IT is going to cost more than £1million to blow up the three tower-block group of council flats at Queen's Park, Blackburn, that no-one wants to live in.
And that's on top of whatever the town still owes on the money it borrowed to build these high-rise dumps.
Add to that the cost to Joe Public of blasting away similar flats at Mill Hill last year and the bit-by-bit demolition of two of the Sixties tower blocks at Blackburn's Larkhill and you have a fair old bill for a housing disaster.
Much cheaper, of course, is the hindsight that tells us that this kind of social housing was a hugely expensive mistake. But was it?
For note that one of the Larkhill tower blocks is being preserved and refurbished as sheltered accommodation and that the high-rise complex at Daisyfield, also earmarked for oldies, is far from undesirable.
What this tells us is that, essentially, what was wrong was not so much the flats as the type of tenants.
In short, let them to decent, law-abiding old folk and tower blocks do not become such a liability that the only solution is writing them off and blowing them up. But let some of them to no-good scum who make the lives of decent folk a misery and drive them out and they go irredeemably downhill.
Let us not blame cheapskate Sixties architects, then, but housing managers.
Perhaps they would tell us why they cost the public such a packet for homes that were wrecked beyond redemption that they lasted barely a generation.
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