Local need – or the developers’ greed?

AFTER returning from a recent walk on what used to be quiet countryside, which now borders the Goitre Fach building site on Llantrisant Road, I discovered from your website that the projected five-year growth in Cardiff’s population has been revised downwards from 40,000 to just 9,000.

So an awful lot of unnecessary houses are being built in Plasdwr (and elsewhere in the city).

Cardiff council leader Huw Thomas is not personally responsible, but his suggestion that this huge discrepancy could be due to “Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic” seems implausible.

More likely is that those responsible had looked at Cardiff ’s rapid population growth over the previous decade and simply extrapolated it into the future. Doh! Big mistake!

Incoming workers from other parts of the EU would have contributed to the previous growth. But more significant was probably the number of UK students coming here.

This was always likely to be shortlived, as the UK’s “higher” education sector contracts to a more realistic size.

And short-term residents with limited income don’t generally want “executive” properties in outer suburbia.

Planners should have worked on much more realistic assumptions about population growth and the location and type of housing needed.

Were some councillors too keen to believe their own hype about Cardiff being Europe’s “fastest-growing capital city”?

And were the canny developers able to play on this?

The Plasdwr developers will still get their profits, if only from long-distance M4 commuters and BBC types soon to be moved out of London.

But whether Plasdwr ever resolves the genuine housing needs of local people is another matter entirely. Ian Hughes Morganstown, Cardiff