Two council homes on Florence Road are nearing completion. The three storey homes are equipped with solar panels, spacious gardens and five bedrooms each. They will be affordable houses designed to home large families who may currently be in housing which isn’t big enough for them. The homes are replacing four garages which used to be on the land. While they were Haringey owned, the council found that the space was being underused and was much more useful as affordable housing. The garages were also situated in front of a large, nearly inaccessible, and therefore completely underused green space.
The decision to reuse the space was approved in October 2014, and was just one of 10,000 planned builds for the following decade, according to the council’s website. The housing built is just a part of the Haringey initiative to use council owned spaces more effectively in order to allow as many people as possible access to high-quality housing in the borough.
The new homes are an improvement to the community as a whole, with one resident of Florence Road saying: ‘I think these new houses are a much better way to use the scarce space of London for the housing that is so badly needed, especially for those that are working in central London’ The council is using underused, forgotten space to transform people’s lives and improve the borough as a whole. A site which used to be home only to four cars can now change the lives of two families who are able to live in high-quality housing.
Emma Aarts
St Mary Magdalene Academy
