Testing the donut hypothesis August 6, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, London, Maps, Regeneration.add a comment
An interesting project from Radical Cartography:
These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.
This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.
Just from visual inspection, it also seems that poverty donuts all tend to have about a five-mile radius, regardless of the size of the city. Perhaps this is the practical limit for commuting without a car?
I can’t do a perfect comparison with London because we don’t have small-area income data available like they do in the States, but this map of unemployment might do the job:
How does this match the theory? Okay, I suppose, if you take the West End and the Square Mile as the ‘centre’ of London. The ‘poor’ band seems to be proportionally wider in London than in the American cities Bill looks at, perhaps because of the artificial limit imposed on London by the green belt – if you looked at the same data for ‘Greater Greater London’, including satellite towns beyond the green belt, you might get a picture more similar to the American one.
Megamalls, walkable cities and ‘la Londonisation’ August 6, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, Design, Europe, London.1 comment so far
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.
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
Housing and hatred in Barking and Dagenham July 8, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housing need, Local government, London, Planning.add a comment
Here’s another article focusing on the housing crisis as a key factor behind the recent electoral success of the racist British National Party in Barking and Dagenham. It suggests that the ease with which the BNP whipped up resentment over asylum seekers and other ‘outsiders’ apparently jumping the queue (sometimes, it was claimed, with the help of cash grants from neighbouring boroughs) for social housing is a bit of a puzzle, as there are only a handful of asylum seekers accommodated in the council’s housing stock. Charles Fairbrass, Labour leader of the council, suggests people are attributing shifts in the housing market to council policy:
There is a growing black middle class in London and many of them want to get on the property ladder. Because we have some of the cheapest housing in London, they choose to buy here. And when they buy ex-local authority property, people often assume that those properties are still local authority and they’ve been allowed to jump the queue.
I wonder if the movement of homeless households around London has something to do with it too. After all, according to the numbers in Figure 3.6 here, fully one third of the ‘privately rented’ housing in Barking and Dagenham is actually inhabited by homeless households who are being put up in rented accommodation while they wait (often years) for a permanent home. Many if not most of these households will be non-white, and many have probably been placed in Barking & Dagenham by other councils. This could well be perceived by locals as an influx of ethnic minorities into the borough’s social housing stock.
All this benefits nobody except the BNP and the (blameless) private landlords who get to collect extra-high rents (mostly funded through Housing Benefit) from their homeless tenants. The main solution has to be to increase the supply of permanent social housing to provide a decent permanent home to all those who need it.
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.
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
Nick Raynsford on planning obligations June 4, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housing markets, London, Planning.add a comment
Here’s an excellent article on the government’s proposed Planning Gain Supplement by former local government minister (and MP for Greenwich and Woolwich) Nick Raynsford. I’m impressed by his clear explanation of why the PGS, which at first sight appears an ideal solution to the vexed question of tapping planning gain for community benefits, may not work in the context of brownfield development:
There are serious grounds for concern [with PGS]. The first is to do with the concept itself. The PGS is predicated on the assumption that there is a significant one-off increase in land value when planning permission for development is granted. When the earlier development tax schemes were evolved, this was generally correct. It still applies to some extent, particularly with greenfield developments. However, today’s more complex planning system allows value to emerge progressively through the various stages of plan development, so the uplift at the point when permission is granted might be less abrupt.
But on many brownfield sites the position is very different. Where there has been profitable prior use of the site, there might be little or no immediate uplift in value when planning permission is granted. Demolition and remedial costs and the need for discounted lettings in the early stages of development can effectively eliminate any such immediate gain. The site might well prove very profitable in future years as the new uses consolidate, but because the PGS relates only to the immediate uplift in value attributable to planning permission, that future profit will remain uncaptured.
The example of the large-scale regeneration schemes in my Greenwich and Woolwich constituency is instructive. Through the Section 106 procedure, the local authority has successfully negotiated very substantial developer contributions towards infrastructure and social and environmental provision. Yet because many of the sites, such as the Greenwich peninsula, required very expensive decontamination works, it is doubtful whether there was any significant uplift in value when planning permission was initially granted.
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.
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?
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.
