Who could disagree with the Crisis Scotland charity that the deaths of 40 homeless people in a relatively prosperous city like Edinburgh in 2024 was “completely unacceptable”?

There is no question that homelessness is “traumatic,” as Crisis Scotland’s policy chief Maeve McGoldrick put it this week, but it’s not proven that homelessness was the cause of the fatalities. It’s more probable that underlying causes like drug and alcohol addiction will have contributed to both homelessness and an untimely death.

That is not to say the continued inability of local and national authorities to take meaningful action to tackle the underlying causes of the housing shortage shouldn’t be challenged. “A laser focus on ending all forms of homelessness is needed to drive down these numbers," said Ms McGoldrick, and she’s not wrong, if at the very least it means the lack of a permanent address can’t be used as cover for the Scottish Government’s equally shocking inability to slash the number of early deaths directly attributable to drug and alcohol abuse.

For years, new affordable house construction has run at around half the rate necessary to meet demand, and new schemes take years just to get through planning, as developers of the proposed transformation of the currently dreary Cameron Toll shopping centre are well aware.

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They hope to deliver up to 500 new family homes, up to 175 of them affordable, and last week over 400 people attended a consultation event to see the latest details. The plan is to retain the Sainsbury’s supermarket at the heart of the current glass-enclosed mall, with the flats built above and around a new shopping street to replace the current arcade, plus a new transport hub in the unlikely eventuality that the South Sub train line is reopened to passengers and the tram service to the Royal Infirmary is built.

Even without trains or trams, the plan looks like a very welcome reimagining of an unloved corner of the city, and with the expected end of inexplicable council reluctance to approve new all-weather community sports facilities in nearby Inch Park, the district could be transformed.

With some understatement, insiders say there is a long way to go, even if an outline planning application is submitted on schedule this summer. Such is the scale of the proposals – one block is ten storeys high – objections are inevitable and it will be years before anyone can call it home. Maybe there will indeed be a tram service rumbling past by the time it’s built.

And when it comes to a hearing, the developers will need to bring their A-game if they are to persuade a majority of the council’s planning committee that a ten-floor block at this location, overlooking the Georgian Inch House, is acceptable against the alternative of fewer flats.

Similarly, it’s easy to see the promoters of a 155-unit apartment block at Granton’s Western Harbour being given a thorough grilling this Wednesday about loss of trees and biodiversity even though the site is on reclaimed land which 60 years ago was mostly water, and they will no doubt face extra costs to mitigate the removal.

The alternative to making pragmatic policy changes is waiting for demand to be depressed by the falling birth-rate – look at shrinking school roll projections and project them in 25 years’ time – but is anyone seriously going to argue for that? All the virtue-signalling sleep-outs by middle class do-gooders will make no difference to the housing supply unless decision makers wake up to the many barriers they erect in the way of fast delivery. If 2024’s toll is repeated every year, the number of people dying homeless will be well into the hundreds before schemes announced now become reality.

One factor slowing up the delivery of new homes is increased cost associated with requirements to meet high energy and insulation specifications, cut fuel consumption and, the theory goes, help save the planet.

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Into that category goes district heating systems, like the theoretically brilliant plan by Swedish state energy firm Vattenfall to warm Granton apartment blocks with heat generated from sewage pipes; announced with great fanfare and then dumped, as it were, as unviable.

A report to Edinburgh Council’s policy and sustainability committee this Tuesday reveals that supporters of heat networks, like the Edinburgh Communities Climate Action Network, can’t even agree what they should be for, yet expect them to be delivered as a priority.

“There are multiple, and in some cases conflicting, ambitions for what heat networks will achieve in Edinburgh,” says the report.

“For example, a desire for heat networks to drive decarbonisation versus a desire to ameliorate fuel poverty, or a desire for heat networks to generate surpluses for investments versus a desire for heat networks to run on a not-for-profit basis at the lowest cost to the consumer.”

The recommendation is to park the whole thing until their goals are agreed, in which case nothing will happen until, as someone once said, the rocks melt in the sun. And then district heating won’t be so much of an issue.

Meanwhile, the minutes of an all-party oversight group to look at Edinburgh Council’s climate emissions reduction plan – how the authority can cut the emissions from inefficient buildings like the City Chambers, and its vehicle fleet – reveals a development which will have conservationists like the Cockburn Association in such a spin they will be able to sell electricity to the grid.

“Work was ongoing,” it notes,” to explore whether there was scope within Edinburgh for onshore wind turbines through a landscape sensitivity assessment.”

Wind turbines in Edinburgh? One each on top of Calton Hill, Easter and Wester Craiglockhart Hills, Corstorphine Hill, Blackford Hill, and two on the Braids and Arthur’s Seat?

Well, it’s nothing rural communities aren’t facing, and the Scottish Government’s Energy Consents Unit are waving the applications through.

I can’t wait for Galileo, Boralex, Vattenfall, EDF or whoever to seek permission for an Edinburgh scheme. The community benefit offer will need to make the tourist tax look like coppers.

John McLellan is a former Edinburgh Evening News and Scotsman editor, now director of the Scottish news publishing trade association Newsbrands Scotland. He was a City of Edinburgh councillor for the Scottish Conservatives from 2017-22.

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