Building new homes

There seems to be no shortage of luxury flat building! Turn them into social housing.

There's lots of little parcels of land lying vacant. Here's one to start with: on the corner of Brixton Hill and Dunbarton Road, close to Brixton Prison, there's been a fair sized piece of land vacant for several/many years. There's never been any activity on it and it's also an eye-sore with hideous boarding round it, which has partly fallen down several times in high winds. There's room for a block of flats on it. Who owns it? Why is nothing being done to put it to use?

I believe that we should challenge the notion that the housing crisis can only be solved by building more homes in the capital.

Firstly, we should ensure that there are no empty homes in London. That means insisting that people who own properties live in them themselves or rent them so others can live in them. The number of properties kept on short lets, through companies like Air BnB, should also be limited. It is criminal that properties stand empty while people do not have a safe and secure place to live. And it is wrong to build high-rise, high-density housing all over the city, often on green space, when there are properties standing empty.

Secondly, we should convert empty office blocks to housing.

Thirdly, we should encourage businesses to move to parts of the country where there is less pressure on housing. This would do much to revitalise areas of the country that have limited job opportunity and take the pressure off housing in London.

London is already an over-populated and overcrowded place. London will choke itself to death where any possible little space is utilised. Computer mapping may perhaps show the most "efficient" or "ideal" distribution of housing, but London is becoming a sterile, concreted over, nasty place where sterile monsters of glass and steel replace bushes, creating huge wind channels and sun traps. This WILL result in a city blighted with enormous HEAT in summers and STORMS throughout the year.

The way forward should be careful planning of births and influx of people into London, mixed with careful, considerate and moderate building/ planning, ensuring that pollution is kept to a minimum, and new green and wetland areas maintained and created throughout. Buildings should be impact assessed as to height, carbon foot print and "look/ feel". All property developers with huge portfolios are to be strongly encouraged to rent out at social rents and all empty properties should be seized and given to Council control to be rented out.

There are plenty of brownfield sites in London, and for my mind, I think a simple open submission call for young architects to provide solutions - who genuinely live surrounded by these issues we face - would be a solution.

where the homes are built is immaterial its the costs of those homes thats important