At 12pm today I had an envelope pushed under my door. In it was an angry letter about me trying to create this SECAB project. No contact details were left, and the person who delivered it left the stair before I had a chance to see them.
I am happy for residents to get in touch with me with comments and queries. That is why I have supplied my name, address, phone number and email address in all my communications. I always knew that there would be some opposition or concern with my plans, and I hoped to be able to address any of these. I want to make sure the entire community is happy with this project before we decide to go ahead.
As the letter-writer left no way for me to reply directly, I have decided to reply on this website and in other communications to other owners. A complete scan of the letter is available for download. I have also reproduced the contents so that I can reply in-line.
After studying the letter, I believe it was written by someone who has been hit before by large communal maintenance bills imposed unilaterally by an external institution. I understand that the tenements at 7 and 13 Cadiz Street have seen major works done which had a major financial impact on their owners. As it was hand-delivered, I expect it will be an owner-occupier. A tenant is also possible, but they would not have dealt with the communal repairs before.
The City of Edinburgh Council runs a Statutory Repairs Notice system. This was intended to help the council ensure that the traditional tenements in the city would be properly maintained, given that they are not factored. See this Wikipedia page for more details. A 2011 BBC report revealed that there was corruption involved in serving these notices and so unnecessary works were being carried out at great expense to owners.
Individual property owners are in a David versus Goliath situation with institutions like the council, or possibly Port of Leith Housing Association. They are filled with staff who know about buildings and the laws on maintenance. Unless you have connections in the property or building industries, it is likely that getting any third-party advice on demands they make will be too expensive.
The only free way for owners to protect themselves against bad decisions by institutions is to band together. The tenements of Salamander, Elbe, Cadiz, Assembly and Baltic Street are all roughly the same age and construction. Advice for one tenement very likely applies to the others too. If works are truly required on one, then they will likely be required on the others. The cost of survey and advice can be spread across more owners. Between the 170 properties there will also likely be individuals with connections to the building or property industries who may be able to help. So far on this project I have encountered two architects and a groundworks company. I’m sure there will be other trades represented as well.
The worry which appears to have driven the response to my project is that this will be financially ruinous. I have made it clear in my communications that the cost would be a pittance per year. However, the author seems to believe that owners will be left with ever-escalating costs. I don’t have any special powers to impose ever-escalating costs on any owner, even in my own tenement. This isn’t England where leasehold properties have to deal with a freeholder who can cripple owners with ground rent increases.
If tenements wish to appoint a factor to handle communal maintenance, then that is their prerogative. Even a factor is bound by majority rule. If a factor misbehaves, then the owners can vote to replace them. The only compulsion can come from a majority vote of owners inside the tenement, or an external body like the council.
In the longer term, I hope that the organisation for the back green maintenance can spill over into the other areas of tenement maintenance which can cause the biggest headaches. Most maintenance is done reactively, not proactively. Instead of a manageable ongoing preventative maintenance program, owners get a terrible lottery where they could be hit by a big bill at short notice. By organising across tenements, we can save costs on preventative maintenance. Rather than imposing costs on owners and residents, I am trying to save them money. Rome wasn’t built in a day and I want to prove that we can organise the garden before trying anything more complicated.
For interest, here is the last estimation of support I have across tenements:
| Tenement | Factor | Inclined percent |
| 1 Assembly, 8 Baltic | 87.50% | |
| 3-7 Assembly | 46.15% | |
| 9 Assembly, 3-5 Cadiz | PoLHA | 90.91% |
| 2-6 Baltic, 2-6 Salamander | 68.75% | |
| 7 Cadiz | 93.75% | |
| 9-11 Cadiz | PoLHA | 95.00% |
| 13 Cadiz | 75.00% | |
| 47-51 Elbe | 66.67% | |
| 53-59 Elbe | 72.73% | |
| 8 Salamander | 93.75% | |
| 10 Salamander | 50.00% | |
| 12-20 Salamander | 85.71% |
This is the first and only negative response I have had so far. The remaining ‘not inclined’ number is only due to lack of response.
The lack of decorum of how I received the letter and how it was written as a personal attack rather than a constructive criticism has led me to respond with loosened professionalism.
M Proven
We’re off to a good start. My surname has been mispelled. I’m used to that by now.
16/8 Salamander Street
Edinburgh EH6 7HR
25 May 2020
How dare you threaten 49% of residents with misuse of the Tenements Act to get your own way as if somehow we have done something illegal.
At this point, I’m not threatening 49%. I have already reached majority support in most tenements. I expect only a handful of difficult cases across the tenements.
The Tenements Act ensures a civil legal responsibility between the property owners in the tenement. That’s because the fortunes of all the owners in the tenement are tied together. Without the clear power to apply majority rule (plus provisions to protect minority owners against unreasonable maintenance) we would have chaos. Every legal system needs a way for communal maintenance to be organised in tenement-style buildings. If you don’t like it, then you’re under no obligation to live in a tenement.
Of course, I’m not sure how I can actually misuse this. Everything I am proposing relies on the owners within each tenement agreeing. That’s where the Tenements Act enforcement comes in. The Act includes no provisions for random folk around the corner with too much time on their hands to get their noses into things.
If you do not remove all of your posters spreading fear & alarm you will be reported to the Police.
“999, what service?”
“Police”
“What’s the emergency”
“Someone is educating tenement flat owners about the Tenements Act! And doing a community organisation project! And on purpose!”
“…”
I would be delighted for the local police force to become aware of SECAB. They know the history of the area and the way that communities got broken up. Establishing networks of trust within and between stairs means less crime and fewer problems for everyone. An organised stair is one which can better react to antisocial behaviour and ensure that its secure entry system is working correctly.
I will put up more posters.
And stop masquerading as the Salamander-Elbe-Cadiz-Assembly-Baltic Community Association. There is no such thing and you have no legal standing.
There is such a thing as the Salamander-Elbe-Cadiz-Assembly-Baltic Community Association. I created it. ‘Community Association’ is already a legally meaningless term. Yes, this isn’t a company registered at Companies House or a registered charity. Does that mean it can’t be allowed to exist? No.
Now, it is true that I could have waited until I had established the resident and owner contact networks before creating SECAB. However, I had to create a website and social media presence to help people find out about my project. I only ended up calling it SECAB after I had to describe it as a project affecting ‘the tenements bound by Salamander, Elbe, Cadiz, Assembly and Baltic Streets in Leith’. That’s a bit of a mouthful. I had to buy a web domain and I didn’t want to waste money with a temporary one. http://mark-provan-of-16-stroke-8-salamander-streets-quixotic-project-to-organise-12-tenements-around-the-back-green.scot isn’t ideal either.
Now that I have interested owner contacts across the tenements I am looking to create a constitution and association procedures for the next stage of SECAB. I’m very good at tracking down owners, and maybe dealing with the building maintenance side of things. I’m not so good at the other more social parts like organising community activities. I want to get other owners and residents involved so that this project can continue to thrive even as people come and go.
It might interest you to know that residents do make the effort to weed and apply salt to keep down. They hang washing. They keep the area clean and plant flowers in pots and flower beds. They put out tables and chairs when needed and have even held barbeques. All free of charge without exploiting anyone.
I know that some residents already do this, because I actually have gone out and talked to them in person. They were initially a bit sceptical about how much success I’d have in organising all the tenements. They seem to have come around now. They have told me that they know all the folk who do their bit to keep the back green as good as they can. They don’t seem to know who you are. I showed them your letter and they’re not that keen on you either now.
We have never noticed you outside doing anything positive for the community and there is nothing to stop you getting off your butt and making an effort instead of trying to force us to subsidise your social life. You have no right to go behind our backs.
Other than spending hours tracking down absentee landlords? Organising visits by gardening contractors who I know can do the weeding job better than myself? Getting to know the other people who live around the back green? Being a public face?
What do you expect? Voluntary actions have not worked. People are too busy doing too many other things. Paying someone to do the garden on your behalf is not some sort of luxury. Having the time and skills to do any outdoor work at all is the luxury.
There is only one door with rubbish outside. If it bothers you then call Environmental Health Dept.
So this doesn’t bother you? Why don’t you phone them instead? Or why don’t you get off your butt and clear it out yourself, if trying to organise it between owners is forbidden?
Port of Leith would love to make extra charges just like they try with everything else – so then they can increase prices exponentially year on year to subsidise their political ambitions. They will do anything for money which is why we clean inside and outside ourselves.
The last time I checked, I’m not Port of Leith Housing Association. They’re a property owner just like any other. I’m organising this on their behalf. Their power only extends to the properties they own or factor.
I have no legal power to compel any other owner to do anything. The only power I do have is to persuade. So far, this has been successful. The legal compulsion to get the entire back green cleaned up by the professionals comes from a 50%+1 vote in each and every tenement. If a single tenement believes this to be unreasonable, then they are under no obligation to go along with the plan.
How long do you suppose your “quotes” will remain before skyrocketing like everything else ? And then you will leave us with a contract we cannot get out of.
As gardeners are well known for having complex and unbreakable contracts. Why would the individual tenements agree to a gardening, or any other, contract they knew would become ruinously expensive? Agreeing to a maintenance contract is a maintenance decision where the 50%+1 threshold applies. Why would 50%+1 in any tenement vote for something more expensive than it needs to be?
If individual tenements want to go and organise the maintenance of their own section of the back green then that is fine. They can even go and erect fences to separate their bit again. I think they’d much rather save money by pooling together and being able to make use of the whole space.
It might interest you to know that even before lockdown, your neighbours were struggling to pay bills and 100% rent increases. After lockdown many will have no jobs to go back to so the main priority will be keeping a roof over their heads, not signing blank cheques for open ended contracts.
There are no blank cheques. Each tenement would agree to the contract terms. Any spending would be agreed by that tenement.
I know that money is tight, and we are in an extraordinarily bad economic situation. I do not believe that invalidates the need or support for the garden. £5 a year, or whatever it would cost, is very little money. I know that every penny counts for many people, and we have a society now reliant on foodbanks. However, that does not mean the garden cost is some extravagance. The time taken and cost incurred for any individual resident to clean up their section is too great. Someone with no money is also likely to have no time to spend doing gardening. No one is sitting around doing nothing all day for no reason. A life on unemployment benefits or Universal Credit is one spent doing pointless job searches and signing on. Disabled people are even less likely to be able to do their bit to maintain it.
What would you rather we do? Not bother cleaning it up? We could save a lot of money if we all decided to stop fixing the roofs and just let water come running in. That would make life a lot easier for cash-starved residents.
I am happy to help any owner-occupier who would be unduly burdened by any maintenance cost. I know that owning a property does not in itself mean you have any money spare at the end of the week or month. When contacting owners and residents I have found many willing to pay additional shares of the gardening costs just to make sure the project can happen. For obvious reasons I have not widely shared this before, as I know that promising upfront to pay the cost will make some owners freeload unnecessarily. This project can only work if every owner who is actually able to pay, actually pays.
However, even in the case of cash-poor owners, the reality is still that the value of your asset will increase as a result of any garden improvement projects that we undertake. While it may be a long time until you sell your property, you will get more money for it than you would have otherwise. This must be recognised.
There is also the hard reality of owning a property. When you make the decision to buy, or not sell, you take on the responsibility of maintenance. This is clearly true for any building. If you buy a bungalow, then you are the one who has to pay for the roof to get fixed. Being in a tenement means many of these costs are reduced because they can be shared between many more owners. If you are long-term unable to afford a gardening fee, then you are going to find it very difficult to handle any other unplanned costs. Roofs and cupolas do leak. If you would rather have the burden of paying for maintenance held by someone else, then you need to rent. The Council do have the Shared Repairs Service available for circumstances where owners cannot be found or cannot pay, but this is not free. You would have a note against your property title so the council would reclaim the money plus expenses when you sell.
Landlords will simply pass your unnecessary charges onto tenants. Everyday we are told something will just cost a few quid here and a few quid there and before you know it, you can’t pay your bills.
Private landlords already charge the maximum the market is willing to bear. They can’t arbitrarily increase rents for the same reason that they don’t charge less than going market rate. Rents are not tied to owner costs. If they were, then why do mortgaged flats go up for rent at the same amount as ones where the mortgage was paid off long ago?
Individual tenements will never vote for a charge which a majority of their owners believe to be unnecessary.
Port of Leith tried something similar a few years back until they realised the real reason why folk neglect the back court is because of dogs. Owners deliberately use it as a dog toilet. If you want to do something for the community then invoke the Tenements Act against irresponsible dog owners.
That’s funny, because my understanding of the back green is that it used to be surrounded by brothel and drug den flats. Owners went around fitting locks to their back doors to keep the back green out. This changed years ago but the space hasn’t come back into popular use.
I’ve only seen one flat use the back green for their dog, and they clean up after it. They’re delighted to support this project. When residents use the space, they will recognise other residents with pets and exert social pressure to stop any fouling incidents if they do occur.
Its time for you to grow up young man. This is not a students union. You are now living amongst real people with real problems, poverty. If you don’t like it then go back to your middle class enclave instead of trying to force us into debt. Its people like you that cause homelessness.
Ah, so we get to the ad hominem attacks. I am a terrible human being by virtue of being born in lucky circumstances. How dare I try to make the world a better place by investing my own time and effort into turning a neglected resource into a nice place to sit out in the sun for the residents of these tenements.
Leave us alone and get a life. The lockdown will ease in time.
Obviously becoming a community organiser and public face in the community does not qualify as having a life.
Meanwhile, people who write angry anonymous letters and don’t have the courage to show their face or even knock clearly are the life of the party.
SECAB 
I am not working class myself but Leith is. All the accommodation around Salamanda Street is working class and so will the new ones be too. Long may it remain so. To gentrify Leith would take away a huge part of what makes it a good place to live. On the other hand, living in a scruffy, badly maintained and dangerous tenement doesn’t make you working class, it just makes you foolish!
I hope other tenants and owners see this and realize that taking an interest in your property is not a middle class thing. It’s just a good common sense way of saving money.
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I wouldn’t have thought it a very good idea to publicly bully one’s neighbours for holding views other than your own. Isn’t that why social media is so notorious ? No wonder the writer did not leave a forwarding address !
The zeal with which you immediately set about it casts doubt on the motivation behind this initiative when you have already spoken of forcing owners to pay up. It comes across as an autocracy not an association. I hope you yourself will not be standing as either chairperson, secretary or treasurer. Would you please publish the impartial, independent verification of the poll you conducted from each of the tenements.
From what you say, you seem to have bought a property and wish to increase its value but want everyone else to pay, whether they can afford to or not. I’m sure there are other owners who may want that too. But property ownership requires each tenement to make its own repairs, not on trying to get neighbours to pay. Otherwise you would have bought Title to the whole neighbourhood when you bought your property; but you only own your apartment in your tenement. Would it not be more appropiate to organise owners to take responsibility for the upkeep of your own tenement, rather than ask tenants from the whole area (who make up a majority but barely get a mention) to foot yet another bill on top of spiralling rents, in order to enhance the value of your property in which they ultimately have no stake ? That’s the whole point of property ownership. Its an investment in which you yourself invest and you yourself, reap the benefits. Not private tenants faced with post Covid19 eviction or Social Housing Tenants who are already in need. Make no mistake, landlords (private or public) will impose this as a “service charge” and if you see £10 as a pittance then you have obviously never had to count every penny.
It seems to me the writer raised some important points. The Port of Leith Housing Association will get hold of it sooner or later and try to impose their own subsidiary company. You will have no control over quotes which are already doubling
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Hi Barry,
Individual owners in one tenement can’t force other tenements to pay up for anything other than what’s specified in their title deeds, which is generally only the gable walls supporting two adjacent buildings. The compelling factor comes from the majority vote within the tenement. Without this ability to compel other owners to pay for maintenance costs, you have complete chaos.
Something like that happens in England and Wales with flying freeholds and it makes properties unmortgageable! E&W generally have terraces rather than tenements, and there’s not really a specific property title type suited for flats. The best you generally find is a leasehold for your flat (where you’re actually just renting the place but with a contract which can be inherited and can last hundreds of years) where the freehold (the actual true land ownership right) is split equitably between the leaseholders. Leasehold titles, including of properties which don’t structurally depend on one another and don’t really share services, is a big problem in E&W. There are some unfortunate souls who have bought new builds and didn’t get enough independent legal advice to point out that the ground rent charges will be extortionate, or that the freeholder has the right to charge for utterly ridiculous things. For instance, some freeholders charge a fee for you to have the right to have a pet. That’s one thing if you’re renting a flat, but quite another if you’ve bought a detached house with a garden!.
The only real exception to the inter-tenement lack of compulsion here is the weird tenements on Elbe and Assembly Street. They share their back greens and that’ll be set up in their titles with shared maintenance responsibilities too. Otherwise everything was set up for the back greens to be separate from one another by iron railings. A lot of tenements have been able to keep their back greens separate, so they don’t need to organise anything like this. The circumstances here really are very unusual. There are other places where tenements share back greens unofficially but they don’t form this sort of tight closed ring where you inevitably have to bring in all twelve of them to get anything done.
I will admit that I was a little upset to get that letter and I do think, on reflection, that I could have handled it a bit better. I don’t want to go and delete the post because that would be erasing history, and some people might not like that either.
As is probably really clear I’m quite an odd person who does things which aren’t really what normal people would do. I think that’s just my character, for better or worse. What I had found out here is that there had been a lot of different attempts over the years by private owners, tenants and by PoLHA to do something about the back green. None of them had really worked. The last time anything worked it was because the council were throwing free money at the problem in the form of improvement grants, and owners didn’t have much to complain about there. There are just so many properties around, and modern ownership and occupancy is so different to how it was back when they were built, that trying to organise anything across them is going to be a real challenge. The only institution that can actually do it is the council because it has SRN powers, but it can’t really use them to make the back green look better. It’s not a public space and it’ll never be a public space so no one outside this ring of tenements would want the council spending its own money on our back green.
PoLHA owns a scattering of flats around the back green because at the time of the improvement grants, many owners decided just to move out and/or sell up and let PoLHA (being owned by and working on behalf of the council) manage the works and take on the property. This isn’t unusual for tenements across Scotland which were at one point not far away from complete demolition. Here’s a cool photo (https://www.capitalcollections.org.uk/view-item?i=38063) I found of Bath Road back in 1896, not long after the tenements there were built. All that’s left now is the corner tenement, now all black and sooty, above The Pond. Our tenements could have faced a similar fate had they not been built with internal WCs.
Back then the fact they owned only some of the flats wasn’t that important because the council grant free money cannon avoided most need to agree with other owners. They didn’t even get around to appointing themselves as the factor of most of them (aside from 9 Assembly, 3-5 Cadiz – apparently it needed major works done to fix drainage-induced subsidence). The other tenement they factor is 9-11 Cadiz, which was built as a warehouse and as converted by PoLHA in the 80s into 20 essentially modern flats inside an old facade, even including a lift.
Now that the council grant free money cannon is over, and the SRN corruption scandal means the council won’t get involved unless there’s a critical health and safety risk, we’re on our own. Right to Buy has meant some PoLHA flats have leaked out into private ownership, making it harder for them to do entire-block schemes or appoint themselves as factor. With the difficulties they face in unfactored tenements with majority private ownership, they’ve decided to start selling off those flats once their tenants decide to move out. They’ve sold the four flats they used to own on Salamander Street and the two they merged into one in Assembly Street. However, they’ll be keeping onto their current Cadiz and Assembly Street ones since they have a workable majority vote.
In any case, they don’t have the time or resources to go and organise the entire back green. While they could force the private owners in the tenements where they have a working majority vote to pay for the garden maintenance, they don’t have any leverage over the others. Someone in PoLHA could go and do all the same work that I’ve done, but then they’d be spending dozens of hours on a scheme of only ‘marginal’ benefit for a small number of residents. It’s easy for them to browbeat owners into major tenement renewal works since that just means paying a surveyor and a building contractor, and the cost of the works well exceeds the cost of organising them. The back green though? It’s still only a few hundred pounds a year for the whole thing. It’s like the cost of rent or a mortgage payment for just one of the flats.
The PoLHA tenants apparently already pay £1 a month in a service charge which nominally covers garden maintenance. I’ve spoken to a good few of them and some are really quite keen to get involved in the cleanup, improvement and organisation plans. That money doesn’t really go anywhere today, which I know is a problem. Even if PoLHA did get gardeners in to do everything they possibly could enforce, it’d leave the back green only half done.
Some private landlords are indeed scum. Some of them appear to be much more reasonable than that. I think quite a few of these flats were bought as starter flats to be lived in, and then their owners had to move up elsewhere. I have talked to some of the people who’ve been buying them up as investments too. There’s not a great amount I can personally do to fix the problems of the fundamentally broken housing and land system in the UK. I know there are problems and that’s why I’m such an advocate of the idea of Land Value Taxation and full-blown Georgism. That tax would fall on property owners and not tenants and eventually erode away any structural economic benefit to owning property vs renting it.
If trying to make the back green a nicer place for all residents is a problem, then I’m not sure what the solution is. Keeping it just the same? Making it worse? Realistically most of the land value uplift these flats have seen and will see is due to the combination of perpetually low interest rates, the increasing concentration of a knowledge economy in Edinburgh and the plans to build the tram network. I fear that residents who would worry about being gentrified out of their home by the garden plans would most likely end up being gentrified out of their home at the same rate by everything else that’s going on. In any case, a solid third of the flats are owned by PoLHA who, for all their faults, do provide reasonable homes at comparatively affordable rents and with the security of a social housing tenancy. Unlike in London, there’s no way these could be redeveloped/gentrified into higher density.
My proposal for SECAB is just a committee that would recommend to the owners of the tenements what works should be done in the back green. Other things inside the back green can then be organised by the committee alone, like who gets to put what plant pot where. It’d be like an allotment, but with more concrete and raised beds. Alongside this the owners in each tenement are getting organised so that they can more easily sort out communal repairs that are relevant only for them. For instance, some of the tenements are now looking at getting secure entry system fixes done. With the effort I’ve put into finding private landlord owners, it’s far easier now for the others to organise small repairs and improvements. Then we can also organise other cost-saving measures for owners, like gutter cleaning. Gutter cleaning isn’t some luxury that tenants would need to pay for. To the rental market it’s an invisible cost. It’s there so that the owners don’t get lumped with huge SRN bills if their gutters overflow, fail and come crashing down onto the pavement, or cause damp problems in the roof or walls.
For all of the pain of renting a flat, there are some aspects where owners have it worse. Losing your home is not a fun experience for anyone, but financially the worst a tenant can normally suffer is the loss of their deposit. Owners can be liable for tens of thousands of pounds worth of costs from which they can’t escape. As nice as it would be for landlords to jack up their rents to cover these costs, as they’re invisible to the rental market, they won’t be able to get them. Landlords already generally charge as much as the market is willing to bear. They can’t raise rents if there isn’t someone out there willing to pay more in rent for that property. Some of these flats have been unoccupied because their landlords haven’t dropped their rents in line with real market conditions after Covid and the effective end of the AirBnB tenement flat.
Oh and speaking of AirBnBs – that’s your enemy if you want someone to attack for raising rental costs. I know a few of the AirBnB ‘hosts’ have dropped out of the game recently, due to Covid or the general sense that the game was up since the council enforcement had stepped up a notch. I would have no qualms about making life very difficult for an AirBnB landlord if the situation required it. None of them have planning approval and all of them are illegal changes of use which would never be permitted for flats in a stair.
So yes, there’s a huge amount of things which need thought about with a project like this. I’ve tried my best to be a bit more concise than normal and just get to the point in my initial communications with owners. That point is that once the majority vote of owners is reached in a tenement, there’s really not a lot of point kicking up a fuss. That means this thing can probably actually happen some day rather than staying a pipe dream. I know of a few cases where that lack of upfront detail then made some people have subsequent questions and comments, but I’ve tried my best to answer them. Ultimately all I can do is ask and persuade, not force. If you own your flat then you’ll have no less say over this than I do.
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Oh my God.
You seem to be completely obsessed with boosting your property value at other’s expense. I can’t read this stuff anymore. I just don’t have time. This is not a community association. Its all about YOU. When are you going to realise that folk are facing mass unemployment and evictions after Covid 19 instead of trying to swamp them with endless detail. They have higher priorities, but you are talking about compelling residents from other tenements to pay for your repairs. I appreciate you may be lonely due to lockdown,maybe join a club or something. You appear to have too much time on your hands.
And when are you going to publish the INDEPENDENT verification of the poll you conducted from each of the tenements ? No more detail, just publish their verification of your figures
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Hi Barry,
I’m not really sure what you’re proposing. If we don’t want the back green to fall into permanent disrepair, then we are going to have to do *something* about it. There are only a few people left who have been looking after their bits of it, and they won’t be able to continue doing it for much longer.
If this happens, then the people who want to use it just to hang up their washing are going to suffer too. At absolute minimum, there just needs to be a way for all the owners to agree the bare minimum weeding costs and keep an eye on any new problems. I don’t think it’s a good idea for this responsibility to be in the hands of one person.
The ‘poll’ is based on my spreadsheet where I’ve recorded a Yes or No answer based on the communication I’ve had with the owner. Most were by email, but some were by phone and others were in person. I don’t know how anyone would independently verify it, unless they went around annoying everyone a second time for the sake of £5 a year. The only real proof comes when the official Yes/No decision is made to the final proposal. I’ve set up email groups in each tenement so the owners can all discuss this if required. In order to take someone to court to force them to pay up, the other owners would need to have the proof that the decision had been made lawfully.
The only real issue I could see would be if someone lied to the other owners that they had the majority vote already. I haven’t done that, and I’ve worked hard to connect owners with one another so they can discuss things without me if required.
I don’t think most people are interested in going to all this effort to oppose £5 a year of garden maintenance. They really don’t seem to care. I do care, and I do have a bit of time on my hands. So far many people have appreciated that.
If you want I can tell you which flats in your tenement are owner-occupied and whether they said yes or no. You can go and check yourself.
Mark
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We must all try not to miss the point. All buildings come to a stage in their lives when they are no longer keeping the weather out and instead are starting to let it in. Slates start sliding, Gutters get clogged, plants take root in the mortar And rain gets into the fabric. After 100 plus years, these tenements have now reached this critical stage. I have been renovating old buildings all my working life and I know for certain that if these issues aren’t tackled as a matter of urgency, the whole building reaches a state of dilapidation very quickly. This includes all areas, from the roof, the walls and the foundations. We need to take action now to prevent us having to address really expensive and urgent issues later and it will happen much sooner than you would think, honestly, you’ll be surprised. Get it done now and you will save yourself a lot of money.
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You might also like to approve a comment with which you will not agree. I believe this would be “democratic”
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Hi Barry,
As far as I can see there aren’t any other unapproved comments other than yours. I think WordPress says how many unapproved comments there are and it might just have been counting the other one you had.
Mark
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To answer Hugo. What you are talking about are normal repairs which is the responsibility of owners in each tenement. It does not need a communal repair fund to pay for other people’s repairs. This has indeed been done for 100 years. There is nothing stopping owners getting repairs for their tenement done. It is in their Deeds.
The back green is not in permanent disrepair. Residents do look after it and there is no reason why they should not be “able to continue doing it much longer” – only if it is taken out of their hands and monetarised. Folk do it because they want to. They care. It does not need to be turned into an impersonal business threatening court acton.
There does not appear to be any mandate for this association. A spreadsheet by someone with a clear agenda is not independent verification and it appears to be based on taking “someone to court to force them to pay up”, That is not a community association. Quite the opposite. It is highly divisive and will have neighbours prosecuting each other. If the someone with a clear agenda does not know what independent verification is then this project has no constitutional basis. It still appears to be based on the notion of £5 being insignificant which shows a lack of knowledge of our neighbours. Some of the quotes already appear to have doubled and they will continue to do so. £5 will soon increase and we will have residents being ostracised, taken to court and possibly worse.
That’s not Community. It will lead to residents discriminating against and looking down their noses at each other.
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Hi Barry,
Many thanks for your reply.
Yes I agree, if there is an issue with a flat that has no effect on other properties then, of course, this would be a matter purely for that owner to resolve. However, when you have several owners inside one building then the responsibility for the upkeep and maintenance of the roof, the walls, the foundations, gardens, the corridors, the stairs and the entrance is shared.
In the event of any of these going wrong, then repair and replacement can be massively high. In order to avoid big shocks coming through our letter box and landing on our door mat, surely it would be best to start up a fund by paying a small sum every month for maintenance; Like, paining the windows, clearing the gutters and foul drains, re-pointing stone work, mending leaks to the roof and even the upkeep of the shared space, if you like.
This make sense. For instance, timber windows are vulnerable to rot. When they do, they are more or less useless and have to be replaced. Replacing just one of the stair windows would cost about £2,000 plus the cost of fitting. Multiply that by 3 and you are facing a big expense. however, by spending £100 quid, split between 9 flats, maintaining them, every 2 years, you could extend their life indefinitely. Of course each individual flat has its own windows and it would be the responsibility of each owner to foot the bill, or not, it’s up to them and certainly not the rest of us.
It’s the same with the other things; Nobody wants to be faced with a bill for a new roof. Even if it’s split between 9 properties, it would still come to about £2,000 each. It’s far cheaper for someone to go up once a year and replace a few slates and clear the gutters while they’re at it.
As for the entrance door, I personally don’t like the idea of people using the unsecured area for dealing drugs or pissing in it on a Saturday night. I would much prefer it if they all did that somewhere else.
This isn’t about taking people to court or forcing other people to pay for the upkeep of your own property. It’s about reducing the cost of everyone’s legal responsibilities which isn’t a bad idea, is it?
Regards,
Hugo
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No. this is not right. You are responsible for your own tenement..Repairs are carried out by owners within a tenement. Not everybody else. If repairs overlap an adjoining tenement then they both pay. Not the whole neighbourhood. There is nothing to stop owners in each tenement putting money aside for repairs. Some tenements HAVE been looked after and repairs carried out at great expense – including the repairs which you mention. Why should they pay for your repairs as well ?
What began as a weeding project on the back green appears to have turned into repairing Hugo’s roof and gutters. That’s going to cost a lot more than £5. We are now looking at 10’s of thousands of pounds. Hugo needs to repair his own roof, in co-operation with other owners in his tenement; not rely on tenants of rented properties paying for it through increased service charges. Tenants with no stake in the future value of his tenement. (Are Hugo and Mark from the same tenement by any chance ?). Its one of the obligations of buying a property, having a survey done, carrying out repairs and reaping the profit some years later. You would not expect to have to pay for repairs to a property in Constitution Street so why are you expecting residents of Elbe/Cadiz/Assembly/Baltic streets to pay for your roof.
If the initial proposal was not independently verified then neither will any further proposal be independently verified so there is no evidence that what one ONE or maybe TWO people say is true. This project has no constitutional legitimacy.
You are trying to get local residents to pay for your repairs. Crowd funding for your repairs.Its your property, your responsibility, your profit. Are you going to share your profits with the community ? No. I don’t think so. If we pay your bills then we want a stake in your property and your profits
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Hi Barry,
Firstly, we both agree that the cost of repairs carried out to shared areas of a tenement should be shared equally by the owners, The cost of repairs carried out within a flat is the responsibility of the owner. I SAID THIS IN MY REPLY!
Secondly, I have not met Mark. I don’t know where he lives but I do know we don’t share the same tenement. However, he has a good plan which proposes OWNERS set up a saving scheme, where OWNERS pay an agreed amount every month, to set up a war chest to deal with repairs to areas for which OWNERS have a shared responsibility. THAT’S ALL! It’s not a plan for world domination, it’s just an idea to make life easier when OWNERS have to pay for maintenance and repairs to the SHARED AREAS of a tenement which is now reaching the end of its life. He suggests OWNERS in separate tenements get together and set up separate schemes to do this and for, POSSIBLY, all tenements to eventually link up in the future.
Next, you assert that I am attempting to force other tenants and other owners to pay for the repairs on my own property. Nothing could be further from the truth Barry. I have already competed my repairs in full, payed for out of my own pocket, thank you very much. I resent your allegations.
What is your real agenda in opposing this scheme Barry?
Hugo
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