Why do we indulge suburban NIMBYs? A rant about housing policy.

The precious green belt that we must preserve at all cost

I was thinking about doing a careful analysis of the different political parties' proposals on housing. After all, it's one of the biggest things out there and, as Jimmy McMillan said, the rent's too damned high. Not only the rent but the price of housing and the price of land.

Anyway I'm not going to bother with the careful analysis because every party's housing policy is stupid. It's fair to say that, if you want a forced choice, the Conservative's ideas are the least stupid and Labour's are utterly deranged. Out there we've got rent controls, assorted unspecified reforms to tenancy laws, 'tenants unions' (whatever they are when they're at home), commitments to build oodles of housing without making any changes to the supply of land, subsidies for mortgages and a rate fixed by the government for those mortgages which, when you think about it, is just rent control for rich people.

Everyone - other than planners and planning academics - knows full well that most of the problem with high rents and high prices goes away when you stop limiting the supply of land on which people can build houses. But those planners and planning academics invest their time telling us that 'oh no, it's not like that at all, planning is vital' - mostly by denying the basic economic premise of a relationship between price and supply.

I had an brief interchange on Twitter with a chap from a housing association about Labour's plans for zillions of new council houses. The chap (his name was Murtha) thought this an absolutely splendid idea because of inequality and vulnerable people and "evil tories". I asked a couple of questions about how it would work given Labour absolutely insist that they can build 150,000 new council and social homes every year without increasing the supply of land on which houses can be built. Just like the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats they believe in this mystic and wonderful thing called "brownfield sites" on which all the houses can go meaning that nice middle class people on the margins of the big cities (who might be tempted to vote Labour to stop Brexit or something) won't have to have smelly council estate sorts on their doorstep lowering the tone of the area.

I lose count of the number of times I see councillors who not so long ago were voting for local plans that called for thousands of new homes popping up in the papers alongside local NIMBYs waving banners opposing a few new houses in those councillors' wards. Earlier this year lots of liberal democrats, independents and groups with names like "Badford And District Residents against Overdevelopment" found themselves running district councils previously Tory-controlled having spent the campaign saying they'd stop development. These new leaderships' are finding that, despite promising the NIMBY voters there'd be no development, they are going to have to agree local plans they said were headed for the bin.

More than any other area of policy, housing is dominated by this sort of abject stupidity. It's not that we don't need new social housing (even council housing) but that, if you say that you'll do this without increasing the supply of land, your policy will result in two things - more of the sort of high rise council flats that causes so many problems in the 1970s (and are being demolished because nobody wants to live in them) and more expensive private housing because you've taken up all the land building council houses. And, just to be even handed, the same goes if you create artificially cheap mortgages with subsidised deposits - without new land supply this just increases house prices.

Meanwhile local councils - or rather their national body, the LGA - are telling everyone that it isn't the fault of the planning system that no houses are getting built but the wicked developers who get planning permissions and don't build. Nobody points out to those councils that it doesn't work to grant planning permissions for speculative developments in the wrong location (where the landowner vainly believes doing so will get him more value) while actively blocking developments by actual housebuilders in places where people actually want to live.

Just today a planning academic (this makes me cry, really it does) said this after I'd mentioned that we had more housebuilding when we didn't have a planning system:

We had mass suburbanisation and huge loss of countryside. Planning system if not continually interfered with by govt would have social justice at its heart. That is why it came into being in the first place.

Seriously - mass suburbanisation and huge loss of countryside? Here's the reality:

The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales.

Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban. But even that isn't the end of the story because urban is not the same as built on.

In urban England, for example, the researchers found that just over half the land (54%) in our towns and cities is greenspace - parks, allotments, sports pitches and so on.

Furthermore, domestic gardens account for another 18% of urban land use; rivers, canals, lakes and reservoirs an additional 6.6%.

Their conclusion?

In England, "78.6% of urban areas is designated as natural rather than built". Since urban only covers a tenth of the country, this means that the proportion of England's landscape which is built on is…2.27%.

Yet a huge amount of political capital is invested in stopping that 2.27% of England becoming 3%. This is the stark reality of housing and planning policies, urged on by decades of anti-suburbia snark. Politicians, local and national, are terrified by a tiny minority of suburban NIMBYs who think its more important to preserve golf courses, redundant airfields, derelict greenhouses, former race tracks and tumbledown industrial sites than to have homes for the next generation in places where that generation want to live and can afford.

Right now, in different ways, all our political parties are proposing to solve the nation's housing problems through the use of public subsidy of one sort of another just because they're frightened of these NIMBYs. Billions in taxpayers cash splurged on housing simply because politicians haven't got the guts to tell people that, if they want more affordable housing, the way to get it is to reform the planning system, end the absolutism of green belt and dump the idea of detailed local plans. And then let the private sector build new suburbs.

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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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So you want to be a NIMBY? Cough up then...

So you want to protect that precious view? Right now what NIMBYs do is put pressure on politicians to stop developers building in that view. Perhaps the answer is that the NIMBYs should cough up?

Last week, The New York Times published a story about the residents of a 12-story loft building in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood who, faced with the prospect of a new condo building that would block their view of the Empire State Building, decided to bargain rather than litigate.

The building's inhabitants offered to buy the air rights from their neighborhood developer for $11 million. Residents on the upper floors paid up to $1 million, people on the lower floors paid less, and those on the bottom floor paid nothing at all. People who didn't have the cash to pay their full share relied on loans from their neighbors.

In return, developer Gary Barnett ceded his right to build anything other than a three- or four-story structure on his property.

It's long been true that the only way to save a view is to own that view and full marks to these New Yorkers for stepping up to the mark.

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Someone tell the CPRE that people don't want to live in "run down areas"

A bit of that countryside the CPRE wants to save

People don't want to live in run-down "regeneration" areas but this doesn't stop the CPRE from pressing its NIMBY di tutti NIMBYs button:

'By ensuring that run-down areas, which are crying out for regeneration, are prioritised we can build more of the homes so desperately needed in areas where people want to live, while simultaneously preventing the needless loss of countryside to new housing.’

See kids, in the world of NIMBYs like CPRE, you're going to be living in high rise rabbit hutches next to a railway line on the edge of an industrial estate. This isn't really to "protect the countryside" but to allow people in million pound houses down in places like Surrey to protect the tiny bit of the countryside we actually need to build family homes for the next generation.

The CPRE is right we do desperately need housing in "areas where people want to live" but those areas are not in the derelict inner city, they're down in suburbia on the fringes of the city. The very places CPRE say represent "needless loss" of countryside.

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Are NIMBYs killing your city?

We've been told - are still being told - that the big city is the future. From the proponents of agglomeration theory to advocates of green economics, the dominant argument is that we need to pile everybody up in rabbit hutches. This is either to save the planet or else because such cramming will give them access to many more shiny experiences under the fabulous city lights.

The thing is that, as they get to the point of wanting to settle down (how dare they want to give up on the endlessly unfulfilling lifestyle of the big city), maybe have a family, the sheer expense and inconvenience - yes inconvenience - of city life (plus its noise, dirt and crime) switches a switch in folks' minds. Move to the suburbs it says. Buy a house with a decent sized yard (or garden if you're civilised). Get near some good schools. Spread out a bit.

As the evidence tells us:

By contrast, the biggest winner is Houston, a region many plan­ners and urban theorists regard with contempt. The Bayou City gained nearly 15,000 millennials (net) last year, while other big gain­ers included Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin, which gained 12,700 and 9,000, respectively. The other top metros for millennials includ­ed Charlotte, Phoenix, and Nashville, as well as four relatively ex­pensive areas: Seattle, Denver, Portland, and Riverside–San Bernardino. The top twenty magnets include midwestern locales such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Columbus, and Kansas City, all areas where average house prices, adjusted for incomes, are at least 50 percent lower than in California, and at least one-third less than in New York.

And the same goes for the UK as the Centre for Towns recently mapped - leaving aside the churn to other large cities, the move out from London into its suburbia is accelerating. Some of this - Canterbury, Thanet, Tendring, Colchester - is a long old haul if you're going to commute back into the big city but people are moving there, leaping the under-developed and over-priced green belt areas and populating places previously seen as too far to travel from.

We have to find a way to ensure that we are protecting the things we care about - community identity, heritage, wildlife and environment - while allowing for people to escape the trap of the city and the city's rent. Suburbia is much maligned but it is not less 'green' than a dense city and it offers other things - calm, tranquillity, community and child-friendliness - that the big city doesn't offer. If, like most people, you eat out occasionally (and at a selection of two of three preferred places), visit the theatre or cinema two or three times a year and museums or galleries once in a flood, then the supposed advantages of the city diminish besides the desire for safe streets, places to play, god schools and, above all this, a home with a garden.

Right now, supposedly for the sake of 'open' countryside, we are allowing the NIMBYs to kill your city. From being places populated by the full range of economic classes, cities are increasingly places where only the richest and the poorest live - in the USA the most unequal places aren't in Trump-voting flyover country but in the great progressive cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York. The ordinary middle classes - teachers, nurses, firemen, cops as well as the clerks and administrators - can no longer afford to live in the city and social housing, such as it exists, is filled (quite rightly) with the least well-off, minimum wage earners and the vulnerable.

Despite this progressive (as well as conservative) city leaders still pretend that this inequality can be resolved without new suburbs - listen to Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester:

“Whilst it is not possible to develop an ambitious 20-year plan for Greater Manchester without losing green space, it is clear that many communities feel strongly that the plan as currently drafted is unfair and disproportionate.

“As a result, it could diminish quality of life in some communities and restrict people’s access to good air and green space. The plan needs to be rebalanced to respond to these concerns and demonstrate a commitment to sustainable development.”

The NIMBYs have won - build more densely, pile up people into the sky, cram cheap housing onto former industrial sites, anything but allow new suburbs, new places for a new generation to breathe more freely, escape the harshness of the city and bring up a new generation.

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NIMBYs gonna NIMBY (and why the planning reform we need will be so hard)

To understand why (however much doing so is the right thing) it'll be tricky getting major reform of planning policies to allow better land supply and ultimately more affordable housing, here's the new leader of Uttlesford Council (Uttlesford is the bit of Essex round Saffron Walden) explaining his plans:

R4U will also revisit where the new towns will go and how many new homes are needed. After Brexit he says an economic downturn may mean fewer people moving here.

While the Great Brexit Train Crash is largely to blame for Conservative collapse here, it's worth noting that this new leader points at a growth-oriented local plan as the thing that matters. Along with his pals, John Lodge wants to re-apply the tourniquet to the local area - limiting new housing and stifling the potential economic growth that should accompany the expansion to Stanstead Airport.

Across the south of England groups got elected committed to preventing new housing, limiting growth and riding the narrow self-interest of existing home-owners. These groups have a variety of names - most commonly (name of place) Residents or (name of place) Independents but sometimes just plain old-fashion Liberal Democrats - but the unifying feature to them all is that 'residents voice' always means 'not in my back yard', these are NIMBY parties and they're going to NIMBY good and hard.

The current local plan process isn't fit for purpose - it takes an age to produce, is compromised by endless central government tinkering, and produces a system that doesn't meet housing need while, at the same time, promoting NIMBY attitudes. It's not just Green Belts (only 6% of Uttlesford is in the Green Belt) but the view that, as Cllr. Lodge puts it, "we will decide..." when outside Green Belt, UK law tells us that there's a presumption in favour of development and it rests with the planning authority to give reasons for any refusal that are compliant with local plans and national guidance.

Up here in Bradford, we are now in our 12th year of preparing our local plan - we've agreed a core strategy but, as a result of the latest bit of central government tinkering, we're in the process of reviewing the central part of that strategy - how many houses we need. The number right now is 43,500 and, under the (not yet introduced but, you know, we'll use it won't we) standardised method, this might drop a little. And, at some point in the next two years, we might get around to considering the actual land allocations to build those houses, a process that will take at least two years.

The whole strategic planning system is a joke but it will stay so long as it can be used to secure anti-growth, anti-housing policies at a local level. And we'll continue to see the likes of Cllr. Lodge elected with a mission to deliver NIMBY policies - mostly by booting the growth into long grass labelled 'infrastructure'.

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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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Momentum and Millionaires: A point about London's gentrification

The Market Urbanists observe a 'Bootleggers and Baptists phonomenum in housing:

We see the same thing today in the housing supply debate: many community activists with valid concerns over gentrification’s impacts have come to oppose upzoning. They point to cases where new housing has appeared to result in or not solve displacement as arguments against allowing more housing to be built. However, typically this is a result of projects being limited by regulations in the first place, making luxury development the most profitable new housing possible. In taking this stance, these advocates wind up boosting the cause of NIMBYs who either wish to preserve their property values or protect their views against even the slightest infringement.

I guess we'll call it Momentum and Millionaires (after all Jon Lansman famously lives in a posh flat and his son's a developer).

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If you don't want your view spoiling, buy the view....

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NIMBYs are fine if they're like Canadian philanthropist, Jim Hill:

Philanthropist Jim Hill is very proud of the Inglewood art gallery he founded in 2012.

So much so, that when a proposed development threatened the view from the gallery’s showpiece west-facing window, he bought the lot — and cancelled the development completely.

Which is the whole point. If you want to keep that view, you have to own that view. Otherwise someone can (and probably will) block it.

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Mrs Fowler's problem is nothing to do with the Coalition proposals on planning...

The view into Swaledale - nowhere near Sudbury but lovely nonetheless

Planning is a tricky business. Especially if, like me, you’re the elected representative of about 20,000 people living in West Yorkshire’s ‘green belt’ – or the glorious South Pennines as I prefer to call it. However, the degree of rubbish that is spoken about planning beggars belief. And is only topped by the utter nonsense spouted from all sides on the subject of housing and housing markets.

The biggest bit of nonsense is the implication that our current planning system doesn’t start from the premise that the land owner has a right to develop. The point of planning has not been to stop development but to direct that development. This has always been so and, despite the efforts of socialists and assorted NIMBYs, remains the case.

So when the government proposes a simplified planning frame work that presumes in favour of “sustainable development”, why do we get an explosion of shock and wild claims that vast acres of England’s green and pleasant land will be snaffled up by evil housing developers seeking only vast profits from the building of ticky-tacky boxes all over those productive fields.

We get writing like this evoking England’s wonders:

The fields are at their most golden and shadowy now, their soft lines framed by the ash trees; the sloes and blackberries are swelling, and plums squash underfoot. Two bikes are abandoned by the track, left by children who are exploring the woods. A young couple smooch in the weakening summer light. A flushed jogger from the local estate waves, as his Spaniel strains to get off the lead and on to the open land.

The writer, one Rebecca Fowler, wishes to protect her interests as the owner of a fine old house with a glorious view. And apparently the Coalition's policies are threatening this interest:

Twelve months on, it is not the spectre of ghosts that face us, but bulldozers. We are at the centre of a battle for the countryside threatened by potentially drastic “planning reforms”. As Clive Aslet outlined this week in The Daily Telegraph, under the new government proposals, the opportunity for effective local opposition to housing developments will be superseded, and cash incentives offered to councils to pass plans in a bid to boost the economy with a quick-fix, concrete-coated solution.

Immediately I smelled a rat – this woman is opposing an existing planning proposal under existing planning rules. Why – other than the newspaper’s campaign – is she referring to rules not yet in place?

Yet that view is now threatened by a development of 170 houses. Despite passionate opposition, not just from ourselves but more than 2,000 locals, English Heritage and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, plans are close to being approved.

So it has precisely nothing to do with the new National Planning Policy Framework at all. But is a purely local debate as to whether or not Mrs Fowler’s view should be spoiled conducted in the context of planning policies and planning guidance introduced by a Labour government.

For sure, the NPPF won’t change this – there’s still a view that the owners of property should be allowed to develop that property unless there are reasons for that not to happen. And the presumption in favour of development enshrined in the original 1947 Act is, for the first time, to be conditional on it being “sustainable”.

The substantive change in the rules following from NPPF is that the specifics of planning – where to develop housing, industry and so forth – it no longer dictated by national guidance or regional plans but by the local councillors we elect to represent us. People who we can ‘un-elect’ should we so wish. The ability of developers to appeal to distant inspectors is curtailed and the centralising, controlling ‘planning policy guidance’ and ‘planning policy statements’ will be consigned to the dustbin.

Right now those 2000 people (plus Mrs Fowler) in Sudbury are opposing a vast, impenetrable bureaucratic system that satisfies no-one except the planners and lawyers who make their livings from its byzantine detail. Allowing local decisions makes sense – it may still mean Mrs Fowler loses her view but that decision will be made by politicians who she and her neighbours elect not by a government official in Bristol.

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Isn't this the case wherever you put it?

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The Manchester Airport enterprise zone will undermine attempts at economic regeneration in other parts of the city, a new report warns.

Wouldn't that be the case wherever it's was located in the "city-region"? Or is this really about something else entirely?

Ah, yes! It's those professional NIMBYs again:

Research commissioned by the North West Regional Group of national charity the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) hits out at the Government’s decision to locate Greater Manchester’s enterprise zone at Manchester Airport, saying the site is the "wrong" place for a zone.

You see building an enterprise zone near existing transport hubs for rail and air plus great motorway links is a really bad idea! Here's CPRE NW fussbucket-in-chief, Andy Yuille:

"The evidence suggests that Manchester Airport enterprise zone will likely suck economic life from the rest of Manchester and the wider North West.

"There’s a real risk that major development in the green belt in south Manchester [where the airport is situated] will undermine attempts to revitalize town and city centres elsewhere.

"Nothing in the proposals we’ve seen so far indicates how this prosperity black hole will be prevented. There is certainly a need to attract investment and create jobs in Manchester, but this just isn’t the right place to do it."

So those distribution businesses, the manufacturers and the bit tech companies - they aren't more likely to set up here bringing jobs and wealth to places like Wythenshawe, places among the poorest in England?

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