Last night saw visits to Wester Hailes and Juniper Green Community Councils, two adjacent, but completely different communities. Strangely, last night they were discussing a common issue, housing. Wester Hailes is coming to terms with the withdrawl of Prospect Housing Association from a development at the "10 acre site" partly due to reduced housing grant money available from the Scottish Government. It means that much needed affordable housing could be denied to an area that badly needs it. There is some talk of alternative developers being interested but possibly with an inferior design. We need more information on this and it will be pursued.
Then up to Juniper Green for a brief presentation by Taylor Wimpey on why they think the Green Belt should be breached to build houses on the field at Muir Wood Road. I wonder if they've thought about building at Wester Hailes ...? Probably not.
Talking of which, some new council housing has been built in the south of the city, unfortunately not enough and certainly not enough to make an impact on the 3000 homes that have been lost in the last 5 years.
Labour's Cammy Day explains in more detail on the rather excellent Edinburgh Labour website.
2 comments:
Please don't let them build on the Muir Wood Rd. Let's save our green belt. I can see plenty of sites nearer the city centre that are sitting empty.
Great to council homes being built again in Edinburgh.
Keep up the great blogging.
Bill
Many thanks for your comment. It will be interesting to see what the Planning Dept's response will be once the application has been submitted. I agree there are other sites, like the one I mentioned in Wester Hailes, that need to be developed first. I too welcome new council houses but we need more, much more, considering we've lost 3000 in the last 5 years alone. At this rate we're going backwards rather than keeping up with demand.
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