Planning Permission Granted for Mixed-Use Block; Community Response Demonstrates Complexity of Housing Debate

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

Hackney Council has approved a mixed-use development on the site of a former industrial yard near Dalston that will include 340 flats, 35 percent of which will be “affordable” at the London Plan definition of affordable, which is up to 80 percent of market rent, which in Hackney means affordable in the technical sense and not affordable in the sense that most people would understand the word to mean. The development has been opposed by some local residents, supported by others, analysed extensively in the Hackney Gazette, and approved by the planning committee after a three-hour meeting that I attended because I find these meetings more interesting than most television.

The Meeting

Planning committee meetings are where London’s housing politics becomes real rather than rhetorical. The people who oppose development present their concerns: increased traffic, overlooking, loss of light, character of the area, the specific visual impact of the proposed building on the surrounding streetscape. The people who support development present their concerns: the housing crisis, the waiting list for social housing that is currently at twelve years in Hackney, the economic activity that construction generates, the commercial units that will produce local employment. The planning officers present their assessment, which is usually in favour of approval provided certain conditions are met, and the committee votes.

The meeting I attended produced a 6-3 vote in favour, with the three dissenting members citing concerns about affordable housing provision that are genuine rather than performative. Thirty-five percent at 80 percent of market rent is the policy floor, not the aspiration. Several councillors have been arguing for years that Hackney should require higher affordable proportions and that the market will deliver them if pushed, and several developers have been arguing for years that it won’t, and the truth is somewhere in the middle of a financial viability calculation that both sides have a stake in getting right and different incentives about how to present.

The Fundamental Tension

The fundamental tension in London’s planning debates is between people who live here now and want the city to remain as it is, and people who need to live here and cannot because the city as it is does not have enough housing for them. Both groups have legitimate claims. The planning system’s job is to balance them, which it does imperfectly and procedurally, in three-hour meetings where the outcome matters enormously to the people in the room and is barely noticed by the city around it.

For London planning and development news, see Evening Standard. For Hackney and East London community coverage, visit MyLondon. For London political and council news, see Metro London.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London with the directness of someone who has watched the city change around her and formed views about whether the changes are improvements. London in 2026 remains simultaneously extraordinary and exhausting, beautiful and unaffordable, among the world’s great cities and among its most difficult to live in without inherited wealth or an income in the top decile. She covers it because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban life, economic inequality, culture, and community in the twenty-first century is worth telling with honesty and occasional outrage. She does not claim to be neutral. She claims to be accurate, which is harder and more useful.

I started writing about North London because I lived here and nobody was writing about it the way I wanted to read about it: honestly, with affection and criticism in equal measure, without the twee village-in-the-city framing that lifestyle journalism uses and without the class anxiety that serious journalism uses when it notices that people are paying extortionate rents to live somewhere that has a good bus service and a Waitrose. North London is a place where people actually live, and living somewhere is more complicated than either of those framings captures. I write the complication. Lowri Griffiths, bigsmokebrokecom.

The North London I cover is not the North London of property supplements, which features period features and excellent school catchment areas and the phrase ‘up and coming’ applied to every street within cycling distance of a farmers market. It is the North London of the 141 bus, the Haringey housing waiting list, the Turkish social clubs on Green Lanes, the Hackney planning meetings, the Tottenham High Road, and the Overground trains that are reliable enough to build a commute around. It is a place, not a postcode lifestyle category, and I am stubborn about covering it as a place.

What London journalism owes its readers is the same thing all journalism owes its readers: accuracy about what is actually happening, context for why it is happening, and the honesty to say when something is going wrong rather than finding the positive angle that makes the story easier to read and less useful. North London is going through changes that are making it both better in some ways and less affordable, less accessible, and less diverse in others, and both things are happening simultaneously and deserve simultaneous coverage. I am trying to provide that coverage, one piece at a time, from the perspective of someone who lives here, pays rent here, takes the bus here, and wants the place to be better than it is.