Nimbys or regeneration? Its not chips or daddy…
Howard Lake | 3 March 2008 | Blogs
I read in Charity News Alert with dismay that “Crisis has dropped plans to build a £60m urban village for former homeless people in East London after lawyers advised that an appeal against an earlier planning rejection was unlikely to be successful.”
This was a brilliant regeneration project that would have benefited so many people and helped to revive a neighborhood, brought to and end by short-sighted counselors afraid of their voters. Leaving the decision to an appeal, and so placing the real decision out of their own hands, is not so clever when the appeal fails to materialize or eats into scarce charity funds.
I thought this capital appeal would be hard enough without such an expensive struggle taking place. It is increasingly difficult to utilize brown-field sites for rebuilding and conversion projects. So, fundraisers are well advised to include the likelihood of protest in their feasibility studies, however well thought through the project.
So, Mildmay Mission Hospital and Crisis underestimated the NIMBY factor, and now the NIMBYS’ neighbours will not receive “a new hospital, church, primary healthcare centre and over 370 affordable homes”. Its neither chips nor daddy for some people.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.