Are apartments relics of a bygone era?

Who’d have thought that the high-rise city living apartments that shot up all over Nottingham city centre would ever become relics of a bygone era?
Yet the paralysis in world financial markets means that’s exactly what they seem to have become, even though some of them are only a few months old.
I was talking to an experienced developer earlier this week, someone who knows the city well, and asked what he thought about these schemes.
His verdict was blunt: “The apartment development model is in the bin.”
Unfortunately, the collapse of the market for new flat developments could well have dragged something bigger down with it: Nottingham’s plans for large-scale regeneration.
Why? Well, the theory behind a lot of these schemes was that if developers could make a load of money by building residential developments, there’d be enough funding sloshing around to take a punt on some offices, shops and restaurants too.
With house prices still rising and the economy steaming ahead, that was fine in theory. But the practice post-property crash and post-credit crunch was summed up by the same developer thus: “A big driver of these schemes is in ashes. If you haven’t got thousands of dwellings in your scheme then you are struggling to find the economic under-pinning.”
The end result is that Waterside, a scheme that hoped to bring forward a new, family-oriented community next to the Trent at Colwick, lies becalmed.
Eastside, the £900m masterplan for the redevelopment and regeneration of the hinterland between the Lace Market and Sneinton, may see a speculative office development but the large-scale residential schemes that appeared on dramatic artist’s impressions are unlikely to move off the drawing board.
Only Southside, the scheme centred around Nottingham Railway Station, now looks like it can keep some momentum. That’s because it has a publicly-funded transport interchange at its heart, one for which there is demonstrably a need.
Nottingham won’t be alone in learning lessons from this. Major cities across the country are dotted with high-rise apartment buildings that no longer make commercial sense (indeed, the specialist property press is full of adverts from liquidators trying to sell them out of the wreckage of failed development companies).
May be those some of those high-rise buildings should have been offices rather than apartments. There has been pent-up demand for office space among both businesses already based in Nottingham and businesses and organisations that could move here.
With large-scale lending currently at a crawl, it is touch and go as to whether we can meet that demand. But that is where the best hope for development currently lies.
For now, the glossy regeneration masterplans borne out of a housing-led boom will have to sit in the pending tray.
It would be a mistake to forget them, though. The best businesses are those who draw up their plans for expansion while the economy is still contracting. Those plans may need to change. But Nottingham doesn’t need to be a city of relics.