This is the best summary I could come up with:
The proposals have provoked questions about how soaring land values, offshore property ownership and weak national and local planning powers have deepened England’s housing crisis.
The Guardian revealed the mansions’ state in 2014 when it gained access to the properties and found crumbling swimming pools, collapsing ballrooms and ferns growing out of sweeping staircases.
Over the years, owners on the avenue have included the film star Gracie Fields, who lived on the site of The Towers, the former newspaper and pornography publisher Richard Desmond, a Nigerian oil billionaire and a Kazakh oligarch.
In one house there was a sheaf of invoices detailing a £7,314.54 order for kitchen equipment made in September 1992 including a “robot juicerator”, teak salad servers and a melon baller.
In the basement of the Towers, built around 1992 on the site of a mansion formerly owned by Fields, were unopened wooden crates marked “bulletproof glass” – an indication of the security fears of the previous owners.
Today, said Ross Houston, Barnet’s cabinet member for homes and regeneration, “transfer of ownership and the lack of a bringing forward sites is something that local authorities have limited power over”.
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