Fancy buying a new, two-bed flat, with delightful views over the London-to-Brighton railway line, and all for a little more than £400,000?
The Ruskin Square first phase of residential development at East Croydon: when finished, it will include Poor Doors
Then this is your chance.
“Vita”, the first residential development at Ruskin Square, right next to East Croydon Station, is to have another “launch” event next month.
It emerged just before its last piece of marketing “engagement” that the Vita residential blocks are to feature controversial “Poor Doors”, and operate a form of “apartment apartheid” so that those who live in the development’s handful of “affordable” homes will only be able to gain access through a back door, and not the main entrance way.
There is also considerable doubt whether those living in the affordable properties will be allowed to use the “exclusive” residents’ gardens to be built on the block’s roof. “Affordable” homes in this context means those which are sold or rent for 80 per cent of the market value.
According to an invitation sent out by the agents marketing the development, all of Vita’s one-bedroomed flats have already been sold. The full price of the cheapest properties now available for local, hard-working families looking to buy are £401,000.
The “launch event” (a second one) will be held in an 11th-floor marketing suite at AMP House, just the other side of Dingwall Road from the building site, all day on July 18.
Some of the presentational material used at the previous Vita “launch” event. What the developers of Vita who have hijacked the philosophy of John Ruskin have failed to appreciate is that the great Victorian thinker would have had nothing to do with the hypocrisy and greed of their development
The marketeers’ email, from someone called Elliott Stiling, the “sales and marketing director” for Vita, gushes, “We are delighted to announce our sales event on 18th July, when a selection of homes will be released. You’ll have the chance to to find out more about this exciting development and reserve your chosen property.
“Two-bedroomed homes start from £401,000. In the meantime, you can find out more about Vita by downloading our Fact Sheet and Floor Plans. We’ll be happy to answer any questions at the event.
“It would be great if you could let us know you are attending the launch event by replying to this email.”
- You can read the Vita “Fact Sheet” here, which is especially useful if you’re looking to buy a Yuppie apartment, or if you are from overseas and fancy doing a spot of buy-to-let investment in Croydon, which the developers over-stress is not too far from London.
- You can view here the floor plans of how little a cool half-million quid can buy you on the site of a former coal merchants’ yard in south London.
- And you can acknowledge Elliott Stiling’s invitation to attend the latest “launch” by emailing him at sales@placesforpeople.co.uk
- Work underway to get Boxpark to pop-up in summer 2016
- Ruskin Square could include new theatre if council refunds £3m
- Inside Croydon Events: for dates and links to what’s happening in and around Croydon, updated daily, click here
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In most schemes private owners pay service charges for a variety of facilities. £300 a month isn’t uncommon in London for an upmarket scheme to pay for a concierge, gym and roof terrace. If these facilities are to be available to social tenants (by virtue of sharing the same entrance), they need to be paid for. With just over three quarters of social tenants reliant on housing benefit, this money will either have to come from the taxpayer or the private owners in the block.
While you certainly have a right to a roof over your head, I’m not sure it extends to a Croydon Council funded 24 hour concierge who picks up your dry cleaning.
Entirely correct, David. And you underline the completely inappropriate nature of this and other speculator-led developments, when the real need is to provide thousands of truly affordable homes.
This development’s 161 new homes will all be included in the statistics of “new homes built”. Yet only 36 of these will be “affordable”, under the perverted definition provided by Boris Johnson, where sale prices or rents are set at around 80 per cent of market rate. How many nurses, teachers, firefighters or those on the £6.50 per hour mininmum wage which even a Croydon Tory MP says is impossible to live on might be able to “afford” to buy or rent such homes?
And so the social cleansing of swathes of London continues…
It’s not difficult to give access to different parts of the building to different people without providing a separate entrance. And the lower orders may well want to pay for certain extras – parking especially springs to mind. A standard office/hotel swipe-card system will work fine. And a concierge will know perfectly well who is entitled to what.
I can’t see any practical reason for separate doors. The residents of the posh flats will just have to avert their eyes when the rest of us get back with our Tesco or Lidl shopping.
What price homes for our children?