maximum sustainable population density – something in the form of N people per hectare of land. If this exists somewhere, I think it could help ensure that the borough’s housing provides homes appropriate for our diverse population and that we retain sufficient neighbourhood open spaces and can be confident that the local infrastructure, including schools, GPs etc., could cope with demand.