Are we building enough new homes? June 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in History of housing, Housebuilding, Housing need, London.1 comment so far
Great to see Channel 4’s excellent FactCheck service back in action, especially as today they took a timely* look at housing minister Yvette Cooper’s claim that “We’ve increased the level of house building very significantly to one of the highest rates for many years now”.
It’s a good analysis too. As they say, the volume of housebuilding in 2005 was indeed the highest (at 159,000 units – see table here) since the early 1990s, but it was nowhere near the estimated annual household increase (209,000) and also way below the level of the 1980s (around 180,000 units a year), let alone the 1970s (around 260,000 units a year). They also talk to the right people, such as Adam Sampson of Shelter, who correctly points out:
When Thatcher came to power, the government had historically built 100,000 council properties a year. In 2003 the government built no more than 13,000 equivalent properties. That alone explains the massive drop in output.
Indeed. In the chart below the blue is homes built by the private sector, the black is housing associations and the grey is local authorities.
One point FactCheck might have raised is that looking just at the number of units built doesn’t tell you whether we’re delivering more housing in terms of rooms for people to actually sleep in. Clearly a hundred 4-bed houses is a greater housing supply than a hundred 2-bed flats, so the apparently declining average size of completions (especially in London) should temper Cooper’s enthusiasm somewhat (though to be fair to her, she’s seemed a lot more interested in the consequences of failure to build family homes than her predecessors).
*given the publication tomorrow of the ODPM committee’s report into housing supply and affordability
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.
