London is turning into California (unfortunately it's the politics not the weather)

 

I don’t make predictions often, but I do recognise that what’s happening elsewhere might presage changes that could happen here in the UK. For reasons of language and its domination of popular culture (plus the growing impact of social media on elite opinion), the United States might present us with something of that future.

We used to think that we were somehow above the culture war politics of the USA and the slightly bizarre national significance of issues like abortion, guns and saying prayers in schools. Of course, we shouldn’t dismiss such concerns, but next to economic or broader social issues – health, crime, jobs, pay, taxes – they should fall further down the list of concerns. Part of the problem here is that the people who control the agenda for political debate see abortion, guns and prayers as important and personal whereas the problems of working class life (can I feed the kids, is there a job to be had, oh shit my husband just got laid off, can I afford to buy that) are outside the lives and experience of those agenda setters.

The UK’s agenda setting class (or “people with blue ticks on Twitter” as I like to call them) take their line from their equivalent in the USA and that counterpart class doesn’t live in Texas, Oklahoma or Alabama, it lives in New York, Chicago or, most often, California. This California:

…61.5 percent of our voters choose Hillary Clinton for president; we made Kamala Harris the first Indian-American (and second African-American woman) to be elected a United States senator; we reaffirmed overwhelming Democratic majorities in state politics; and we voted to legalize marijuana, ease parole for nonviolent criminals, raise taxes on cigarettes, extend income-tax increases on the wealthiest few, boost school spending, restore bilingual education, encourage the reversal of the Supreme Court’s noxious Citizens United ruling and ban single-use plastic bags.

California, the wonderful progressive paradise. A progressive paradise where the biggest losers are black and Hispanic residents, most of California’s middle- and working-class:

Since 1990, Los Angeles’s black share of the population has dropped in half. In San Francisco, blacks constitute barely 5 percent of the population, down from 13 percent four decades ago. As a recent University of California at Berkeley poll indicates, 58 percent of African-Americans express interest in leaving the state—more than any ethnic group—while 45 percent of Asians and Latinos are also considering moving out.

On any measure of equality you care to choose, California comes out badly: it has some of America’s worst schools, the gap between rich and poor is widest, the numbers of homeless people is highest, and the levels of job and business creation are shamefully low. On any objective measure California is failing. Yet the people who preside over this failure continue to enjoy power, indeed the control of California by the progressive wing of the Democrats is a solid as the racist wing of that Party’s control was in Georgia or Alabama in the 1950s.

My prediction is that, if you want to see the future for London (and its satellites – Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge) then look to California. Watch as politicians appeal to their elite neighbours with cycling schemes, junk food bans, sugar taxes and planning controls all coupled with a patronising indulgence of identity politics – Black Lives Matter, LGBT++ Pride, quotas for women, cosplaying as Muslims or Sikhs, frowning concerns about “hate speech”, and almost daily warnings about the “far right”.

Meanwhile every lobby that arrives at city hall’s doorstep is indulged with promises of protections and controls (especially if there’s a useful contribution to the mayor’s re-election or the MP’s campaign fund). Portentous statements about the housing crisis will be followed by attacks on efforts to reform planning. Virtue-signalling about refugees won’t stop the same people then making sure those refugees are dumped as far away from their nice central London life as possible. National government is lambasted for homelessness or the lack of jobs while ‘public space protection orders’ move on the street sleepers and licencing rules or advertising regulations clobber small businesses.

Right now, London is about 50% non-white and, for all the problems that go with this diversity, can be proud of this. But most of those non-white people are the folk doing the lower paid jobs – cleaning, driving, clerking, guarding – and they really can’t afford to live in the city. Places like Brixton that used to be dominated by the black working-class are now filled with youthful sorts – fully signed up to California’s progressive, righteous agenda until (just like in San Francisco or Los Angeles) it comes to working-class jobs and housing. Want a new housing development or new industry and you can’t move for wealthy white actors, tech company owners and journalists with a thousand reasons why those homes and that industry have to be somewhere else.

My prediction is that London will become more like California, and especially urban California. Some of this will seem great and it will certainly sound progressive, but it will be accompanied by the steady sound of people leaving. And, just like with San Francisco, the people who leave will increasingly be black people as they head for places where the cost of living gets a little closer to the money available.

Only four of London’s 32 Boroughs have a non-white leader and the Labour leaders in inner city boroughs are all white middle-class professionals (mostly male). Such leaderships will take the black votes in their area for granted and will play the “we care” card by accusing opponents (and the national government) of racism without doing much to change the real life problems of those black communities – high crime rates, expensive housing, lousy bus services, dirty streets. Their councils will tell people – black people – they smoke too much, drink too often and eat the wrong food while doing nothing much to provide affordable homes let alone a route into home ownership and a real stake in their city. Then raise a flag on Haile Selassie’s birthday as if that helps anyone.

The middling sort of black person, hard-working, a decent education and something of a career isn’t staying but is looking for a job and a home elsewhere – in North Kent or South Essex, in Swindon or the few remaining affordable parts of the South Coast. Some will commute back into London to work in hospitals, drive trains or administer insurance claims but many will find, especially in these post-pandemic work-from-home times, that they can make a fine, happy family life somewhere other than London.

The result is that London becomes a place dominated by the guilty rich and the once young doing trendy well-paid jobs that let them eat out a lot while living in a pokey little flat they can barely afford. Plus people – mostly black people - stuck in overcrowded, badly managed social housing who clean up after the rich and the young, ferry them about town in cabs and tubes, serve them breakfasts, and man the bar doors to keep them safe. If you want what London once was – diverse, full of opportunity and affordable – then it needs a different sort of leadership, one less taken by Californian culture wars and more bothered with building homes, controlling crime and encouraging small business. One less fussed by how you get to work than with the work being able to make ends meet. And one that puts the interests of London’s workers ahead of London’s elite. I don’t, sadly, think London will be getting any of this any time soon.

 And the same for New York - big cities are finished.

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Lockdown Living - in which the Resolution Foundation discover (and then ignore) London's housing crisis

 The Resolution Foundation has published some work looking at what they call "Lockdown Living", essentially a brief review of housing conditions in the UK:

We show that living conditions in lockdown have been determined by long-term housing trends such as tenure change, the failure to build sufficient social-housing stock and weak regulation of the private-rented sector. As we face the prospect of local lockdowns or even a second wave going into the winter months, both short- and long-term action to address the inequalities uncovered here is needed more than ever before.

What the Resolution Foundation find shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone with more than the passing appreciation of housing issues in the UK. We're told that poorer people live in less good, more overcrowded conditions and that older people tend to have more living space than younger people. Unsurprisingly, given the age and social profile of BAME communities - younger, poorer - these groups are more likely to be in poor homes (Resolution Foundation use damp as their test here) and more likely to be overcrowded.

The report makes few recommendations (suggesting, for example, that opening playgrounds, libraries and leisure centre especially in more deprived areas would ease pressures from lockdown) but points to several problems within our system such as changing tenures and how this impacts on health and well-being. The authors, however, remain stuck with the belief that the resolution to housing issues such as those they describe lie in more regulation and more state-controlled housing provision. At no point to they try to understand how it is that the well-being of owner occupiers is so much better than that of renters (both social and private sector).

It is notable too that no attmept is made by the authors to understand geographical factors in their findings. We read that BAME people are more likely to live in overcrowded conditions, less likely to have a garden, and more likely to live in a damp home. Clearly a concern but the Resolution Foundation should also have noted that 55% of the UK's BAME population lives in London which also has much higher levels of private renting, high rise living and poor quality social housing.

Similarly, having noted how over 55s have much more living space, the authors don't then also recognise that this is what might be called an "empty nest" effect brought about by young people leaving home for work or study rather than a direct consequence of intergenerational housing inequality. There's also a geographical issue here since London has a much younger age profile than the rest of the UK and further that the Resolution Foundation's use of unadjusted income skews the findings since average London incomes are much higher than much of the rest of the UK.

It's good that this work is done although the Resolution Foundation could be a lot less 'glass half empty' in its presentation. The problem, however, is simply not a function of PRS regulation or the lack of funding for social housing for all that some changes here would be desirable. The problem is London. Every single measure that the report uses reflects the crisis within London's housing - overcrowding reflects a (social and private) rental market dominated by flats, damp homes the overwhelming of environmental health enforcement by the sheer numbers of private rented properties, and the loss of wellbeing by the fact that 'thirtysomethings' in London stay renting because they can't afford to buy.

It's almost certainly the case that the young and less well-off have, in terms of day-to-day living, suffered worse under lockdown - the "lockdown is lovely" crowd were mostly well-heeled retirees outside London with nice homes and gardens in smart market towns not stressed immigrant families in a London high-rise or young professionals trying to work from home on a wobbly IKEA desk in the corner of a bedroom. But stripped of the emotive messaging, what we see from the report is further evidence that London does not begin to meet the housing needs of many of its residents and that the only way to meet these needs is to build more family housing. Enough that, over time, we can get back to the conditions of those 'thirtysomethings' parents and have family homes affordable to people on average pay.

Spending lots of money on new social housing (which is unlikely to be family housing in London) or badgering government into new rent regulations might seem like a good idea but, in reality, it's using an inadequate sticking plaster to cover over the damage done by the lack of housing land supply in the South East and London. Without the wholesale reform of our strategic planning system to free up five- or ten-times more land for housing, the problems found by the Resolution Foundation will persist.

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Why would anyone leave London?

On the 27th July 1987 I set off, suitcase in hand, from Kent House Station to arrive some four hours or so later at Bradford Interchange. It feels odd to think that all those years ago I made the decision to leave the place where I'd been born and brought up, the South London suburb of Beckenham, to take a job in Bradford. Lots of people, especially Londoners, have asked me why I did it, why did I leave the 'Greatest City in the World' to live in one of those dreadful, dreary, northern places they'd seen on the telly. Even a few curious Bradford folk have asked!

My usual answer is either: "someone gave me a job" or a longer explanation that, even in 1987, London was expensive. There was little hope of me being able to afford to buy even a tiny place in my home town and I faced the prospect of either spending most of my life on a train in from Essex or North Kent or else buying a pokey flat in Hackney where you'd need three bolts on the door and daren't go out at night. Leaving London was an easy decision and choosing Bradford was simply because, besides the job offer, I actually knew somebody in Bradford.

I'm writing this sitting in the kitchen of our house in Cullingworth where, if I stand out on the terrace, I can look out at the wooded valley where we live, can hear the chatter of birds, the basso profundo moo of cows fattening in nearby fields and the bleat of sheep on the moor. Sometimes in a morning the clip-clop of horses passes by on the bridleway out back, accompanied by girly giggles or gentle conversation. In twenty minutes I can be in the centre of Bradford, it's a little more than half an hour into Leeds and even Manchester can be reached within an hour. If you put your foot down on the north bound A629 you'll be in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in a breath and an hour later, given favourable traffic, Windermere and the Lake District beckons. Why would anyone leave London?

Yet sometimes the idea of leaving a place, especially a place a grand as London, seems an impossibility:

One beneficiary of this idea, though, could be the former 5 Live presenter Victoria Derbyshire, who could be appointed the Today programme's fifth presenter. She comes from Bolton, so the argument goes. Trouble is, her family is unlikely to welcome such a move. Her husband is a fellow West Ham season ticket holder and she has two teenage children. Why would anyone want to uproot their family like this?

This was Iain Dale talking about the daft idea of sending a bit of the Today Programme "Up North" in the form of Nick Robinson. As a piece of tokenism this is classic BBC but Iain's tone troubled me, not because moving to a new job sometimes comes with tricky decisions for families, but because there was a sense of "only in London" about the post. Or maybe it was just Dale using the term "Professional Northerner" in his headline.

Crossing this attitudinal bridge, the view that everything of importance happens in London, is central to the idea of "levelling up" England's regions. And it is perhaps the most difficult part of the project to achieve for the simple reason that people don't see what I see out my window, they see what they'll lose even if the view from their window is just a brick wall. Not just the West Ham season ticket but the connections, the familiar places and bewildering choices. To go where? To Durham, Hull, Stoke or Wrexham, to places you've vaguely heard of but (if the average person's geography is a guide) would struggle to place on a map.

Part of the problem is fifty years of portraying England's north and midlands as dour places filled with slightly unhealthy blokes in work clothes talking funny. Pictured in drama as an endless struggle interspersed with strong tea and large women in flowery aprons: The North, whose leaders arrive in London, twisting their proverbial cap in their gnarled workers hands, to ask the rich folk for more money. And now, when those leaders no longer look like professional northerners, nothing has changed. Week after week little clumps of the North's great and good cram onto the train to head for meetings with ministers and civil servants in the glittering glories on London. "Please Sir, can we have some more?" is the plaintive cry of these folk.

This picturing of places far from London as primitive, barely out of the stone age, is not new. I recall a geography lesson where we discussed perceptions of distance and place. Mr Delaney produced what Dungeons & Dragons DMs would call a "crudely drawn map" showing England from the perspective of a Londoner. A map where The North was a place of rude huts and outside toilets beginning at the end of the Metropolitan Line, and where London contained everything of any importance or significance. This mindset, even from those who began their life somewhere other than London is what must be overcome if we are to level up.

I'm not sure how we do this, how we change attitudes, expectations and opportunities so people don't see ending up in Hull (with a decent job and a cottage in South Cave) as some sort of failure. Some of this is, as Chris Blackhurst suggests at Reaction, about government's choices:

The brain drain has to be reversed, the civil service has to move north, out of London, and not just the back room jobs but all the jobs, leaders included. The private sector, too, has to be incentivised to relocate. Again, it can’t be the rehoming of satellite operations – the North has long and bitter experience of those, of their arrival and their subsequent closing – but the headquarters.

But Iain Dale's article tells us that, if the reaction to one journalist leaving London is "oh my god, what a terrible idea, everyone's in London", what will be the reaction of civil service mandarins with a nice house in Amersham and children at a good day school? I mean, do they even have good day schools in Newcastle? Civil service reorganisation will be doubly difficult if the reorganisation doesn't just mean a new set of names for ministries and moving to a different office in Chiswick or Kensington but means moving to some place you've never heard of in a part of England that's more than an hour from London.

The other day I read a newspaper report about some men who'd gone for a pint somewhere in East London and been charged £6.40 for a pint of ordinary session bitter plus a late night supplement. Here in Cullingworth you won't pay more than £3.30 for a beer like that (and it will have been brewed in the village too). Yesterday I went to the Polish bakers on Manningham Lane in Bradford returning with five loaves of fresh bread plus a challah - all for just over six quid. Compare that to the price of a single sourdough loaf in Borough Market.

London is expensive, crowded, often lonely, crime-ridden and unhealthy. For all the great institutions (the ones you never go to because you're too busy), it's as much a place of homelessness, mental breakdown and filth as it is of those famous bright lights. Londoners spend hours hanging from straps on tube trains, cramming overground trains and holding a pole in a bus. Hours that could be spent sitting in the garden with a cup of tea or walking into the village for a pint. We're told that the business of London is a good thing, "drives the economy" say all the experts, but somehow I've a feeling I was right to leave.

But then, why would anyone leave London?


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NIMBYs are destroying California. They'll do the same to London if we don't stop them.

California, the golden land of promise, blessed by sunshine, fertility and the fruits of liberty. It's in a mess, you might even say dying. For the first time in its history the Golden State has more people leaving than arriving. And the reasons? As Jimmy McMillan once said "the rent's too damned high". California has an acute, almost terminal, housing problem:

The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.

Four out of ten Californians pay more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage, the worst in the USA. And the reason is pretty simple. Californians have voted, agitated, campaigned, petitioned and marched against building new homes - again and again. NIMBYs are destroying California.

This being America, the finger is pointed at the zoning system used by town planners over there and, specifically, zoning only for single family homes. Worse than this, these zones don't just say "you can only build single detached homes here" they also dictate the size of individual plots. And in places where agricultural land sells for $1m per acre, limiting density to at low as 10 homes per acre makes for expensive homes. But it's not just this rather crazy system but that it is made worse by having 90% of the land in the state excluded from development and by having a set of NIMBY-inspired environmental, heritage and ecological policies the main effect of which is to prevent development.

Bob Tilman has spent best part of six years trying to get permission to redevelop his laudromat in San Francisco into an apartment block. There's still no permission and opponents - yes opponents of housing is a city with a huge crisis - have used political pressure, environmental regulations and heritage rules to try and prevent the scheme. Elsewhere in the city the same anti-housing campaigners have stopped the development of a homeless shelter.

We can, from the comfort of civilised England, smile and laugh at California's problems. We can point at the gross hypocrisy of progressive, left-of-centre politicians working with wealthy residents to stop affordable housing. We can even boggle as politicians elected on supposedly pro-housing platforms then spend half their campaigning on stopping housing. But we need to pause for a minute and consider whether, in our 'world city' the same problems are brewing.

Spend even a little bit of time looking into London's housing issues and you'll quickly find all the same conditions we see in California. Not just rising homelessness, sofa-surfing and exploitative, often illegal rentals, but politicians (commonly those progressive left-of-centre politicians like we see in California) saying that the impossible is possible, that we can meet housing need in a growing city without making a lot more land available for housing. There are nice warm words about 'brownfield' sites, talk of increased density and affordable housing provisions, but when the chance comes to get one of those dense development with lots of affordable housing, reasons are quickly found to refuse the development. "It's too tall". "What about heritage". "Ooo Kew Gardens".

This pattern is repeated everywhere as council planning committees indulge loud NIMBY lobbies by drawing up the most restrictive local plan possible with the least amount of housing land allocated they can get away with. And then those same Councils lobby for billions in public money to "solve the housing crisis" - the housing crisis their planning decisions have contributed to. Just about every home counties planning authority is squirming about trying to reduce the self-evident need for them to play a bigger part in meeting the housing demand that a massively successful London brings.

The planning system has a sclerotic local plan process, is obsessed with protecting the 'green belt' at all cost, and is vulnerable to loud, organised anti-housing minorities. We should look at California and take the warning - get the system changed, allow more housing development and put the NIMBYs back in the box. Most people support more housing for families, more affordable housing and a fairer planning system, it's time politicians - nationally and locally - had the balls to face down the anti-housing campaigners and get a nation where the rent's not too damned high.

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"We don't like cities, oh no. We love 'em"

One of the concerns emerging from Onward's research into the 'politics of belonging' was a concern about cities:

71% of people think that “more people living in cities has made society worse”

We could, of course, explore what exactly we mean by city here but the sentiment is an important one given that, as Onward showed in earlier research, we don't want new homes built outside the city. At the heart of the sentiment is that people really do yearn for community and, rightly or wrongly, consider that the city does not provide for such neighbourliness.

Despite this finding people continue to move into cities and the larger the city the more attractive it is to the migrant.

The United Nations in 2009 and the International Organization for Migration in 2015 both estimated that around 3 million people are moving to cities every week. Approximately 54% of people worldwide now live in cities, up from 30% in 1950. Sources estimate this will grow to 2/3 of world population in the next 15-30 years. More than half of urban dwellers live in the 1,022 cities with greater than 500,000 inhabitants.

The reasons for this migration are primarily economic - the city is where the work is so you go to the work - but there are also a collection of amenity and social factors that perhaps get less attention. I had an unresolved conversation a while ago with former ASI research director, Sam Bowman about whether the wider amenity value of a place is factored into housing costs (there's more fun stuff in a city meaning that the value from the rent is greater). There are more social and business opportunities in a city making it more appealing as a place to live.

The problem is that this doesn't explain the disconnection between what people say they want (essentially suburbia) and what they actually buy (city living). There is probably a 'life stage' factor in all this with younger people and wealthy 'empty nesters' populating a largely child free city while those with families choose the suburbs but it also reflects how suburbia not only lacks the city's amenities but also lacks affordable places to live. In times past suburbs, even well-connected suburbs, were cheaper than the city (they were also cleaner and smog-free) but the virtual halt on expansion changed this pattern.

The policy challenge is, I suspect, less about housing than it is about the connectedness of housing to the city amenities and associated agglomeration effects. When we look at transport infrastructure we spend too much time calling for multi-billion investments connecting city to city rather than creating a more intensive network within a large urban area. When you have that connectedness (as London has) it is ridiculous to then have restrictions on development within easy access of that network (which London also has). Elsewhere the situation differs either because of dispersed populations or because of topography, fragmented political geography and underinvestment (Transpennine England is a good example here) - there is no network and without it less agglomeration effect and less successful cities.

The other part of the policy challenge relates back to people thinking living in cities makes society worse, to the lack of social capital in dense urban places, and to the transience of environments dominated by private rented property. Plus, of course, the persistent problem of affordability. The odd thing is that in a previous age we considered that as a principal means of providing housing, private renting was exploitative and we replaced it via municipal housing and the encouragement of home ownership. Today many urbanists seem to favour renting as an approach praising its flexibility and, of course, affordability.

Suburbia was our historical compromise between the city and the countryside - many of the amenities of the city and access to its agglomeration effect while maintaining a sense of space and an idea of community. We need to recognise that strategies to prevent the expansion of cities - for reasons of cohesion, environmental protection and snobbery - have contributed to a significant problem. Right now most of the land needed to accommodate expanding cities is non-urban and at the margins of the exiting built area. We are actively preventing development here - this needs to change. At the same time we need to look at strategies aimed at making the city itself more liveable - experimenting with flat pack housing and sky gardens or building more child-friendly environments within developments.

None of this precludes the need for more development land at the city margin or the requirement to spend money on the networks needed to integrate new development into the wider city but we need to get away from the rigidity of current plan-driven development models. We need to recognise that families need private outdoor space (and parks, while great, don't meet this need) and that cities do too little to make families welcome. This matters because families stay put for a substantial time - the demands of children (schools, childcare support and the activities of growing up) tend to keep people in one place for a long time, something that would allow for denser urban areas to develop the sense of community that transient singles really don't provide.

How our urban environments develop, whether or not we shape them in the manner of suburbia or as rabbit hutches for tomorrow's peons, is one of the big policy questions but sadly one mostly pushed aside by dominant obsessions with slaying perceived environmental demons. The decline in community is as big a problem as climate change yet we seem not to be thinking about how to restore trust, how to create stable neighbourhoods and how to get this without throwing out the social and economic advantages of the city.

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Welcome to Hotel California: ASI's proposals for more microflats

Those lovely consequentialist neoliberals over at the Adam Smith Institute have come up with their latest wheeze to solve London's houisng problems - really tiny flats:

Living in micro-homes could "expand choice" for young professionals and help tackle London's housing crisis, a report has suggested.

A neoliberal think tank is calling for the Greater London Authority (GLA) to scrap its rules on minimum floor space.

The Adam Smith Institute said homes in the capital with less than 37 sq m of floor space could be an "affordable opportunity" for young people.

Now I appreciate (and the ASI make this point in their report) that our neoliberal friends also want a "profound reform of housing regulation" but the problem with the microflats idea is that it gives another excuse for housing's key problem (lack of land supply) to be ducked by authorities. It's also likely that, despite the ASI saying Londoners were "comfortable with living in smaller apartments", this covers over another problem with housing supply - even if we build good numbers of new homes, if they're flats we're not meeting the need for family housing.

A decade ago my colleague Huw Jones (former strategic housing guru for Leeds City Council among other achievements) talked about the idea of shared living as a stepping stone from being a student (where micro-flats with shared facilities are the norm) to regular housing. Huw would point out that shared living allows for that social environment that young people living alone desire (without the 'on top of eachother' problems with flat sharing). So the ASI's idea isn't without its merits.

The problem is the transition - moving on from renting a small apartment into family housing - is increasingly difficult for many young people earning good money in big cities like London (and increasingly Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham). Unless there is this transition the effect of increasing the supply of rented flats (whether micro- or not) is to create Hotel California - "you can check out any time you want but can't ever leave".

The winners under such as situation are not the young people paying big rents for a well-proportioned cupboard with a window but the businesses renting these micro-flats out. Not only do microflats increase the rental yield but, by providing "communal amenities such as games rooms and open living spaces", a further yield generator is provided - the service charge (justified because someone has to clean the shared space, look after any equipment and manage programmed maintainence).

Microflats can be added to a series of other wheezes - densifying suburbs, taller towers, more council housing, subsidised mortgages, rent controls - that give excuses to the wealthy folk living in London's green belt. Excuses that allow MPs to say stuff like this piece of spectacular NIMBYism from Crispin Blunt:

The proposed Redhill Aerodrome development is not an isolated issue. Under the current planning system, local authorities such as Reigate and Banstead and Tandridge, situated in the Green Belt, are being put under unreasonable pressure to build unrealistic numbers of new homes by the Planning Inspectorate. Leaders of all 11 Surrey borough and district councils agree that most of Surrey is heavily constrained by the Green Belt and other important designations, imposing severe limitations on their ability to meet local housing targets.

This (not allowing the owners of previously developed land like aerodromes to realise value and develop much needed housing) is the problem and building microflats in Battersea or Camden will only give the Crispin Blunts of this world another excuse to pretend that housing need for London can be met without thousands of new family homes in Surrey (or Kent or Berkshire or Hertfordshire or Buckinghamshire).

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Build homes people want to live in (it is that simple)

Hardly a day passes without another seemingly creative solution to the UK's (well mostly London's) housing problems being presented. And, since nearly all these creative solutions don't involve increasing the supply of land for housing where people want to live, nearly all of the solutions are wrong. It really is that simple - more land, more homes, more affordable housing:

A 2016 academic analysis by David Albouy, Gabriel Ehrlich and Yingyi Liu estimated that, in general, rents decrease by 3 percent for each 2 percent increase in the housing stock

As the author, Patrick Wolff, here points out (talking about San Francisco and Silicon Valley):

The Bay Area must increase its total housing stock by 50 percent over the next 20 years to bring affordability down to a reasonable level.

Wolff also reminds us that this degree of growth is perfectly possible:

Detroit and Texas grew far faster during their booms, as did our own Bay Area in the 20 years following World War II.

As, of course, did London in the 1930s. I don't have the detailed figures to hand for London, it's not growing as fast as the Bay Area and growth may be slowed a little by Brexit, but there's already an undersupply (high rents tell us this). So let's go with Wolff's 50% and reduce a bit to, say, 40%. There are currently about 3.27m households in London and I'll assume they're all housed. Using Wolff's model London will need 1.3m new homes over 20 years to meet demand and address the problem of affordability (which is 65,000 per year). The current London plan proposes fewer than 50,000 per year resulting in a shortfall on demand of 320,000. The absolute effect of this will be higher rents and house prices. And remember that all this assumes London's growth is lower than San Francisco's - if the city matches that growth it will need a further 300,000 homes just to keep pace.

I'm not going to set out what should be done - everybody knows. We just need to ask why we're not doing it.

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Crime and gentrification...

We were all utterly shocked to discover that, for the first part of 2018, the rate of murder in London was worst than that once Capital of Crime, New York City:

London police investigated more murders than their New York counterparts did over the last two months, statistics show, as the British capital’s mayor vowed to fight a “violent scourge” on the streets.

Now, setting aside that New York is probably still worse than London despite its impressive decline in crime, there might be a reason for this - gentrification or, if you prefer it "positive income sorting":

These metros are expensive because they have restricted their supply of new housing even as they continue to generate strong demand for it. As a result, homebuyers and renters in these metros compete with each other over a smaller housing stock, bidding up prices, and pushing out those who are the least financially able. The high cost of housing also deters potential in-migrants, especially if their incomes are low, which drives up the income levels of those who are ultimately observed moving in. Of course, homeowners and certain fortunate renters can stay put in their homes for a long time, even when they can no longer afford them at current prices, so positive income sorting can be a slow process.

That's from housing economist, Issi Romem in an article that's nothing to do with crime. But it seems to me that, as places become wealthier and more exclusive at scale the sort of people who are more likely to commit crime (young, male, less well-educated, lower social class) simply aren't there to commit the crime. What Romem found, however, was that cities with more socially fair housing policies maintained a balance (the income and social class of in-migrants matched that of out-migrants), which is perhaps great for a wide range of other social factors but less good for crime rates. It's a thought.

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Cities, housing and the new serfdom

I am more and more convinced that cities and the fandom surrounding urban densification is the biggest threat to a fair, equal, open and decent society. Yet even the YIMBY movement seems to be trapped in the idea that we should cram more and more people into a tiny part of our land area leaving overprotected rural areas affordable only those fortunate to inherit, rich enough to buy or trapped in a marginal life renting one of the vanishing numbers of such properties outside the city.

The problem is that the idea of cramming more units into already dense places (and central London is, by almost any standards bar urban Spain, very population dense) simply doesn't resolve the affordability problem. Here's an illustration from California:

Dense housing is about three to seven times more expensive to build. Combined with the very high cost of land zoned for high-density development, market prices inevitably end up beyond the means of nearly all Californians. New publicly subsidized “affordable” apartments in one dense Bay Area development are estimated to cost upwards of $700,000 to build—more than the cost of two-thirds of all homes in California, according to our analysis of American Community Survey data for 2016.

The beginning of understanding our housing problems comes when we ask what kind of homes people want rather than asking how many 'units' we can shoehorn into the limited land supply local councils allow for building.

The suburban house is the idealization of the immigrant’s dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.

And it's not just the immigrant into California - such as the man who the above comment, Edgardo Contini  - who want to live in suburbia, it's most families everywhere. Not because they're selfish ingrates who want to spoil the environment driving their cars but because they want space, openness, light, air and land, all the things they can't get in the confining, claustrophobic inner city. It's something like this from geographer Anne Snyder :

“There is a growing craving for life to be lived offline, for human contact to be enjoyed with real handshakes, real meals around real tables, and real care for neighbors, knowing that in a pinch that neighbor will watch out for you in turn.”

Cities are exciting places filled with experience - everyone should perhaps have a go at living in one. For some, it is everything but for most there comes a point where the thrill of having the buzzing cultural brilliance of the city at their fingertips begins to pall - it's too ephemeral, insubstantial and, while great for grown-ups, no place to raise a family. Yet so many people are trapped - great jobs, fantastic social life, but no way to have a stake, to put down roots, to join a real neighbourhood. And this didn't use to be the case, in times past (and not really all that long ago either) people could have those great years in the city and then follow them with great years raising a family in a welcoming, neighbourly suburb. So you aren't going to have a family (or, rather, you keep putting it off):

Recent Harvard econometric research associated bloated house price increases with a reduction in birth rates among households that do not already own a home of their own. Similarly, high housing prices were cited as a cause to delay having children in a recent Bankrate.com survey. In places where housing prices remain around historic levels, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, Orlando, and Houston, birth rates are much higher.

Maybe you think us not having children is a good thing (over 70% of Inner London households are childless) but I've a feeling it's short-sighted, requiring the city to suck in more migrants from elsewhere just to sustain its appetites. And who is going to look after you when you need it? Cities are creating a society that sees short-term economic advance and personal utilitarian gratification as the only good. Community can be replaced by service contracts, neighbourhood by professional networks or 'corporate internal communities', and real social capital by the ephemera of social events.

“Zero” is also the most common response when people are asked how many confidants they have, the GSS data show. And adult men seem to be especially bad at keeping and cultivating friendships.

Our home is at the heart of all this and what matters here is that it's our home not some rented flat on a rolling short term lease. Yet so much of the debate about housing is stuck in an obsession with numbers rather than a discussion about needs or wants - all coloured by a cod environmentalism exploited by those who benefit from land values artificially inflated through the deliberate restriction of supply by government (a restriction eagerly supported by politicians with their cant about our "precious green belt"). And it gets worse - urban containment, densification and its consequential gentrification results in poverty:

High rents are leaving many at the brink of poverty. Adjusted for housing costs, California has the largest share of its citizens living in poverty—well above the rate for such historically poor states as Mississippi. And homelessness has surged in the priciest places, particularly in Los Angeles and New York City, which account for about 4 percent of the national population but 25 percent of its homeless population.

Our housing policies (and please let's not pretend the the UK's problems are so very much different from California's) are making us poorer, less happy, more dependent, tied to work and the work environment - a new bunch of serfs, highly educated with what seem great jobs, but with no stake in society beyond delivering the production business and government desires - serfs. As Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin conclude (and you should too):

The shift to an ever more unequal, congested, and feudal society is not inevitable. We have the capacity to expand housing opportunities for future generations. There is no reason that we need to surrender the universal aspiration that for so long has defined our society.

Build suburbs.

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Densification policies won't solve London's housing crisis

Here's Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

Nowhere, here or abroad, has densification materially improved housing affordability, whether for low income households or the larger number of middle-income households. Density-oriented policies have helped drive prices up so high that Bay Area, $200,000 salary engineers cannot afford a home near their headquarters. In the meantime, many young families are increasingly leaving the state for less heavily regulated and less expensive states like Texas, Nevada and Arizona. Among those under 35, 80 percent of all homes purchased nationwide are single family houses and virtually all surveys of millennials express an overwhelming desire for this kind of residence.

This reality is lost on our planners as they seek to square the circle of providing family housing in an ever denser planning environment. So what do those pesky millenials want in a house?

“This is very likely because a huge majority are now married (66%) or in permanent relationships (13%, and almost half (49%) have children under the age of 18 living with them. In other words, it appears that they are seeking to raise their families in suburban rather than mid-city environments. And the NAR figures confirm this, showing that in the past year 57% of buyers under the age of 36 opted for suburban homes – and that the most popular type of home purchased (83%) was the single-family suburban home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.”

So in response to demand for the sort of suburban environment my generation enjoyed, the planners tell us they want denser development, flats above shops, tower blocks, garden-free apartments or town houses. This makes no sense yet it's precisely what the latest iteration of the UK's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) expects.

At some point we have to start asking people living on the fringes of London's suburbia (and other cities too) just why they have such an issue with some of the land near them being used for new suburban homes. Is it simply a matter of 'build 'em somewhere else'? Or are the common concerns - school places, traffic, medical centres, drains, floods - genuine? Maybe it's more visceral - some people in Cullingworth feel it isn't a village any more because of the new development.

There are lots of options and alternatives - new towns, garden communities, new villages, urban extensions - but none of these involve densification, piling people up on top of each other, cramming them into "walkable", "sustainable" tenement communities, a 21st century version of the crowded housing we cleared in the '50s, '60s and '70s. Build more suburbia, dammit!

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Regeneration without new land for suburbs created the problem of Haringey

If you restrict the availability of land for housing, poorer parts of town get gentrified - "regenerated" as we like to say in England. And, because we've restricted land for housing the poor people who live in those gentrifying areas lose out:

And that displays the flaw behind the creative class theory up to now. The idea itself is excellent–creative class professionals enhance urban cultures and economies, and should be welcomed. But cities that have embraced them so far, such as San Francisco and Austin, have not anticipated for this by allowing the necessary new housing. And the results are predictable: wealthier professionals are fighting with poorer service-class workers over the same set neighborhoods and housing stocks–and the latter group is losing.

Right now - as Claire Kober has discovered - the political consequences of this trend are problematic. Not because the people opposing gentrification have got any better proposals than the gentrifiers and regenerators but because a bunch of left wing agitators are riding to power on the back of promising a better world without really explaining how. And doing it violently. It's not just Momentum agitators in Haringey but a trend seen in Barcelona, Seattle, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney. In every case existing residents are promised new homes, protected rents and the benefits of a delightfully shiny regeneration and, in every case, those residents see wealthy incomers changing their world.

As it happens, I think that local leaders like Claire Kober deserve credit for their efforts - it's not their fault that we've had four decades of urban containment in London - but they should also be saying to people like London's mayor and whoever is in the revolving door as housing minister this week that the city needs space to grow. Central London has pretty close to the world's highest rents (Manhattan and Hong Kong are worse but they're islands so have an excuse) yet nobody is prepared to say that it is wrong-headed planning policies that are to blame not foreigners, property developers, landlords or local council leaders.

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London's property market - are the vultures circling yet?

My wife owns a share in an apartment on the Costa del Sol and it's lovely. But as successful investments go, it isn't one. The area between Estepona and San Pedro is littered with the marked out roads, pavements and street lights for what would have been thousands of villas and apartments. Even some of the completed developments are ghosts, mothballed by the developer or the bank against some possible - even mythical - future recovery in the housing market. Don't get me wrong here, there are also thousands of completed developments filled with happy people from all over Europe, it's just that the enthusiasm of developers, the gung ho (and sometimes corrupt) approach of local councils to development and an international property investment industry focused on flipping off-plan rather than housing people resulted in a vast oversupply of development opportunities.

For all that the Costa del Sol is great, the supply of people who want to go and live there is limited especially given the competition from other sunny, cheap and welcoming places like Bulgaria, Malta, Cyprus, assorted Greek Islands, Turkey and Portugal. Not to mention the rest of Spain's Mediterranean coast. I know that 'living there' covers a multitude of options from full time residency through spending winter on the beach to what amounts to extended tourism. But such opportunities limit the demand for such property, even in a world where a two-bed apartment will cost as little as £100-150k.

Imagine then how limited the market must be for two-bed flats that are selling at £2-3m!

There are an extra 14,000 unsold apartments on the market for between £1,000-£1,500 per sq ft. The average price per sq ft across the UK is £211.

Molior says it would take at least three years to sell the glut of ultra-luxury flats if sales continue at their current rate and if no further new-builds are started.

However, ambitious property developers have a further 420 residential towers (each at least 20 storeys high) in the pipeline, says New London Architecture and GL Hearn.

So we already have 14,000 empties and plan on building about 40,000 further properties to go onto this market? Do we not see that this is going to do nothing at all to resolve London's housing problems, will probably bankrupt a couple of developers and will result in a lot of wealthy Londoners stuck in negative equity. Regardless of any Brexit effect, the simple truth the we learned on the Costa del Sol applies here - there aren't enough people who have the cash to buy these apartments and who want to own property in London.

...hundreds of Asian investors who had bought London developments off-plan in 2015-16 in the hope of making a quick profit by selling apartments on closer to completion have instead lost hundreds of thousands of pounds. “They intended to flip [buy and sell on] the apartments and make big profits, but it hasn’t worked out like that, and now they are trying to get out at the smallest possible loss.”

A lot of folk who lounged on Spanish beaches back in 2004 or 2005 will be very familiar with this pitch - it was what the salesmen said back then: "the market's booming, everyone's investing, you only need to put down a deposit, you can't lose!" A loads of people took the punt, sticking down options on, as yet unbuilt, apartments and villas expecting to "flip them". It didn't happen. Most ended up owning an apartment they hadn't expected to own that was worth a lot less than the mortgage. For some it was a financial mess, even a disaster.

In London and for the New London Architecture "shiny city of millionaires" sort of developers, the prospects look pretty grim right now. Not because of Brexit (although that probably hasn't helped) but because if your development strategy is based on there being an increasing supply of people who can pay more than £2m for two-bed flat, then - outwith Venezuelan-style inflation - your strategy is going to crash. London's centralise and densify policies are creating this situation. Indeed, I'm sure the vultures that feed apon unsuccessful capitalists' vanity are circling already.

The problem is that, in every way (not just housing) London is too expensive, not family-friendly and lacking in the essential community that makes places work. Without revisiting the "build it ever higher" strategy - densify, densify, densify - London faces a second property crisis; one of empty mothballed homes owned by anonymous finance houses, crashed property developers, a frantic secondary market of short term lets, and an ever-wondering public asking why the city built things for international investors to 'flip' rather than homes that people might want to live in?

I recall a conversation with a Yorkshire developer about a conversion and new-build scheme in Saltaire. He ended up rescuing the development by creating a rental business for the flats he couldn't sell. Speaking to me he said: "Six months earlier I'd have been pricing up yachts, six months later I'd have been bankrupt." Right now London's 'build it and they will come' development market is looking pretty ropey and it's hard not to conclude that, as ever, avarice and vanity have meant that property developers have ignored the lessons of the Costa del Sol.

Yes, you've got benign local (and national) government keen for you to build. For sure, there are banks from all over ready to throw money at the schemes. But are there actually enough real customers for the things you're building? If there isn't, you need to think again about the strategy. In the case of London, we've maybe reached the point where there isn't.

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