9 ms·

Penthouses and poor doors: how Europe's 'biggest regeneration project' fell flat

44 points by hownottowrite 5y ago

Glavnokoman 5y ago
Hmmmm. Am I supposed to sympathize the guy who lives in 1M$ worth apartment and complains his 10M$ neighbors get more of everything?
- notahacker 5y ago
  Tbf, he's a guy that lives in what would probably be a £100k apartment in most UK cities who pays rent on the 75% of his property he doesn't own even after putting down £200k. I mean, it's not exactly the poverty line, but I can understand him not being delighted the deal includes subsidising the maintenance of facilities for the exclusive use of his wealthy neighbours.
  - pc86 5y ago
    Is it common in the UK to put down large sums of money on real estate you'll never own outright? What sorts of rights does he have to sell, sublet, etc.? What sort of guarantees does he have that his rent will truly be 75% of the market rate and not just increase to 100% over time? The whole thing sounds about as financially responsible as putting a large down payment on a leased car.
    - ealexhudson 5y ago
      It's relatively new. The basic idea is to bridge the gap between rental and home ownership: you don't need as big a mortgage to buy a share of a property, and you can benefit (proportionately) from any capital gains from the increase in value of the property. In that sense it's potentially more beneficial and opens up access to the property market; in practice it seems to help push up demand and therefore prices. In recent years it has arguably been too lucrative to be a landlord which has pushed back against home ownership and pushed up values; that's changing a little bit. Shared ownership schemes are a band-aid over a more general problem.
      - bsenftner 5y ago
        That general problem being financial literacy. These sound like terrible financial deals.
      - Nursie 5y ago
        > in practice it seems to help push up demand and therefore prices All of these schemes do that, because they address the housing market from the government-preserving invariant condition of "We can't ever let the market drop, we'd be voted out in a second" So they come up with schemes and financial products to allow more people to access home ownership in some form or other without impacting property values. See also stamp-duty holidays. More or less by definition these things increase demand and push house prices up further. It's insanity. It's also massively to my benefit as a homeowner who is about to leave the UK...
      - fy20 5y ago
        It's worth mentioning the purpose is to provide low income families - there is a limit on how much your family can earn to be eligible - an opportunity to own a property that they otherwise could not afford. That limit is £80k (£90k London) which puts you well into the middle class though. There's no way someone working in a supermarket and supporting a kid on their own would ever be able to afford something like this.
    - ivanbakel 5y ago
      >Is it common in the UK to... It's not "common", but it's becoming increasingly necessary for some as prices rise far beyond what most people can afford, even on a high-interest mortgage. You're far more likely to see it in Central London than anywhere else in the UK, though. Do people want to do it? No. It's a situation forced on people by property owners and the housing market. "Financial responsibility" can't be everyone's first priority when talking about housing.
  - randompwd 5y ago
    That's not the case. The only people being subsidised in any way, shape or form are the affordable housing people. FTA: > They stress that the affordable housing blocks are managed by Peabody and Optivo, which “had the option to choose which facilities they wanted to buy into for their residents”. > Spokespeople for Peabody, Optivo and L&Q all say that it is never their intention to make any community feel excluded, and that their policies do not include access to the private amenities in order to keep the service charges to a minimum.
  - homonomics 5y ago
    The affordable housing units are subsidised by the wealthy neighbours.
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    He’s also a guy that lives in a relatively fancy area of probably the most desirable city in the world.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      I still don't understand why anyone would want to live there. It's an area that - irrespective of price - would end up near the bottom of my list of places in London I'd consider living, alongside far more run down places.
      - notahacker 5y ago
        Anticipated price appreciation and a relatively central location. But yeah, "fancy" is really pushing the description of a district composed of council estates, building sites, an industrial-scale wholesale market and rail junctions
        ryanlol 5y ago
        “relatively fancy” :) Embassy gardens is very fancy compared to how most Londoners live.
        vidarh 5y ago
        The buildings are fancy, but there area has no character. I'd pick a much less fancy building most other places in London over living there.
      - ryanlol 5y ago
        The prices are almost half of what they’d be on the other side of the river for comparable developments, it’s a reasonably short drive to central london.
        vidarh 5y ago
        I'm saying I don't think living there would be worth it for half of areas on the other side of the river with some actual character. If I had the money for flats there, I'd prefer to spend it almost anywhere else in London - either somewhere smaller somewhere with more character, or something much larger further out. I can't imagine the conditions that'd make me consider living there. A lot of the developments along the river (both sides) that stretch will end up with significant modifications over the coming decades, as so many of those areas are just soulsuckingly dead and awful.
- niffydroid 5y ago
  I understand where you are coming from, but for me the issue is more about affordable housing. It's basically gentrification of an area and forcing poor people out. I cannot remember by law how much % of a development has to be deemed social housing, but it is generally a requirement now days since councils cannot really purchase or build properties. Now days you will not see any sort of massive council estates being built any more, which is why these developments have to have social housing. You can trace this all back to the 80s when the government privatised council housing stock and allowed people to buy their social housing. I grew up on a council estate and it can be hell, it's the same families and group of people which cause most of the issues and it comes in waves as they get rotated around the various council estates in the region. The estates are generally neglected by the council as well. Near me an ex 3 bed council house, with a dodgy raft foundation, breeze block ends and a timber frame goes for £210,000! You'd be looking at a mortgage of around £800 per month, and if renting it will cost more. You've now also got to deal with the housing benefit (from the government) changes. Before it would be straight up paid by the council or government to the property owner, recent changes means people are given the money to pay for the rent (I think you can opt in for it to go directly to landlord) which has reduced the social housing stock even more as landlords do not want deal with the payment issues. With how bad the benefit system has become and is being run, after reforms, people are often in arrears or not getting the money because the system is just borked. Poor people are very much getting priced out of areas where they live, with a lack of social housing stock available combined with a chaotic benefit system, they are very much forced out into other areas, if they they do get somewhere, then bare minimum will be done to maintain it.
jimparkins 5y ago
I am British and worked in central London for years. The idea of owning an 800,000 apartment in central London was a ridiculous luxury. Most people that I worked with had to commute like me for 1-1.5 hours a day from outside London commuter towns into work (some way more than this). This was the nature of the beast. Is it "right" no. I just do not see how 800K GBP apartments are a) affordable and b) practical - it would be much better to focus on decent commuter links, subsidies for travel and affordable housing around London - than creating token affordable housing in the centre for the sake of it. If you do not like the commute then move to another city. I did for this exact reason.
- iamben 5y ago
  I'm currently living the dream that after the (somewhat) exodus of folks to cheaper, spacier suburbs, the fact that people want to work from home and (as per the article on the front page yesterday) would rather quit than commute again - we might actually get some affordable housing in London. Be that converted offices, new builds, or just availability. Annecdata, but looking at Zoopla the lower priced (ha) places are dropping or not selling as they did... But who knows. Still blows my mind what the half a million quid you can easily spend on a flat in town will get you pretty much anywhere else.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    When I first moved to the UK I rented a room literally across the road from Marble Arch and Hyde Park, I've since moved progressively further out. Despite 20 years of price increases, my mortgage on a 3 bedroom house with a garden in Croydon costs me about the same as that first room did... It'd take a seismic house price crash to consider moving back in even with a commute. It's expensive here too, but the differential is staggering given East Croydon is a 15 minute train ride from both London Victoria and London Bridge.
    - secondcoming 5y ago
      Croydon isn't as nice an area as Hyde Park.
nob0dyasked 5y ago
Living in Nine Elms in a house valued at 800k and complaining about class inequality. Soul-crushing!
mensetmanusman 5y ago
“Andrea Franzel lives in an apartment in the Chancery building of Embassy Gardens, a shared ownership block managed by the Peabody housing association. After months of navigating dense bureaucracy, as chair of the residents’ association, he secured some funding to buy a painting for the building’s bleak communal lobby, along with a mirror and a small console table. But, after three years, Peabody’s neighbourhood manager ruled that the table was a fire hazard, and had it removed. “It sounds like a small thing,” said Franzel, “but that little table was part of our community. We used to buy fresh flowers and leave things for each other. Now we have nothing.” “ The face palming stories of heartless bureaucracies using excuses like this to stick it to the little guy. The interesting thing to me is that it happens in every society. Some humans love wielding power over others.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  Human society does not function at scale. When one can ignore the anonymous others' needs, just add population to create tyranny.
  - afthonos 5y ago
    There is precious little evidence that it worked better without scale…
- m_mueller 5y ago
  Reminds me of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". Highly recommended film.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Definitely, also 12 monkeys, they almost got 2020 right :)
    - m_mueller 5y ago
      maybe not 2020, but 2030 could be the ticket if governments don't start being serious about bio terror countermeasures. that's about how far we are from desktop sized virus sequencing machines from the looks of it :(
cpwright 5y ago
What surprises me most is that London seemingly has no tow trucks for cars blocking emergency egress from a building for months. Presumably a boot is useless if they aren't going to pay the fines anyway, but it would seem that they probably would want the "supercar" back.
- rurban 5y ago
  Problem is more that they block a private entrance only, and don't want to enrage the car owner, who might cancel his rent contract. A safety inspector should visit and tow it. Then the rich guy can be angry at the city
- ryanlol 5y ago
  One of my favourite things about living in London is that you don’t have to live in constant fear of the tow truck. The city of westminster does not remove vehicles for parking violations. https://www.westminster.gov.uk/parking/has-your-vehicle-been-removed https://www.westminster.gov.uk/parking/has-your-vehicle-been...
Nursie 5y ago
Just FYI, this article is a few months old.
- dqpb 5y ago
  Have things changed in the last few months?
  - Nursie 5y ago
    They've probably got worse :)
djhworld 5y ago
Interestingly even the wealthier residents of this complex have seen huge hikes in the service charges (presumably to pay for the running costs of the sky pool...) Might be affordable to those with lots of money, but probably a hinderence to those just about getting by with the mortgage payments https://pastebin.com/PZ5XQkWH https://pastebin.com/PZ5XQkWH (article from the FT)
- cm2187 5y ago
  It could also be foreign investors stuck in an investment they expected to flip ahead of completion, and not paying their share of the service charge (I was in an old building in central london where that was exactly the case). Also a classic of these luxury buildings is the developer extracting revenues through overcharging for property management. There are now legal ways out but it is a painful process.
- csmiller 5y ago
  It’s odd that it seems like all of these ultra-luxury places are so poorly constructed and run. This tower in NYC now has a required $15k annual spend at the restaurant, among other problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-rise-432-park.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-ri...
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
1. This is darkly hilarious; it sounds like the market is a mirage of wash sales, same as(?) crypto: > In 2016, shortly after many of the projects launched off-plan sales, property analytics firm Propcision observed a strange phenomenon. Hundreds of luxury flats in Battersea and Nine Elms were continually being listed for sale on sites such as Rightmove and Zoopla, then taken down and immediately relisted. It was being done at such frequency across so many developments that it distorted the market across the whole area. “It gave the impression that there was not only a lot of activity,” said Propcision’s director, Michelle Ricci-Zak, “but that the average price in that area was going up – when actually we proved it was going down.” 2. Also, whoever wrote this had too much fun: > a crowd of swollen shafts at this bend in the river We have dicks and V. S. Naipaul! > the first of the priapic bunch to smack you in the face ...with a nice visual, in case you missed the first one. 3. Finally, check this phrase out: > What’s going on in Nine Elms and Battersea has nothing to do with maximising social good or creating mixed communities. It is pure social cleansing.” It's Yugoslavia all over again!
fallingfrog 5y ago
Luxury condos as a vehicle for speculators are a dead end. This is the model we should be trying to emulate: https://citymonitor.ai/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capital-earned-its-place-in-housing-history https://citymonitor.ai/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capit...
CydeWeys 5y ago
There's a lot of anti-development NIMBY rhetoric in this article, along with the baseline assumption that more and taller development is a bad thing. Yet the current housing crisis has been caused by an acute lack of development, of decades of not enough housing having been created, with subsequent increases in housing costs. I suspect part of the problem is simply that they aren't allowing enough development. If it's not easy/possible for a developer to buy existing sparser land in the city, knock down what's there, then replace it with a much denser/taller 10+ floor apartment building of many median market rate rent units, well then there's your problem. We used to do a lot more of that in decades past, and that's what comprises a lot of the more affordable housing inventory on the market today.

44 points by hownottowrite 5y ago

Hmmmm. Am I supposed to sympathize the guy who lives in 1M$ worth apartment and complains his 10M$ neighbors get more of everything?

notahacker 5y ago
Tbf, he's a guy that lives in what would probably be a £100k apartment in most UK cities who pays rent on the 75% of his property he doesn't own even after putting down £200k. I mean, it's not exactly the poverty line, but I can understand him not being delighted the deal includes subsidising the maintenance of facilities for the exclusive use of his wealthy neighbours.
- pc86 5y ago
  Is it common in the UK to put down large sums of money on real estate you'll never own outright? What sorts of rights does he have to sell, sublet, etc.? What sort of guarantees does he have that his rent will truly be 75% of the market rate and not just increase to 100% over time? The whole thing sounds about as financially responsible as putting a large down payment on a leased car.
  - ealexhudson 5y ago
    It's relatively new. The basic idea is to bridge the gap between rental and home ownership: you don't need as big a mortgage to buy a share of a property, and you can benefit (proportionately) from any capital gains from the increase in value of the property. In that sense it's potentially more beneficial and opens up access to the property market; in practice it seems to help push up demand and therefore prices. In recent years it has arguably been too lucrative to be a landlord which has pushed back against home ownership and pushed up values; that's changing a little bit. Shared ownership schemes are a band-aid over a more general problem.
    - bsenftner 5y ago
      That general problem being financial literacy. These sound like terrible financial deals.
    - Nursie 5y ago
      > in practice it seems to help push up demand and therefore prices All of these schemes do that, because they address the housing market from the government-preserving invariant condition of "We can't ever let the market drop, we'd be voted out in a second" So they come up with schemes and financial products to allow more people to access home ownership in some form or other without impacting property values. See also stamp-duty holidays. More or less by definition these things increase demand and push house prices up further. It's insanity. It's also massively to my benefit as a homeowner who is about to leave the UK...
    - fy20 5y ago
      It's worth mentioning the purpose is to provide low income families - there is a limit on how much your family can earn to be eligible - an opportunity to own a property that they otherwise could not afford. That limit is £80k (£90k London) which puts you well into the middle class though. There's no way someone working in a supermarket and supporting a kid on their own would ever be able to afford something like this.
  - ivanbakel 5y ago
    >Is it common in the UK to... It's not "common", but it's becoming increasingly necessary for some as prices rise far beyond what most people can afford, even on a high-interest mortgage. You're far more likely to see it in Central London than anywhere else in the UK, though. Do people want to do it? No. It's a situation forced on people by property owners and the housing market. "Financial responsibility" can't be everyone's first priority when talking about housing.
- randompwd 5y ago
  That's not the case. The only people being subsidised in any way, shape or form are the affordable housing people. FTA: > They stress that the affordable housing blocks are managed by Peabody and Optivo, which “had the option to choose which facilities they wanted to buy into for their residents”. > Spokespeople for Peabody, Optivo and L&Q all say that it is never their intention to make any community feel excluded, and that their policies do not include access to the private amenities in order to keep the service charges to a minimum.
- homonomics 5y ago
  The affordable housing units are subsidised by the wealthy neighbours.
- ryanlol 5y ago
  He’s also a guy that lives in a relatively fancy area of probably the most desirable city in the world.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    I still don't understand why anyone would want to live there. It's an area that - irrespective of price - would end up near the bottom of my list of places in London I'd consider living, alongside far more run down places.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      Anticipated price appreciation and a relatively central location. But yeah, "fancy" is really pushing the description of a district composed of council estates, building sites, an industrial-scale wholesale market and rail junctions
      - ryanlol 5y ago
        “relatively fancy” :) Embassy gardens is very fancy compared to how most Londoners live.
        vidarh 5y ago
        The buildings are fancy, but there area has no character. I'd pick a much less fancy building most other places in London over living there.
    - ryanlol 5y ago
      The prices are almost half of what they’d be on the other side of the river for comparable developments, it’s a reasonably short drive to central london.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        I'm saying I don't think living there would be worth it for half of areas on the other side of the river with some actual character. If I had the money for flats there, I'd prefer to spend it almost anywhere else in London - either somewhere smaller somewhere with more character, or something much larger further out. I can't imagine the conditions that'd make me consider living there. A lot of the developments along the river (both sides) that stretch will end up with significant modifications over the coming decades, as so many of those areas are just soulsuckingly dead and awful.
niffydroid 5y ago
I understand where you are coming from, but for me the issue is more about affordable housing. It's basically gentrification of an area and forcing poor people out. I cannot remember by law how much % of a development has to be deemed social housing, but it is generally a requirement now days since councils cannot really purchase or build properties. Now days you will not see any sort of massive council estates being built any more, which is why these developments have to have social housing. You can trace this all back to the 80s when the government privatised council housing stock and allowed people to buy their social housing. I grew up on a council estate and it can be hell, it's the same families and group of people which cause most of the issues and it comes in waves as they get rotated around the various council estates in the region. The estates are generally neglected by the council as well. Near me an ex 3 bed council house, with a dodgy raft foundation, breeze block ends and a timber frame goes for £210,000! You'd be looking at a mortgage of around £800 per month, and if renting it will cost more. You've now also got to deal with the housing benefit (from the government) changes. Before it would be straight up paid by the council or government to the property owner, recent changes means people are given the money to pay for the rent (I think you can opt in for it to go directly to landlord) which has reduced the social housing stock even more as landlords do not want deal with the payment issues. With how bad the benefit system has become and is being run, after reforms, people are often in arrears or not getting the money because the system is just borked. Poor people are very much getting priced out of areas where they live, with a lack of social housing stock available combined with a chaotic benefit system, they are very much forced out into other areas, if they they do get somewhere, then bare minimum will be done to maintain it.

jimparkins 5y ago

I am British and worked in central London for years. The idea of owning an 800,000 apartment in central London was a ridiculous luxury. Most people that I worked with had to commute like me for 1-1.5 hours a day from outside London commuter towns into work (some way more than this). This was the nature of the beast. Is it "right" no. I just do not see how 800K GBP apartments are a) affordable and b) practical - it would be much better to focus on decent commuter links, subsidies for travel and affordable housing around London - than creating token affordable housing in the centre for the sake of it. If you do not like the commute then move to another city. I did for this exact reason.

iamben 5y ago
I'm currently living the dream that after the (somewhat) exodus of folks to cheaper, spacier suburbs, the fact that people want to work from home and (as per the article on the front page yesterday) would rather quit than commute again - we might actually get some affordable housing in London. Be that converted offices, new builds, or just availability. Annecdata, but looking at Zoopla the lower priced (ha) places are dropping or not selling as they did... But who knows. Still blows my mind what the half a million quid you can easily spend on a flat in town will get you pretty much anywhere else.
- vidarh 5y ago
  When I first moved to the UK I rented a room literally across the road from Marble Arch and Hyde Park, I've since moved progressively further out. Despite 20 years of price increases, my mortgage on a 3 bedroom house with a garden in Croydon costs me about the same as that first room did... It'd take a seismic house price crash to consider moving back in even with a commute. It's expensive here too, but the differential is staggering given East Croydon is a 15 minute train ride from both London Victoria and London Bridge.
  - secondcoming 5y ago
    Croydon isn't as nice an area as Hyde Park.

nob0dyasked 5y ago

Living in Nine Elms in a house valued at 800k and complaining about class inequality. Soul-crushing!

mensetmanusman 5y ago

“Andrea Franzel lives in an apartment in the Chancery building of Embassy Gardens, a shared ownership block managed by the Peabody housing association. After months of navigating dense bureaucracy, as chair of the residents’ association, he secured some funding to buy a painting for the building’s bleak communal lobby, along with a mirror and a small console table. But, after three years, Peabody’s neighbourhood manager ruled that the table was a fire hazard, and had it removed. “It sounds like a small thing,” said Franzel, “but that little table was part of our community. We used to buy fresh flowers and leave things for each other. Now we have nothing.” “ The face palming stories of heartless bureaucracies using excuses like this to stick it to the little guy. The interesting thing to me is that it happens in every society. Some humans love wielding power over others.

bsenftner 5y ago
Human society does not function at scale. When one can ignore the anonymous others' needs, just add population to create tyranny.
- afthonos 5y ago
  There is precious little evidence that it worked better without scale…
m_mueller 5y ago
Reminds me of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". Highly recommended film.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Definitely, also 12 monkeys, they almost got 2020 right :)
  - m_mueller 5y ago
    maybe not 2020, but 2030 could be the ticket if governments don't start being serious about bio terror countermeasures. that's about how far we are from desktop sized virus sequencing machines from the looks of it :(

cpwright 5y ago

What surprises me most is that London seemingly has no tow trucks for cars blocking emergency egress from a building for months. Presumably a boot is useless if they aren't going to pay the fines anyway, but it would seem that they probably would want the "supercar" back.

rurban 5y ago
Problem is more that they block a private entrance only, and don't want to enrage the car owner, who might cancel his rent contract. A safety inspector should visit and tow it. Then the rich guy can be angry at the city
ryanlol 5y ago
One of my favourite things about living in London is that you don’t have to live in constant fear of the tow truck. The city of westminster does not remove vehicles for parking violations. https://www.westminster.gov.uk/parking/has-your-vehicle-been-removed https://www.westminster.gov.uk/parking/has-your-vehicle-been...

Nursie 5y ago

Just FYI, this article is a few months old.

dqpb 5y ago
Have things changed in the last few months?
- Nursie 5y ago
  They've probably got worse :)

djhworld 5y ago

Interestingly even the wealthier residents of this complex have seen huge hikes in the service charges (presumably to pay for the running costs of the sky pool...) Might be affordable to those with lots of money, but probably a hinderence to those just about getting by with the mortgage payments https://pastebin.com/PZ5XQkWH https://pastebin.com/PZ5XQkWH (article from the FT)

cm2187 5y ago
It could also be foreign investors stuck in an investment they expected to flip ahead of completion, and not paying their share of the service charge (I was in an old building in central london where that was exactly the case). Also a classic of these luxury buildings is the developer extracting revenues through overcharging for property management. There are now legal ways out but it is a painful process.
csmiller 5y ago
It’s odd that it seems like all of these ultra-luxury places are so poorly constructed and run. This tower in NYC now has a required $15k annual spend at the restaurant, among other problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-rise-432-park.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-ri...

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

1. This is darkly hilarious; it sounds like the market is a mirage of wash sales, same as(?) crypto: > In 2016, shortly after many of the projects launched off-plan sales, property analytics firm Propcision observed a strange phenomenon. Hundreds of luxury flats in Battersea and Nine Elms were continually being listed for sale on sites such as Rightmove and Zoopla, then taken down and immediately relisted. It was being done at such frequency across so many developments that it distorted the market across the whole area. “It gave the impression that there was not only a lot of activity,” said Propcision’s director, Michelle Ricci-Zak, “but that the average price in that area was going up – when actually we proved it was going down.” 2. Also, whoever wrote this had too much fun: > a crowd of swollen shafts at this bend in the river We have dicks and V. S. Naipaul! > the first of the priapic bunch to smack you in the face ...with a nice visual, in case you missed the first one. 3. Finally, check this phrase out: > What’s going on in Nine Elms and Battersea has nothing to do with maximising social good or creating mixed communities. It is pure social cleansing.” It's Yugoslavia all over again!

fallingfrog 5y ago

Luxury condos as a vehicle for speculators are a dead end. This is the model we should be trying to emulate: https://citymonitor.ai/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capital-earned-its-place-in-housing-history https://citymonitor.ai/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capit...

CydeWeys 5y ago

There's a lot of anti-development NIMBY rhetoric in this article, along with the baseline assumption that more and taller development is a bad thing. Yet the current housing crisis has been caused by an acute lack of development, of decades of not enough housing having been created, with subsequent increases in housing costs. I suspect part of the problem is simply that they aren't allowing enough development. If it's not easy/possible for a developer to buy existing sparser land in the city, knock down what's there, then replace it with a much denser/taller 10+ floor apartment building of many median market rate rent units, well then there's your problem. We used to do a lot more of that in decades past, and that's what comprises a lot of the more affordable housing inventory on the market today.