Link: Developing [news] March 31, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Linkage, London, Planning, Regeneration.add a comment
For a blog with plenty to say (and I mean plenty – thirteen posts today! Haven’t they heard of the nap?) about planning, architecture and housing in London, see Developing [news], run by Hana Loftus of General Public Agency. I look forward to it reducing my already-slothlike posting rate – I was going to write a post about the new Environmental Audit Committee report, only to find that Hana’s covered it nicely already.
The market for parks? March 26, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, London.add a comment
In Friday’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins laments what he sees as this government’s contempt for city parks:
Ken Livingstone and Tessa Jowell see the royal parks as akin to New York’s Central Park, canyons of commercial opportunity amid towers of the new urbanism. They are the sort of civic leaders who would build a casino on Brighton beach and a conference centre on the white cliffs of Dover, because they simply cannot see why not.
It wasn’t always thus:
Each monarchical era donated a park to the capital. James I gave Hyde Park, Charles II St James’s Park, George IV much of Regent’s Park, and Queen Victoria Kensington Gardens (albeit for the “respectably clad” and no servants). Whenever a patch of open space became vacant, it was considered appropriate to add it to a park. When the Royal Botanical Society vacated Regent’s Park’s Inner Circle in 1932, Queen Mary donated the land to the public as a rose garden …
They do not make these places any more. Parks are pearls beyond price.
But if parks are so valuable, why don’t they make them any more? People certainly do value city parks – to the tune of £11 million per hectare if the figures in Table 2.1 of the Barker Report are to be believed. But even this probably can’t compete with the returns from residential development in the more valuable areas, so we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of market-provided parks in central London (although maybe there could be a market for the parking-space delivery model).
So why doesn’t the public sector provide new parks? One problem is that of competing uses – land is scarce, and inner cities that lack parks tend to lack housing too. My borough, Islington, probably has the least green space of any part of London except the Square Mile, and in Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan was earmarked for an extra 800 acres of green space – a fifth of the London total. It never happened, presumably because there was always someone who wanted to build houses instead, and always someone who needed to live there.
Another problem is deciding who should be taxed to pay for it – do just the residents of Westminster benefit from Hyde Park, or should we also look from contributions from everyone in London and even the other regions? Finally, there’s always the bottom line: it’s not just the opportunity costs that are high, but capital costs and maintenance are all expensive. Councils, particularly those in inner London, probably just don’t have the money to splash out on new city parks.
That means we have to make the most of the limited green space we have now. Like Simon Jenkins, I don’t believe that should mean fencing off a huge chunk of Hyde Park for a months-long Star Trek jamboree.
Tear down the high rises? March 22, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Communities, Design, Europe, Housing markets, International, Regeneration.add a comment
In an oldie but goldie post over at the AHI blog, David Smith argues that “High-rise public housing never works. Never has worked, never will work”.
Overall he makes a very convincing case, and mostly I agree – high-rise housing filled with poor people has been a disaster here in the UK as much as in America or France. How much of this was down to the physical form of the buildings? Just about all of it, says David, though I think the examples he cites demonstrate that the kind of inhabitants matter too. Maybe high-rise blocks wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t populated with high proportions of bored, workless young men, for example. Here in London, some local authorities have moved the families out of their towers, refurbished them and converted them to 100% sheltered housing for the elderly, for example, so there may be some use for some of these buildings after all. As for the rest, I agree with David – tear ‘em down.
The post raises another issue for me. David quotes this passage from Christopher Caldwell in the NY Times Magazine:
If you don’t vary the housing units in a given neighborhood – if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths – you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.
Again, I agree. But doesn’t this apply to the private sector too? Here in London, most new private supply consists of one or two bed flats in high-density developments. There’s plenty of demand for them (for now) and no doubt they do the job for their inhabitants for a few years, but you can’t raise a family in them. So should planning authorities do more to guide the market towards producing fewer, larger homes to keep families in the inner city? Won’t this just drive up prices for everyone? And can we really have ‘mixed communities’ if the only family housing in inner cities is for poor families? I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but I think we need to be asking them.
Determining design March 20, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Housing markets, Regeneration.add a comment
Here in the UK an increasing proportion of new affordable housing is provided on sites comprising mostly market-price housing, through what are known as ‘Section 106′ agreements. In exchange for planning permission to build new homes for sale, the developer agrees to provide a proportion free to a housing association for letting to those in housing need. In high-cost areas such as London, these ‘S106′ units tend to be part-funded by government grant, which makes it difficult to identify how much extra housing S106 is really contributing. But since units provided on S106 sites (as opposed to those built entirely by housing associations) now account for more than half all affordable housing output, they are certainly contributing to the mixing of tenures the government wants to see.
Concerns have been raised as to whether affordable homes built by private developers and handed over as part of S106 agreements are as high quality as those build directly by housing associations. These concerns receive some support in some interesting research recently published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and written by Jon Watson. He finds that S106 units are generally smaller than those built by housing associations, and usually fail to meet the space standards set out in the ‘Scheme Development Standards’, which are mandatory for homes built by associations but not those provided by private developers.
Watson suggests that private developers can get away with this by playing off housing associations against one another – if one baulks at taking on sub-standard housing, you can always find another that won’t be so squeamish. He worries that this is storing up problems for the future:
If it is accepted that SDS sets standards which aim to support long-term sustainability of dwellings, such as tenant requirements, tenant running costs, RSL maintenance costs and letability, then this could have significant, long-term implications in these areas.
This reflects a perennial problem in housing supply – those who build and sell homes in the short term are generally not those who will have to live in or manage them in the long term. This inherent mis-match probably explains a good deal of the shoddy product turned out by councils, housing associations and private developers today and in the past. In fact, the standards of design on regeneration projects, where the incumbent residents are closely involved in deciding how their environment will look, tend to be higher than those on new-build schemes. Since badly-designed new affordable housing has clearly contributed to serious deprivation and exclusion in the past, shouldn’t we be looking for ways to involve future residents – those on waiting lists, for example – in the design of new housing?
Housing research online March 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housing in general.add a comment
There is quite a lot of high-quality academic research in and around the subject of housing available for free online if you know where to look. Here are a few good places to start:
- Papers from the 2005 conference of the European Network for Housing Research
- And from the 2004 ENHR conference
- Abstracts and papers from the 2004 International Housing Conference
- Research papers from the Centre for Neighbourhood Research
- Detailed handouts for a course in Housing Economics and Finance at the London School of Economics
I think that’s plenty to be getting on with for now.
“Concreting over the countryside” March 16, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, NIMBYs, Party politics, Planning.add a comment
From a news story in yesterday’s The Daily Telegraph:
Five million new homes will be needed in England over the next 20 years, 1.5 million of them because of record levels of immigration, according to Government figures published yesterday.
From the accompanying editorial:
The basis of this claim is questionable.
Indeed it is. From the government press release announcing the new figures:
The household projections are not an assessment of housing need.
The basis of the claim in the Telegraph is questionable mostly because the Telegraph has invented it. The government figures released are projections of future household growth if current demographic trends continue. They are unconstrained by the availability of housing.
But as both the government and the Telegraph are well aware, housing is extremely expensive at the moment, and likely to remain so for some time. So whereas one person households account for 150,000 of the 209,000 projected annual household growth, in reality many of these single people will not form households of their own, but will stay at home or share with other single people. Alternatively, they’ll all go live in tiny flats in London, sparing the Telegraph’s beloved South East from the depradations of Mr Prescott’s bulldozers.
But even if that doesn’t happen and every single new household requires a new home, every single one of which must be built on new land – how much land would be used up? Handily, Charles Clover of the Telegraph has the calculation to hand:
If translated into new homes built, this would mean the loss of more than 368 square miles of countryside … in 20 years. That is a rate of urbanisation of 16 square miles a year.
The total area of England is over 50,000 square miles. I would have thought that a government that allegedly wants to ‘concrete over the countryside‘ can do better than less than 1% of the land area in 20 years.
Not-very insular living in ancient Rome March 14, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Europe, History of housing.add a comment
Here’s the perenially excellent AHI blog on the world’s first apartment buildings – the
insulae of ancient Rome, the only solution to a city of a million people on a site of little over 400 hectares:
Built of brick, probably unplastered and little ornamented, they were entered from exterior stairs that led up, over a ground floor of shops, to corridors off which opened single rooms that were numbered. Each room had its own window of mica or selenite, translucent enough to remind you morning had arrived. Some rooms had small balconies for taking the evening air (and disposing of garbage and night soil) …
the insula became the standard form of Roman middle-class as well as working-class housing; and not merely in Rome, for there are numerous examples in Ostia and Pompeii. It combined shops and workshops on the ground floor, flats on the floors above, thus achieving mixed uses in every block: a form that can be found in Italian and larger French cities to this day.
One in fifty households in London is homeless March 13, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Homelessness, London.add a comment
According to the latest government figures, 19.7 out of every 1000 households in London are homeless. That’s 63,800 householsd, or one in fifty.
Does it seem like a lot? Remember these are not rough sleepers but people put up in temporary accommodation by local authorities who are (according to the official definition) “unintentionally homeless and in priority need” (which means the figure leaves out those who are unintentionally homeless but not in priority need and those judged to be intentionally homeless).
Mostly this ‘TA’ is leased from the private sector, often at very high rates. This has a serious impact in terms of worklessness:
Rents averaging £300 per week, reaching up to £450 per week in some cases, mean people living in private sector leased temporary accommodation are often totally reliant on housing and other benefits. The way housing benefit tapers off as income rises means that every pound earned can yield as little as 10 pence in real income … Greater London Authority (GLA) research estimates a homeless household with three children living in temporary accommodation leased from the private sector must earn £960 per week before they are ‘significantly’ better off in work.
and other costs to the families themselves, and by extension to the public purse:
The report estimates that temporary housing is costing the taxpayer over £500 million every year, including:
· £300 million on higher rents and additional housing benefit costs
· £90 million on additional take up of out-of-work benefits (income support)
· £50 million on out-of-school provision for children
· £30 million on additional take up of sickness benefits (incapacity benefit)
· £10 million on additional visits to the GP due to health problems
This all seems to come back to the shortage of permanent affordable housing for the homeless to move into. Building (or buying) more social housing would probably save money in the long run, as the government seems to have acknowledged (see under ‘Temporary v Permanent?’ here), but it seems concerned about the upfront expenditure, which would have to be funded by borrowing.
Regeneration the Brazilian way March 9, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, International, London, Regeneration.add a comment
Today the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, visited with Deputy PM John Prescott a regeneration scheme in London’s East End “to share ideas on regenerating deprived areas”. I wonder who learnt more? The West Ham and Plaistow project is a New Deal for Communities scheme, set up by Labour to bring together local services, funding streams and, most importantly, communities themselves to try and address the multitudinous problems of the most deprived areas in the country. NDCs seem to have had broadly positive results so far, though probably not as positive as Labour had hoped.
Maybe we in the UK can learn from what they’re doing in Brazil. For example, there’s this World Bank report on “Integrated urban ugrading for the poor : the experience of Ribeira Azul, Brazil”. Among the key findings are the importance of “clear roles and responsibilities in institutional arrangements [and] the need for strong local government participation”, factors which have historically been similarly crucial but too often lacking in regeneration efforts here.
Better homes, greener cities? March 2, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, Planning.add a comment
In Better Homes, Greener Cities, Alan Evans and Oliver Marc Hartwich say “Our cities are becoming grey deserts”. They know this because:
Nearly half the UK’s playing fields have disappeared in the last fifteen years. Front gardens 22 times the size of Hyde Park have been lost in London alone.
This is not all that convincing. The first claim comes from the National Playing Fields Association, who compared a count of playing fields in 2005 (44,000) with a count in 1992 (77,949) and seem to have simply assumed that there were no differences in methodology. The second claim comes from the London Assembly, who in their report Crazy Paving hyped up the rather unsurprising finding that two-thirds of London’s front gardens “at least partially covered by surfacing other than vegetation” – like a driveway. Lastly, Evans and Hartwich are unlucky to have published their apocalyptic conclusions justa few days before the National Audit Office released a new study finding that
The decline in the quality of urban green space has been halted in most areas and there are signs of recovery in many places. Both those who manage and those who use urban green space agree. In 2000, managers in less than 44 per cent of urban local authorities believed the quality of their green space was stable or improving. This figure has increased to 84 per cent in 2005. And urban residents’ satisfaction with green space increased by eight per cent between 2000 and 2003.
These slightly sloppy claims aside, there is much to agree with in Better Homes, Greener Cities. It’s true that urban green space is much more worthy of protection than most of the ‘Green Belt’, some of which should be built on and some of which converted to genuinely high quality environmental amenity (which could simply mean letting it grow wild). It’s also true that local government finance is so centralised that councils have little incentive to support new development.
But some of their recommendations also seem a little contradictory: “The planning system should be localised, putting communities in charge of their own development”, but “Local authorities would be set minimum building targets by central government and would lose revenue if they failed to build up to the minimum” (which, considering that local authorities don’t actually build their own housing, pay for most infrastructure, or control the rate at which construction is started or completed, seems a tad unfair). As ever, the problem with giving more power to the local level is that they might use it to do something you don’t want them to.
