Residents of a small Selwyn community say they will keep fighting to save their homes after being told they must vacate them by 2039.
The district council last month voted to confirm the eviction of the entire Upper Selwyn Huts settlement on the shores of Lake Ellesmere because of the impact of climate change.
That looks like it’s about a nearby settlement (Selwyn Hutts) that is being kicked out next year. This article is about Upper Selwyn Hutts, a separate settlement. They probably thought they were safe, though surely they would be starting to get the hint.
Weird though that your article has people say they poured all their money into it, but also say their family has owned the hut for 100 years. Maybe I’m misunderstanding their point.
But realistically, it seems crazy to pour all your money into a house that only gets it’s lease extended for 5 years at a time! I guess the lesson is that cheap houses are cheap for a reason.
Situations where you don’t own the land under your home are always a bit messy, in my view.
Yeah, though I think typically leasehold is on long terms (like 100 years). If you build a house at the start of that 100 years you get your money’s worth. But if the 100 years is ending in 5 or 10 years, you’d be pretty careful about what you spent on the place.
The major problem with lease hold, is that picking up a house and moving it to a new lease is extremely difficult and expensive or just impossible. Unless your house is a transportable by design.
So when the lease holder decides to increase the cost of the lease (usually by a lot), you are effectively trapped.
Contrast that with leasing a building for a business, if the lease holder decides to increase you lease, you can just move your business…it may be difficult and expensive but it is never impossible.
Oh, sorry, my bad, didn’t notice the two names. These are the ones who are out in June?
I am so confused by this hut system. It just doesn’t seem like a good idea.
It sounds like there may be 4 settlements with similar names in the same area!
The hut system is definitely not a good idea by modern standards, but it’s 100 years old and runs on a similar system to other leasehold land. I even got the impression that perhaps the 5 year renewal cycle is reasonably new. Perhaps it started as 100 year then when it came up for renewal the council switched to 5 yearly while they worked out what to do.
Yeah it would have been fine back in the day, when there was housing for everyone.