round table
Left to right: Toby Fox (3Fox International), Colin Hunter and Alisdair McIntosh.
All sorts of things are being thrown up in the air right now — there’s the requirement coming for 25% new-build to be affordable housing, there’s the Edinburgh housing standards... households by 2015. Managing the brownfield redevelopment is absolutely core to that. We can’t have greenbelt release in an undisciplined way. The unique selling point about Edinburgh is its seven hills and its accessibility to open space and fresh air. It’s in everybody’s minds. The waterfront has an enormous part to play. JB: Edinburgh is leaking family homes to all the other counties. That is driving prices mad for family homes and flats. Edinburgh has a population of 450,000. It is not Barcelona, Birmingham or London. The city faces to the sea so we can only come to it from one angle. We should work with communities and go along with the connectivity points which have just been made. We need to do something that encourages the development community and appreciates the size of Edinburgh which, like our Scottish teams, fights well above its weight in an international market.
KA: But the interesting thing is that Edinburgh was a denser place in the 1920s than it is today. So the fact that it is a compact city is deep in its history. Families have been prepared to, and still do to this day, live in high-value tenements districts. High-density doesn’t mean high-rise. SM: All sorts of things are being thrown up in the air right now — there’s the requirement coming for 25% new-build to be affordable housing, there’s the Edinburgh housing standards... Looking at it from a private sector landowners’ perspective, all this is reducing the bottom line. KA: Affordable housing policy was a new requirement introduced gradually from 2001. We review its effectiveness every year, and whether it’s delivering and doing what we want. The council reasserted our case to central government to ensure a stream of housing association grants subsidy for the bricks and
mortar, but not the land costs. We’ll continue to focus on that central requirement. It’s the one big risk to sustainable growth to the city — not having enough affordable housing. Q. What can be done to help the Waterfront development? KA: By having a local plan which is clear and a system which is up to date, and the determination to work with central government, and other agencies, to explore other funding mechanisms in addition to section 75. NT: One of the problems we’ve had historically is not having a high-profile economic development officer in the city. It’s unusual when working on a development of this size not to communicate with the head of economic development. The other thing the city is missing is the ‘Bernstein Factor’, such as in Manchester. 26/27
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