Superstar hamlets? July 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Environment, Housebuilding, Housing inequality, Housing markets, NIMBYs, Planning, Rural housing.add a comment
In an earlier post, I wondered whether London might one day turn into the kind of ‘Superstar City’ researchers have identified in the US. But according to today’s Guardian, it looks more like the Superstar syndrome (high income households taking over areas that are unique, desirable and feature little or no new construction) is happening in many parts of the English countryside:
It may be an over-simplification to argue that a form of social apartheid grips rural England, with traditional country dwellers confined either to the remaining council houses or the tied cottages of the big estates, rarely in contact with their neighbours – the superannuated, and rich. But the divisions are apparent.
A good place to start is the roof of England. Drive on the country’s highest road, where the lush North Pennines briefly meets a more barren landscape, and the pressures and conflicts of the countryside are soon evident. Down the winding Hartside pass, old farmhouses and buildings – which once supported hundreds of agricultural workers – have become the preserve of a new rural elite. At the bottom of the pass, and over the Eden valley on the edge of the Lake District, Kit Scott-Harden, aged 59, has farmed 300 acres on a tenancy most of his working life. With his income around £45,000 annually – 60% met by subsidy from the EU’s common agricultural policy – he’ll be lucky to break even this year.
Most farmers are now in their mid to late 60s. The industry is rapidly contracting. Farmers’ sons often leave the land. The result: empty properties. As upland farmers, and the few remaining agricultural workers struggle to make ends meet, wealthy incomers splash out hundreds of thousands for small cottages – and, sometimes, close to £1m for larger properties. Over two years ago a two-bed cottage in the hamlet next to the Scott-Harden farm went for £280,000 to an investor. “Terrifying price,” he says. “And it would be worth much more now.”
There’s usually plenty of space to build in these areas – the main obstacles are NIMBY attitudes, an over-protective planning system and inadequate funding for new social housing in rural districts.
Lord [Ewen] Cameron, a cross-bencher in the Lords and former chairman of the government’s Countryside Agency, can see what is happening from his farm in south Somerset. He is alarmed by the rigidity of a planning system blocking affordable housing initiatives. This has led to “serious demographic mismatch in the countryside”. Why, he wonders, do the authorities approve plans to convert buildings into holiday cottages, yet refuse plans for low-cost homes? He would like to see redundant farm buildings re-classified as “brownfield land” so that they can benefit from urban-style grants and incentives. “Why can’t we build, say, 50% for straight purchase and the rest for renting? That would benefit people all round.”
But, as things stand, Mark Shucksmith, a professor at Newcastle upon Tyne University, a government adviser and expert on rural housing and planning, says the countryside is becoming too skewed in favour of one class. “While people have a clear aspiration to live in the countryside, it is becoming much more exclusive,” he laments. “You have to ask that if only people with higher incomes can afford the move, how this chimes with the [government's] agenda of choice that is rooted in the context of social justice.”
As I said, NIMBYism is a big reason for resistance to new housing developments in rural areas, but it’s hard to disentangle pure selfishness from the quite justified perception of much new housing supply as ugly, sprawling and car-centric. This takes us back to the vexed questions of design quality and planning and funding new public transport, which I hope to look at in more detail in the near future.
Quick links 15/06/06 June 15, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Environment, Housing markets, Housing need, Overcrowding, Party politics, Planning.add a comment
Sorry for the lack of posting recently – too much work, sun and football on the telly. Here’s a round-up of what’s been happening:
- Homes to be energy-saving rated: “Every house sold in England and Wales will be given an energy efficiency rating like those found on electrical goods”. Sounds reasonable to me, but will it be introduced for rented housing too? Doesn’t seem to have been confirmed, but these people seem to think it will be.
- MPs out of touch on housing concerns: “while 98% of the public think that a lack of affordable housing is a major issue, only 34% of MPs think the same.”
- Redwood all at sea: Let’s build a new city on land reclaimed from the sea, says John. Not sure if this is meant to be more environmentally friendly but it probably wouldn’t be. Maybe Redwood has been inspired by Anthony Lau’s concept of Offshore Living, part of the Sustainable Living By Design exhibition at the GLA, which involves sticking people in refashioned cargo containers stacked on decommissioned oil rigs.
- Fancy re-designing Castleford?
- A tight squeeze: “A chronic shortage of family sized homes, planning problems and economic ‘factors’ are contributing to the growing crisis of overcrowding.”
- Beware the winds of change: “Low income households could lose out in the government’s push towards homeownership, Dominic Maxwell warns”.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
