Whole communities will be decimated through gentrification!

It was reported in the Liverpool Echo yesterday that more than 100 families who live in a part of the Liverpool Kensington area, an area which encompasses 4,000 properties and has been designated as a £62m New Deal for Communities (NDC) regeneration area, are now on a firm war footing with the Liverpool City Council and the 36 oppressive NDC regeneration administrators, who have set themselves up in a new £1.4m administration building that is also home to another bunch of oppressive community worker known as Parks Partnership. The NDC regeneration workers are headed by a middle aged £60,000 per year out of town middle class, mother superior type, chief executive. It is now an accepted fact amongst NDC residents that the £62m NDC funding is being used to decimate the community so that massive gentrification of the area can take place. What we are witnessing here in Kensington is the destruction of a whole community by local government and all the service providers who work in so called “partnership” with them.

The Echo article also states that the City Council has had extensive “consultation” with the NDC residents. Anyone who knows how City Councils operate in the UK know through bitter experience that the so called consultation methodology that is used by councils and all their conniving service providers is not in any way conducive with open democratic procedures, neither does it reflect the views of the wider community. The consultation forms are cleverly put together and designed to contain loaded questions, which almost always, covertly promote the agendas of local and central government and the dominant culture at civic society level that the latter represent.


The Echo article can be observed on the Liverpool Echo web site Link:
 http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/page.cfm?objectid=14592485&method=full&siteid=50061

As has recently been reported on Indymedia, from the onset of this regeneration initiative it became quite apparent even to the most casual observer that the Liverpool Kensington NDC area was chosen because of its close proximity to the city centre and because the M62, one of the main motorways into the City Centre, runs directly through the centre of the NDC community.

Already over 700 houses have now been earmarked (with more to follow in other parts of the NDC area) for demolition in the Gladstone Road Royston Street area of the NDC zone. Over 200 RSL tenants have either left or been moved out of the above mentioned area completely and a proposed 100 former RSL properties in one corner of the same area could be left standing and refurbished so as to sell to troublesome argumentative homeowners who’s properties are going to be demolished. This stealing of RSL properties without any meaningful consultation with the RSL tenants is happening because the RSL Community 7, which is a subsidiary of the massive RSL the “Riverside Group” and the City Council know that the homeowners will refuse to leave the area if they are not offered another house under what is now being called a “key for a key arrangement. As can be seen from the Echo article when the homeowners unite as one group they can force the council and the RSL’s to back off so the council and the RSL’s have to put structures into place to stop this. They normally do this through what is known as the “philosophy of gradualism” but when that fails they simply steal former rented RSL properties from under the noses of the tenants, refurbish those properties at about £12,000 per property, then sell the properties to demolition homeowners for the money that the homeowners will receive from the compulsory purchase of their old homes. This is happening throughout the whole of the UK as the New Labour government marches ahead with its national new homes for sale and shared ownership strategy. The New Labour government knows that by using the philosophy of gradualism, just like the Tories did, that in twenty years time the younger generations will just come to except as normal that they will have to pay £200 to £300 per week mortgage for their new house. This government also wants to relinquish its responsibility to the rented sector and in effect put the rented sector, i.e. public housing, into the hands of private sector landlords such as RSL’s who have to hike up the rents so as to stay in business.

It is now becoming an excepted fact that about 80% of the new houses that will be built by a construction firm called Lovels will be for sale and shared ownership. The first wave of these houses will be built in the Gilead Street area of the NDC zone, an area which directly encompasses the area where the above 100 families live. The first phase will involve the building of 172 houses and luxury flats and out of these only 44 will be built for the RSL Community 7 to house demolition tenants in.

From the onset of this NDC initiative Community 7, the City Council and the New Deal regeneration administrators put structures into place to enable them to surreptitiously go out into those parts of the community which have been earmarked for regeneration, identify the few argumentative tenants and those tenants who have leadership skills and secure the silence off these tenants with veiled promises that they will be first in line for relocation to the few new houses which will be built for rent.

Lovels are working in so called “partnership” with the “Riverside Group” are building thousands of houses for sale on former public land right across Merseyside, land were council and RSL houses once stood. This is being allowed to continue because the media refuse to report on it and the trade unions will not take any meaningful action to stop this insidious blatant stealing of former public land by wealthy builders and property developers with the sole intention of building houses for sale on it.

What is happening concerning the issue of housing in the UK is “capitalism” in its most insidious form!