‘Economic violence’: Birmingham residents decry plan to raze 1,900 homes

When Laura Kudrna bought her home on the Ladywood estate in Birmingham, it brought to an end a 12-year period of renting in which she’d moved 20 times. “I was so excited to be able to stay in a home that I thought I would have for life,” she said.

But her new sense of security was shattered when she found out that her property was one of 1,900 dwellings listed for potential demolition in what is thought to be one of Europe’s biggest single-site estate regenerations.

The scale of the proposed project is staggering: 6,000 people could have their homes torn down as part of a £2.2bn project in which 1,266 council houses and 567 properties belonging to private homeowners could be repossessed in a mass compulsory purchase order for the area.

In their place, 7,500 homes will be built in a high-density housing plan on a 61-hectare (150-acre) site. About 1,000 of these will be designated as affordable council-owned homes, according to a report presented to cabinet.

If the numbers involved seem imposing, the strength of feeling in opposition to the plan is more than a match. Residents said they were furious and accused the council of “psychological economic violence”.

The battle lines have been drawn over familiar terrain. Birmingham Council described the initiative as the most significant redevelopment project in a generation, in a city where there is an urgent need to build more housing. The number of people who presented to the council as homeless rose to 600 a week last year.

On the other side of the debate, Kudrna, 39, is leading the Ladywood Unite campaign to voice people’s concerns about the project. They say they understand the need to increase the housing stock, but not through the demolition of good homes.

She said: “They appear to be planning to knock down good-quality and new housing for this. It is just so egregious. We are absolutely pro-home building. There’s a lot of great land to build on in Ladywood, like this building is derelict, and this building is derelict,” she said, pointing to vacant land near her home. “Why can’t they just build on those instead of coming after our homes?”

The project will be done in phases over a 15- to 20-year period, and compulsory purchase orders would be used as a last resort, the council said.

Homeowners would be entitled to a compensation package and the council was exploring options to help people living on the site buy the new homes, for example through shared equity.

The council said it intended to take a “build-first approach”, meaning people would not be moved out of their homes until a new property became available on site, and would ensure no one had to leave Ladywood if they did not want to.

Some people said they were sceptical this would happen. George Smith, who is retiring from his job as the head of an academy trust when he turns 60 this summer, had planned to spend his free time enjoying life at the home he bought when it was built 30 years ago.

It sits on a modern, well-maintained estate, but it falls within the red line of the proposed demolition zone, and is at risk of being flattened.

“I own the freehold. I’ve put everything in here, this was a lifelong home. I had no thoughts I would ever need to move and, if I did, it would be on my own terms,” he said. “It’s the real injustice of it all, and at the same time the council are being totally incompetent at meeting with us.”

The regeneration scheme has been beset by problems for months. At a consultation meeting held by the council last year, nearly 100 residents were unable to get into a community centre packed to capacity, prompting an angry crowd to form outside.

“There has been a horrible lack of community engagement,” said Kudrna. “We’ve really struggled to get the council to meet us, or give us any information. It’s psychological economic violence, truly.”

Marco di Nunzio, an associate professor in urban anthropology at the University of Birmingham, is studying the Ladywood regeneration scheme. “Birmingham is seeing a return to what used to happen in the 60s, taking down entire areas and rebuilding them,” he said. “Within the UK, there are town-planning laws which allow, if there is a public interest, the local authority to seize assets.

“But is the Ladywood regeneration project in its present form actually in the public interest, if it involves displacing a large number of people to make room for a commercial endeavour, with no firm and binding commitment to deliver social and affordable housing?”

Ladywood has a large black and minority ethnic population – 58%, compared with 51% in Birmingham as a whole – and high levels of poverty and deprivation. It has the highest child poverty level of any constituency in the UK.

Di Nunzio said there were real fears people could be priced out of the area and there was a significant psychological impact of the upheaval.

“The opacity of the process, that open-endedness when you’re losing your home is excruciating. There is a huge issue of anxiety, some parts of the community are quite vulnerable,” he said. “The level of injustice that you might experience, it really affects people’s sense of self.”

The Labour government has set out plans to build 1.5m homes in its first term, and cross-party concerns have been raised about the risk of overriding community issues in the process.

Ladywood residents said they feared the big push for more homes could put freehold properties at risk of demolition as part of similar schemes to increase housing density.

Jayne Francis, the council’s cabinet member for housing and homelessness, said: “We know that much of the community in Ladywood feels frustrated and uncertain about what the scheme means for them, and we’d like to apologise for any distress caused.”

She added that the only decision that had been made was to appoint St Joseph, a subsidiary of the housing company Berkeley Group, as the council’s preferred development partner.

“No other decisions have been made on the regeneration scheme or what homes will or will not be demolished. The regeneration of Ladywood is right at the beginning of the process, with many decisions yet to be made with the community.”

Francis said the council was developing a “community and resident charter” to set out its commitment throughout the project, and a second round of engagement workshops had begun.

“We will work hard to rebuild trust with the Ladywood community and to make the most of this exciting opportunity to revitalise an area that was primarily built in the 1960s,” Francis said.