Rather than tag this onto that other thread, I thought I'd start another, albeit still related to housing, but referring back to a comment jgdoherty made

I also put this on the Sydenham Town Forum, as a a spin off from discovering, while trying to work out how new housing helped maintain services in Lewisham, that in the year to Oct 12, no empty properties in Lewisham were brought into occupation - which would have helped just as much as new build. I'm a bit doubtful about this number, but as it stands it suggests either that there really aren't any empty homes other than ones only temporarily empty, or that Lewisham officers are not very good at getting empty homes into use. But to put this into perspective, I've produced some charts, comparing Lewisham with other London boroughs, first looking at total numbers of empty properties, and then this as a percentage of empty properties as reported in the GLA Datastore





Lewisham may not be doing well, but it's far from the worst.

There's a chart for total vacancy rates from the same GLA databank since 1991, which shows the rate in London declining by more than 50% since a peak in 1993. What interests me about this is that I believe this has been a time when the private rental sector has expanded significantly, with a fair amount of 'buy-to-let' investment money going into the sector. The fact that vacancy rates have fallen so much makes the idea that buy-to-let investors are worsening the housing shortage in London fairly implausible.

This post was last modified: 14-01-2013 11:47 PM by Tim Lund.