Skip to main content

Vital city housing demolished under Labour. Greens ask _why_?

Green Councillors are concerned that the Labour-run City Council has disposed of significant social housing in Norwich and allowed it to be demolished without firm plans for replacement.

In 2006, the Green Party opposed the City Council's decision to uproot council tenants and leaseholders at 50 flats in Barrack Street on the basis of developer plans for a mixed use development.   In 2007, 19 sheltered flats at Greyhound Opening were 'decommissioned' and elderly residents were relocated.  Both sites still lie empty.  

Green Councillor Paul Neale, County council candidate for Town Close said: "I am shocked, when there is a national housing crisis, and a local crisis made worse by the Bedroom tax, that tenants at Barrack Street and Greyhound Opening were moved against their wishes and the sites remain empty. The Green Party is pressing the Labour Cabinet at the City Council to urgently set out a solution to this issue."

Green Party City Council candidate for Mancroft, Simeon Jackson says: "Norwich's housing stock is in need of refurbishment to bring it to modern energy efficiency standards. This would create local jobs and be a long-term investment - the Green Party's real alternative to destroying homes. We have been pressing the council to improve housing whenever we have the opportunity, such as within our proposal for the City Deals bid."

NOTES AND PHOTOS

The original flats on the South side of Barrack Street can still be seen on this old satellite picture at Google Maps - http://goo.gl/maps/rhlOA. 

Since the demolition of the flats, the site remains undeveloped, now 7 years on, behind a metal wall. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More on why 20's plenty -- without need for any further 'trials'...

There are a number of reasons for setting a default speed of 20mph throughout the 'unclassified' road network in residential parts of a city such as Norwich. Most important perhaps is that of driver recognition as to what the speed limit is. If you have 20 mph as the default then you not only establish this limit clearly, but you also adjust the driver's recognition as to what is the "normal" speed in such residential areas. The most important aspect is that drivers set 20 mph as the norm with those 30 mph areas or roads being seen as 50% faster, rather than seeing 30 mph as the norm with 20 mph as 33% slower. The psychological adjustment of normal speeds in residential areas is key to the success of reducing speeds and therefore danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore any trial, pilot or whatever, that only implements 20 mph in a tiny proportion of the city is not modelling 20's Plenty in any realistic manner.   When considering the val...
2 comments
Read more

Stansted: a reflection

The key question, in relation to protsts like that at Stansted last week, is: which side are you on? Are you on the side of big corporations profiteering from completely unsustainable climate-destructive behaviour? Or are you on the side of people with no vested interests just making a non-violent stand, at considerable cost to their own time and money, for the sake of all our futures? It doesn't seem to me a hard judgement to make... Rupert Read Green Party Councillor, Norwich, and Lead Candidate for Eastern Region for the Greens in the 2009 Euro-elections. DID YOU KNOW: A vote of about 10% across Eastern Region on June 4 2009 would be enough to get me elected to the European Parliament... http://rupertsread.blogspot.com
2 comments
Read more