Pocket - Page 9 of 9 - Starter homes for city makers

Pocket’s out & about this autumn!

September 3, 2015September 3, 2015 Hannah Godwin 2 Comments

There is a huge need for affordable housing in London. The young, hardworking Londoners who make our city tick cannot live near where they work. City makers are keen to save up and get on the housing ladder but costs and prices are just rising year on year and wages aren’t keeping pace. But Pocket has a great solution: our homes are close to transport links, sold with at least a 20% discount to market and are 100% owner-owned.

Our newest development Western Road UB2 (pictured above) is launching for sale this month and consists of 36 one bedroom Pocket homes in Southall, in the borough of Ealing. With their hefty discount, cleverly designed interiors and generous communal gardens they are going to sell fast… so we are out and about this autumn spreading the word and making sure as many city makers as possible have the opportunity to buy these Pocket homes. We’re launching more schemes across London later in the year and into 2016, so even if Ealing isn’t your area, come and say hello!

Looking for idle land… a typical Pocket plot

August 17, 2015August 17, 2015 Hannah Godwin 1 Comment

London’s a big place, and most developers think big when it comes to land. Big regeneration opportunities with big profits attached. At Pocket, we take a different approach. Our mission is to provide as much affordable housing as we can on a site, so we tend to favour ‘infill’ sites; land that either doesn’t have any particular purpose, or is no longer used for the purpose it was previously intended. Idle land. This includes old garage sites which have become under-used storage facilities for junk, community centres which are not used by the community any more, or just spaces between buildings.

It makes sense to develop these sites. They’re already within an existing community, they can tap into the existing infrastructure and services, they allow the densification of London, rather than pushing its urban boundary out into the green belt. Here are some examples of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of ongoing projects which are a fairly typical plot size of anything up to 1 acre:

Marischal Road SE13, Lewisham. Disused garages. 0.185 acres. 26 Pocket homes

This site in Marischal Road SE13 is perfect for Pocket. We’ve designed a scheme that brings 26 Pocket compact apartments to Lewisham, just a stone’s throw from the bustling market, shopping centre and excellent transport links of Lewisham DLR and overland. We’re starting construction in August 2015, with sales going live in Spring 2016.

How to help London stay successful – a snapshot of Ed Glaeser’s recent visit to our city

June 8, 2015September 17, 2020 Hannah Godwin Leave a comment

By Lucian Smithers, Director of Sales and Marketing, Pocket

At Pocket we have all read ‘The Triumph of the City’ by Ed Glaeser. Glaeser’s views about what makes cities great and how they can remain successful give heavyweight academic substance to Pocket’s belief in delivering starter homes for London’s city makers – you could even say we’re groupies.

So you can imagine our excitement at the prospect of hearing him talk in the UK last month at Warwick Business school’s outpost in the Shard. He was also interviewed in the Guardian, and even better, he popped in to visit Pocket and hear more about our philosophy and business model – we think he liked it!

Glaeser’s work focuses on the power of successful cities. Note the word “successful.” His studies cover huge geographical and historical distances to find the lessons about how great cities have managed to thrive and in some cases come back from the brink. And his visit to London meant he gave some thought to the similarities, and differences, between the UK and our friends across the Atlantic. He pulls out the simplest observations from a huge set of data and experiences, and here are some of the nuggets of genius that we took away for London: Read More

Unlocking London’s Housing Potential – what more can we do?

May 13, 2015May 13, 2015 Hannah Godwin Leave a comment

Last year, the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) produced a very useful report into housing in London, ‘Getting our house in order’. The report aimed to build a ‘business case’ for the creation of more homes in the Capital, noting the urgent need for more homes at all levels in London, and urging Government (national, regional and local) to work together to deliver more homes for London’s workforce.

This week LCCI has published a follow-up paper, ‘Unlocking London’s Housing Potential’, focusing on one of the main recommendations in their original report – the release of public land for housing. Public land release is especially important for the development of affordable housing yet, as Pocket is quoted as saying in the report, it can take up to four times longer to acquire land and planning on public sector sites in London than private acquisitions. This can be crippling for a small developer like Pocket.

Housing for the people who make London tick

More needs to be done to support the development of housing in London, especially housing that is specifically designed for the crucial workforce that keeps the city ticking. The report highlights that ‘51% of London firms believe the lack of housing… was the issue having the most impact on their business…’. London needs the right kind of housing in the right locations in order to keep these talented and valuable people living in, and contributing to, their communities. We have been banging this drum since Pocket started building affordable homes, so it’s great to have more voices added to this call. Read More

Is it really a compromise to have less living space?

May 11, 2015September 17, 2020 Hannah Godwin 1 Comment

The London property market is getting more and more expensive, so it makes sense that young buyers are finding they need to ‘compromise’ to get their foot on the housing ladder – moving to less popular, less central areas is all part of London’s evolution, and buyers are expecting less and less space as they go further out. But is having less space really a compromise?

More space costs more to furnish, more to heat, and gives you more room to keep more stuff, while today’s young workforce is trying to minimize all of this.

Are we suffering from Stuffocation?

James Wallman’s book Stuffocation (www.stuffocation.org) describes that, the consumer culture of the west is starting to wane; people are finding that more does not mean better. He looks at this from a range of angles and all the indicators seem to be pointing in the same direction. The new digital generation coming of age now can be viewed from various intellectual perspectives:

Political scientists say they have grown up in relative stability and therefore don’t feel the need to hoard material goods
Environmentalists will tell you that the threat of global warming has meant a greater consciousness of consumption
Psychologists note that earning more and buying more doesn’t equate to happiness
Economists also point out that in a world of rising costs and stagnating incomes, most people simply do not have the money to keep buying more stuff
Technologists tell us the reason why we are turning away from material goods is, actually, because we can. After all, what’s the point of owning physical books and CDs when you can access them from the cloud?

A Royal Visit

April 21, 2015April 23, 2015 Hannah Godwin Leave a comment

At Pocket, we’re proud to be a business that straddles the public and private sectors. This is a pretty unusual position for a property developer, but for a property developer that focuses solely on the intermediate market, it’s an obvious position to take. It means we work a lot with Local Authorities, and we talk to lots of private institutions about collaborating on projects and to raise money. But one institution we hadn’t spoken to before last week, was the British Monarchy. It hadn’t really occurred to us, despite the interest that certain members have traditionally shown in the built environment.

So when we were contacted by the office of HRH Princess Anne, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. HRH is President of CSCLeaders, a global leadership programme for 100 exceptional senior leaders, selected each year from government, business and NGOs across the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. This year’s challenge for the participants is ‘What makes a city smart?’; we talked to 10 delegates about Pocket’s role in delivering intermediate housing for London, and especially about how we bring together the public and private sectors to do so.

HRH Princess Anne joined us for part of the presentation, and stayed behind afterwards to hear more about Pocket’s specific projects and future plans. She was a very engaged guest with well-informed views, and it was a pleasure to introduce her to Pocket. As well as feeling honoured to have been selected by CSCLeaders to participate this year, we were also pretty thrilled to have such a distinguished guest, and enjoyed watching her discrete cavalcade slip in and out of Floral St – blink and you would have missed it!

The plight of the first time buyer hits the stage!

March 31, 2015April 23, 2015 Hannah Godwin Leave a comment

It’s all over the newspapers, the despair of ordinary working Londoners struggling to get their foot on the housing ladder. Spiralling prices, lack of housing choice, ridiculous rents all add up to a conundrum meaning it’s impossible to save, and even if you do save, there’s nothing to buy and it’s all too expensive anyway. For some, the ‘bank of mum and dad’ is their only chance to move on, and that option isn’t available to everyone.

But what’s it actually like to be a 25-35 year old living and working in London, trying to get on in life?

Short of going back in time (and I might add that things haven’t changed so much for someone in that age bracket, it was never that easy!), a good way of reconnecting with this audience is to go and see Deposit, a play by Matt Hartley, which follows the plight of two couples who opt to live together in a tiny one bedroom flat in a bid to save deposits for their first homes. It’s all there, the pressure it puts on their relationships, both as couples and between the couples, the disparate salaries between public and private sector workers, lifestyle choices that need to be made for the sake of saving for the dream of owning your own home. And a few other bombshells that I won’t give away here. If only the protagonists, Rachel and Ben, Mel and Sam, had known about Pocket, it might not have imploded quite so dramatically for them!

Deposit is a brilliant snapshot of a truly worrying situation currently faced by London and its workforce. Go see it!

http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2015/deposit/

Homes for Britain rally, March 2015: Six quotes that rang true for me

March 17, 2015May 29, 2015 Lucian Smithers Leave a comment

This week saw over 2,000 people from Housing groups across the country converge on Parliament square and we went along to show Pocket’s support. The objective was surprisingly simple – don’t let the housing crisis drop down the political agenda.

In the process of every general election, a range of issues start to shape the debate around the campaigns of the main parties but by the end, it’s the big beasts of Health, Education and Welfare that tend to dominate. So on Tuesday, housing associations, developers, architects, planners, social landlords and many more all came together to ensure that this doesn’t happen. The aim was to get senior politicians from all the major parties to commit to ending the housing crisis in a generation and delivering a comprehensive long term plan for housing within one year of taking office. And all credit to the organisers, they managed to get senior parliamentarians from all the major parties (and Nigel Farage) to commit to this aim. Read More

Pocket two bedroom – setting the standard for a compact two bedroom home

February 9, 2015April 24, 2015 Hannah Godwin Leave a comment

Customers love our Pocket one bedroom apartment design, but there are plenty of people out there who want an affordable, compact two bedroom home in London. They might be friends buying together, a couple who have plans to start a family, or homeworkers who need the extra room.

Planning policy currently states that a two bedroom home must be a minimum of 61sqm in size, which allows for a household of three adults, and is generally unaffordable to the first time buyer market.

We thought that there might be a better offer for first time buyers looking for a two bedroom home, by using compact design to develop a proposal for two adults – a two bedroom two person offer (2b2p).