All articles by Josephine Smit – Page 2
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FeaturesUrban visionaries reunited
Remember this line-up? The Urban Task Force gave the red card to low-density suburban sprawl and switched play to brownfield sites. Five years on, we reassembled the team for an anniversary kick-about.
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Comment
Quite a spread
A total of 71 lucky housing associations and their partners are enjoying a feast of sizeable two-year funding allocations from the Housing Corporation. The move away from scheme-by-scheme grant funding to working with a smaller number of preferred partners gives those partners the security and the clout to deliver new ...
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FeaturesHave you got the message?
Miller Homes is smoothing the homebuying process by texting its customers regular reports of how building work is going. It brings a whole new meaning to the term mobile home …
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FeaturesLet them eat cake
After some years surviving off crumbs of Housing Corporation grant, 71 housing associations are to sit down to a two-year feast as preferred partners with backing for a string of projects. Josephine Smit looks at the impact on development. Data collated and analysed by Irum Malik of Economic Strategies
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News
Instant home
Need affordable homes fast? How fast? Is three hours fast enough? What? You want fast and cheap? How cheap? Wait a minute, here, read this article
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FeaturesDesigning by Numbers
Design codes are like Huntley & Palmers biscuit tins: people see different things in them. In fact, the only thing everyone agrees about is that they are here to stay. We get to the bottom of the argument.
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Comment
Get Cracking
"I don't know much about coding," one housebuilder told me as I researched this issue's cover feature. Lucky man.
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NewsPoor reception
Consumer programmes on the box delight in publicly humiliating housebuilders. The housebuilders say this is a sad distortion of the truth, but the Housing Forum's customer surveys disagree. We assess the claims
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FeaturesMake my day
Duncan Innes, the director of English Partnerships, is seen as John Prescott's enforcer for the all-important task of building houses in the South-east. But it would be difficult to imagine a more mild-mannered Dirty Harry, as we found out.
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Features
Where has all the land gone?
The government has used the planning system to force developers to put most of their residential developments on brownfield land. And it did to for excellent reasons. Unfortunately, the consequences have been dire.
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NewsBarker threatens shoddy housebuilders with OFT
Housing review offers streamlined planning in return for improved customer standards and land tax
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FeaturesDream over
For five years, the Peabody Trust has been the standard bearer of progressive housing in Britain, producing ideal homes such as the BedZED development pictured. Now that it has been forced to cut staff and move away from development, are prefabrication and sustainability lost causes?
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FeaturesWhat a difference a year has failed to make
Twelve months after John Prescott promised to kick-start Britain's biggest regeneration project in the Thames Gateway, visits three key areas and finds that few of the grand plans have left the drawing boards. Plus, the first of our regeneration jargon-busters
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Comment
Guarding your patch
I can imagine how some of our readers will react to this month’s cover feature on the move by commercial developers into the residential sector. Some housebuilders will be outraged at the sheer brass neck of the Lipton family and their suggestion that housebuilding is so inefficient that it will ...
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FeaturesSpot the difference? Three years, 60 jobs and a whole lot of cash
Here we see the damage Kate Barker's review of the planning system has caused a London scheme and the threat it has posed to one company's future
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News
HBF warns Barker not to 'rig the market' for land
Housebuilders fear commercial developers and quangos will get 'special treatment' to boost competition
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NewsHousing Forum names firms with unhappiest customers
Barratt, Rialto, David McLean and North Country are the poorest performers in buyer satisfaction survey
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NewsLiving in the past
Concept homes are supposed to lead the way to the future. The only problem is, the housebuilding industry never wants to follow. As David Wilson Homes launches a fresh mission, we wonder whether the industry will ever boldly go anywhere
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FeaturesEach year, 40,000 desperately needed homes don't get built. Who's to blame?
When Kate Barker announced the findings of her review into housing undersupply last week, housebuilders were smug that the finger was pointed at planners – until they realised they weren't getting off scot-free. So did the industry need to hear a few home truths? We found out