Tag Archives: Bristol Housing Festival

HOUSING CZAR ABDICATES

The Reverend Rees’s highly regarded Cabinet Member for Housing has sensationally QUIT the council. Paul “Wolfie” Smith resigned from Rees’s cabinet on Tuesday and also QUIT as a councillor to take up a lucrative £90k (plus bonus) a year position as Chief Exec at Elim Housing Association. The resignation leaves the Reverend without a majority at Bristol City Council.

According to social media, Wolfie was a great champion of social housing and has had some success over the last few years getting homes built and tackling homelessness. However, over the last year some increasingly erratic policies have emerged from Wolfie’s housing department where Jez Sweetland, who runs the Bristol Housing Festival and happens to be a prominent member of the Reverend’s Church at the Hope Chapel, Howells has become increasingly influential.

Harebrained initiatives emerging from Sweetland have included a plan to build 173 IKEA chipboard homes on the verge of the A4174 Airport Road and another madcap idea to build ‘Hope Rise’. Tiny modular flats for young people over the car park at St George Park. This week the council even started a queue jumping ‘super tenancy’ opportunity for these properties, directly offering a shared council home to applicants in exchange for voluntary work with vulnerable young people. A plan that is unlikely to comply with law.

Wolfie’s department also announced their intention last month to create the slums of the future. They will house 200 homeless people and families in the shoddily converted Parkview office complex in Hartcliffe. Homes that do not meet national space standards. The owner of the flats, Caridon, are also one of the country’s most notorious slum landlords.

Has Wolfie thrown in the towel? Has he quit while he was ahead? But how ahead was he anyway? Despite all the promises of council housing from the Rees administration and Wolfie’s regular assurances that his projections to meet a manifesto promise of 2,500 homes, 500 affordable, a year were ‘on target’, the stats say something quite different. In March 2016, there were 27,402 council homes in Bristol. By March 2020 there were 26,833. A net reduction of 469 council homes.

Of course, Wolfie can’t be held to blame for the Tory ‘Right to Buy’ policy, which has led to this reduction in council homes. But he can be blamed for spending four years delivering half-arsed market solutions and supporting timid private sector responses to the city’s housing crisis. These solutions have simply failed to deliver and were never going to deliver the quantity of council homes required to turn around a housing crisis.

Wolfie can also be blamed for entertaining Sweetland and his weirdo ideas for the last few years. The evangelical nutter is now left free to dominate the show with his Victorian Christian charity message and fill the city up with his cheap shit housing for the poor and vulnerable.

Are we in more of a housing mess than when Wolfie started?

SOUTH BRISTOL: “YOU CAN’T HAVE GREEN SPACE”

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The Reverend Rees’s deranged efforts to build his way out of his carefully branded “HOUSING CRISIS” is hitting south Bristol and its open spaces very hard. Following last month’s unveiling of the Reverend’s IKEA/BOKLOKS housing solution, giving his loopey evangelical mate Jez “I’m no housing expert” Sweetland free rein to build 200 IKEA chipboard homes for the DESPERATE and the VULNERABLE on the narrow verge of a trunk road in Hengrove, comes news of another attempt to grab open space in south Bristol.

Filwood residents expressed their displeasure at Rees’s madcap “CHIPBOARD AND PRAYER” plans for the Airport Road at a cabinet meeting last month and community GROUP KNOWLE WEST FUTURE asked that the council, at least, reduce the number of homes planned for the small and narrow tree-filled site to 100. The group said, “A possible 400 people emanating from this site would be a significant addition to that area and if that is to happen other parts of community retail and infrastructure need to be improved.”

Meanwhile, less than a mile away at Broadbury Road in the heart of Knowle West, Curo Housing Association have unveiled plans for 47 homes on a small piece of COUNCIL-OWNED OPEN SPACE WITH A PLAYGROUND behind Broad Plain House. And the community are not impressed that their wildlife and rights of way are to be traded away by the council for concrete, traffic and overshadowing by large buildings.

Residents have also pointed out that the site is part of GARDEN CITY PLANNING PRINCIPLES and that the area was built to have green spaces. However, principles, planning or otherwise, are in short supply at Rees’s DUMBED DOWN FREE MARKET COUNCIL or at even dumber Curo. Instead Curo Communications Manager Valentina Warren gives the game away by gormlessly explaining the complex planning vision underpinning the Reverend’s “housing crisis”. “You can’t build new homes and have green space at the same time,” she’s announced.

So that’s south Bristol’s NEW ENVIRONMENTAL AND PLANNING STRATEGY sorted by Rees and his ragbag of religious looney mates, voluntary sector morons and second rate Counts Louse planning officials, then:

“No green space for you – losers.”

RELIGIOUS NUTTERS TO RUN BCC’S HOUSING PROJECTS

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The Mayor’s Christian crazed-cultic friends to run a new 200 home housing development in Bristol.

RELIGIOUS NUTTERS TO RUN BCC’S HOUSING PROJECTS (main)

Grave-sucking Bethel cult (see The BRISTOLIAN, 50) ‘apostle’ and Bristol Housing Festival director JEZ “I’m no housing expert” SWEETLAND has used his weirdo ‘fluence over Marvin Rees to SEIZE control of a projected housing development of 200 HOMES on Airport Road. Public funding will come from Homes England and the homes built by IKEA/Skansa, according to cabinet papers signed off by the Reverend Rees this evening. For providing land to the circling corporate and evangelist vultures, BCC gets ground rent.

30 per cent of these cheapo IKEA houses will go to Bristol’s vulnerable and needy at ‘affordable’ rates (no doubt including bonus ‘spiritual’ brainwashing by Marvin’s grave suckers), while the rest of the chipboard ‘innovative modular technology’ FLAT-PACK CRAP gets sold to wannabe home-owners who can’t afford anything better and are desperate enough to sign up and pay a mortgage on one.

The IKEA/Skansa house building vehicle is aptly named BOKLOK(s) and has been expanding into the UK’s cash strapped housing-for-low-earners construction market since 2007. A summary of what BoKloks ‘housing’ is all about is found in Australia’s ‘The Daily’ of June 28, where Dr Troy of New South Wales University says that focusing “on reducing construction costs … JUST REDUCES STANDARDS OF HOUSING FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO OTHER OPTIONS.”

As well as his efforts to warehouse the city’s poor in crap accommodation under the ‘Bristol Housing Festival’ brand, Sweetland also attended the MIPIM ‘property developer’ CARTEL JUNKET in Cannes with the Mayor in March. He’s also linked to a circle of local churches (New Hope in Hotwells, Woodlands in Cotham, and Christchurch in Clifton are three out of five or more) and a wider network of front businesses and ‘community’ organisations, especially active in the Stokes Croft area. These include Love Bristol, Release Academy, Happytat, Elementary Bakery and The Well Launderette. All are directly or indirectly connected to Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) in Redding, California .

BSSM, as The BRISTOLIAN has warned before, is a BONKERS US evangelical cult that seeks influence in high places across the world by placing its ‘advisors’ (such as Marvin’s RACHEL MOLANO – is she a BCC employee or not?) close to leaders it has BRAINWASHED. These include right-wing Australian PM SCOTT ‘Let Them All Drown’ MORRISON, and our very own Reverend Mayor.

Beyond their bizarre, creepy beliefs and practices, readers should be aware that the BSSM founders have expressed SUPPORT FOR TRUMP, EQUATED ABORTION WITH GENOCIDE, and rally behind the discredited ‘CONVERSION THERAPY’ FOR GAYS. BSSM also loudly assert that Bristol is their ‘SECOND CITY ON A HILL’. Their takeover of rust-belt Redding, California being their first CHRISTIAN GENTRIFIER COLONY.

The Reverend can have whatever personal beliefs he likes, but he cannot COMPROMISE HIS PARTY or ABUSE THE SECULAR AUTHORITY OF HIS OFFICE to advance his dodgy cult and its dubious agenda in our city.

The BRISTOLIAN SAYS… BOKLOKS TO THAT!

Hear Jez Sweetland for yourself (from 23 minutes he preaches the Bristol Housing Festival to his church and boasts about his Bristol City Council connections: http:// https://www.mixcloud.com/hopecommunitychurch-talks/jez-sweetlands-life-of-faith-and-bristol-housing-festival/

Cabinet report: http:// https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s41854/190923%20Airport%20Road%20Cabinet%20Paper%20FINAL.pdf

JET SET TROUGH JOY

CRATE EXPECTATIONS

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Bearing a large marketing budget and a tireless PR team, BRISTOL HOUSING FESTIVAL launches itself upon an unsuspecting city. “Bristol is a city of innovation and creativity. It is a city that is prepared to stand up and lead. It is a city that punches above its weight,” runs the insufferable PR bullshit.

But what does it all mean? A recent spate of articles in the local press gushing about “INNOVATION” and “CREATIVITY” in housing have highlighted such creative ideas as dumping the homeless in shipping containers; plonking cheap flats on top of multi-storey car parks for key workers and grabbing gardens in Knowle West for trailer-sized eco homes for god knows who?

And who’s behind this shameless five year MARKETING DRIVE to warehouse the city’s poor in cheap, crap accommodation? Please step forward Patrick “Shit” Shine, a “specialist in global fixed income and derivatives” who’s now an employee of London-based Tory thinktank, the SHAFTESBURY PARTNERSHIP.

According to its website, the Shaftesbury Partnership is a “SOCIAL BUSINESS” and a “practice of professionals committed to large scale 21st Century social reform”. While the Co-founder of the Shaftesbury Partnership is Nat “Wee” Wei, a former MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT for McKinsey, the notorious right wing management consultancy, turned venture capitalist.

And, if you still have any doubt about what Wei means by “21ST CENTURY SOCIAL REFORM“, in 2010 he was made a life peer and appointed Chief Adviser on the Big Society by David Cameron. This was after the Shaftesbury Partnership under the management of Wee Wei and Shit Shine set up the “Challenge Network”, which got a big share of CASH from David Cameron’s Big Society scheme, the National Citizens Service, to send children to summer camps at a cost of £1,182 PER CHILD.

Now these deep blue Tories have pitched up in Bristol to “innovate” and “create” in the ruins of our public housing services by shoving the poor in crates. And the first to applaud their efforts and climb aboard this MARKET SOLUTION bandwagon are none other than Labour bigwigs, the Reverend Rees and his housing sidekick, Paul “Wolfie” Smith.

“The festival will turn Bristol into a showcase of the latest innovation in housing building and financing,” The Reverend BREATHLESSLY ANNOUNCED from his tedious blog while Wolfie booked himself in with the Tory boys to deliver a KEYNOTE SPEECH to help kick off this festival of crap housing for the poor.

And guess who’s chief executive of this miserable little Tory bandwagon? Please step forward failed lawyer Jez Sweetland who admits “I’M NO HOUSING EXPERT“. He is, however, a regular at the Reverend’s church, The Hope Church in Hotwells.

How cosy.