David Farrer, whose blog you can find here, had kindly drawn my attention to this, from the FT.com site. I totally agree that there has been and is a lot of new development of older, brownfield buildings and sites, much of it very good. But as I pointed out in my comment replying to his, the areas involved are still tiny – a few dozen acres at most – and any visitor to Liverpool will be struck by how much of its urban residential districts resemble Glasgow in the 1970s.
Top-class renovations of, say, waterfront warehouses, into penthouse flats for the thick end of a million, are not going immediately to benefit your average terrorised single mum in Toxteth, trapped on benefits and as the probable serial baby-mother for “youths”, similarly trapped. Unless socialists with a vested interest in maximizing the population of these people suddenly decide altruistically to go and break rocks in China, instead of continuing to staff the “welfare” agencies and Town Halls, thus freeing up the economic and the political horizons for myriad small businesses, to get these people back to work and self-respect, the main problem will, er, remain.
For Life, Liberty and Property
