Lack of housing is not the fault of city council (From Oxford Mail)

Lack of housing is not the fault of city council

6:40am Friday 19th March 2010 in

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IT is very easy to highlight problems like housing for people in Oxford.

It’s even easier to sit on the sidelines demanding silver bullet solutions — particularly when someone else has to pay.

Shelter, the homelessness charity, is quite right to say something needs to be done about provision of rented social accommodation and low-cost housing schemes, but is picking the wrong target in Oxford City Council.

The brutal reality is that many people born in this city will never earn enough to be able to stay here and see their families grow up here. They have to move away to cheaper outlying areas.

And the even more stark reality is that, particularly in these economic times, this city is constrained by cost, politics and geography from a massive boom in social housebuilding.

The city council has numerous budget problems which preclude it from just dropping millions of pounds into a housing project. It just can’t afford it, with or without Government help.

And even if it could, the ongoing controversy over building at Grenoble Road shows that the necessary house numbers would never get agreement from the county council and the CPRE.

Shelter would be better served using its time to look for practical solutions for Oxford rather than dumping the blame in the city council’s lap.