| Comment | Most of the riverside west of Tradeston all the way out to Greenock is privately owned and in the hands of inheritor companies of the original port and dockyard owners. That's the basic reason for the lack of meaningful or joined up development.
It's an endless challenge for the city, and what little development has happened over the last few decades has happened either through lengthy negotiation between the city and the landowners, or more often than not, only because there's a financial prerogative for the landowners to act. For a long time they were content to landbank, to sit on the land and watch its value increase over time.
A change has happened though in that very recently it's become more financially viable and appealing to use city-centre adjacent gap sites for housing development and rental income streams, than to simply watch the land value increase over time. That's why we're seeing a boom in development along the river. The city's doing its bit to harness this new interest in development and coordinate it into some sort of coherent plan as best it can, creating a Strategic Development Framework for the River Corridor just a few years ago: https://www.glasgowconsult.co.uk/UploadedFiles/River%20Corridor%20Strategic%20Development%20Framework%20-%20Draft%20November%202018.pdf |
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