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“Poor Doors” show how town centre subsidises suburbs

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CROYDON COMMENTARY: Having worked to establish a community organisation for East Croydon, ROD DAVIES finds it disappointing to find developers planning to introduce divisive “Apartment Apartheid” locally, and suggests further inequalities in which parts of the borough fund other areas

This news of segregated entrances is a disappointing development just as the East Croydon Community Group (now to be called ECCO) has just held a very inclusive and positive first public meeting last week.

What developers Redrow call the “Morello Quarter”, their development at East Croydon which will have separate entrances for social housing and private residents

I can understand how it adds to the marketing to people abroad who have fixed ideas about social housing tenants, and who will never live in the properties themselves and want to ensure the best return on their investments.

But I find it disappointing because the last thing we need is any more division at a time when we are trying to come together and support each other to make the whole community better.

The problem is that land and property owners have a free hand to limit supply to the market by driving up asking prices and impeding development through planning consultation.

In addition the scope for responding to the desperate need for large quantities of social housing construction is severely limited by planning guidelines that restrict developments outside the centre of Croydon to nothing higher than three storeys. While this does preserve the 1920s and 1930s environments of the leafy streets, it means that there is inevitably an insufficient supply of space to provide decent housing for the poor (actually, the average person in Croydon today).

Further, it concentrates social problems into very small areas that lack the capacity to cope with them, and requires the residents in the areas adjacent to the high density developments and concentrated social housing to live with and accept enormous social change, unlike the majority of Croydon. Yet they receive no recompense for the impact.

A resident of central Croydon, whose life is blighted by all the exploitative private sector developments that are marketed abroad and the increasing density of occupation of rented houses by the economically marginal, might well ask what justification does Croydon Council spend any money in beautifying the outer areas when it can’t even keep the streets clean in the centre.

What is desperately needed in Croydon is a detailed analysis of how and on whom the council spends its funds in relation to the very different population density between the centre and the edges of the town, and the actual cost of delivering those services.

I rather suspect that we’d find that inner Croydon has been subsidising outer Croydon for decades and the imbalance is getting worse.

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