Definitively dense August 6, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Overcrowding, Planning.add a comment
The problem with handing down national planning policy is that fortunes can turn on the smallest difference in phrasing. Example: when the government says it wants to see higher housing densities, it defines ‘density’ in terms of dwellings per hectare (see its draft policy statement, PPS3). Reasonable enough, you might say, but the chronic lack of family-sized housing in higher density areas is forcing a rethink in some quarters, as described in this article reprinted from the RIBA Journal:
The definition of density and how it is measured is important, because interpretations can lead to wildly varying design approaches. The government’s preferred method of calculating density is dwellings per hectare, which works fine when considering uniform house types, but not if you are trying to encourage a variety of unit sizes. The latter produces a far lower average density than a mass of one-bedroom apartments. Alternative methods of calculation are beds per hectare, or habitable rooms per hectare.
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
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.
Changing the overcrowding standard July 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Homelessness, Housing need, Local government, Overcrowding.add a comment
The statutory measure of overcrowding in England is a bit of an anomaly. From Tackling Overcrowding in England: A Discussion Paper:
Although the intention of the legislators in 1935 was that the standards should be regularly updated, they have in practice been carried over unchanged into the 1985 Act. They are as a result now well out of line with contemporary expectations. For example a couple with a boy aged 15 years and a girl aged 13 years in a one-bedroom flat would not be statutorily overcrowded because the father and son could share one room and the mother and daughter the sitting room (or even the kitchen).
This hasn’t in itself increased the number of overcrowded households – that’s driven by the availability of accommodation that is both suitable and affordable – but it has reduced the recognition and assistance available to people in overcrowded homes. Changing the standard might give overcrowded households more priority when it comes to accessing social housing, as opposed to homeless households who might be living in housing that’s at least big enough even if it is temporary.
With the publication of this discussion paper it does look as though the government really wants to tackle overcrowding. The main solution will still have to be building more larger affordable homes, but changing the standard should at least go some way towards removing a major distortion in the system for allocating social housing.
Superstar cities July 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Housing economics, Housing inequality, Housing markets, NIMBYs, Planning.add a comment
According to Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai, ‘Superstar Cities’ arise when high income households are sorted (or sort themselves) into areas that are (a) desirable, (b) unique and (c) feature low rates of housing construction. Their very restrictiveness makes them desirable, and perhaps their desirability makes them more restrictive. A similar dynamic certainly appears to be happening in some parts of the UK, but will it ever go so far as to make London, for example, the exclusive domain of the rich?
Here’s the abstract from NBER (the full paper is here):
Differences in house price and income growth rates between 1950 and 2000 across metropolitan areas have led to an ever-widening gap in housing values and incomes between the typical and highest-priced locations. We show that the growing spatial skewness in house prices and incomes are related and can be explained, at least in part, by inelastic supply of land in some attractive locations combined with an increasing number of high-income households nationally. Scarce land leads to a bidding-up of land prices and a sorting of high-income families relatively more into those desirable, unique, low housing construction markets, which we label “superstar cities.” Continued growth in the number of high-income families in the U.S. provides support for ever-larger differences in house prices across inelastically supplied locations and income-based spatial sorting. Our empirical work confirms a number of equilibrium relationships implied by the superstar cities framework and shows that it occurs both at the metropolitan area level and at the sub-MSA level, controlling for MSA characteristics.
Income inequality and housing affordability July 15, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Housing economics, Housing inequality, Housing markets, Uncategorized.add a comment
There’s evidence that relative low income can lower subjective well-being: people feel worse when those around them earn more. But can earning relatively less make you objectively worse off, even if your own income doesn’t fall?
Apparently so. In a great bit of research, Janna Matlick and Jacob Vigdor find evidence that the increasing incomes of others can raise the price we pay for housing, leading to more income spent on housing or overcrowding. Especially in tight housing markets, like we have in many parts of the UK, “the poor do worse when the rich get richer”:
Do rising tides lift all boats? If raising the income of the wealthy increases the prices that the poor must pay for certain necessities, then it becomes more difficult to argue in favor of policies that exacerbate inequality on the grounds that they at least do not lower the incomes of the poor …
In the end, the evidence on this question is mixed, and it seems relatively clear that the answer depends critically on the elasticity of housing supply. In this sense, the study of demandside determinants of housing affordability problems should not be conducted in isolation from study of the supply side. In the United States, tight housing markets tend to be those where incomes are rising rapidly at the high end of the distribution, while incomes at the low end trend upward only slowly if at all. In these areas, the poor have experienced greater crowding, and there is at least some evidence that their expenditures on housing increase as well, though not in all specifications …
Do price effects negate the impact of “trickle-down” effects? The answer appears to be “sometimes.” The key to making rising tides lift all boats appears to be ensuring that there are more than enough boats to go around.
What this paper doesn’t cover is the further effect of higher house prices on inequality: in a rising market, those who could afford to buy enjoy windfall gains which they can use to help their children buy when the time comes, distorting the market further and leaving those who couldn’t afford to buy in the first place (and their children) even further behind. This effect is already quite marked in Britain.
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.
A room with a view … of the Pyramid Stage July 9, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Rural housing.add a comment
If you’re at the Glastonbury festival next year you might see something unexpected – ten units of social housing, built on land donated by the festival organiser, farmer Michael Eavis. Inside Housing has more details. I wonder where they are on the site? The critical question come June 2007 will be whether they’re downwind from the toilets or not. Also, will the temptation to sub-let to Coldplay or other visiting superstars prove too great?
