Modern cities - creations of humanity's selfishness

Joel Kotkin writes about the sex recession and, in doing so, provides this striking statistic:

The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, this had expanding to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry.

Kotkin points to technology and a millennial generation who find personal interaction troubling or stressful ("...a survey of American millennials found 65 percent don’t feel comfortable engaging with someone face-to-face, and 80 percent prefer conversing digitally...").

Some of the outcomes from this de-sexed society are probably a good thing - fewer teenage pregnancies, for example - but it does give us another example of the prurience of modern youth culture, a puritanism embraced with enthusiasm by a generation of helicopter mums and judgemental fussbuckets.

The main reason, however, probably isn't culture change but rather the consequences of economic circumstances. For sure, employers like kidults - university educated millennial sorts who probably aren't going to do anything inconvenient like settling down to have a family - but the circumstance of people's lives also matters - people can't afford the risks of sex (also known as children). Here's Kotkin again:

High property prices and rents associated with dense cities correlate closely with low marriage and fertility rates. The places where child-bearing has plunged towards historic lows, are generally those with the highest house costs — including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

This utilitarian urban culture represents, as I've said before, a dead end for humanity. Cities and the life of dense urban civilisation is anti-child. Such places are designed to entertain young adults (a definition now extending to adults into their 40s) rather than the old-fashioned purpose of our presence on the planet - having a family. The environmental argument about population provides cover for such indulgence - having a family is portrayed as more selfish than living an essentially unattached life in one of civilisation's urban wonderlands.

Perhaps, in thinking about our society, we'll one day wake up and realise that two generations of anti-family public policies did not represent a liberation but, instead, were a period of spectacular selfishness on behalf of humanity.

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Can we build family homes not factory farms for hipsters?

You'll hear it from time to time - "London is the least densely populated mega-city", "we could build higher and more denses to solve the housing crisis". I've a problem with this argument and it doesn't matter whether it comes from the anti-development CPRE or the trendily pro-development London YIMBYs, because it doesn't reflect what people want. And, while we can all have a laugh about the things local councillors say at planning meetings (certainly the twitterati had a field day here) but these guys in Leeds have a point:

“This is a very dense development.

“I look at that and think there is no public or amenity site on the development.

“There are odd days in the year where it’s nice, warm and sunny, and there is nowhere in this development for people to go outside and sit.

“It seems like you are trying to cram a lot onto this site with very little amenity space. If you had children you wouldn’t want to live here, because there is no space for them at all.

“I really don’t like this (application), and the more I think about it, the less I like it."

This is a proposal for 242 tiny flats that are said to have "co-living space" making it all fine, I guess. The problem is that Cllr Colin Campbell, who words are above, is spot on. Providing a laundry room and free (or 'included in the service charge' sort of free) wi-fi doesn't fit the bill. There are a lot of reasons why dense, high-rise developments of this sort are anti-family but they are also sub-optimal for any long-residency.

Spain famously has some of the most population dense cities in Europe - living in flats and apartments is normal for much of the population and generations of Spaniards were brought up in these sorts of places. But there's something important Spain gets right that we are failing to do - people need an outside. Not a tiny little balcony you can squeeze two tiny chairs onto if you jiggle them nor just access to some sort of communal garden or open space but a decent-sized outside where you can do something - from sitting and lounging to having a long lesurely dinner with the family.

"What about the weather" will come the obvious reply and, it's true, Spain does enjoy more sunshine and less rain than Leeds. But is it really beyond the wit of architects and designers to create places that have an outside - a roof garden, a terrace, an atrium - while providing for everything the British weather can throw at them? Whether it's the glass curtains that so many Spanish flats acquire or awnings, or part-covered spaces there is a way to give people the outside they want, a personal space where there's fresh air (or not so fresh in the case of some city centres), a view and the chance on a good day of some sunshine.

For densification to work in our cities it has to provide the things that people want from a family home. And a private outdoor space is one of those things (as are dining space, living space, good storage and car parking) yet we're building thousands of flats that fail to meet this requirement simply because the designers think outdoors is a luxury not an essential part of a home. So, for all that I'll grant developers the right to build soul-less and depressing bunny-hutches, it's time we recognised that this simply isn't meeting demand at any level beyond "have I got a roof over my head". At their best these high rise developments are factory farms for hipsters while their worst is as a sort of holding pen for society's flotsum and jetsum. It's family homes we need and what people want, perhaps we should build them instead?

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The Conservative Party is the party of suburbia - we should remember this and build more suburbs

I remember canvassing with my Dad in true-blue Beckenham. At one house the woman who opened the door explained here reasoning in a strong Cockney accent - "we've always voted Labour before but we was in a Labour area. Now we're in a Tory area we'll be voting Tory." Who am I to argue with such a profound argument especially since further study - not least what us direct marketers call the 'Bestseller Effect' - tells me that this sort of decision (not necessarily expressed as bluntly) really is influenced by social geography. Here's Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox on voting in suburban 'red state; USA:

Even if the tide is turning, it’s happening slowly, and the GOP has political and cultural advantages in both Texas and Florida that will delay any turning of the tide even if they don’t finally stop it. Latinos in Texas, for instance, are considerably more GOP-leaning than their counterparts elsewhere. And surely some of the blue-state refugees won’t be inclined to support the same policies that led them to leave these states in the first place. The suburban areas that attract newcomers still tilt decisively GOP, and in 2016, turned out mostly for Trump.

The assumption (and we've seen similar arguments in the UK about millennial suburban migration) is that the left-inclined young urban vote, when it moves to suburbia to do that old-fashioned raise-a-family thing, will carry on voting left despite this likely being against their economic and social interests. Moreover, the millennials cycling out from inner-urban places are, I suspect, more likely to be conservative in outlook if not in current voting choice.

Of course, other demographic factors (not least ethnicity) are significant too - like US Republicans, the Conservatives have less support among non-white voters and, in particular, among two established and economically bettering groups - Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters. This may change but right now these groups remain overwhelmingly Labour voting despite the Conservatives having both the first Pakistani-heritage Home Secretary and the first female Muslim minister.

It's still the case, however, that the left - influenced by its inner-urban core support - is inherently anti-suburb and anti-family providing conservatives with a core message to new arrivals in suburbia. Here's Kotkin & Cox again:

Contempt for suburbia, so common among Democratic-leaning academics, planners, and media, could make appealing to these voters more difficult. Many party leaders support forced densification, anti-car strategies, and the annexation of suburbs—ideas that lack broad appeal in a country where most people live in single family homes and rely on cars and roads to conduct their lives.

If UK conservatives want to build a future base, it will be in suburbia (just like it has always been - we are the party of the suburbs). This means we've got to be brave enough to recognise that building new suburbs and more family-housing should take priority over protecting agricultural monoculture, especially in the Home Counties.

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Unpopularism (some policy thoughts for conservatives)

There's a media caricature of conservatism as being a sort of red-faced, reactionary creed. And, at times, we do sound like the angry bloke at the bar as he moves from beer onto double whiskies - "send 'em home, stop 'em coming, hang 'em, flog 'em, blame the parents, close the borders, scroungers, layabouts, druggies". For all of his modest manner, politeness and media-savvy approach, this is pretty much how a lot of folk see the Rees-Mogg tendency.

Now I really am a conservative, probably more of one now than I've ever been, and this means that we need to take one of David Cameron's cute observations - "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as the state" - and ask what is means in terms of policy. We should also recognise that our social problems seem to be pretty resistant to both the left liberal's "give everyone a nice hug" approach and the reactionary's "kick them up the pants, the lazy oiks" policy platform.

Anyway it seems to me that we should start thinking about those social problems - social mobility, inequality in health and education, housing, community, crime - as conservatives. We should also draw on the actual evidence as to what underlies the problems and how a conservative outlook can make a big difference. None of what follows is economic policy, all of it is intended to strengthen social bonds, reduce barriers between people and places, and provide some pointers to a society based more on the idea of community than the one we have right now.

Crime and Punishment 1 -Shut down prisons. We lock up too many young men and, in particular, young men from less privileged backgrounds. This isn't just bad for those young men, it's bad for their partners, their children and for society. We should stop doing this, close down a load of prisons and make prison more effective. Prison doesn't work as a deterrent and acts to destroy families while damaging society still further.

Crime and Punishment 2 - Legalise pot. If your place is like mine, then hardly a day passes without a proud announcement from the local police about another cannabis farm they've found. Have you noticed how this is reducing the number of folk smoking weed? No? We're losing the war on drugs. With appropriate safeguards, licences and taxes legalised cannabis (and maybe some other drugs too) would immediately end a huge criminal enterprise with all its attendant violence and unpleasantness.

Families 1 - Pay childcare to mums (or dads). We're spending billions (getting on for £10 billion) on providing parents with childcare subsidy. Since the evidence tells us that full-time, attentive parenting is the best development environment for a toddler, we should make that money we currently pay to nurseries and pre-schools also available to mums or dads who opt to stay at home to raise their toddlers.

Families 2 - Divorce reform. OK, we're better off than the Americans as we don't have 'no fault' divorce but it's still probably too easy to get a divorce especially where there are children. We should reform the system so that the interests of children is central to any decision. And those interests must be guided by the evidence telling us that being raised by a single parent is one of the best ways to screw the life chances of those children.

Families 3 - Incentivise marriage. You know why we have marriage? Love and all that jazz innit. Nope - marriage exists to stop men leaving once they've fathered a child. And forget all the religion stuff - every single society on earth has marriage in one form or another. Marriage works because is places a social stigma (sometimes enforced by a familial big stick) on men who abandon women with children. As the evidence on life chances for children born outside marriage tells us, not having married parents is bad for children. We should incentivise marriage through the tax system and, for the least well off, introduce a specific benefit payable to married couples.

Education 1 - school place lotteries. Grammar schools are one of our things as Conservatives. We love them despite the evidence telling us that they make barely a jot of difference to overall educational attainment or social mobility. If we want working class kids to do better then we have to mix them with middle class (and posh) kids rather than, de facto, herding them into separate schools because of social sorting by house price. So rather than grammar schools, let's have school place lotteries thereby creating better social mix in schools to the benefit of those working class kids.

Education 2 - fund more extra-curricula activity. Non-classroom stuff is really important - sport, music, art, debating, clubs - and we've been gradually squeezing it out (mostly by pulling funding and expecting parents to pay). We should fund activity like music, dance and school sport directly and pay the teachers who support extra-curricula activity more money.

Health - merge 'clinical commissioning groups' into local councils. Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are the bodies that hold local budgets for the NHS. We've already created 'Health and Wellbeing Boards' to make them at least talk with the local council. We should go further and put all the health and care commissioning under the local council - it would be more accountable, more transparent and might result in some creative, community-based health initiatives.

Housing 1 - scrap the 'green belt'. All the evidence, wherever you look in the world, tells us that policies constraining the supply of land in large, growing cities result in unaffordable housing. Let's abolish anti-suburb, anti-sprawl policies and focus instead on a planning system that actually protects special, beautiful, and environmentally-important land rather than a huge blanket consisting mostly of agricultural monoculture with all its attendant ecological negatives. This won't make housing cheap overnight but it will set a direction for more supply of land, more homes being built, more variety and a chance for young people to aspire to own a home.

Housing 2 - extend the right-to-buy. Right-to-Buy was the single biggest transfer of wealth from government to people in our history. We need to extend right-to-buy to all social housing with similar incentives to those offered to council tenants in the 1980s. And we should give tenants of privately rented homes the right to buy when a landlord seeks to sell the property - again with a discount similar to that offered to social tenants.

And finally - scrap beer duty for drinks sold in pubs. The pub is the heart of the community - how often does some politician tell us this (usually while having their picture taken with campaigners opposing yet another pub closure). Well pubs are places where people drink beer, that's their primary purpose. So why, if pubs are so bloody important, do we slap a massive additional tax on those drinkers? Scrap the beer duty (and probably duty on cider and wine but not spirits) for the on-trade.

As I said - unpopularism?

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Why do people hate social services?

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At a meeting yesterday we heard a presentation about the impact of welfare reform. The presenter, a housing officer, explained some of the issues and challenges facing families as well as some of the successes. In this presentation one comment stood out - speaking of the client group in question the officer remarked that:

"...they all have a fear of social services."

These very poor families often with huge challenges are utterly terrified of social services and the social worker because they believe that they'll take the children away. These are families where the only 'abuse' is not having enough money and the problems going along with that condition - malnourishment, ill-health, cold and so forth.

The families are happy to deal with the housing association, with outreach workers from Job Centre Plus, with any number of voluntary organisation but suggest social services and they will run a mile.

It may well be that council social services departments have real problem, one they perhaps don't fully appreciate. How do you support a family that lives in fear of you and what you might do? That considers you to be just a child snatcher?

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Urbanisation, families and population decline

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Here's a quote taken from a report written by geographer Joel Kotkin ("What is a City for?"):

In developing countries, where the megacities of the future are being formed, as the price of space rises, the quality of life declines, and city services become less accessible and efficient. Average household size and fertility rates in cities have begun to decline. For example, while The World Bank data puts fertility for China and Japan at 1.6 and 1.4 respectively, Beijing and Shanghai are experiencing much lower rates than the national average. In Tokyo, fertility rate is about 1.2. In Shanghai, according to National University of Singapore demographer, Gavin Jones (2009), it has dropped to a remarkably low 0.7.

These phenomena can be seen in virtually every part of the world, from developing countries such as Iran, China, Mexico and across Northern Africa, birth rates have plunged towards those of higher income countries as they have urbanised. Birth rates among Muslims in Europe, as well, have dropped (Pearce, 2010, pp.114–116). Divorce over the past decade has grown by 135% in Iran, where women now constitute 60% of college graduates. Meanwhile, household size has declined to less than 3.5, according to the most recent national census. In Tehran, another city of largely apartment dwellers with forbidding cost of living, especially for housing, the latest average household size in 2011 was reported to be 3.1 (Erdbrink, 2012).

Not only is this not the picture we expect of developing countries (we are told repeatedly by those with a vested interest in telling us that fertility rates are high and population growth is rapid - this appears only to be true in rural societies) but is raises an interesting question about cities and the process of urbanisation.

On the one hand urban growth drives economic growth, innovation and development but at the same time the reality for individuals and families is that costs rise to the point where raising children is forfeited because the couple simply can't afford to have a family. And because there are no families, no children in our cities the development of the urban environment does not provide for children. Our economic development strategies focus on attracting the young, single and highly educated to creating what Terry Clark from the University of Chicago called the

"...new city, built around the needs of what he calls “the slimmer family” of childless couples and often single professionals, focuses primarily on recreation, arts, culture and restaurants; a system built around the newly liberated individual."

 In a world where few people have families and, where they do those families are small, we build up problems for our future. So far the gap left by the absence of children is made up by migration mostly from rural areas. The question we need to ask is what happens when the migrants run out?

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The ideology of social work: "we are all guilty"

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Michael Wharton, in his guise as Peter Simple, so often found his satire cropping up in real life. So it is with the mantra of Keinz Kiosk, psychologist -  "we are all guilty" he would cry as the audience stampeded for the exits. However, this collective sin sits at the heart of much soft left thinking and damages society in being so.

At a time here in Bradford when we must look to our practice and policies around child protection for all the wrong reasons, the idea that there is nothing wrong with the training, management and development of social workers must be challenged. So I am cheered when Michael Gove, as the responsible minister says:

"In too many cases, social work training involves idealistic students being told that the individuals with whom they will work have been disempowered by society. They will be encouraged to see these individuals as victims of social injustice whose fate is overwhelmingly decreed by the economic forces and inherent inequalities which scar our society."

This isn't to deny inequality or to say that the inconsistency of our education system doesn't result in inadequate parents. It is to change the focus away from the idea that social workers should not judge the actions of their clients.

As the health and achievement of many families demonstrates being poor simply isn't a precursor to dysfunction. However, we have rather got use to the idea of using poverty as an excuse or explanation for dysfunction. For all that each tragic child protection case is different, recent cases have a depressing similarity - not simply the presence of broken families, drugs and alcohol but the apparent failing of seeing a starving child and assuming poverty rather than neglect or abuse.

We are not all guilty, people are not poor because others are rich and Britain is a generous nation - collectively and individually. So when social workers see that starving child, they should perhaps ask themselves whether the fault lies with a neglectful parent rather than an unequal society.

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"Shameless" or shameful - dealing with anti-social families

There have always been problem families – you know the ones that have anti-social children looked after by anti-social parents. These families provide a headache for public services out of all proportion to their numbers – and, as any local politician will know, “something must be done”!

The latest “something must be done” initiative from the increasingly authoritarian Ed Balls is the ‘sin bin’ – an extension of intensive family intervention to include 24-hour surveillance of the family’s activities and described by Balls as '…pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem.' And using CCTV inside the home is a good way to achieve this?

My concern with this isn’t that the worst families are identified and targeted with “intensive support” – this approach has been around for a while having started with NCH projects in Scotland and the North West. No, the problem is the manner in which the aggressive, final option has been brought forward – it is presented by Balls as the primary option not as a last resort. Instead of an intensive ‘carrot & stick’ we just get stick – and lots of it!

If we are to begin reducing the number and impact of problem families – we’ll never get rid of them entirely – we need both a long-term and a short-term policy approach. And developing the right policies must start with understanding what goes on “between the ears” of adults in the target families. These families are:

Poorly educated with low skill levels
Lacking in self-esteem, confidence and personal capacity
Often both victims and perpetrators of anti-social behaviour
Dominated by addictive individuals – drink, drugs, violence

I don’t see how sticking a camera in the faces of these families addresses any of these problems – yes, we get a short term fix by stopping them offending. But at the end of any programme they still have the personal problems and challenges that created the problem in the first place.

A policy platform might look a bit like this:

Short-term:

Intensive support including where needed fostering, respite and high quality childcare

Audit of problems such as drink, drugs and violence and provision of appropriate interventions
Provision of personal development coaching – individually, in groups and as whole families

Remedial skills and education for adults and older children plus early support for pre-school children

Use of jobs and training programmes linked to in-work support for those able to secure employment

Application of ASBOs and other available orders as a control mechanism for the programme by allowing enforcement of attendance

Long-term:

Development of small education units in target areas – breaking away from the vast, intimidating schools that dominate education provision in deprived communities

Re-establishing a permanent, physical, estate-based presence for police, probation, social services and other support services

Creating wrap-around family and youth support with a strong presence within the community

Addressing the barriers to work, stable families and behaviour within the benefits system

None of this requires that we treat these families as unruly zoo animals or ignore the need for tough action to prevent bad behaviour. It does require us to deal with the complicated set of problems – drugs, drink, sexual violence, illiteracy, ignorance and ill-humour – that typify these families. And we should remember that most of the families we’re dealing with aren’t bright enough to be “Shameless”!