I work in affordable housing development as a consultant, mainly for housing associations, but also for private developers. I work on developments in Haringey and I know people who work in those departments at Haringey Council. I have read the lengthy S.106 Agreement for the NDP. Among other work, I write viability assessments for developers' planning applications, so I know exactly what they have to demonstrate to convince a local authority to let a developer off providing the usual quota of affordable housing. And I know what took place when the club and the council decided to work together after the financial crash and the riots.
What I wrote is what happened - that is precisely how THFC avoided providing affordable housing. They made the argument that the NDP was non-viable as a result of the financial crash and that they needed to boost the profits from the private housing to make it viable again.
Here's the underlying detail - the unedited version, if you prefer. With many developments at that time, prior to the crash, banks were throwing money at developers to build schemes that showed a 15% profit - often on heavily-massaged business plans, where the development really made a 12% profit, but the developer was relying on the inflation of property values between approval and completion to cover the difference. It's called "hope value" and it's a chronic problem in development and finance.
Suddenly, after the crash, lenders were freaked out: they were refusing to lend on anything that could not demonstrate a 25% profit margin (up to 30% for more "difficult" sites) and they were doing much harder scrutiny of the figures. Plus there was no "hope value" to rely upon, because the market had stopped rising and had even declined slightly.
On a scheme then valued at about £500m, the difference between a 12% profit and a 25% profit is £65m. That notional "money" had to be found from somewhere, or no one would undertake to fund the development and it would not proceed. That is why Levy & co. started to look seriously at the OS. Because they had no other viable option.
The riots provided a basis for Haringey to attract regeneration funding from the government and the Mayor, who had to be seen to be doing something. The regeneration scheme needed a large private sector development to base itself around, because there is never enough money under the Tories to regenerate an area based on subsidised housing and community initiatives - and the Spurs development was the only game in town. So Haringey and Spurs started talking to each other, instead of lobbing bricks at each other over the wall.
Haringey was alarmed at the prospect of the one major business attraction in the area leaving the borough. THFC needed to make the stadium development viable, especially after losing out on the OS bid. The compromise involved a lot of "planning gain" being dropped from the original proposal, the most notable and unfortunate being about 200 affordable housing flats.
That's what actually happened. So WTF are you on about?
Confused as to why you overreact, only to then flesh out, which would have been helpful in the first instance, and so prove my point.
Thanks for your 'personal interpretation' of numerous events, passed off as fact.
I duly ignored them.