Is the Green Belt racist?

Over half of Britain's 'black and minority ethnic' (BAME) people live in London (excluding small change 55% in 2011 and probably near 60% today). Add in BAME communities in the Home Counties - Luton, Slough, Gravesend, etc. - and it's likely that nearly seven in ten of such folk live within a commuter journey of central London. This isn't to ignore large BAME communities elsewhere (I live in Bradford, how could I) but rather to ask a question about housing. A question prompted by these tweets from Labour MP, Karen Buck:

In the context of the often febrile debate about 'black lives matter', we can see here the case for there being issues with racism in housing. Mind you the 58% figure is, as I've noted above, in line with the proportion of Londoners from BAME backgrounds, but this doesn't detract from the understandable response that black people are getting a raw housing deal. We remember the Grenfell Tower horror and, in doing so, saw once again that many - perhaps most - of those affected were from BAME communities.

Some, in the manner of David Lammy or Doreen Lawrence, see a specific and identifiable structural racism in these statistics, arguing that the conditions and response would be different had the people concerned been white. It is always worth asking these questions since direct racism of this sort is not a sort of woke myth but it is also worth looking more deeply into the reasons for London's housing crisis. I'm sure Lammy, Buck and other Labour MPs representing inner London constituencies are keen to see their residents, and especially the BAME residents, better and more safely housed.

For some while there has been something of a debate about the reasons why, to nick yet again Jimmy McMillan's catch phrase, the rent's too damned high. Some point to structural changes within the housing mix itself (right-to-buy, private rented properties, lack of rental controls, speculative foreign investment, financialisation) as the main reason for this problem while others point to planning controls (urban containment, green belt, onerous infrastructure requirements).

Recently, as evidence from around the world becomes clearer, the case against urban containment gets stronger:

One literature review lists more than 25 studies over a period of 30 years, all of which indicate a potential for association between stringent land-use regulation and higher house prices (Quigley and Rosenthal 2005). The extent to which house price increases are associated with land use regulation varies. Research has associated as much as 90 percent of average overall house price increases with prescriptive land use regulation (Eicher 2008b), with house price differentials of up to 54 percent and new house price differentials of up to 61 percent (Downs 1992)

Time and time again - even from those like economists at the Bank of England who were sceptical of planning system derived reasons for housing unaffordability - the existence of restrictions on land supply to prevent 'sprawl' are noted as the dominant driver of that unaffordability. Which brings us back to what we can (perhaps) call structural racism - if the majority of BAME people live in places negatively affected by perverse incentives within the planning system (like London) then we can argue the system is racist. Or, if you don't favour that Lammy-style analysis (and I'm not sure I do), then you can say that the housing problems for BAME people in London are in large part consequential on decades of failure to build new houses rather than some sort of racist conspiracy against them.

There are a lot of things you can do to make black lives better (improving schools, less racist policing, a more sane approach to illegal drugs, prison reform, less exploitative political and community leadership) but one of the very best things you can do for those lives is to reform the planning system so BAME people can live - plus lots of others who aren't BAME too - in places where they'd like to live rather than seeming perpetually condemned to the cramped, gardenless, unhealthy life of the dense inner city. The Green Belt may not actually be racist but reforming it would be one of the very best things you could do to improve black lives in Britain.

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