An article about the Circus Street development in Brighton entitled “£100m scheme is what city needs” (The Argus, March 22) is misleading. The proposal has more to do with greed than need.

There may be a need for student housing – there is certainly a need for private and social housing – but that does not mean that so many flats have to be crammed on to the Circus Street site.

The article mentions that the wholesale market will be renovated. This is inaccurate; it will be demolished (no objection to that) and replaced with 486 student flats facing the Milner Flats.

Think about the noise which will hit the residents of the Milner Flats when all these windows are open and many of the students are playing loud music.

The site will also include 142 private flats, meaning Circus Street will be developed at twice the density of the Hanover area.

A 14-storey block of start-up offices planned for Circus Street would be better located in the soon to be vacated old Amex building, freeing up more open space on the site.

According to the plans, the narrow courtyards between the blocks of flats will be almost continuously in shadow.

Many of the buildings are black, making the narrow courtyards even gloomier. Brighton is a sparkling city, not a sombre one.

Two tall buildings are planned for the site, which is not in an area designated for tall buildings. What is the point of the council devising policies which are then ignored by the council as the owner of the majority of the site? Will this lead to many more tall buildings in the Valley Gardens conservation area?

It is ironic that the two-storey buildings in the site were cleared away as slums in the 1930s as they were deemed to suffer from overcrowding, yet the present plans suffer from far greater overcrowding. They could be the new 21st-century slums.

Selma Montford, hon secretary, The Brighton Society