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December 11, 2011

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Introduction to Emergency Survival Shelters

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If your plane crashes, your car gets washed away in a mudslide, or your boat sinks and you’re stuck on an unknown coast, your first priority might not be food or water, but an emergency shelter.

It depends on the conditions — weather primarily.

Of course, the best alternative is to get out of the wilderness and back home, but you might have to hunker down before you can leave. In case you do, you’ll need to know how to build an emergency survival shelter.

Assess the situation before you build an emergency shelter

When you find yourself stranded, follow the DAPA procedure:

  • Don’t panic. Disorientation, stress, and fear are the enemies of functionality. You can’t reason yourself through a situation without getting control of your emotions.
  • Assess your situation. Remain calm; look around. You might not know which direction points home, but you can determine your physical relation to the immediate environment. Are you in a gulley? Are you on high ground? Is it cold? Are you injured? Next, is there anyone with you? If so, determine whether they need help. Then determine what tools you have. What’s in your pocket?
  • Plan. Having a plan gives you the means to apply rational thought — it helps keep you mentally stable. Bad morale is lethal; your plan should be designed to guarantee incremental successes. This rewards you with the pleasure of progress. Don’t be too cocky for Baby Steps. Your first success might be something as simple as reaching the vantage point you identified when assessing your situation just moments ago, or identifying North, or taking stock of your tools. If you’re completely befuddled as to what to do, you still must plan. If you can’t think of anything else, determine simply to reach a landmark, like “I’m going to walk 100 yards uphill and see what’s there.” Your goal is always to improve your situation. Be realistic. Your ultimate goal is to get out of the wilderness and get home, but you might not be able to do that right now. If that’s the case, set interim goals that are achievable and improve your situation.
  • Act. What you planned, now you must do. Be diligent, but be flexible. Put some effort into carrying out every step of your plan, but revise the plan if necessary to reach your goal. For example, if you have decided to build your shelter against a fallen tree trunk, but find that the ground is drier next to a rock ledge nearby, feel free to move — if you have time. The goal always is to improve your situation.

Understand Your Immediate Shelter Needs

There are four primary considerations in determining your emergency shelter needs: purpose, environment, physical condition, and materials on hand.

  • Purpose of a shelter. Always, always keep in mind the purpose of your emergency shelter; you only need to provide basic protection from the elements. If the threat is rain, spend your energy stopping most leaks. If the threat is cold, focus on insulation. If the threat is heat, focus on shade and ventilation. Once you’ve abated the major environmental threat, move on to the next item in your overall plan. Don’t waste time and energy perfecting something that’s good enough.
  • Environment. If you’re supremely lucky, you’ll be stranded in an environment that resembles the garden of Eden — food will grow on trees, cold, clean water will bubble out of the ground, you’ll find mossy patches four feet thick for your bed, and the temperature will hover around 80 degrees Fahrenheit day and night. Bet against it, though. Just in case the garden of Eden is hard to find where you’ll be traveling, you should be prepared for a less benign environment. Whenever you travel, it is vitally important to have some information about the weather forecast.
  • Physical condition. If you’re in good condition, you can be more aggressive, take a little more hardship, take a little more calculated risk. If you’re injured, sick, or malnourished, your weakened condition means you’ll have less tolerance for exposure. You’ll have to be more careful to provide warmth, to stay dry, and keep your stress level down. Understand your capabilities and limitations.
  • Materials on hand. As always, your best bet is to have a well-stocked everyday carry bag. Ideally, you’ll have a ripstop poncho with grommets — you can tie this down for immediate shelter from wind and rain. In five minutes, you have a life-saving shelter. Barring that, consider what you do have, whether it’s snow, leaves, evergreen boughs, bamboo, banana leaves, whatever.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/introduction-to-emergency-survival.html

Filed Under: Environment, Housing, Reality, Self-Sustainability, Survival Tagged With: ,

Movers And Sheriff’s Deputies Refuse Bank’s Order To Evict 103-Year-Old Atlanta Woman

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday, a Deutsche Bank branch in Atlanta had requested the eviction of Vita Lee, a 103-year-old Atlanta woman, and her 83-year-old daughter. Both were terrified of being removed from their home of 53 years and had no idea where they’d go next.

But when the movers hired by the bank and police were dispatched to evict the two women, they had a change of heart. In a huge victory for the 99 Percent, the movers “took one look at” Lee and decided not to go through with it. Watch WSB TV’s Channel 2′s video report about the incident:

The stress of the possible eviction made Lee’s daughter ill; she was rushed to the hospital the same day. Lee had one message for Deutsche Bank: “Please don’t come in and disturb me no more. When I’m gone you all can come back and do whatever they want to.”

UPDATE

Chase bank, which services the loan on Hall’s house, has now announced that it will no longer try to evict her and will work out a deal to let her stay in her home.

Source: https://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/30/378565/moves-and-deputies-refuse-eviction

Filed Under: America, Banks, Health, Housing, Money, Occupy, Police Tagged With:

The Secret Revolution in North Dakota

November 30, 2011 By 1 Comment
North Dakota citizens may abolish property taxes, allowing them more control over government spending. Nearly 30,000 signatures were collected to place the people’s initiative on the ballot in June, 2012 that would constitutionally abolish all property taxes in North Dakota.

This landmark measure supports property rights, small government and freedom advocates around the country.

If the initiative is successful, North Dakota will be the first state to abolish all property taxes, both state and local, and will provide a model for the other states to do the same. North Dakota may be the first state to kick off the property rights revolution!

Since 1978 the state legislature has amended, altered or “reformed” property tax 134 times.

This tells us that the tax cannot be fixed.

Legislation to abolish property tax was introduced in the 2009 legislative session. The bill was defeated. There was even an attempt to turn the bill into a study to investigate the issue and that even failed.

Since the initiative qualified for the ballot, several city and county groups have come out in opposition to the measure, in direct violation of state law. The hysteria coming from government leaders include threats that this will be the end of public education, fire and police protection will be terminated, and there will be no more roads (remember that roads are funded through the gas tax).

If the measure passes, two very important issues will be addressed in order to pare down the size of government and spending:

1. The initiative mandates that schools and local governments must be “fully and properly funded” before the state can address any other budgeting (like special interests).

2. The measure also states that all “legal obligations” must be funded. Legal obligations are:

A. Statutory — the things that the state has directed local government to fund.

B. Contractual obligations — spending that the counties and cities have taken on through contracts like bonds, special construction, etc.

After schools, local governments and legal obligations are funded and the real debate begins! Does the city, county or state have the obligation to fund a museum or an art festival? Most people would say ‘no’. Does that mean that the local government can’t fund museums or art festivals? This is an issue of real self rule and local control. If the people really, truly feel they must have a museum or a new hockey rink, then they can vote themselves a new tax to fund it—a sales tax or user fee or special assessment or whatever. They just can’t fund it with property tax.These two points will spark a whole new level of public discourse on the proper role of government and citizen involvement.In addition to forcing the state to prioritize spending, it will also compel them to scrutinize current and future spending, especially if they want to avoid increasing taxes.

According to the Beacon Hill Institute study on EmpowerTheTaxpayer.blogspot.com, there is no need to increase taxes to “pay for” the missing property tax revenues. By putting an extra $3000-4000 in each family’s pocket, the state will enjoy an increase in sales and income tax revenues. Businesses will invest more heavily in our local economy, while the need for some government employees will vanish. The state’s economy will improve without increasing any taxes.

The national mainstream media is not covering this story. The NEA has pledged $4-5 million to fight passage of the measure — this in a state where a Senate race costs less than $1 million. They clearly see the national impact this measure will generate and want to stop it before any other states get any bright ideas.

North Dakota is one of the cheapest places to run a campaign, so if we get good support not only will this measure pass in our state, but we will see it being promoted in other states as well.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/secret-revolution-in-north-dakota.html

Filed Under: America, Family, Housing, Law, Lobbying, Money, Taxes Tagged With:

Class Segregation: Rich Hunker Down in Wealthy Enclaves — Leaving the Rest of America’s Neighborhoods to Deteriorate

November 29, 2011 By 1 Comment

America’s rich haven’t just become richer, according to a new study. They’ve become far more likely to live among their own kind.

Just 40 years ago, most Americans rubbed elbows with neighbors from a fairly wide cross-section of income levels. But today’s rich, Census data show, are keeping everyone else at arm’s length — and more.

How many neighborhoods have you ever seen with oodles of rich residents — and poor schools? Or, vice versa, how many neighborhoods do you know with lots of poor people and richly appointed schools?Silly questions. We all know the answers. Kids in affluent neighborhoods don’t go to schools with leaky roofs, tattered textbooks, and uncertified teachers. Kids in poor neighborhoods do. And what goes for schools, of course, goes for every other public service as well — from parks and libraries to road repair and garbage pick-up. You’re going to be much better off, as a person of modest means, if some of your neighbors have more substantial means.

Back in 1970, the vast majority of Americans lived in neighborhoods that did mix people of substantial and modest means. No more. In fact, says a new study just released by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University, the share of Americans living amid intense income segregation has more than doubled.America’s rich haven’t just become richer, show the study data from Stanford University sociologists Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. They’ve become far more likely to live among their own kind. The same for the poor.Reardon and Bischoff have gone through Census data from all the U.S. metro areas with populations over 500,000. They define as “affluent” those neighborhoods where most families have incomes that run at least 50 percent over the typical family income of the entire metro area.

Poor neighborhoods have most families making less than two-thirds the metro median income.

In 2007, in the nation’s most typical metro areas, neighborhoods that rated as affluent in the Stanford research schema had over half their families making over $112,500. Poor neighborhoods had over half their families making under $50,000.Nearly one out of three families in America’s large metropolitan areas, the Stanford analysts found, spent 2007 in either a severely segregated rich or a severely segregated poor neighborhood.In 1970, by contrast, only one in seven American families lived in neighborhoods that rated as segregated rich or poor.In that same year, 65 percent of Americans lived in neighborhoods where over half the resident families rated as middle income. By 2007, that share of Americans living in middle-class neighborhoods had dropped to 44 percent.

The isolation of America’s rich, the authors of this new income segregation study note, is actually getting more intense than the isolation of the poor. And that isolation, they point out, deeply matters.“The increasing concentration of income and wealth in a small number of neighborhoods,” the two authors note, “results in greater disadvantages for the remaining neighborhoods where low- and middle-income families live.”New Jersey hosts some of the nation’s most income-segregated areas, and this segregation, Newark Star-Ledger commentator Tom Moran observed last week, is taking an ever heavier toll on our political psyche.Growing income segregation, explains Moran, “means people of different means don’t rub elbows as much, their kids don’t play together as much, the parents don’t chat over the back yard fence.

In this segregated environment, people know less and less about people not like themselves. They more easily embrace stereotypes. Politicians from neighborhoods where rich people only interact with other rich people will gravitate more glibly to mean-spirited austerity budget cutbacks.These pols don’t see the threats austerity poses to the well-being of real people with real needs. They see instead the “lazy” poor.This phenomenon has been swirling around the U.S. political scene ever since modern American inequality first began skyrocketing in the 1980s. In 1991, Robert Reich, soon to become the U.S. secretary of labor, gave the phenomenon a label: the “secession of the successful.”America’s top earners, Reich would note, “feel increasingly justified in paying only what is necessary to insure that everyone in their community is sufficiently well educated and has access to the public services they need to succeed.”The nation’s “stark political challenge in the decades ahead,” Reich added back in 1991, will be trying to reaffirm that we remain “a society whose members have abiding obligations to one another.”

We are, the new Stanford data tell us, most definitely losing that challenge.

Source:

https://www.alternet.org/economy/153213/class_segregation:_rich_hunker_down_in_wealthy_enclaves_-_leaving_the_rest_of_america’s_neighborhoods_to_deteriorate

Filed Under: America, Capitalism, Financial Crisis, Housing, Income Inequality, Money Tagged With: , ,

China’s Ghost Cities Fuel Boom-To-Bust Fears

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

China’s “ghost cities” show that the country’s economic boom could be more fragile than it appears.

Kangbashi is a showcase city, laid out spaciously on the grasslands of northern China.

It was dreamt up by the local secretary of the Communist Party as a monument to the country’s new-found prosperity.

The place is dominated by impressive public buildings - a marble-clad library, a state-of-the-art theatre and a giant convention centre.

In the centre of town a 70m-high statue of two fighting horses looms over Genghis Khan Square.

The only thing missing is the people.

Kangbashi was built to house one million residents, but so far only 20,000 have moved in.

Acres of apartment complexes - many of them luxurious by Chinese standards - are deserted. Store fronts are boarded up.

When they first began building Kangbashi, there was a frenzy of investment. The local government contributed a £200m road network. Nearly all of the homes that now lie empty were sold off-plan.

The buyers were China’s cashed-up new middle class. The country’s poorly-regulated stock markets, along with controls on investing overseas, have made second, third and even fourth homes a popular store of wealth.

But from the very outset, Kangbashi defied all economic logic. There’s no industry in the city, and no real reason to live there.

Now Kangbashi - along with other “ghost cities” dotted around China - has come to symbolise what many believe is a dangerous property bubble that could be primed to pop.

The scale of China’s housing boom is staggering. Over the past five years the country has built nearly 40 million new homes. In some cities the price of housing has tripled in the same period.

Chinese economist Zhang Bin said: “If you look at financial crises, they’re always accompanied by property bubbles.

“Lower property prices would definitely be more sustainable and healthy, but a sharp drop would mean a big contraction in the economy and problems like unemployment.”

In Kangbashi, many think the bubble has already popped.

Businessman Wang Pen spent his life savings buying a two-bedroom apartment. He says its value has fallen by 20% since the start of the year.

But Mr Wang finds it difficult to believe that the good times will ever stop rolling.

“When I bought this one three years ago I was still poor, so it’s a bit small,” he said.

“Now I’m thinking of getting another place, something bigger.”

If the bubble bursts on a nationwide scale, it could be disastrous, not just for China, but for global economic recovery.

China is now the world’s second-biggest economy , and by some estimates nearly half of its GDP is in some way linked to property.

Alistair Thornton, Beijing-based economist with HIS Global Insight, said: “Property is the core of the Chinese economy.

“With the eurozone weak and the US stagnant, a sharp contraction in the world’s largest growth engine would have a dramatic effect. It’s not a good story.”

 

Source: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ghost-cities-chinas-boom-trouble-035234326.html

Filed Under: China, Debt, Housing

*Impt* Occupy Homes: Will Taking the Fight to Foreclosed Houses Unleash More Police Violence?

November 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Some worry that camping on private property may invite more extreme police attacks.

A couple of days after the Occupy Portland encampment was busted up by police, 15 occupiers took over a vacant, foreclosed home owned by Bank of America. ”We have occupied a bank-owned house in the northeast suitable to house 30 to 40 people (and encourage others to do the same)” they wrote on a flyer left at the house.

Bank of America, the Portland police department and the homeowners of nearby condos were not pleased by the occupiers’ experiment in egalitarian living and on Friday, police battered down the door, kicking the occupiers out and throwing two in jail, the Oregonian reported.

Other cities also haven’t taken it well when occupiers set up camp on private property. Two weeks ago, police armed with assault rifles stormed into an abandoned car dealership in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to arrest protesters who’d taken over the vacant property. “We had breaking and entering of private property downtown. The government has to respond, ” the mayor said in a press conference the next day, unapologetic about the use of military firearms to subdue a handful of unarmed protestors.

Occupy Homes

After a coordinated national crackdown that dispersed occupations from the public parks and plazas of Portland, Denver, Oakland and New York, occupiers have floated the idea to camp on private space, confronting banks and mortgage servicers at ground zero of their disastrous policies: the foreclosed home.

One tactic is to occupy the home of a family facing eviction, in the hopes that media attention will encourage the bank to rethink whether the homeowners have exhausted their options after all. Another, more radical action is to take over a vacant property, co-opting it for use by a family that’s already homeless (or by occupiers).

There’s a clear difference between the two tactics, but both confront big banks and mortgage servicers’ virtually unchecked exploitation of struggling homeowners, through such shady, or outright illegal practices as pushing foreclosures based on shoddy or falsified paperwork; robosigning; kicking people out of their homes when they are eligible to refinance; starting foreclosure proceedings after just one late payment; and capping it all off by letting foreclosed homes sit vacant and fall apart.

Occupations around the country are already holding actions to aid homeowners threatened with foreclosure, using their bodies — and the TV news vans Occupy actions attract — to pressure banks into negotiations.

Rose Guidel fell just two weeks behind on her payments after a family member who was helping out financially was shot and killed. Despite being served with an eviction notice in September, she’s still in her home, thanks in part to a series of protests that grew larger as members of Occupy LA joined in.

After getting kicked out of Woodruff Park, Occupy Atlanta relocated to the lawn of a police officer who thought his family would be evicted within days. The family ended up leaving the house following threats by the local sheriff that they could be arrested for being accessories to trespassing, the occupiers claimed.

In Ohio, a single mother expecting eviction papers contacted Occupy Cleveland through Twitter, prompting the group to set up tents and stage a sit-in at her house. The action earned her a 30-day extension, which she tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer helped her secure a rental for herself and her two kids.

Right now, members of Occupy Minneapolis live on the lawn and in the home of Monique White, a mother of two who lost her job when her nonprofit employer was hit with budget cuts. When her part-time job at a liquor store couldn’t cover her payments, US Bank moved to foreclose, even though White says she was eligible for a program helping laid-off homeowners stave off foreclosure.

“They gave me the runaround,” White told AlterNet, claiming the bank often lost her paperwork.

“You want to put somebody out of their home after nine years during the holidays? I don’t have anywhere to go,” White said. “I’m tied to the community, not willing to give up my home. It’s not right.”

White, who expected to be served with eviction papers already, says she’s heard nothing from US Bank since the occupiers moved in. “In this case, no news is good news,” she said, certain that the media attention brought by the action has made the bank more amenable to looking into options besides foreclosure.

According to Nick Espinosa, who has been involved in the action with Occupy MN, US Bank PR people have gotten in touch with protestors to ask what their demands are. Espinosa encourages other occupations to reach out to families getting kicked out of their homes.

“It’s an incredibly important tactic that connects Wall Street to Main Street, engaging communities that may not yet have found Occupy movements to be relevant to them.” He continues, “It’s connecting communities of color, and those most affected to economic power — helping forge a resistance to the banks exploiting them.”

He also says the Occupy MN protesters are willing to face off with police to keep people in their homes. “I think at this point it’s up to US bank if they want to pushit in that direction. There are people prepared to defend it and get arrested, but hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Twitter user thexclass, who administers “Occupy Homes” on Twitter and helps homeowners in trouble connect to occupations in their areas, explains the thinking behind occupying homes. ”The battle will be fought exactly where it should. The illegally foreclosed home is ground zero of this crisis, right?” thxclass tells AlterNet. “There is clear right/wrong in the fight against eviction without due process … All we’re seeking is due process for those about to lose their homes. I think that’s the heart of OWS.”

‘Liberating Property’

While thexclass is focused on illuminating foreclosure abuses and helping families that are about to be evicted, other groups are expanding their actions to include taking over vacant properties and refurbishing them to move people in.

Organizing for Occupation (O4O), a group started in the Spring that helped forestall the eviction of an 82-year-old New York woman this August, has plans to start occupying empty properties. (Although the group is separate from OWS, there’s growing overlap between the two — many members have taken part in OWS, while many occupiers are eager to join in their actions, according to Karen Gargemelli, a member of the organization’s media team.)

Gargamelli says the group’s “intake” team is already reviewing homeless applicants to place in vacant properties.

“There’s more vacant spaces than people in the shelter system in New York.” says Gargamelli. “Why are we shoving people in these dangerous, unhealthy shelters, when we can put them into apartments?”

If occupying vacant, private property runs afoul of the law, it only shows how wrong those laws are. “The foreclosure crisis showed there are no rules or regulations when it comes to what landlords and banks can do,” Gargamelli says. “We’re living in a state of chaos.”

Their efforts dovetail with other groups like Viva Urbana in Boston and Take Back the Land, whose philosophy can basically be summed up as: People without homes need homes more than banks need homes.

Take Back the Land lists the following principles at the root of its philosophy:

1) housing is a human right;

2) local community control of land and housing;

3) leadership by impacted communities, particularly low income women of color;

4) direct action oriented campaigns.

Max Rameau, who helped found the group, tells AlterNet it’s the banks that are occupying homes, while groups like TBL “liberate them for use by human beings.” The group brings lots of bodies to its actions, says Rameau, so “police have difficult decisions to make. What are they willing to do on camera?”

Protesters affiliated with the group take over a piece of property, refurbish it and move a family in. Their efforts are usually met with support by neighbors, says Rameau. Or they’ll rally protesters to come to the aid of someone about to get kicked out of their home, forming human chains to keep out the sheriff’s deputies charged with carrying out the eviction.

The group has been successful in getting speedy foreclosures and evictions a second look. They help elderly people who may have been preyed upon by the big banks, raising hell on their lawns until the media show up. If enough media attention lands on the case, a local politician will occasionally get involved and personally oversee negotiations between residents and banks.

Rameau says that although the actions often lead to arrests, police are generally mindful of the optics of manhandling octogenarians in the age of cell phone cameras. However, he believes that if the tactics of “occupying” property continue to grow, in part thanks to actions taken by the Occupy movement, we’d likely see more extreme efforts by law enforcement to shut them down.

“We expect as we take back land, and it grows in number and size, and the impact on banks becomes bigger … the finance industry to push the government to crack down.” The government, he argues, is likely to oblige. “We are fully expecting a crackdown to come.”

Filed Under: Campaigning, Housing, Occupy

House builders lobbied cabinet privately to get planning relaxed

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Barratt, Bovis and Redrow among firms that pressed for ‘presumed yes’ response to development applications

Britain’s biggest housebuilders privately lobbied cabinet ministers to secure a significant relaxation of the planning system, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The chiefs of housing firms, including Barratt, Bovis and Redrow, insisted that ministers introduced a planning policy that would mean the default answer to applications would be “yes” – a presumption that would hugely boost their business prospects.

Ministers included the “presumption in favour of sustainable development” as a key plank of the draft national planning policy framework (NPPF), which is due to come into force next spring.

In June 2010, as the policy was being drawn up, the Home Builders Federation (HBF) demanded the presumption, using a strongly worded private letter that was circulated to Chancellor George Osborne, the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, the business secretary, Vince Cable, and the ministers for housing and planning, Grant Shapps and Greg Clark. The federation’s representatives said the clause “must be introduced immediately”, and that it was among the “absolutely essential requirements” of new planning policy.

The builders stressed that their communication was a “private letter to you and your ministerial colleagues and key government officials, which we are not planning to release to the press”.

Housebuilders are poised to win permission to build thousands of homes on greenfield sites due to the policy.

The government says the reforms will drive economic growth and increase housing supply, which last year slumped to just 102,720 homes built when targets were more than double that.

Conservationists claim the clause represents a green light for development at almost any cost. They fear it will lead to sprawl over the countryside because “sustainable” relates to economic and social development as well as to the environment.

The demand came as part of sustained lobbying that involved letters, briefing papers, meetings with ministers, and working groups of housing executives and senior civil servants. The campaign was revealed in documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to one letter, the planning minister explicitly asked the industry group to say what it “would like to see in the decentralisation and localism bill, and to contribute ideas on other aspects of planning change”.

The HBF said the organisation had always been “open in our call for the presumption, and were most certainly not its architects”.

He added: “In the letter we requested that a presumption in favour of sustainable development be introduced immediately. This presumption was not our own suggestion but rather what was promised in a Conservative party green paper in February 2010.”

The government has already faced criticism over the perception that its planning policy has been being too strongly influenced by builders. Three of the four people appointed to an advisory panel on the NPPF had links to house construction.

The Department for Communities denied the policy was influenced by housebuilders. “The intention to introduce a presumption in favour of sustainable development has been a stated policy of the Conservative party since the publication of open source planning in February 2010. It featured in the Conservative party’s manifesto, and was explicitly stated in the coalition agreement.”

The Commons’ environmental audit committee last month questioned housebuilders about their lobbying of ministers. John Slaughter, director of external affairs at HBF, gave evidence, with Liz Peace, chief executive of the British Property Federation, which represents big developers.

Joan Walley MP, chair of the committee, asked whether the NPPF was “in line with the proposals that you have been putting forward to ministers”. Peace said nobody “in the development industry mentioned the presumption in favour of sustainable development”.

Peace added: “That came from government and from ministers. We were not involved in the drafting of the NPPF at all and we did not really talk about the principles it would enshrine. It was quite an interesting surprise when it emerged in its first draft.”

Slaughter said he would agree with that, adding “obviously we do have meetings with ministers, it is a normal part of what any trade body would do”.

Letters to ministers seen by the Guardian show how, after a meeting in July this year, with Steve Morgan, chairman of Redrow, in which the house builder complained about the “abuse” of judicial review laws used by opponents of developments, Eric Pickles wrote: “I am glad to hear that you will be working closely with my officials to follow up the issues we discussed.”

Neil Sinden, policy director at the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which is calling for the government to rethink the planning reforms, said: “The evidence suggests that some in government have allowed themselves to get too close to the development lobby, which has enabled [the industry] to exert disproportionate influence.

“It’s no surprise housebuilders have been pushing the presumption in favour of sustainable development so strongly. It allows them to threaten local authorities with costly appeals if their applications are not approved.”

Naomi Luhde-Thompson, Friends of the Earth planning policy adviser, said: “Housebuilders have been having a private debate with government and we think that is unfair. The draft NPPF is full of things that have been lobbied for privately but nothing that has been tested in public debate.”

She said the presumption for sustainable development would give housebuilders a mechanism to override local authorities attempts at strategic development as “there was nothing in the NPPF that says building on greenfield sites is unsustainable”.

Enough land for 620,000 homes

Property developers have consistently complained about land supply and strict planning controls they claim block new building. But a recent study estimates the UK’s leading house builders have a sufficient land bank to build nearly 620,000 homes, with almost 50% boasting having planning consent of some kind.

A housing association lobby group told parliament private developers are “in essence restricting supply by the control they exert through these land holdings”. They said ministers are wrong to believe the industry will only press ahead when weaker planning laws are in effect and more profitable ventures on greenfield sites get the go-ahead.

Most of the pressure from builders is in the south-east and towns with quick train links to London.

West London and the M4-M3 corridor is a particular target, with many councils under pressure from builders on one side and residents who fear a wave of upmarket homes spilling on to green belt land.

The social housing group said private developers would start building only when a tax was applied to their land banks.

It said: “While they suffer no cash loss from holding onto their land bank, there is no incentive to push these out into circulation” it said.”

 

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/nov/20/house-builders-lobbied-cabinet-planning

Filed Under: Environment, Housing, United Kingdom