'Poor doors': not the worst thing about social housing | Art and design | theguardian.com
oh goody housing apartheid, whip it up!
"Registered social housing providers always want separate entrances," says Robert Evans, a director of Argent, the developer currently building 2,000 homes in King's Cross, 40% of which will be classified as affordable. "They want to manage their own units, and feel they can get better maintenance and cleaning contracts with an economy of scale, when all the units are accessed off one core." Evans stresses the homes in King's Cross are all "tenure blind", meaning you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between private and affordable units, and have equal entrance arrangements. But he admits the problems come with incorporating mixed tenure homes in luxury schemes. "The difficulty is with the higher-end product in central London, which come with an astronomical service charge," he says. "Housing benefit won't cover that, and if you try to make the private buyers pay for it, that would last two seconds in a tribunal. It's illegal to make one group of residents cross-subsidise another."
oh goody housing apartheid, whip it up!
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