Jenny Kassman of Islington Homes For All group

• I AM replying to Peabody’s comment, published in the Tribune report (Social housing auction fury, June 30), about their auctioning of street properties in Islington.

Back in the late 1960s and 1970s Peabody, together with other housing associations, received large grants of public money from what was then the Housing Corporation, to buy street properties for conversion and letting at low rents as alternatives to council homes.

So apart from the prices of these properties during pre-gentrification Islington being extremely low, being subsidised by public money, Peabody was only required to pay a reduced percentage of their selling price.

Which begs the question whether Peabody should be selling off their street properties on the open market in the first place, while making vast profits on their initial outlays.

It may be fairer, in cases where Peabody wants to sell off their properties, that they should offer them to Islington Council, the maximum asking price – depending on their state of repair – being the percentage of their current selling price equivalent to the percentage of the price for which they bought them initially.

With 14,000 households (the number is growing) on Islington’s housing waiting list, I would argue that Peabody should not be selling a single property other than to the council.

Peabody commented that currently they are building over 500 homes for social rent. If the Holloway Prison site development serves as an example, the 415 social homes out of a total of 985 homes on the site (the rest being for sale or shared ownership) indicates that Peabody’s main priority is not to build homes for those in greatest need.

Moreover social tenants there will be placed mostly in the most unattractive locations on the site, overlooking main roads.

It would be interesting to see the proportions and locations of social homes compared with the other, more costly, tenures in Peabody’s other developments in the borough.

The days have long gone since housing associations existed to house those in greatest need.

JENNY KASSMAN
Islington Homes for All