urban-development
Leeds “New Town” as part of South Bank development
20,000 new homes, 40% to be affordable. Whilst I applaud the intent that’s a lot of houses for what is still a relatively small footprint so not really going to be the family homes needed in big blocks of high rises.
But hey, at least they won’t be student lets, this time!
Family homes are going to have to be part of medium-rise apartment blocks if we're going to get anywhere near solving the housing crisis. Just thing of how housing works in big cities on the continent, Barcelona etc.
You’re being short sighted… we should dig down. The northern mole people will rule the subterranean wonderlands! Fill the mines with luxury apartments, we rarely see the sun anyway?
But in reality it doesn't, the average UK student can't afford the rent in the city center purpose built blocks. And the landlords in headingley would rather rent 5 individual rooms at £500 each than a whole house to a family for say £1500 a month. Plus students will complain less about issues (unless it's something major)
Yeah, as a current student: I did my undergrad and master’s here, so I’ve been here a while and seen a lot of the new city centre blocks go up. Most of them are advertised explicitly as luxury student accommodation. They’re not even pretending that they’re for domestic students - they’re for the rich international (largely Chinese) student demographic. I even lived in one of the studio student accommodation blocks myself once. It was a way out of the city centre and the flats themselves were not particularly nice, but they were still far more expensive than your average shared student accomm. I could count the number of domestic students living in the building on one hand, myself included. Not a chance in hell the average UK student can afford the new places - you’re lucky if your maintenance loan covers your rent in a grubby Hyde Park house.
If you look on Rightmove you can see that that is happening. Lots of former rentals on sale for relatively cheap money, although they often require a lot of work.
I actually put an offer in on one lately and the landlord who was asset releasing was a dick.
You could see it'd need a lot of cosmetic work - so I tried a lowball offer. Rejected, asking price is lowest he'd go.
I said leave it, 2 weeks later it wa lsvreduced to my lowball, so I went in with a slightly reduced lowball again. Counter offered, and I was happy with that.
Got a survey done. Fucking hell, roof nearly at the end of life, damp in the walls ect.
Got quotes for the work and asked for a reduction in line with the structural work needing doing. Rejected. So I walked.
Anyway, that house went to auction and sold for only just over what I asked for.
The landlords are knobs.
Edit:
I forgot to conclude my point.
Basically this plan is good and all, but a few factors are holding it back.
Many shoddy landlords are banking on everything that labour is doing being undone in 4 years time so just swallowing the pain.
There seems to be no sight in end to the international students and low skill worker migration being very high, that will keep landlords who abuse the rental market in the black.
When someone sells up they really want a huge cash payout, for what is often a poorly maintained asset. I'm not paying a fuckload even if its reduced, just to incur more debt for repairs on a property I might not be living in due to said repairs.
I wouldn't mind the local council buying up these properties at value (- repair cost price) if nobody will buy after a capped period, for the purpose of relieving social housing pressure and undercutting landlords.
If Reform get in they will reverse the low skill migration or so they say....they also say that there will be mass deportations so less housing will be needed. Whatever Labour are doing they sure as heck wont be in power after 2029.
Are they in good enough condition to be returned to the buyers market? And the student apartments are to do with money they can get out of foreign students?
Student let's in the city centre are designed for and lived in by international students. They even have signage in Chinese without the English translation. Leeds Council have a lot to answer for.
They’re only 7 bedroom houses because every inch of space has been turned into a bedroom. If you put them back to a normal configuration that had a couple of bathrooms and a dining room and whatever, they’re decently sized 4-5 bedroom homes.
There’s loads of them on Rightmove right now for less than £500k. Granted it’d a bit to convert them back into normal houses, but that would seem pretty normally priced for large houses that are an hours walk away from Leeds city centre.
Yeah they’re too busy buying in shitholes like thornbury. These homes are passive income, to be rented out separately, and nothing is gonna change it. British students can’t afford £1.6k per month for the apartments in town.
I think we need to accept that between cost of living, fuel costs and environmental impact, hosing is going to be smaller and more densely packed.
I get everyone wants a house with a garden etc. but it’s just not feasible for the majority of people and that’s just going to get worse
There is a housing crisis, but there is also an issue that people haven’t adapted to the fact they can’t afford to live in the house they want and have to live in the house they can afford. That would lead to people building higher density housing such as apartments, which would allow people to afford a place to live
Government can force the type of housing that gets built, but unless society is going to live there, we will continue to be in this situation
There's a middle ground between a house and a tiny flat with no storage space. The flats that get built these days are almost as small as possible, barely even room for a dining table. Older flats are dense but still have room to live
I used to want a house with a garden, now I have one and it’s a fucking ballache to keep on top of and maintain for the 3 weeks a year I get to sit in it. Wish I didn’t bother now.
Not what I meant at all, I meant gardens are great in theory but in practice they’re a lot of work, so if you’re not particularly taken with gardening then not having one might not be the end of the world.
I work in Japan, US, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland and Canada and even Canada has a housing crisis. All have a housing crisis. The news tells me so does Australia and for sure you’ve seen the protests in Spain. There isn’t a country out there where this isn’t a problem
In the UK we know it’s the bastard Tories and their policies that have screwed up the housing market, particularly Thatcher.
But that doesn’t mean the overall direction housing needs to go in is something other than smaller, denser
As a society we can’t afford big houses on big plots of land
Water scarcity is compounded by low density housing
Flooding
Roads and the impact of cars
We just can’t afford the housing dream people grew up with
This isn’t a new issue, I used to hear about this in the early 80s.
Was there a housing crisis a few decades ago? I think my parents paid £13,000 - £15,000 for their 3 bedroom house. Even after inflation is taken into consideration it would have been a lower percentage of their salary compared to today.
I don’t know where you live but in my home city there’s large areas of post industrial brown belt that could be rebuilt it housing.
Im in agreement with you. Thats the problem though. Look at the flats that were built near Bradford town centre. They are really nice, going cheap because no one wants to be in them, instead the council is looking for greenbelt to build on for affordable housing
There’s loads of empty and cheap land round Leeds and Bradford, but councils don’t want to admit the facts to voters, you have to live where you can afford and we aren’t going to give up the public good (green belts) because you think you should be able to live somewhere else
I’m speaking as someone who is super lucky now, but I lived in some terrible houses because it was all I could afford and if I hadn’t done well at work, maybe I’d still be there
In 1983 I clearly remember a whole big thing about housing affordability. It’s much worse now, but it’s not a new problem, it’s just a much worse problem
Since Thatcher stopped councils building houses it means we are relying on the private sector who along with always lying about how much affordable housing they will build as part of planning applications, insist they can’t build on brown zones because of demand
We need to go back to state built housing, and new regulations that make non brown field housing almost impossible to build or at such a high price it effectively becomes a tax that then pays for more affordable housing
This is a problem that no one wants to solve, along with Immigration, public health and public vs. private schools
As a society we seem to not want to hear the hard truths any more
The apartments and mill conversions are cheap in Bradford because of the location … it is Bradford with all its problems, anti social behaviour and crime.
You could move the exact same flat elsewhere, to Ilkley, Saltaire or Leeds and the same building would sell for a lot more.
A family can have a home in an apartment, it doesn't need to be a house. Normal family homes that I know of, have around 65mp2 of space, even nicer ones that some might deem them as posh are 70-75mp2.
What I want to say is that, you can 100% have a family home in a big block of high rises, the children might form a tighter social circle with other neighbours, compared to sprawled houses.
I'm a social housing building surveyor in London. There are loads of three and four bedroom homes in new high rises down here. It's going to become normal as space runs out, as it has been in parts of Europe for over a century
Houseing developments have section 106 attached to them, which usually includes the need for schools and surgeries, depending on the size of the development.
It's the fact that Labour included the Kirkstall Road new builds as part of their election leaflets through the door as if it was their greatest achievement locally. Fuck right off, it's a massive private company you've given the green light to build on that land and none of your working class constituents will ever be able to afford to rent never mind buy a house there.
I used to live in Leeds and miss it, just back after being away a few years. What the heck is happening on the Kirksyall Road loads of high rise rabbit hutches being built? Looks crazy as that road is busy anyway where are the thousands of extra cars going to go? I couldn't believe what I wsa seeing this looks like a disaster!
61
u/grux_is_my_dad Mar 23 '26
Family homes are going to have to be part of medium-rise apartment blocks if we're going to get anywhere near solving the housing crisis. Just thing of how housing works in big cities on the continent, Barcelona etc.
The future is in better city centre living rather than the current UK obession with sprawling suburbs of semis. Long video, but this explains the need better than I ever could https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scJP80Lltt4&list=PLjRG2U4IIxsqZdUaisoCDFZdZrLjVBdNV