Schemes picked for £115m GM brownfield housing cash
Private developers, including FEC, Muse, Bruntwood, Capital&Centric, and Property Alliance Group, have all been earmarked to receive a share of the devolution pot.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority has selected the 92 projects that will benefit from £115m of the city region’s £150m brownfield housing pot over the next three years.
FEC has been awarded the single largest grant – just shy of £7m – to support the delivery of 252 homes at Victoria North.
Property Alliance Group has been allocated £6.3m for the 300-apartment One Cathedral Square, part of the Renaissance masterplan.
Muse will get £5.5m to support the delivery of the first 342 homes of the 2,000-home Oldham masterplan.
Bruntwood, in partnership with Trafford Council, has been awarded £1.9m for the ongoing regeneration of Stretford Mall.
Capital&Centric is in line to receive two grants totalling £2.6m for the 52-home Trinity Gateway in Bolton and Ferrous, a 107-apartment project in Manchester.
This City, Manchester City Council’s housing delivery vehicle, will get a combined £15.5m of funding for more than 500 homes across four schemes. These include 136 at Grey Mare Lane and 175 in Monsall.
The £115m funding is part of a larger £150m fund to unlock the delivery of housing on brownfield sites.
A third of the £150m has been earmarked for schemes in Manchester that could see 31 sites redeveloped into 3,380 homes.
Cllr Gavin White, Manchester City Council’s executive member for housing and development, said: “We have been necessarily ambitious through our housing strategy, committing to helping to build 36,000 new homes up to 2032 – of which at least 10,000 will be genuinely affordable to Manchester people.
“This is a challenge both in terms of available land and the funding necessary to build new housing at scale – but we are on course to meet these targets. However, we must be innovative and use the resources available to use.”
He added: “As a post-industrial city, we have lots of brownfield sites that are sometimes difficult to develop, but this land represents a massive opportunity to deliver the homes – particularly the affordable housing our residents need. This funding is hugely welcome and we will help bring these unused areas of Manchester back into use.”
Read the full list of brownfield housing allocations.
Last year, the GMCA selected a raft of projects to benefit from the first £35m slug of brownfield devo cash.
Overall, the fund could support the delivery of 7,000 homes by 2025/26, according to the combined authority.
Can you explain why One Cathedral Square should benefit from this fund? Have you seen which US billionaire is financing the project? Can we have some transparency please?
By mcleod
Looking at the report in the link, a lot of the funding is going to councils and RPs, which will hopefully translate into a decent amount of affordable housing.
However, it isn’t clear why the likes of One Cathedral Square or New Bailey need a public top-up, or some of the private-sector led stuff on uncomplicated sites in the outer boroughs other than trying to keep the Leaders happy.
There doesn’t seem to be that much need for remediation or big civil works that might stop them going ahead without the grant funding.
By Anonymous
Some very iffy schemes in that lot in terms of needing this subsidy, seems the CA have published their funding/scoring criteria, some of the larger city centre schemes clearly won’t be for affordable housing but have been funded multiple millions! Also, with schemes from MCC showing at “TBC” how can that be fair? Surely deliverability is the key thing here…they must know who’s getting the homes or building them
By Voice of Reason
Reckon less than 30% of those schemes will be delivered. Also seems to be very inconsistent in VFM.
By Job
Developers exist to make a profit and without grant contributions like this, their schemes would struggle to meet viability criteria and therefore might not happen. This funding helps.
By Anonymous
Ghost tower! Looks to be of a reasonable height
By Giant Skyscraper Fan
Give it to the RPs and social enterprise developers not to the developers with big cars and lodges in Abersoch
By salford red
Great that this enables more Brownfield sites to be redeveloped, but do some of these subsidised developments propose the type of housing that is currently lacking in their locality? Or is it more of the same, with some gestures out in the sticks?
By Sainsbury's
Most of the privately developed schemes are already benefiting from not having to provide the requisite numbers of affordable housing, spuriously citing viability as a resorb, but we all know that they really are viable and more.
Most of the RP/Council led schemes are getting HE grant for each unit, again making most of them viable.
So, this funding pot really needs to look at the RP/Council led schemes that really are in areas where the values/revenues create lack of viability. It really isn’t that difficult to assess, but this team within GMCA seem to be doing the usual in this world of incorrect application of capitalism, and lining the pockets of those that already have deep pockets.
By Anon