On Monday night we had a meeting of the council ffice:smarttags" />cabinet, at which no party has an overall majority but Labour are the largest group.ffice
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For my sins I am cabinet member with responsibility for Housing, Neighbourhoods and Communications , which for this meeting involved championing the new empty property strategy.
Empty property is a big issue for seaside towns, where faded Victorian architectural grandeur was partly preserved by a holiday economy for the first two thirds of the 20th century. Following the decline in popularity of coastal towns as holiday resorts, this curious form of localised recession brought few remaining options for oversized Victorian single family housing. In the latter part of the last century many buildings were either gutted and turned into cheap bed-sits for rent, or poor quality flat conversions to buy. Another significant proportion was simply abandoned to a spiral of decay and allowed to decline to the point where the cost of repair was more than the final cost of the building.
In the 1980s and 90s I watched this situation continue to get worse, while listening to good old fashioned non interventionist Tory dogma about letting ‘the market provide’ – which it didn’t.
But now Hastings is on the up, after sizable pubic sector investment in regeneration by a more enlightened Labour governemnt. Inflating property prices are now good for physical regeneration but with the lowest wages of any town in the south east, many local residents are still reliant on a volatile private rented sector which is contracting. Meanwhile the council quite rightly has responsibilities to meet the needs of homeless households who are increasing in number as the private sector reduces in size - someting for which there are no 'one size' solutions but where empty property work has an important role to play.
The important issues are how much of the abandoned or poorly managed Victorian / Edwardian housing can be secured and converted for social renting and how effective the council can be to inspire others (through regeneration initiatives) to increase the capacity of the town to support the kind of jobs which bring decent wages to local residents. Both of these things will make a big difference to the life chances of the existing population, while filling the empties will dampen the demand to build on greenfield sites, help reduce crime, drug abuse and fire risks associated with empty buildings, increase the population of the inner town wards to raise the spend in local businesses and increase the value of surrounding properties.
