Now this is all just based on what I think I know. Anything incorrect please feel free to amend.
The houses earmarked for the meadows were, I believe, meant to encourage high earners to move into the city. Anderson points out - rightly - that Liverpool has a severe shortage of upper tier council tax residents.
I suppose from Anderon's pov renovating existing housing for these kinds of residents means much more than just doing up big old houses. It means overhauling entire areas, from infrastructure to landscaping. Presumably this is beyond our means and is considered either impractical or uneconomical by any potential business partner.
Restoring local housing for local people is also difficult as so many people are unfortunately on benefit. There are huge swathes of depressed areas. Doing the areas up without addressing the underlying problems is literally just turd polishing.
That said, watching lovely old houses being knocked down and replaced with modern, identikit matchboxes is a sad sight to me. Yes there are limits to what you can do with old housing stock but I don't think the options have been fully explored. I'm guessing this is because developers have the council over a barrel to some degree when it comes to what gets built and where.
You're pretty much right as I see it. (Although it's also just moving higher earners who already live here into higher council tax bands and freeing up more housing stock at the lower end of the market.)
If you don't want to knock down buildings, and you don't want to build on empty land, your options are going to be very limited.
For developers, there doesn't seem to be as much profit in renovating old houses. It's a slow and expensive process, and the end result will never have the market value of new housing. The way we do even social housing now is usually that it is part of a larger development, and to make that happen, you need either serious public money, which isn't there, or a commercial partnership, which will want to maximise their profit. So new houses makes more sense than old ones.
As for the "lovely old houses" yes, some of them could potentially have a lot more life in them, but most simply were never built to last as long as they have in the first place. The "Welsh Streets" being a prime example, where residents actually voted to have the lot knocked down before some "helpful" types got involved to stop it and left the area utterly derelict for a decade, benefitting no-one. Now there is some work being done, but those houses still do not have basic foundations, and will probably still be prone to the problems that come with that, thanks to the short-thinking of the people who put them up in the first place.
Then there's areas like Anfield where speculators bought up houses on the cheap and left them empty, and the Housing Associations who took on a lot of the stock could do nothing with them. Again, you end up with "tinned up" empty housing, and after a few years of that, no matter what you do, it's going to cost more to put that right than if it had been done as people moved out. (Yes, LFC owned a handful of these. Not nearly as many as was often reported, though.)
And we all know the great crime of selling off the council houses and the council being prevented from reinvesting the money in new housing, which was insanity. So now we have a quite predictable crisis.
And then the Bedroom Tax came along, throwing a further spanner in the works, making one-bedroom properties, which have never been built in great numbers to begin with, the only thing available to large numbers of people on HB. Housing Associations now have three and four bed properties they can't fill and massive waiting lists for small numbers of converted one bed flats, so the "cost cutting" measure has actually meant a huge waste of perfectly good housing, and over demand for a type that may as well not exist.
It is, in short, an absolute shambles, and no Mayor could solve it. What is happening now, though, is quite a lot of new housing being built and a lot of that derelict stock finally being refurbished. There are still huge waiting lists for social housing, and private slum landlords are making fat profits from the taxpayer off inadequate housing that nobody can afford to move out of.
For me, part of the solution should be a rent cap, based on Council Tax bands and LHA rates. So, for example, you can't rent out a Band A property for more than the appropriate LHA rate, and Band B would be LHA+25% or something. (And to hush down the "investors" anything over Band D is fair game, charge what you like.) After all, if the government are happy enough to tell the "customers" what the maximum they can pay should be, then why should landlords get to charge two or three times as much for the most basic (again by official government policy) standards of property? Partner this with offers for HAs and local authorities to buy up affected rented housing at market rate.
That would remove some of the grubbier landlords and agencies from the picture, and strict regulation of the rest, with a much tougher licensing system, would at least mean that there is decent, affordable housing out there for more people.
Otherwise, I can see us going back to the high-rise route, but on a bigger scale.