A group of local mothers are squatting next to London’s Olympic Park. we need social housing, not social cleansing

Why I’m occupying a boarded-up east London council house

A group of local mothers are squatting next to London’s Olympic Park to tell the government we need social housing, not social cleansing

Read more from the Guardian

The landed families of Grosvenor, Portman and Cadogan have been joined by a breed of corporate giants like Lend Lease, CapCo and Ballymore. 

The wave of developers buying up swathes of London includes Malaysia’s SP Setia, which acquired Battersea power station. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities

Affordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East

.Extract from  the Guardian.....Across the country – and especially in superheated London, where stratospheric land values beget accordingly bloated developments – authorities are allowing planning policies to be continually flouted, affordable housing quotas to be waived, height limits breached, the interests of residents endlessly trampled. Places are becoming ever meaner and more divided, as public assets are relentlessly sold off, entire council estates flattened to make room for silos of luxury safe-deposit boxes in the sky. We are replacing homes with investment units, to be sold overseas and never inhabited, substituting community for vacancy. The more we build, the more our cities are emptied, producing dead swathes of zombie town where the lights might never even be switched on... Read More The truth about property developers:

No affordable houses available in the Borough

Friday, 18th July 2014

With the London property market enjoying a seemingly endless boom, buying a home has become a distant fantasy for most working Londoners. This is particularly true in Kensington and Chelsea where house prices increased by 14% over just one year (2012-13) and average well over £1million (according towww.rightmove.com).

Now a damning new report shows just how far out of reach home-ownership is for most of us living (and most likely renting) in the capital.

The report, published by the charity Shelter, reveals 99.7% of London homes are unaffordable for first time buyers. Shelter looked at the asking prices of thousands of properties for sale in the capital, on a given day, and compared them to mortgages that are affordable to average first time buyers capable of saving the standard 18% deposit. They found that, across the whole of London, only 86 homeswere affordable to the typical buyer, or 0.3% of houses on the market. READ MORE FROM KC&W Today

London's housing estates and the case for community control

 London's housing estates and the case for community control

Would the capital's social housing neighbourhoods work better if their residents had real power over how they are developed and run?

More from this blog at The Gaurdian...