Glasgow's Shame Games

A useful blog to follow that focusses upon the coming Commonwealth Games in Glasgow is the Glasgow Games Monitor 2014. It carries the story of Margaret Jaconelli and her fight for a fair deal rather than accept the risible £30,000 she has been offered for her two-bedroom tenement home.Yet Margaret Jaconelli states that an independent chartered surveyor valued her home (which she owns) at £95,000. A quick search on S1 homes shows that there isn’t a single property in the East End of Glasgow going for less than £72,950. This makes a valuation of £30,000 seem like a sick joke.Imagine if a Compulsory Purchase Order was placed on a homeowner in a wealthy suburb of the West End, and if instead of offering the full value of the house, the Council offered less than a third of that value; or shared ownership; or a Housing Association. There would be an outcry. Certain developers – such as Charles Price - who don’t even live in the area, have been compensated with millons of pounds profit. Mayfair property developer Charles Price and the City Council. Price bought a parcel of land in Dalmarnock for £8 million in the period 2002-2005. The land also lies on a site earmarked for the Commonwealth Games Village and is likewise deemed essential for the Games development. The City Council had it within their powers to perform a Compulsory Purchase Order on Price’s land, but instead negotiated with Price (a process denied to Margaret Jaconelli and the other shopkeepers) resulting in a fantastically generous £17 million sale of the land - with £3 million added VAT. A total cost of £20 million pounds . Price has argued that he didn’t know the site he bought would later be developed for the Games Village. This claim seems remarkably economical with the truth. In fact, Price’s PPD consortium was one of two bidders for the construction of the Games Village site, and it is hugely unlikely that a consortium of that scale including leading architectural firms, and real estate advisors wouldn’t know about such a significant development. More likely, they bought the land knowing that its monopoly value would increase enormously with the pressure of the Games.

“I’m just a wee person from the east end of Glasgow...They said well we’re just going to grass the site over. I said, listen, do not tell me that in the East End of Glasgow, near the city centre, that all this land is going to be grassed over. It all boils down to money. I know the way everything gets sold, the bricks, everything, the land will get sold"

Later, when Glasgow bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games, it became clear that the building, like many others around it, stood in the way of the Athlete’s Village. This development of approximately 38 hectares will be adjacent to the new National Indoor Sports Arena and cycling Velodrome. According to the brief to the consortia of companies bidding for the development rights for the Village, the site should ultimately contain around 1,200 homes. The significant majority of these will be sold in the open market after the Games.