Thread

1. dofm · 1790058214 · focus · HN ↗

   Oh dear.

   The redeveloped Battersea Power Station is one of the most soulless, dead-eyed, wealth-obsessed places in all of London. This is a terrible place to put something like a music venue, unless your target market is the adult children of emigres with unexplained wealth, and I think it speaks to Apple’s sanitised, emotionally-distant, luxury-focussed worldview that they would consider it.

   Incredible building. Awful development. They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.

   The free U2 album looks like the work of a tastemaker by comparison.

   1. hbcdbff · 1790061549 · focus · HN ↗

      I suppose you’d prefer the power station to have remained a derelict wreck.

      Honestly, people like you are what holds this country back.

      1. earthnail · 1790062548 · focus · HN ↗

         It turned into a luxury place because that's where the highest margins in construction are. Every developer wants to build high margin houses, nobody wants to build low margin houses.

         City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.

         If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.

         1. hbcdbff · 1790063404 · focus · HN ↗

            I personally see no issue with using prime real estate for… prime housing.

            Affordable housing can be built somewhere that is actually… affordable.

            1. earthnail · 1790067752 · focus · HN ↗

               Imagine you're the mayor. You want to hire companies to build prime housing and affordable housing. Every company only wants to build prime housing, because that's where the money is. If you only give out contracts like that, basically nobody will apply to build affordable housing.

               You're not dumb, of course, so your next step is to say, "if I give you the contract to build prime housing, you also must build affordable housing". That's not ideal for the developer, because the time spent on building affordable housing is time they don't spend on stuff where they make proper money, but at least they can make some money. They agree to take the deal. You think, problem solved, but turns out the developer outsmarts you: they structure the company in a way that they can chicken out of building the affordable housing. In real estate, it's very common to have every building project be its own limited liability company so that one failed project doesn't influence the others. In this case, you put the affordable and the luxury housing together in one Ltd, build the luxury housing, extract the profits by moving them to the parent company and then declare your Ltd bankrupt, meaning they unfortunately can no longer build the affordable housing.

               As a mayor, you observe how you're being cheated, you get real angry but the walk through the courts is too slow, and your voters demand action now. Realistically, you do the court route in the background, but you learned your lesson and now you tell the developer "before I give you a high margin luxury contract, you must have completed affordable housing first".

               Alternatively, you mix the buildout into the same building so that you cannot open the luxury flats/office space without having completed the affordable part. Either way, affordable first, luxury second.

               That is basically the story of the London property market.

               1. dabinat · 1790071444 · focus · HN ↗

                  Another issue is how do you even build affordable housing on land worth millions? The only way to make that work is if the government owns the land forever and commits to never selling it. Which is kind of what the government was going for after WWII with council houses, but Right to Buy ruined that.

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