State mandated auctions for high street shops: a good idea...?
Britain's high streets have been slowly dying over the past several years.
It's not just banks and pubs, which many would mourn the loss of, many larger retail chains are now bailing with the likes of Boots, M&S, and other chains closing branches across the nation.
One in seven high street shops now lies empty.
So how do we solve this...?
The last government's response was to relax planning rules to allow for developers to turn once-were-shops into flats. However this just lead to cheap shitty flats, which has made many high streets even bleaker.
But one of the final gasps of the Tory administration was to allow local authorities the freedoms to enforce rental auctions on high street properties that had been vacant for more than a certain amount of time
Owners of properties would be mandated to accept the most suitable bid for rental.
I can only see this as an upside, a sort of middle way.... owners get to keepn the properties but they are forced to do SOMETHING with it, and as far as I can see they can't lose, they either get nothing for letting the property sit empty or they get something for renting it out.
And it should increase the diversity of commercial offerings in our high streets...
Downsides...?
Well it's gonna piss off the corporates, but besides that this can only help with improving the vitality of Britain's high streets, surely...?!
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politics
It would be good to see more pop-ups and community workshops like a 3D print shop.
Oh I'd be totally on board with that, you can print anything these days!
I didn't realise the printers were so large - friends have one parked in their living room, it's the size of a washing machine. They haven't printed anything because the cartridges are so expensive.
A lot of town centres are looking pretty sad. Chains like Wilco, Debenhams etc have just gone and left big gaps. It's all vape shops, charity shops, second hand phones and nail bars now. Some of the retail parks seem to do okay, but you often have to drive there.
I miss Wilko, I'm still surprised the one in Hereford shut down, it was always busy, I guess it goes to show how much busier those out of town ones are, and how much it costs in relative terms to have to pay all that rent, compared to just warehousing!
Places like the pound shops and B&M seem to have filled that gap, but we need quality products to buy as well. We do like John Lewis, but have to drive a way to get to one. Where I work in Stevenage the town centre is pretty dire, but there are 'retail parks' with the big stores. My home town of Bedford used to have multiple department stores that have all gone. That leaves a hole.
depends who snaps up the property I guess, it could mean, more money laundering, drug supplying, turkish, bulgarian, albanian barber shops, chinese nail bars,east european "supermarkets" always good for bootleg fags. or charity shops. Which tbh we do not want to see.
So many independent traders are put off by high rates and a lack of diversity in towns, the hassle of the OCG thieves stealing from their stores as well as the smackhead alki chancers.
Fuck rob and ryan....welcome to Wrexham.
Thank the lord for the black market, otherwise we'd have another 20% of our high streets emptied out!
I went into one of those polish shops the other day, they just looked confused.
They do sell good beer!