the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

haha sorry, i read that as sarcastic -- apologies for monstering you :)

Tchenguiz is most certainly a landlord - though not of that building. It was the mentality i was getting at

In many ways us who still live in old fashioned council owned social housing are almost becoming the new lower middle class. we get free plumbers that don't come armed with contact-less account emptying devices. Low rents of course, and when a Freeholder rides past on his horse you don't have to drop to knees and doff your cap. Usually the opposite.

God what a fucking shit post. I just re-read it in a Fraser Nelson voice. but I still feel there is som trut ther

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/flat-owners-told-pay-up-14075008

^another instance in manchester. completely puts you off thinking about buying a flat or any leasehold property, which given the housing crisis, is insane

there must be other countries that have less broken systems, surely?

I think in Germany they have a system where owners of flats in shared buildings have a kind of management council that fulfills the same responsibilities as a freeholder often does. That's also, generally, how it works in the UK when properties come with a share of the freehold.

In either situation, the owners still have to pay. The only major difference afaik is they have direct responsibility for organising repairs, rather than it being down to the freeholder. The freeholder is meant to consult with leaseholders on major repairs but the money will almost always come from the residents / individual landlords. It's part of the risk of owning property - going along with the reward of equity in an asset you expect to go up in price.

Scotland.

I don't actually know how the system works in Scotland, I just know it's different and there seem to be less people getting fucked over.

This may just be the terms of my flat but I always thought you owned the inside of the flat for the term of the lease and anything exterior was the responsiblity of the freeholder, which is usually covered with service charges etc. Forcing people to live in a deathtrap until they pay up £30k+ in one go, especially if the owners were responsible for the cladding in the first places, goes beyond issues of mere legality (and the leaseholders seem to have a legal case here anyway).

The con of selling a (usually private sector) flat or newbuild house on leasehold and then hitting homebuyers with rapidly escalating ground rents (leaving their homes effectively unsellable) is another issue that's getting a lot of traction right now.

In general leasehold abuses are one of those things that angers virtually everyone wherever they are on the political spectrum and addressing them should be an easy win for an even remotely competent government.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/26/ground-rents-aristocrats-shell-firms-among-those-making-millions

No surprise that some of our ex-pm's family are amongst the shadow clique of freeholders.

I wonder how much freehold the royal family has a stake in

ooh look

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/11/duchy-of-cornwall-residents-fight-freehold-ban-prince-charles

and this is before we consider the Crown Estate itself

iirc one of the main policy movements in this area has been to make it much easier to force freeholders to sell the freehold to organised groups of leaseholders, but that has been around in one form or another since the 90s. It’s not necessarily a panacea though, the famous Art Deco block Marine Court in St Leonard’s was taken over by an LLC made up of residents - and they’re still paying thousands of Pounds a year in running repairs.

Forcing developers to take permanent responsibility for shonky work they have done would be good, though.

This may just be the terms of my flat but I always thought you owned the inside of the flat for the term of the lease and anything exterior was the responsiblity of the freeholder, which is usually covered with service charges etc.

I don't think this is normal, at least in ex-LA buildings - e.g. we had to pay a few thousand £s when the lifts got replaced in our building. At least in London, as said above I think there is an expectation in ex-LA flats that you will sometimes get random 4 or 5 figure bills.

yeah I suppose I'm surprised that even with recently built properties developers aren't liable for dangerous materials or builds. the whole idea of land as investment is repulsive to me but anyway

otm

I'm proper ilx level socialist on that last point surprisingly enough

like most finite resources it's difficult to justify any system that tends towards creating gulfs of inequity

More about "basic human requirement" than that tbh

that's kind of what I meant, you can't allow some people to accrue vast pools of land without denying it altogether to a lot of people, either now or in the future

same reason that some people might baulk at privatizing access to air or water

https://www.thegreenhead.com/imgs/canned-air-9.jpg

What's that from? "Silent Movie"?

oh tom, tom, tom

http://www.tbo.com/storyimage/TB/20170426/ARTICLE/304269729/AR/0/AR-304269729.jpg

was struck while reading noted ilx socialist francis fukuyama by how central the treatment of land is to politics and how key the imposition of western/european/british models of land ownership were to colonialism. its not a v sexy issue but it's fundamental and not really been taken seriously as a live issue

(xp) I got off the bus by then tbh.

in the next election this aggressive neo-feudalism really needs weaponising against these fuckers.

Spaceballs is the movie equiv of SNL ito "no only you Americans think thats any good and no we haven't seen it"

I saw it in the cinema. I was 12 tho.

that Fukuyama bit is feeding into the same kind of thought I'm struggling to elucidate - the way that socialism or other forms of let's call it "justice politics" are focused on the present, which of course doesn't exist except conceptually, but the focus is always on distribution of resources at a given moment in time and doesn't seem to account for the effects in time of laws of ownership and control. they are structuralist politics as opposed to whatever.

sorry this is waffle I'm just feeling it out

Nah relevant imo NV

Also any change in practice will be attacked over time by expertise, power and resources in order to return imbalance over time so a focus on correction as situational is flawed vs a broad standing ethos with an enormous stick

overtime

some of what i was feeling out in last night's unfocused flu-bound rambling was much the same, except it got lost in the details of leasehold vs free hold: that who owns what and why this matters is of salience to a much larger tranche of current society, and that this particular series of events is actually help people dramatise it for themselves

mailreaders were happy to try and pin blame for grenfell itself on some poor bloke with a crappy fridge, but they were also blazingly angry about it: and as the threat persists, and more obviously points at them -- burn to death or never be out of debt! the home-owning democracy! -- then the tensions mount, and the anger. good polltics is seizing on this and saying, look, there is a better way out of it

i am weak as a kitten this morning

The better way out of it is public ownership of all housing resources tbh but the Mail fantasy of a property owning democracy is always built around the house rather than the apartment.

of course, and I think the clearest cases you can make for public ownership or at least heavy public management are with resources like land/homes: always going to be needed, never going to grow any greater unless future space communists can terraform Mars. mark's right, anxiety over housing and its bubbles could be an excellent wedge for this kind of argument.

of course this intertwines thoroughly with social care costs/aging population etc

tomorrow's Daily Mail readers will be kneejerk socialists as the only viable system for defending their way of life

It’s not necessarily a panacea though, the famous Art Deco block Marine Court in St Leonard’s was taken over by an LLC made up of residents - and they’re still paying thousands of Pounds a year in running repairs.

Forcing developers to take permanent responsibility for shonky work they have done would be good

Yeah I mean fundamentally if you buy a freehold house or share in a block and the roof collapses you're on the hook for that repair, that's fair enough. Getting a bill for the upkeep of a building in which you own a leasehold flat is OK as well (as you say it's part of the risk you accept when you buy it).

The issue here is that the building is a potential deathtrap and they are refusing to do the necessary work *at all* until the residents stump up a large cash sum. If the owner is also the developer then this is a deathtrap of their own creation (and annoyingly I can't find any information on that). This is, I guess, where any legal recourse might come in?

Another reason why the Tories should be more worried about this is that it's yet another example of the collapse/hollowness of the Thatcherite dream as it was originally sold.

(Sorry, missed the last couple of posts there)

Is this not the sort of thing that's covered by buildings insurance though - is it that the owners thought that the freeholders' insurance covered this and it didn't?

not sure how building insurance works for cladding 1 flat at a time

buildings insurance seems pretty useless in my reading of it - another frustration is that a leaseholder (at least ex-LA) you don't get to choose this, you just have to go with what the leaseholder chooses.

Okay so suppose the unthinkable happens and the Croydon block burns down tonight killing lots of people. It's already been established that the owners were fully aware of the risks and declined to do anything about it until the residents paid up, rather than taking the cladding down immediately and worrying about the money later. They had deep enough pockets to do that easily. Who is legally liable?

There's an extra £44m for reinforcing Fortress Calais meanwhile.

xp

I wonder if the Freehold owner's employment of Fire Officers - even if they intend to charge the residents for the privilege - would count as admission of some level of responsibility

Do you mean in this case or generally, Toby? I am personally very fond of it, as an electrical fire in my flat last month means that I get put up for a few months until insurance-provided builders rebuild my bedroom, rather than sleeping on a soot-covered futon.

This is the extent of my experience with it, though, but it's been pretty smooth.

I meant generally - although that sounds good! "Pretty useless" is way too strong a term, sorry - but I don't like not having any say in the provisions of the insurance (and e.g. as providers have changed over the last few years, the exclusions have varied, so sometimes we'd be covered if our neighbours accidentally blew up our flat making bombs, sometimes not...Hopefully that's not really a practical concern, but it has made me sceptical of exactly what would be covered in the event of something serious.)

We definitely had to choose our own buildings insurance provider when we bought last year, so either the terms of our contract are way off in a number of ways or the insurance rules just vary from building to building.

I'm not sure insurance would cover this particular eventuality given there isn't any damage to the building and the cladding was presumably there when the policy was taken out (even if there was no survey going 'dudes this is highly flammable'). Most policies won't pay out for things like asbestos removal afaik.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/18/council-set-to-take-on-tower-block-that-landlord-refuses-to-make-safe

ctrl+ "guillotine"