Apr 4th, 2017
Affordable housing in Camden – Make housing developers be transparent!
By Rachel Whalley
Greedy developers in Camden can shirk their responsibility to build affordable housing by using a legal loophole to say they won’t make enough money. What’s worse is that the maths they use to work out their profit is kept secret. Even the council don’t see it. So developers can play all sorts of tricks to wriggle out of their duty.
Some councils in London have already closed the loophole and put an end to this. So now pressure’s building for Camden to make the change too.
38 Degrees members Una, Rina and Graham have set-up a petition asking Camden Council to force local developers to make their reports public. If thousands of us add our names now, it’ll be clear evidence for the council that local people want this loophole closed in Camden too, as soon as possible.
If you think that developers shouldn’t be able to worm out of building affordable housing, then sign the petition today. It only takes one minute:
By not building affordable housing, developers are making Camden into a place where only wealthy people can live. Applications for new housing developments come in all the time. So if this continues any longer, then the culture and community that makes Camden so special could be lost forever.
Islington, Greenwich, Lambeth and Bristol councils have all recently protected their residents from developers by making sure that the developer’s reports – called “financial viability assessments” – are made public and so able to be scrutinised. If enough of us come together here, we can make sure that Camden council follows suit and protects Camden too.
If you think that people’s lives should come before developer’s profits in Camden, please sign the petition:
