Should public housing and regeneration funding be linked to increasing housing land allocations?

Scott Beyer toured America looking at the development and growth of some 30 cities. Beyer has a lot to say (I'm not sold on his enthusiasm for density but his market urbanism approach is mostly great) and one suggestion is that housing subsidy should be target:

But those subsidies ought to be directed into the dynamic elastic metros. That is where land is cheaper, approvals faster and labor cheaper, because construction workers haven’t been driven away by high home costs. And unlike stagnant inelastic metros, this area of the country is also where jobs are always available. This means that the housing subsidies not only stretch further, but place people in markets where they can actually be self-sustaining.

This runs counter to government instincts which are to target subsidy to the greatest need. The problem here is that the greatest need is often a creation of the urban containment policies used by those cities Beyer calls 'dynamic inelastic metros'. In the UK this would cover London but also other places in the South such as Brighton, Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge. Indeed, because England has a nationally-directed system of planning, there are very few places (Milton Keynes, Medway, Thurrock) that come anywhere close to the 'dynamic elastic' ideal in Beyers' review.

Imagine, however, that there were billions in housing funding - to provide new affordable homes, respond to homelessness, and support relocation - but that this funding was predicated on the local authorities providing significant increases in land for housing? This would present councils with an interesting choice - take national funding for new homes or continue to side with NIMBYs in preventing development. You could take this still further by linking non-housing subsidy and grants to the same metric - you zone for more homes and we'll give to the economic development funding to go with those new homes.

If we want to break the NIMBY hold on development - where an ugly redundant airfield is precious green belt - then we need to give local authorities a real incentive to do this. Making economic development, housing and infrastructure funding contingent on releasing more housing land might just be the trigger needed.

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