ON SILVERDALE GARDENS, a cat is yawning in the torpid summer sunshine. This immaculate cul-de-sac of bungalows doesn’t feel like an economic and cultural battlefield. I’m in New Barnet, where Hertfordshire makes a thrust deep into the belly of historic Middlesex: it’s the liminal region mythologised by the writer Nick Papadimitriou as the “Scarp”, where the Thames basin rises to the chalk uplands to the north.
“So they’ll knock down my house?” asks one homeowner. As carefully as I can, I explain the concept behind Street Votes.
Street Votes is the flagship housing policy idea that has emerged from the right-leaning think tanks of SW1, and I have come to test the reaction first hand. The policy brainiacs argue that we’re in a housing crisis, and that high property prices and rents are a problem of supply. Their favoured solution to increase the number of homes, Street Votes, would allow residents to permit development on their street or block.
To illustrate how successful this could be, Street Votes advocates cite a street of 26 post-war bungalows that are 15 minutes-walk from both New Barnet rail and Cockfosters Tube stations, so here I am. But don’t worry, they’ll only knock down your house if enough of your neighbours vote for it.
Street Votes would allow residents to share in the “uplift” — a written by Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes. This was Street Votes’ debutant ball. Both authors be-long to what magazine called “a tight clique” of interlinking Tory-inclined wonks that has promoted Street Votes relentlessly. Its advocates are confident that block votes can bypass “Nimbyism”, or the grassroots local opposition to development.
