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Megamalls, walkable cities and ‘la Londonisation’ August 6, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, Design, Europe, London.
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The general reaction to the interim report of Kate Barker’s inquiry into the planning system seemed to be that it was a bit of a damp squib, with much less enthusiasm for major reform than was expected. But Anna Minton worries that Barker wants to promote out-of-town superstores over small-scale city shopping on the basis of efficiency (or at least redress what Barker might see as the current bias towards the latter). She contrasts what she sees as the increased privatisation of public space in Britain with Jan Gehl’s vision of an open, bustling, diverse, pedestrian-friendly public realm. I’ve just started reading Gehl’s Life Between Buildings myself, and his arguments for a walkable cityscape are certainly persuasive. But there’s a difference, I think, between that and simply trying to preserve the state of urban commerce in aspic, as the Parisians seem to be attempting:

In Paris, French policy makers have become so concerned about the British experience that they have described the trend as “la Londonisation” and have introduced planning regulations specifically to prevent it. As a result, about half the shops in Paris will have restrictions placed on them to prevent changes of use, so that a foodshop remains a foodshop and a bookshop or a greengrocer cannot become part of a mobile phone chain.

If true, I find this policy fairly nutty. What’s good for Parisians today won’t be good for them always, and specifying the particular use of each property surely goes way too far.

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.

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Tear down the high rises? March 22, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in America, Communities, Design, Europe, Housing markets, International, Regeneration.
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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.

Regeneration the Brazilian way March 9, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, International, London, Regeneration.
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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.

Housing need and the reciprocal welfare state March 2, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, History of social housing, London, Overcrowding.
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Here’s Will Hutton on housing, racial tension and the welfare state in London’s East End:

And while the public institutions look good and the place well-ordered, beneath the surface there is an ominous cracking of the values that underpin both public initiative and the welfare spending on which so many families depend. For, as The New East End, one of the most original and authoritative recent books of contemporary sociology, argues, there is mounting disaffection here about the principles on which today’s welfare state is constructed.

It is breeding both a disaffiliation from the Labour party and unwelcome racism that Labour’s leaders should heed more closely. The New Labour aristocracy should beware; this is toxic stuff – and it arises mainly from the principles it espouses.

The flashpoint is not welfare spending, education or health, although all can be problematic – it is housing. The white working class, once the largest group in the borough, thinks that Bangladeshis are more readily housed in bigger and better homes. ‘They’d come over from Heathrow immigration,’ reports one of the 800 interviewees on whom the book is based, ‘and straightaway, they’d be housed. Our children couldn’t afford to buy around here, so they had to move out.’ Such sentiments are expressed many times over.

The authors think the white working class has at least half a point. The 1968 Housing (Local Government) Act made homelessness the key to housing entitlement, which had the unintended effect, they write, of pushing council housing away from the realm of the respectable poor to the rough. It revived the notion of welfare as charity. No longer could working-class families make their way to the head of the housing queue through patience and good behaviour; instead, those in need, especially from minorities, could leapfrog them.

The resentment this sparks is huge. The postwar working class thought it had created and earned a welfare state that was based on the same principle of ‘reciprocity’ as their communities: families looked after their own and others, expecting the favour to be returned.

The working class was wrong. Partly because of cost pressures, partly because of liberal, middle-class guilt and partly because it has seemed rational to target money where it is most needed, the welfare state has transmuted into a means-tested entitlement system. This may seem rational in the Treasury, the Institute for Fiscal Studies or the LSE lecture room, where targeting scarce financial resources is elementary housekeeping. On the ground, it is sheer poison.

… families and individuals most likely to lose in the race for housing are both more inclined to be racist and distrust the values of the current welfare state. To drive the point home, women over 55 are more likely than men to be racist; but, as the authors acknowledge, it is their children who are least likely to be housed, and they who are most likely to suffer loneliness when the kids move out of the borough.

Kate Gavron, one of the authors, told me that she was pulled both ways; if the state does not meet need, however undeserving, who will? My view is more uncompromising. Better a welfare state that works for the majority on the basis of universalism and reciprocity and which people of every race understand than a welfare state that works for the minority and succours racism. The lesson is clear. Means testing and targeting are, in the long term, a social, racial and values disaster.

The implication of Hutton’s conclusion is that housing should not be allocated with a means test, which leaves two options: ration the same supply of housing out on the basis of time spent on waiting lists, or increase the supply to meet all or at least more needs.

The frustration is that he addresses the cost of neither option, which are considerable: if housing is no longer allocated on the basis of need, those in most need will lose out, while the cost of meeting all housing needs in Tower Hamlets would be immense (which is not to say it wouldn’t be worth it).

Hutton’s article (and possibly the book he describes) might give the impression that Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets are doing pretty well out of the welfare state, but they still suffer the most poverty and the most overcrowding in an area where around a quarter of social renting households are overcrowded (see tables here).

Some might argue that the parents of overcrowded families have brought their situation on themselves by having too many children, which ignores the fact that poverty often goes hand in hand with overcrowding, and also that many Bangladeshi families are large primarily because they look after their elders at home. It also begs the question of whether the faults of the parents should be visited on the children who would otherwise have to grow up in overcrowded conditions.

Hutton is right that the problem of housing need poses a problem for the reciprocal welfare state, but it would be much less of a problem if the supply of social housing wasn’t so pitifully inadequate in today’s Britain.

Where should we build new social housing? February 28, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, History of social housing, Planning.
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This presentation to the 2005 Planning Summer School by Professor Glen Bramley has some interesting slides in it, not least the decomposition of regional price differences and price changes into different causes such as labour market trends and planning restrictions. But most intriguing to me is the chart reproduced below, which shows the proportional increase in social housing stock in wards grouped by their level of deprivation.

bramley social.png

What this seems to show is that the most deprived 10% of wards, which already hold around one-third of the existing social housing in England, seem to be where most of the new social housing is being built.

Arguably, there are good reasons in favour of such a strategy – the most deprived areas are probably cheaper to build in, there will be less political opposition from affluent local home-owners, and deprived areas tend to have more existing local housing need anyway.

But aren’t there equally good reasons to resist an ever-growing concentration of social housing in the poorest areas? I recently argued that the local concentration of social housing tenants contributed to concentrated poverty and deprivation. A better policy might be to scatter new social housing in the less deprived parts of the country. This would help de-concentrate poverty, and if it does hit house prices in those affluent areas, well, some would see that as no bad thing.

Places of last resort February 16, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, History of social housing.
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In their article (page 3 here) for the LSE’s Urban Age conference on London, Miguel Kanai and Sarah Ichioka say

the decaying and rapidly shrinking stock of affordable housing in inner London continues to be, depending on the analyst’s view, an etrapment or the last resort for the least fortunate in a largely unaffordable metropolitan housing market.

I would argue it’s a bit of both. Social housing has undoubtably been a last resort for those unable to access housing through the market, but it’s also true that many social housing estates have become pretty bad places to live. Why?

I’d pick out three main reasons.

  • Residualisation: council housing used to be mostly inhabited by the working classes, ie the upper end of the lower end of the income distribution. This was in large part because council rents were too high for the poorest of the poorest. But from the 1970s on, as rent rebates finally allowed the very poorest to afford council rents, as local authorities were forced to accept a duty to accommodate homeless households, and as the more affluent tenants left the sector by exercising their Right to Buy, social housing was predominantly the tenure of the workless poor. These effects were compounded by the huge rise in unemployment in the 1980s. As Chris Holmes says in his book A New Vision for Housing, this ‘residualisation’ was not necessarily a bad thing by itself – “the opening up of council housing to more of the poorest households was a desirable and overdue change”. The problems arose because of the interaction of residualisation with the second major factor.
  • Concentration: The wave of council house building after the second world war was notable for creating local concentrations of social housing in far greater numbers and densities than had been seen before, many in inner city areas. This was partly a result of the extreme resistance to social housing from residents of affluent areas. As the poor and workless came to comprise a greater proportion of those living in social housing (as described above), the natural result was a great concentration of poverty and worklessness on single estates. Being poor is bad enough, but being poor and surrounded only by other poor people is worse, because it means fewer links to job opportunities, a neglected physical environment, and probably a worse schooling for your children as the impacts of deprivation on each child’s education and development are compounded – and children with a no prospect of a job and bored at school are more likely to gravitate towards anti-social behaviour and crime. In many cases, these effects interacted to create a downward spiral into hopelessness.

The combination of residualisation and concentration would have been bad enough in many cases, but only when combined with our third factor did many estates become such supremely bad places to live.

  • Design: Holmes rightly calls the post-war ‘mass housing experiment’ “a disaster”. Most new estates were built in a rush and with little money, in a time when modernist architectural ideas were offering a hopeful but in retrospect totally impractical vision of high-density living. In practice, high-rise towers were often badly designed by architects, shoddily built by private contractors, poorly maintained by landlords and bereft of safe and secure play areas and surrounding amenities. High density living can work, as it does in many continental European cities, when accommodation is well designed and maintained and poverty is not piled on top of poverty, but in England the combination created serious problems. The fact that some former ‘no-go’ towers are becoming attractive to renters in the private sector suggests that greater mixing of tenures would have avoided many of the problems, but the urgency of providing accommodation to so many in need and, again, the resistance in other areas mitigated against that.

Recognising the increasing problems on the estates, those who could afford to often upped and left, which unfortunately tended to compound the problems for those left behind. Apart from simply being poorer, those left behind faced several barriers to finding work and, if they could, moving on and moving out:

  • The benefit trap – The combination of high marginal tax rates, steep withdrawal of housing benefit and the cost of childcare makes work a pretty unattractive proposition for many who rely on HB to pay part of their rent. So they stay workless, and stuck in social housing.
  • Immobility – Moving around within the sector is complicated and costly, which makes relocating to take advantage of job opportunities more difficult. Again, the net result is you’re stuck where you are, with any skills you have going to waste.
  • The housing market - Even without these other factors, the unchecked rise of house prices would have made a home of their own an impossibility for many in social housing.

Social housing itself can’t be blamed for making its tenants poor, and without subsidised housing millions of people would quite clearly have been much worse off, as they were in the private sector slums and hovels occupied by so many well into the latter half of the last century. As a tenure of last resort, it does its job very well. But for too many social housing became something of a dead-end, and because they all tended to be lumped together in the same places the estates became places of last resort.

But it isn’t a lost cause by any means. Here are a few suggested solutions:

  • More mobility within the sector across local and regional boundaries to allow greater access to work opportunities.
  • Get rid of (or at the very least significantly reduce) the benefit trap by reducing the housing benefit tapers, cutting taxes on the lowest incomes, and subsidising childcare costs.
  • More spatial mixing of tenures – Where possible and without neglecting the primary purpose of social housing to meet housing needs, move economically active people into council estates and poorer people into richer areas. Social housing has worked best when it has been mixed in with other tenures. Many streets in London demonstrate this – they contain apparently identical homes, some of which are privately owned or rented, some of which are rented from the council or a housing association. De-concentrating deprivation, from both ends, can work wonders.

The first two proposals are basically technical. The third, though, would be a major break from post-war practice, and politically controversial in affluent areas who have traditionally resisted any provision of social housing. Well, tough. The lesson of the past few decades is that social housing can help solve the problem of housing need, but if we concentrate it all in small inner-city areas we are storing up huge problems for the future. The rich may feel like they can escape these problems, but experience suggests that concentrated poverty, deprivation and crime impose costs on our whole society. A common-sense approach to accepting smaller levels of social housing in more areas of the country will ultimately benefit everyone.

Commoncensus.org February 11, 2006

Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, Maps.
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Michael Baldwin is doing some fascinating work at Commoncensus.org to map the cultural or personal borders of communities in America, as opposed to the political or admininstrative. He simply asks people what they consider to be their local area, and using their physical location aggregates the answers up into maps like this (click to go to the site proper):

commoncensus.png

There’s variations on the theme, too, like the Manhattan Neighbourhood Map and, ingeniously, maps of sports team fan areas. Reading all this, I thought it would be interesting to ask people whether they identified themselves primarily in terms of their local community, or their state, or their country, but of course he’s already done that too.

It’ll be great to see how these maps develop as they fill up with more entrants. Also, I’d love to see the patterns of affinities this method produces for Ireland and England – according to the FAQ Michael intends to extend coverage to Europe, and has already been repeatedly pestered by English football fans presumably wishing to establish beyond doubt that all Manchester United fans come from London.