Quick links 30/05/06 May 30, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, Housing economics, Housing inequality, Links, London, Planning.add a comment
Not one but two Guardian opinion pieces related to housing today:
- Philip Pullman: The Castle Mill Boatyard will be wiped out and “developed” into a cluster of identikit houses by British Waterways and their developers. This plan isn’t only ugly: it’s daft.
- George Monbiot:Housing inspectors could make a huge impact on climate change – by enforcing the laws on energy efficiency.
Monbiot is scathing about the government’s new, voluntary “code for sustainable homes”, so I wonder what he thinks of this:
Climate change is top priority of London Plan review
Mayor of London Ken Livingstone announced that his London Plan Review will set radical new objectives for planners and developers that will require new developments to connect to “decentralised” local energy supplies and achieve the highest standards of sustainable building design. The Review also doubles the carbon emission reductions that developments must achieve through onsite renewable energy from 10% to 20%.The London Plan Review also proposes to set carbon dioxide reduction targets – a 20 per cent reduction by 2015 and a long-term target of a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. This is the first time that statutory carbon reduction targets have been set for London.
The Mayor is proposing a series of new development, transport and energy policies all with the aim of making London an exemplary and sustainable world city, adapting to inevitable climate change and reducing future carbon emissions.
Looking at the detail of these policies in the text of the Mayor’s Further Alterations to the London Plan, it seems to be a similar story of lots of encouragement, ’should’-ing and good practice, but without real powers of enforcement. The new London Plan should give a boost to sustainable construction in the capital, but we’ll have to see whether it is ultimately too little, too late.
Last link today is to Housing wealth – First timers to old timers from the IPPR. Exec summary is here, key points are as follows:
combating the wealth inequalities produced by the growth in home ownership cannot be achieved with subsidies to help people onto the housing ladder. Nor can homeownership alone deliver the benefits associated with mixed communities, such as improved educational outcomes and increased levels of community participation. Rather than providing large subsidies, the government should support people at either end of the lifecycle with policies that encourage ownership of a wider range of assets.
Housing conditions and educational attainment May 29, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Housing need, Overcrowding.add a comment
In “A Room With a View or a Room of One’s Own? Housing and Social Stratification“, Dalton Conley (an ‘academic superstar’, according to the Guardian) reports some interesting findings on the relationship between family background, household conditions and educational attainment.
Echoing similar research carried out in France, he finds that “children who lived in crowded conditions … completed almost a quarter year less schooling than those who lived in more spacious conditions”, that home ownership also boosts attainment independently of family background and concludes that “housing plays an intermediary role in the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next”.
The issue of overcrowding raises interesting questions about ‘absolute’ versus ‘relative’ effects similar to controversies over absolute versus relative poverty. It’s easy to see why crowded accommodation might have direct impacts upon children’s attainment independent of conditions outside the home – Conley cites evidence for higher morbidity, less privacy and less ‘consructive interaction’ between parents and children in crowded homes. But are there relative effects too? Parents and teachers of overcrowded children often describe them as reluctant to bring friends round because of shame over conditions at home, and if they do attach a stigma to their home life they may be more reluctant to spend time there, perhaps increasing their exposure to negative influences outside the home. This is all hard to measure, of course, and if I had to say I’d guess the ‘absolute’ effect dominates, but the fact that we are still picking up clear effects caused by overcrowding measured as over 1 persons per room, even thoguh that was probably considered relatively salubrious in early 20th century London, suggests that relative effects are also important.
Two other findings of Conley’s are interesting, but perhaps more so in the American context of black-white housing segregation. Firstly,
even when a 5-year income measure, education and other demographic characteristics are held constant, blacks and female heads [i.e. lone mothers] suffer from worse housing outcomes
but
when socioeconomic and housing conditions are held constant, Africa-Americans actually demonstrate an educational advantage over their non-black counterparts of almost four-tenths of a grade.
The message is clear – if you want to close the education gap between black and white, you have to close not just the gap in incomes but the one in housing conditions too.
Deluded of Tunbridge Wells May 29, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, Factoids, Homelessness, Media, NIMBYs, Party politics, Planning.2 comments
Greg Clark, Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, has a shocking tale to relate (via obliging Times journalist Rosemary Bennett):
Up to 20,000 new homes each year that ministers claim are going up on brownfield sites are actually being built in back gardens, figures show.
That “up to”, friend to alarmists everywhere, sets alarm bells ringing, as does the implication that unsuspecting homeowners are waking up to find that sneaky developers have dumped a block of flats on their geraniums. So let’s do what Rosemary Bennett didn’t and give this factoid more than a moment’s reflection.
Her article goes on:
“Garden grabbing” now accounts for 15 per cent of all new housing as family homes in towns and suburbs are pulled down by developers and replaced with flats.
The Conservatives, who obtained the figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government, said that the public was being “deceived”.
Greg Clark, Tory MP for Tunbridge Wells, said: “Most people assume that when the Government talks about building on brownfield sites it means ex-industrial land, like disused factories and railway sidings. They have no idea that much of it is actually beautiful, green, environmentally important gardens.”
That first line really is a peach. What Clark and Bennett call “Garden grabbing” actually covers any and all construction of new dwellings on previously residential land – including the land occupied not by gardens but by the buildings themselves. So if, for example, someone pulled down a block of flats without gardens and replaced them with semi-detached homes with gardens, Clark would call that “garden grabbing”. The logical extension of the argument is for all current residential land to be frozen in its current state of development for perpetuity or for it to be declared undevelopable greenfield as soon as the current dwellings are demolished. That would naturally create far more pressure for greenbelt land to be developed, but I’m sure Clark doesn’t actually want that.
The article implies that “garden grabbing” is a new or growing phenomenon, since it “now accounts for 15 per cent of all new housing” and Bennett cherry-picks 1997 as a base year since the figure then was only 11 per cent. What she mysteriously omits to say is that back in 1986 (under the Conservative government), fully 26 per cent of all new housing was built on previously residential land, and that this “garden grabbing” accounted for half of all brownfield development. This was revealed by Yvette Cooper in her answer to Clark’s parliamentary question on the matter, but he naturally chose to ignore the far more serious offences of his party colleagues, and Bennett naturally chose not to bother herself fact-checking the figures he spoonfed her.
500% Dynamite May 23, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, Housing economics, Housing need.add a comment
George Monbiot comes out swinging this morning: “Second-home owners are perhaps the most selfish people in the United Kingdom”. He rightly wonders why they should pay only 90% of the standard council tax, and suggests 500% instead. That all?
Okay, 500% is way over the top (and would inspire all sorts of wasteful avoidance tactics), but I would tend to agree that a discount for second homes doesn’t make much sense. I’m pretty sceptical that second home owners should really be getting all the blame for homelessness in rural areas, though – there’s the simple failure to build enough new social housing too. But at least George’s plan would have the welcome side-effect of making Simon Jenkins’s head explode.
Biloxi Blues for the New Urbanists May 23, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Communities, Design, Planning, Regeneration.3 comments
Here (and reproduced below the fold for non-subscribers) is a great article in the New York Times on the battle over the reconstruction of Biloxi, the Mississippi resort town devastated last autumn by Hurricane Katrina. It depicts a bunch of New Urbanists, with their elaborate plan for a neat, walkable, picket-fence New Biloxi against … well, against almost everyone else.
I’m not that familiar with New Urbanism, so I found it rather educational. I can see the attraction of aspects of their favoured designs, but when they’re so uniformly applied the effect must be stifling (as Peter Weir recognised). There’s something creepy about how carefully every detail of every building is controlled, and combined with their apparently exclusionary approach to consultation this is surely not the way to rebuild a community.
Link from Brad Plumer’s blog, a rich source of other interesting links, such as this, this, and this.
Valley of the one-bed flats May 17, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in London, Planning, Regeneration.3 comments
As Developing News notes, the Lower Lea Planning Framework has just been published by the Mayor. This “seeks to build on the area’s unique network of waterways and islands to attract new investment and opportunities, and to transform the Valley into a new sustainable, mixed use city district”. In terms of housing that means:
Maximising the use of this land and the industrial land that is retained indicates that the LLV would have the capacity to deliver between 30,000 and 40,000 new homes (with at least 44% as family housing)
Surprised there’s that much family housing expected? Don’t be – they’re counting 2-bed flats as ‘family housing’, which is rather stretching the term. If you dig a little deeper it turns out that they’re only expecting 33% of the total to come with 3 bedrooms or more. Compared to the estimated requirements from the Mayor’s own study of an annual supply of 40% 4-bed plus, this has to be a serious disappointment from a housing needs perspective. The Lower Lea Valley must be as close to a blank page as we’re going to get in London, and if we can’t build serious amounts of family housing there where can we?
Wayne Jacobs? May 15, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Links.1 comment so far
New entry on the blogroll today is no, 2 self, a blog by architect Rob Annable. I like his letter proposing Wayne Hemmingway as “a Jane Jacobs of suburbia”. Having been lucky enough to catch Wayne giving a pretty inspiring speech to an affordable housing conference last year, I’d certainly second that nomination.
Painful choice May 14, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Homelessness, Housing economics, London.add a comment
A fairly recent innovation that is still spreading across the social housing scene in Britain is choice-based lettings (CBL). Under this system, homeless households or existing tenants looking for a transfer are not simply placed in a new home of the landlord’s choosing but given the opportunity to ‘bid’ for homes that become available. A bidder is given points according to their priority on waiting lists (e.g. more for being overcrowded or with health needs) and the bidder with the most points gets the property.
The idea is catching on because of the inherent desirability of people choosing their own homes, and because of the assumed knock-on effects of greater tenant satisfaction and lower turnover. But there may be unexpected drawbacks too, especially in areas (such as pretty much all of London), where the supply of lettings has not increased enough (or more accurately, has fallen too much) to make choice meaningful for all but a minority of bidders. Where before they simply waited on the housing register for as many months or years as it took to be allocated a suitable home, now thousands of tenants with relatively low priority regularly endure the heartbreak of bidding for a new home (and the fresh start in life it promises) only to see it go to a more ‘deserving’ case. Living in limbo hurts, but perhaps less so when escape is not dangled in front of you every week only to be snatched away each time.
Just how seriously should we take these feelings? Some London MPs take them very seriously indeed, as this debate last Wednesday in Parliament showed. Here’s Karen Buck, Labour MP for Regent’s Park & Kensington North:
Ironically, the choice-based lettings system, which is increasingly used to supply housing, and which I wholly support in principle, is making the intensity of the competition that I have described toxically transparent. For example, a rare three-bed property in my constituency was advertised through the choice-based lettings system two weeks ago and it attracted 244 bidders from the already heavily filtered top-priority category A list alone. Given that only six three-bedroom properties have been advertised in the current financial year, most desperate people, even on that list, face an almost endless round of unsuccessful bidding, which is an injection of pure poison into already deprived neighbourhoods.
And here’s Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North:
As my Friend said in relation to the choice-based letting scheme, people on the housing waiting list go into a bidding frenzy every Thursday when the local paper comes out. Most of them are sadly disappointed. People come to my advice bureau in tears saying that in two years they have managed to visit one property with 20 other families and did not even manage to get an offer at the end of that process. Such a cruelty goes on week in, week out.
What’s the solution? Surely not to abandon CBL, but to make it meaningful. That has to mean – surprise surprise – building enough new housing to make moving into a nice new affordable family in London a bit more likely than winning the National Lottery.
NIMBYism resurgent May 14, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housing economics, NIMBYs, Party politics, Planning.add a comment
The NIMBY News Daily Telegraph reacted with predictable horror to Ruth Kelly’s determination to increase housing supply even in middle-class areas. This is anathema to the Telegraph and its readership, who seem to agree that more housing should be built somewhere, just not in their ‘local communities’. Instead, it should be built somewhere comfortably distant so as not to affect the ever-rising value of their property.
It is notable that nowhere in the story is there any acknowledgement by the Tories or their journalistic mouthpiece of the huge unmet need for social housing. Instead, the shadow local government minister is more concerned opposing densification and Labour’s (non-existent) “plans to bulldoze Britain’s back gardens”. Maybe this indicates the future path of Conservative housing policy – paying lip-service to the aspiration to increase housing supply while objecting to any practical means of achieving it, and insisting on the right of local communities to block housing development (but especially housing for those on low incomes) in their areas.
Since it was precisely this NIMBYism that created the current concentrations of social housing in inner-city areas and all its attendant problems, and since its other main consequence is to boost house prices in the non-developable areas, it seems to me there is a case for making NIMBYs pay for the priveleges they enjoy at significant cost to others. I don’t mean “make them pay” as in kick over their garden gnomes and key their cars – I mean councils that don’t build their fair share of the affordable housing needed in their region should make a financial contribution to the councils that build more than their fair share, and that this charge be recovered from homeowners through the council tax. I hope to come come back to this rather appealing notion later.
