Link-dump: energy efficiency, regeneration, densities, buy-to-let and more August 1, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housebuilding, Housing economics, Housing investment, Housing markets, Housing need, Linkage, London, Planning, Regeneration.add a comment
Apologies for the light posting of late, which was due to more work demands and some very pleasant weekends away. There’s a lot to catch up on so here’s a quick link-dump – I’ll try to come back to one or two of these items in more detail later.
- The Sustainable Development Commission has published ‘Stock take: delivering improvements in existing housing‘, which details “the technical options available for minimising the energy and water consumed and waste produced by residents of the existing housing stock”. The big question for me is what can be done to improve the efficiency of privately owned homes, with a particular question mark over privately rented housing, which the report rightly identifies as suffering from a ’split incentive’ problem – the tenant doesn’t have the incentive to invest in upgrading the home when she’s not going to be living there long, and the landlord doesn’t have the incentive to do so because she doesn’t pay the bills. Personally I think the landlord should pay some of the bill, but then I would say that because I’m a tenant. See also “Reducing the Carbon Impact of Private Rented Housing“
- England’s Housing Timebomb, from the National Housing Federation, features a prediction from Oxford Economic Forecasting that “the average house price in England will increase by around 50% by 2011, from just under GBP195,000 at the beginning of 2006 to GBP286,000, equivalent to 9.2 times the projected average salary for 2011″. The study concludes that housing associations should therefore be building or refurbishing 80,000 affordable homes each year instead of the current 40,000, which would obviously require much more funding from the state. They might well be right, but this one might get filed under “They would say that, wouldn’t they?”.
- The Town and Country Planning Association has published a commentary by Julie Cowans with the ungainly title of “Cities and regions of sustainable communities – New strategies”, but the potentially radical message that traditional approaches to addressing poverty (focusing on the “worst” estates first) should be abandoned in favour of proactive policies aimed at creating mixed income communities, i.e. enticing middle-income households into poor areas and trying to capture the resulting increases in land or property values. This has already excited some comment in the housing blogosphere (such as it is): Hannah is sceptical, Kevin pretty enthusiastic. I think Cowans may be drawing on the findings of this work, which I’ve started reading but have yet to finish. Anyway, hope to say more on this in due course.
- According to CB Richard Ellis, there has been an extraordinary increase in the density of new residential developments in London, no less than a quadrupling (in terms of habitable rooms per hectare) in just four years. They seem to mostly put this down to policy changes, but surely the huge rise in land costs (which obviously isn’t entirely unrelated to policy) is the main driver? Interesting quote: “We found schemes within regeneration and other special policy areas are frequently gaining planning permission for greater density than is recommended in the London Plan”.
- Labour-run London boroughs are building a lot more affordable housing than their Conservative counterparts, according to Inside Housing: “The 11 Tory authorities in power before the election were due to deliver just 18 per cent of grant funded homes in the capital.” Word on the grapevine is that some incoming Tory administrations have effectively vetoed large numbers of affordable housing developments that were going through the planning stage. Certainly, I don’t expect Hammersmith & Fulham council will be delivering 65% affordable housing in the next few years, as it has in the past.
- And finally, the Financial Times celebrates ten years of buy-to-let in the UK
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.
Public attitudes to housing development July 13, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housebuilding, NIMBYs, Planning.add a comment
In her interim report into the planning system, published last week, Kate Barker included the following table.
It’s interesting data, but importantly it’s also a bit incomplete. The figures here give the impression that people are much more opposed to social rented than to private housing (net support of -10 versus +28), but if you go to the original data (Q15 here) you can see that it is really flats that people are opposed to, with private flats getting the same net opposition as social rented ones. It’s not immediately obvious why this should be, but there are plausible possibilities – is it because flats tend to be more high-density, or because they’re often poorly designed in this country, or because they’re associated with unsociable or anti-social inhabitents, or because they mean more households per hectare and therefore more perceived strain on local services and amenities?
There are a few other interesting findings from that survey (called the ‘Saint Index’), such as high public support for getting more money or in-kind benefits out of developers through planning obligations and very strong support for case-by-case assessment of those obligations instead of using the fixed tariff approach apparently favoured by the government.
Valley of the one-bed flats Part 2 July 7, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Housebuilding, Housing need, London, Planning.add a comment
I posted a while ago in disappointment at the lack of family housing being planned for the Lower Lea Valley. Now it looks like the same applies to the wider Thames Gateway. That’s according to someone who should know – Eric Sorenson, chief exec of the Thames Gateway Partnership, writing in Building magazine:
What is striking in large parts of London Thames Gateway is the predominance in development of one and two-bed flats. It is as if there has been a significant over-reaction to the increasing number of smaller households …
We know from experience in Europe that higher-density flats can and do work for families. But they have to be reasonably sized, designed to be spacious and flexible, have good sized balconies, require good performance from local management and a well maintained public realm.
What we get too often here are small flats with insufficient commitment to address families’ requirements. Local authorities are becoming increasingly firm about family housing provision in their planning policies but, if there is unbalanced emphasis on housing numbers rather than the nature of the output, we simply won’t create sustainable communities in the Gateway.
I think the same goes for London as a whole, and probably the wider South East. It’s notable that in the proposed update to his London Plan, Ken Livingstone is gung-ho about a big increase in housing numbers and densities, but pretty much devoid of any effective policy to ensure those numbers consist of the family housing London needs, according to his own Housing Requirements Study.
Building in mediocrity July 5, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Design, Housebuilding.add a comment
Okay, so this isn’t directly about housing, but it is a scandal:
Billions of pounds are being wasted on new schools which are badly designed, poorly built and unsuitable for staff and students, according to a study by the government’s own advisers.
That’s CABE, and you can find a summary of their report here. Some key points:
- 31 per cent of schools were classified as ‘partially good’ and 19 per cent were assessed as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Half of the 52 schools reviewed were categorised as mediocre or poor.
- All of the good or excellent schools were completed in 2005, which suggests that overall design quality is getting better.
- Generally, schools performed best on issues of functionality and least well on build quality.
- Any procurement route can produce a good result, although schools using the private finance initiative (PFI) performed less well than other forms of contract. All but one of the lowest 10 schools were procured using PFI, whereas of the top 10 (all the good and excellent schools) only three were procured using PFI.
It’s that last bit that has me worried, because the government is in the middle of a £1.2 billion programme to build or refurbish social housing. Is there something about PFI that makes a badly designed product more likely, in housing as well as in education? An earlier CABE policy paper suggests there might be.
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
