Inside the Southside’s most ambitious, most delayed housing project

“If you bought something from a shop and it wasn’t what you’d actually paid for, you’d take it back, right?” It’s a blustery day and David, a tall Gen Z-er with an open, friendly face, is showing me around the Victoria Infirmary housing development in Langside when he stops to make his point. He moved in here over two years ago, taking advantage of the Scottish Government’s New Supply Shared Equity scheme to buy his first home. The sales brochure had promised a beautifully designed complex of Victorian conversions and tasteful new-builds with landscaping and car parking to boot. In reality David’s home sits at the centre of an overgrown, pothole-riddled, partially inaccessible building site. 

His point, which he makes with a rhetorical, exasperated question: when should residents like him conclude that, far from an urban-living dream, they’ve actually been sold a pup?  

Next, I meet Nina, who also lives in the shared equity block. We’re sipping coffees in Queen’s Diner and have a clear view across Battlefield Road to the three so-called Nightingale blocks that are being converted into luxury homes. The imposing structures, replete with curved balconies and decorative cupolas, were originally earmarked for demolition but have been kept as a nod to the site’s former Victorian splendour. The flats inside are being marketed by Beech Grove Homes, the sales arm of site owner the Sanctuary Group, for between £335,000 to £555,000 and should have been finished in 2023. Yet today the balconies on two of the three buildings are encased in blue scaffolding and Nina can’t remember the last time she saw any work going on there.

“I don’t know how construction is supposed to work,” she admits, “but the pace seems insane, especially when you see other developments going up all over the city. Sometimes we see sudden progress, then it all stops.”

Nina knows too well the impact such delays can have. Like David, she was forced to wait 18 months longer than expected before getting the keys to her flat. The date was extended in dribs and drabs, making her existing housing situation difficult to manage. Finally, she moved back home to her parents’, her mortgage had to be rearranged, and she ended up paying more than she’d originally budgeted for. Yet she’s one of the lucky ones — others in the block had to rearrange their finance more than once and ended up paying a couple of hundred pounds more a month than expected. Nina, an articulate young professional, likes her flat, though, and will be happy when the diggers and cordons and all-night flashing building-site lights have gone. 

But Nina and David aren’t their real names. They are two residents in a block of 32 who have been badgering the builders for answers for years, so they don’t want to be seen as the public faces of their, their neighbours’, and wider Langside’s bubbling discontent. They want to know when they’ll stop living in a construction site with poor connections and petty grievances, and when they can start living the Southside dream they were promised.

But, with the building contractor working on the site facing financial difficulties, when exactly will that be?