IT was one of those pivotal moments. Tony Blair's old flatmate Charlie Falconer (Lord Falconer of Thoroton to me) came to Burnley and found he could buy up a street full of houses in Burnley Wood and still have change from a decent brief.

And so we heard about the newly discovered phenomenon of "housing market collapse", to be solved by a new process called Housing Market Renewal.

We got an archipelago of new quango type bodies, including the East Lancashire Housing Market Renewal Partnership which decided to call itself Elevate.

At first John Prescott took charge through his Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, though it's now gone to the more sensibly named Department of Communities and Local Government under Ruth Kelly.

Loose talk by Prescott led to press stories about knocking down very large numbers of terraced houses in the north of England - anything from 200,000 to 400,000.

It's now very clear that this scale of demolition is not going to happen. So what is it now about?

One thing is remarkable - the prices of terraced houses in East Lancashire have leapt up in the three years since Elevate set up shop.

I was talking to people over the weekend in streets in the South Valley of Colne where the sale prices of houses have gone up by two and three times.

These are streets with a very long tradition of cheap owner-occupation.

But a lot of the recent price rises are due to pressure from speculative private landlords - the buy-to-let market that has boomed in recent years.

House prices have gone up and housing market collapse no longer exists.

But these landlords often don't live round here.

They may (or may not) let and manage the houses through local agents - and some of those do it reasonably well and some don't.

Some local first-time buyers can't afford these houses any more and they may have problems with mortgages.

So the proportion of privately rented houses in these streets is increasing.

As residents and neighbours, many tenants are as good as anyone else.

But some are not and it only takes one or two "neighbours from hell" to wreck a house and ruin a street.

So the conundrum is this: the value of the properties goes up and the quality of life in some streets goes down.

Has anyone got any quick answers? I haven't.