The boomers ate all the avocados
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I’ll say it again - they can’t block housing being built if it complies with policy. They can harass Councillors and be a general PITA but ultimately it is the populist Councillors on the Planning Committees who often seem to have no grasp on regulations and policies that are the issue e.g. I’ve heard of examples where they’ve refused applications then been reminded by their planning or legal officers that they have to give a (legitimate) reason which is followed by a farce where they try to come up with some BS.
It usually ends up with them getting taken to appeal, losing and often paying costs out of scarce Council funds. The houses get delayed, the locals still end with them and the Council (and developer) lose money but the Councillors can say how they fought hard to stop the development.
Believe me, I’m all in favour of anything that makes the process simpler plus more houses being built means more work. If Boomers were the real reason for the issues I’d be jumping on your bandwagon.
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Main jist of this thread will be...
"It's like trying not to be ageist but you see a boomer on the TV, and you're just like I hate, you just want to hate all boomers because they're there, and I don't hate all boomers at all, but I think that boomer should be made homeless."
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.2 -
Mars?
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If you ever venture towards "historic buildings" twitter, you get a lot of tweets saying "please help us protect this *semi non-descript-usually-victorian-building-that-looks-quite-nice* from this building monstrosity" and it's some design which sort of envelopes the historic building with some fancy 8 story block of flats.
The comments below are usually quite funny. 30% "yes, how can I help" and 70% "build the fucking thing".
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I suspect you'll find that in all geographic FB groups too... to give you a bit of ammunition in your anti-boomer quest, each time a photo of a 1960s car-filled dual carriageway Exeter centre crops up, it gets 9-1 "Oh it was soooo much nicer back then!", and it does my nut in. It was horrible, the only saving grace being that the post-war shoddily-built rebuilds didn't look quite as tatty as they do now. They even wax lyrical about this pile of poo... the only nice thing about it was the font for the signage.
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Retired homeowners are not the cause of decades of undersupply of social housing - because that is where the most accute shortage is. They do not have control of the planning system. Every Local Authority has a Local Plan. This is the document that sets out among other things what new housing the LA would like to see and where. The content of the Local Plan is drafted by Planning Officers and formally adopted by Local Councillors, with ultimate oversight from the Planning Inspectorate and the Courts. Until recently, the total amount of new housing included in a Local Plan was a mandatory figure set by Central Government. One of the Councillors might be a boomer, but not most of them are working age. Planning Officers are definitely not boomers.
There are examples of Local Councillors who leverage some local opposition to development to get/stay elected. They may try to influence the drafting of the Local Plan in terms of what locations are included for new housing or they may lobby for additional criteria/hurdles to be added that applications need to meet.
Generally speaking, if a developer or a Housing Association wants to build some housing in a location allocated for more housing, then subject to the design meeting other criteria in the Local Plan - building form, size of rooms, bio-diversity net gain, etc. - it should be recommended for consent. That recommendation is made by Planning Officers, not boomers. Many applications are decided under delegated powers - i.e. are made solely by Planning Officers.
People, including but not exclusively boomers, are entitled to lodge objections to an application. These objections are (as is often the case) not relevant to matters of planning policy they will be disregarded. If there are more substantive objections are received, the decision will go to the local Planning Committee made up of elected councillors. This is where the decision is most vulnerable to councillors feeling pressured to refuse applications by vocal objectors. More organised objectors will engage a planning barrister to assist in building a case against the application.
It's important to state that this is not a flaw. Developers do put forward poorly thought out proposals and these should be refused.
There is also an expertise gap. I've sat through Committee meetings where councillors have to be repeatedly corrected by Planning Officers and the LA's legal advice on what is/isn't a planning matter or relevant to the application in question.
One of the major issues for developers is the amount of time and expense required to achieve consent. Part of this is due to under-resourcing of Planning departments as a result of austerity. Departments have been running at ~25% vacancies for years. That just means that a lot of decisions and even more pre-application advice is late, often by months, or poorly considered. There is also significant mission creep with Planning departments - presumably at the urging of Councillors - requiring more and more supporting information for each application. For a small development to convert a large house into two large flats, we might need:
A design and access statement
A heritage statement
A fire safety strategy statement
A daylight assessment
A biodiversity assessment
An arboricultural report
A construction traffic management plan
A basement impact assessment
A ground investigation report
Maybe an acoustic report if we want to add a heat pump.
Oh, and a set of drawings describing the design.
Fingers crossed there are no bats or newts found on site.
That's easily £20-30k of fees just to prepare the documents for a single additional dwelling that has in principle support, plus council fees for at least one round of pre-application advice, the application itself and the application to discharge conditions attached to the decision. That process can easily last 6-12 months. If you want to fill a weekend go to your local authority planning archive, download and read all the documents for a major development.
This additional information is all worthwhile - obviously we should consider the impact of construction traffic or whatever - but the overall effect is to put a very high hurdle on any serious development. Then there's the CIL and Section 106 agreement where a local authority requires a payment towards community infrastructure from the developer. On one conversion of a single derelict house to 3 flats, the LA demanded several tens of thousands effectively asking the developer to build at a loss.
Again, no boomers
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
Plenty of boomers still work rjsterry. How old do you think they are?
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
I think some people believe that a bunch of pensioners from The Wantage Action Trust waving placards at a council meeting is what determines if a development gets built of not. If a scheme is compliant with policy then it should eventually go through. All protestors normally manage to achieve is delay and additional cost to all parties other than in situations where a developer decides it is no longer worth the cost and hassle (or the rare occasions where they actually have a valid objection). I sometimes have sympathy with them e.g. one scheme I worked on in Hereford was going to completely encircle what is currently a hamlet of beautiful Tudor era houses with 1200 new homes (I lost my sympathy after having to attend a meeting with them - right bunch of over-priviledged, rude boomers) but when you view the site from satellite imagery it makes complete sense, especially with the proposed bypass that was due to be constructed at the time.
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On a side note I have just applied for a bus pass.🦕🦖
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Sponging bar steward
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The youngest boomers will be 60, the oldest will be 78. The vast majority will be retired.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Oh my, not only have all the boomers stolen all the houses, but they're stealing the jobs too, even though they are all multi-millionaires.
House blockers, job blockers, wealth horders.
Poor little top 1% earner in their 30s, no wonder they're so angry.
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You forgot bed blockers and bus blockers 😁
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Yeah, the other 99% however, happy as larry. If you think I'm agry, wait till you see people who earn a more common amount.
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Out of interest, I did a quick word search for ‘Boomers’ on the forum and apart from Knog Boomer lights I found this interesting vintage Thread.
All due respect to Rick, he has been fighting the good fight on behalf of millennials for many years. I hope they appreciate it.
From 2011…
https://forum.bikeradar.com/discussion/12750116/the-generation-blame/p1
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Currently in our household we have one working and one retired. Are we taking the piss 😉
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In my experience they seem more inclined to just crack on with things. I've worked with a fair few and never heard any of them moan about their lot as much as you do.
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Haha you think I moan to my boss about it?
The only moaning I do is that he needs to pay me more.
What’s the forum for?!
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Bit sad how many more posters there were back then.
Boomers drove them all away 😞
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
They probably were boomers and nature has taken them from us! We even had a few female posters back then too.
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Surely if they are retired and living off their overly generous state pension then they aren't working. Point remains: boomers aren't solely responsible for the housing shortage.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
A simple way of helping to free up the property market would be to have a low flat stamp duty rate of 1% (no exemptions) on your primary residence and make it fiscally neutral with an increase in council tax
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This threadnismproving to be good entertainment.
And as an added benefit, it seems to be quarantining most of the whining Millenni-bollox in one thread 😀
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Would be sensible anyway but I don't think that would make much difference to overall supply. Also CT is about to get big hikes anyway.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
On the current malaise of the Conservative Party, The Economist compare them to the old Trade Unions of the 70s.
I guess if the argument below says that the Tories are 70s labour like clientelists to the old, my beef is with said clients.
Some Tory mps see themselves less as part of a project of national government, more as delegates sent to negotiate with it. Their job is to extract benefits for their voters and to see off reforms that threaten them. Leaders of Tory factions issue dark threats of industrial action in the form of “vote strikes” or a calendar of sabotage they term the “grid of shit” (a phrase of which Arthur Scargill, a miners’ leader from the 1980s, would have been proud).
Those Tory supporters are disproportionately found among the old. That is a problem. Britain’s most pressing challenge, says Robert Colvile, the cps’s current head, is demography. As the population ages, keeping spending on the over-65s at its current 10% share of gdp would require the economy to expand by nearly 3% a year for the next 50 years. Yet much of the Tory party ducks this looming crunch, much as the unions of the 1970s refused to engage with post-war governments’ trilemma of combining full employment, low inflation and high wage growth.
Our role in society is to look after our members, not run the country,” shrugged Joe Gormley, a miners’ leader. The same attitude prevails among Tory mps at budget time. The public finances are fragile: Jeremy Hunt’s promise to reduce Britain’s debt as a share of gdp in five years’ time rests on heroic assumptions about spending restraint. Rather than confront that challenge, each year backbenchers present the Treasury with lists of tax cuts for their favoured groups (inheritors of large estates, pub landlords, motorists, dog-owners and so on) and pleas for “levelling up” cash for their areas. Their rhetoric is Thatcherite; their behaviour is clientelist.
Keeping a lid on taxation (due to hit 37.1% of gdp by 2029, the highest share since 1948, according to Britain’s official fiscal watchdog) means tackling productivity. Yet when productivity-enhancing measures threaten the well-being of the core Tory electorate, mps go on strike. The cps wants sweeping liberalisation of Britain’s planning rules; successive governments have caved to Tory backbenchers who have fought like picketing miners to restrict building. Britain’s housing shortage is the Conservative equivalent of the “closed shop”, which shielded unionised workers from pay competition. Insiders, who own homes, benefit from rising asset prices; outsiders pay the price.
Restraining spending would also mean reinventing the welfare state. Over 14 years in government, several schemes to fund adult social care—among them duties on property, payroll taxes and insurance schemes—have been proposed and then strangled. Like the carworkers’ unions that fought off modernisation, a desire to see off short-term pain has prevailed over the long-run benefits of a reformed social-care system.
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The title of this thread does seem to be uncannily accurate...
It has be a Boomer conspiracy to make the Millennials pay more for their favourite food. I can imagine the Boomers laughing as they sit in their enormous houses worth
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
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nimby extremists, send them to rwanda
my bike - faster than god's and twice as shiny0
