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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Why the Green Belt needs reform in one image...

This building is owned by Bradford Council. It is in the Green Belt. It is a ruin. Bradford refused permission to develop it or restore it. It sums up why that policy - and the attitude of planners - needs urgent reform:

At a time of housing supply crises, this should not happen.

The housing problem summed up...

This is from Wendell Cox at New Geography (and Demographia):

Middle-income households are increasingly unable to afford middle-income housing, because their prices have been driven up by excessive regulation. More households are added to the queue for subsidized housing, as they can no longer afford the market rate housing that has increased so much in price. With this demand, induced by excessive regulation, its governments typically have long waiting lists for subsidized housing. It is not surprising that homelessness is increasing in this environment. When people must pay more for housing relative to their incomes, they have less for other goods and services. This explains how California, home to some of the world’s greatest wealth, is also home to the highest poverty rate among the 50 states when housing costs are considered.

Cox is writing about the USA but, as the evidence shows, other places - Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK - are just as bad:



The answer is to build more houses that people want to live in - not pokey flats in tower blocks, not 'micro-homes', not 21st century council houses but family homes with gardens, y'know: suburbs.

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Conservatives urging restrictive planning controls are planning their own demise

Liz Truss was right when she said that the Conservatives limpet-like attachment to uban containment policies would usher in a far left (and antisemitic) government:

In the early 2000s, there was only a weak connection between land-use restrictions and partisanship. Democratic places were only slightly more regulated than Republican ones. Interestingly enough, many towns that started out more Republican actually became more restrictive over time. This, for Sorens, is a key piece of evidence: “These data support the central claim of this paper: Democrats do not cause stricter zoning, but stricter zoning causes more Democrats (relative to Republicans),” he writes. In other words, when Republican towns increase land-use restrictions, they tend to drive away more Republicans.

I know this is the USA but the impact of urban containment policies is always to drive up land values (and rents and house prices) resulting in places where only the very rich and the poor can live. The less well off - especially the most marginalised such as immigrant groups, single parents and the disabled - live in social housing that is de facto reserved for such groups while the richest can afford the sky high prices and stratospheric rents. The most left-wing places in the USA are becoming, as a result of anti-development policies, the most segregated and most unequal.

As conservatives we should be pragmatic - if the result of such policies is the persistence of housing dependency for the less well off and, as reported recently, an explosion in wealth inequality as land values rocket then we should be looking for an answer that meets aspirations to own for as many as possible, that protects the poorest without enriching landlords and which doesn't featherbed the already rich. Right now, all we're getting is Onward proposing the extensive use of compulsory purchase to prevent landowners profiting from artificially expensive property as a result of those urban containment policies. Such an approach is little different from South African government seizing farms in the name of equality. Plus the, mostly left-wing run, councils in inner London will simply use the cash to shore up their client base through sustaining housing dependency.

Instead of allowing NIMBY residents on nice Surrey towns (and their MPs) to set the agenda, we should be doing was Liz Truss said and making it easier to develop in the city and easier to develop outside the city - if we don't we can expect to see the same happening to Conservative support in London as happened in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Hull.

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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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If you want to save old-fashioned community in your Home Counties town, you'll have to build more houses.

Offcumdens we call them up here in Yorkshire. Grockles is the preferred term down in the West Country. And I'm absolutely sure there's a suitably perjorative term in Welsh. Stewart Dakers, in his anonymous Home Counties town, says this:

And there are hundreds more Glorias, Regs, Janes and Charlies, the lifeblood of community, all priced out by the ballooning property market inflated by metropolitan demand. Their replacements from central London haven’t the time or the inclination to commit to civic duties,- and besides, their friends live in Notting Hill.

It's a familiar litany, one captured in Steve Knightley's song 'Country Life':

And the red brick cottage where I was born
Is the empty shell of a holiday home
Most of the year there's no-one there
The village is dead and they don't care
Now we live on the edge of town
Haven't been back since the pub closed down
One man's family pays the price
For another man's vision of country life

I've a load of sympathy for people looking on as rural England declines - either emptying entirely as folk leave, the pubs shuts, the shops goes and the school is closed or else backfilling with wealthy retirees and city second-homers. For Stewart Dakers' home counties place, the future should be better than places too far from the big city to make a commute practical. The first clue to this failure comes in the article:

This is not gentrification, but rather social cleansing on a grand scale, and it won’t end well. As that pub-goer foretold all those years ago, able, qualified and dedicated job-holders are being displaced. Ten years ago it was bin men and classroom assistants pushed to the periphery of Home Counties life; now it’s teachers, nurses, physiotherapists. Anyone on an average wage is increasingly unable to afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance of their workplace, meaning our suburban utopias will soon become dystopias of understaffed services.

I know it's all a bit polemical but it hints at the problem - people, including very rich people, want to live in Stewart's Home Counties Idyll. And we've decided that we're not going to make that easy by stopping anyone building new homes there. The 'social cleansing' is pretty much the direct consequence of high demand for the few available homes. Add to this that the local council can't build new houses for rent because national government won't let them borrow and that that same lack of land stops housing associations or even groups of local worthies from building homes for those vital key workers like bin men, teachers and so forth.

Home Counties folk can cry as much as they want about how immigrants from some other place are destroying their nice community (how familiar the language used sounds to us folk in places like Bradford) when they have the capacity to get off their backsides, walk down to the council and tell them to draw up a local plan that makes the necessary land for that much needed housing available. It's a bit different deeper into rural England where the problem is no families, no amenities and dead places in beautiful landscapes, but in Surrey, Sussex and Hertfordshire those local people have every incentive - and the means - to get the homes built.

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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 houses are expensive.

I like Peter Hitchens, he offers the same iconoclastic hammer to the centre-right's certainties as his brother did for the centre-left. Among Hitchens' common themes is a harking back to a time when we had full and steady employment, low levels of crime, stable communities and trust in institutions. Quite rightly, Hitchens tells us that these things are good things and that conservatives - whether of that party or not - should be concerned to get them back.

Sometimes, however, this enthusiasm for the essential elements of conservatism leads Hitchens to the realm of fantasy:

The homeowners of Britain are being lied to, and unfairly smeared to try to get us to accept a hideous and irreparable destruction of green space in suburbs and the countryside. They are also being blamed personally for a problem they did not cause, in a nasty war on the middle-aged. They should resist this.

This opening gambit is familiar, a justified reaction to the now too common trend of blaming 'baby boomers' for all the ills of modern society and especially for houses being so expensive. Hitchens tells us that this ain't so and the fault lies with "grabby developers", mass immigration, the "epidemic of divorce", the success of London, right-to-buy, and what he calls "targeted inflation".

Now, leaving aside the 'positive money' argument that Hitchens uses in his "targeted inflation" argument, it's hard not to see some truth, at least in the creating of demand for housing, in this list. And, as the rules of supply and demand tell us, increasing demand will raise prices if new supply isn't readily available. The problem with Hitchens argument is that he lays all the blame for house price increases on increasing demand for housing (whether as a home or as an investment) and none of the blame on the lack of housing supply.

Or more importantly, land supply. Because it is how much land we have on which to build (taking as read the increased demand Hitchens describes) that determines how much the homes built on that land will cost. After all it costs pretty much the same to build a house in Kensington as it does in Burnley but the former will sell for a few million while you'll be lucky to get a hundred grand for the house in East Lancashire.

And the supply of land for housing, across most of England, is something determined by government. Moreover, for nearly 70 years, the government - national and local - has determined that most of the land in places where people want to live will have a 'presumption against development'. Not to protect special beauty, heritage or environment but simply to prevent 'sprawl' and encourage denser development in the existing towns and cities. The name for this policy - and it's popular right across the English-speaking world - is urban containment. I saw this described in a school debating competition on this subject as a 'tourniquet for the city'.

Urban containment- even when we're laissez faire on densities - doesn't work. Indeed, it's one of the primary reasons for the housing crises in London, San Francisco, Sydney, Auckland, and Madrid. Here's work from Australia's reserve bank on the subject:

According to the research, and assuming typical mortgage provisions, (Note) the urban containment effect (our term) adds from $150,000 to nearly $500,000 to house prices in major Australian metropolitan areas --- this is not the house price, but the additional impact of urban containment ... The urban containment adds up to $29,000 to annual payments on the average house in Australia’s major metropolitan areas

In the UK this uplift would be between £80,000 and £275,000 - this is the cost of that tourniquet and represents, when multiplied by the hundreds of thousands or properties involved, billions in lost opportunity for the UK (and those other places caught in urban containment's web). And remember, simply making development more dense doesn't solve the problem (partly because building upwards is expensive but most because densification simply increases land values which are the source of our problem in the first place).

If we are to have a debate about urban containment it needs to be on an informed basis - one that recognises the social and economic costs of these policies. It isn't good enough simply to list the reasons why there's more demand for housing and then shout:

...the rape of the Green Belt and the overdevelopment of the countryside will mean our children inherit a blighted country, almost unrecognisable as the beautiful, civilised place my generation inherited from our forebears.

This is splendid polemic but doesn't answer the question as to how we offer the same deal to the next generation - how do they get that stake, a real tangible stake, in their land and culture? I agree entirely that some of the development we get today is pinched, crammed, and dominated by brick and concrete with little space for garden, greenery or the margins when kids can build a den or play out the make-believe that ten-years-olds invent. But this overdevelopment is caused by the lack of land, by the containment. London's 1890s and 1930s suburbs - the places Hitchens' waxes lyrical about - were built with space and openness because the land was cheap, there weren't planners with clipboards and rulers to tells them what they could or couldn't do. Why would future developers not do the same given space and a free rein?

The social cost of urban containment isn't a joke either - this is America, which is worse than Britain, but anyone visiting our cities will see this happening:

Homelessness has long been a San Francisco problem, and with home prices rising, it’s arguably worse now than ever. A January report on SFgate.com claimed that the city’s homeless count is close to 6,700, and a local advocacy group estimates the count at 12,000. The problem is all very visible throughout the city, and increasingly, in Oakland and Berkeley, with open drug use and fights blaring out from the encampments that rest along sidewalks and below underpasses. A recent U.N. official, after visiting the Bay Area, said that in some ways, the city’s treatment of the homeless is worse than what she saw in the slums of India.

For sure, there's other reasons for homelessness than just high rents but getting a roof over peoples' heads should be a start. And, right now, someone losing their rented place in London, is going to find it really hard to get another place, for the first time in my lifetime people are on the streets solely because there isn't a home available for them to live in.

It seems likely that we will keep these policies - the rage in Hitchens' polemic really does reflect how people feel - but I hope, in doing so, that we won't carry on pretending that there isn't a social cost to having urban containment. We'll keep large swathes of countryside - much of it not especially special - while cramming more folk into unsustainable city living, having more homelessness and a generation embittered by their inability to do what their parents did, buy a house.

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Why house prices should be the number one concern of a Conservative government

Housing is the largest expenditure item in the household budget. Higher house prices have a disproportionate potential to reduce the standard of living by consuming funds that would otherwise be available to purchase other goods and services. Even more concerning, high house prices, and related high rents, increase relative poverty, as many lower income households may have to forego basic goods and services because of higher housing costs, and may even be forced to seek public housing subsidies.

Worsening housing affordability and its adverse impact on the declining standard of living threaten one of the greatest human advances in history – the democratization of prosperity.

In 1959, 1970 and 1979, Conservative leadership set out the aim of creating a property owning democracy with the private ownership of housing at the heart of that promise. In broad terms, though building, liberalising finance and through right-to-buy, those Conservative leaders - Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher - delivered on that promise.

Today that promise needs renewing. The answer to the housing pain of younger people doesn't lie in rent controls, council housing or build-to-rent, the answer lies in setting out how ordinary working families can buy a house. We've made some progress though protecting right-to-buy (although failing to extend it to the wider social sector is a disappointment), reducing stamp duty and Help to Buy. But these instruments don't change the fundamentals for too many people in London, houses are too expensive to buy. This expensiveness is a function of land prices not the cost of building a house and the way to reduce land prices is to make more land available for housing in places where people can live and work (or commute to their work).

In the short term (getting that land supply up isn't an overnight task) a Conservative government should also abolish stamp duty for first time buyers, reform green belt regulation to allow small scale building on brownfield sites, support approaches aimed at reducing build costs, develop more flexible shared equity schemes, finish the job of reforming leasehold and give tenants first refusal (with a RTB discount) when landlords sell property. Other thoughts might include tenant ownership of social housing, reforming conveyancing, longer tenancies in the private sector, and a ringfenced 50% levy on land sales with value increases consequential on housing allocations (at least so long as that value is in the gift of the planning system).

It may be a step too far to simply abolish the green belt but we need to review its size and purpose. Simply opposing 'sprawl' because sprawl is bad can't be justified in an age of electric autonomous vehicles, improved mass transit and home working. Suburbia is socially beneficial and, if transport changes happen as we expect, will be less of an environmental concern. The economic case for densification - based on agglomeration as a driver of growth - needs challenging both because it is socially damaging but also because that economic case is based on removing the brightest from elsewhere and piling them up in the big city to produce.

If we do these things, the main reason for young (and not-so-young) people's angst - not having a real, tangible stake in society - is removed and we once again deliver on the idea of a property-owning democracy that has been at the heart of British conservatism for 60 years.

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Quote of the day: Urban containment doesn't work

From a profile by Aaron Renn of demographer, Wendell Cox:

Wendell also denies that he’s anti-urban, but does believe development should be allowed on the fringes. “I love cities. I’ve lived in three of the four European and American megacities. Only London have I not lived in. I’ve lived in Paris, LA, and New York…I am not a proponent of low density or high density. I am a proponent of those arrangements that get us great affluence and less poverty. And that means low land prices. The big problem with urban planning in the United States…[is that] the competitive market for land has been absolutely destroyed on the urban fringe and we have seen unbelievable two and three times increases in the price of housing relative to incomes in some cities. I couldn’t care less quite frankly about sprawl or densification, though at the same time I do believe that in the United States we’ve made some major errors in failing to put some limits on the extent of sprawl, but that doesn’t mean we should be doing things like green belts or urban growth boundaries because those inherently destroy the market and destroy housing affordability.”

Absolutely - great profile piece too.

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Clean, green, child-friendly and joyful - why we need more suburbia

I wrote recently about our confused, often negative relationship with suburbs and the idea of suburbia:

So why is it that we have such a problematic relationship with suburbia? How did a suburban boy like Simon Schama come to use 'suburban' as an insult, as a way to dismiss someone he disagreed with and felt, in some way, beneath his attention? And when did we start the fetish of the city - the dirty, crowded, unsafe, unfriendly, child-free city? A fetish that, frankly, is something we (perhaps secretly) despise - what we hanker for is suburbia.

I feel that this attitude is damaging society by supporting the idea that somehow suburbs are places without soul or even worse, places that are environmentally damaging, socially divisive, mere creatures of our car-crazed culture. Suburbs are a sin:

In all, that suburban form of homogeneity, orderliness and spacing was an outward response to internal desires for security and control. But there was a cost to such an approach. Namely, the texture of life. Because sameness breeds sameness, which breeds stasis—hence, the “soulless” suburb moniker that has come to permeate the pauses in between suburban praise of “good schools,” “abundant parking” and “safety.”

Inside this desire is something else. Yes, it's to do with safety, comfort and good schools but it's also about space to live. And this is the reason why so much of the New Urbanist, city-focused planning and development approach is problematic. We might be building places suited to people in one stage of their lives but those folk don't stay in a sort of city living, Peter Pan world of endless youthful fun. Mostly because there comes a point in many people's lives when youthful fun isn't fun anymore.

Suburbs are essential if cities are to succeed rather than turn into rapacious parasites sucking the life from rural communities while the 24-hour party people become ever richer in their unhealthy, child-free towers:

For the first time in the history of the Western world, the one-person household has become the dominant mode of living. In Manhattan, New York City’s most densely populated borough, more than half of all homes have a single occupant.

Now I'm sure most of these single-person households are perfectly happy but there, niggling away in the back of my mind, is a question as to whether this really is ideal living. What we do know is dense urban environments in the developed world are increasingly child-free. Here's Aaron Renn, who lives in that child-free Manhattan:

The values and priorities of people without children are different from those with children. One example is the value people put on space. In our central cities populated with largely people who have no children, a big obsession is changing zoning regulations to allow smaller units, including so-called “micro-apartments.” These kinds of developments would enable more upscale young adult singles to live in cities. That’s good in itself. Yet it is not paired with equal concern about creating more housing for families.

When you look, for example, at the recently published (draft) London Plan - 2kg of turgid prose interspersed with nice maps - you see that, far from addressing the sort of concerns Renn raises, the Mayor simply sees housing as a numbers game with the solution being to build the little boxes on top of each other rather than next to each other. In places - Grove Park, Eltham, Southgate, Chiswick - that were once filled with family homes (with gardens), we can expect ever taller accommodation blocks suited to the frenetic, solo life lived by so many young Londoners. All this is intended to avoid taking anything out of the precious 'green belt', to not build new suburbs but crowd the ones we've got.

The attacks on suburbanisation - as typified by that London Plan - continue. Witness the responses to the damage done by Hurricane Harvey in Houston. We're told (by New Yorkers) it is the Texan laissez faire approach to development that made things worse:

For years, the local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of six million.

Terrible! Suburban sprawl at its worst - we need denisification, zoning, strict enforcement. Or do we?

Houston’s dispersed, multipolar form, notes MIT’s Alan Berger, may have helped it respond more effectively to Harvey; the city has no central point, like Manhattan in New York City, whose closure damages the entire region. If we accept that more Harvey-like events are possible, even probable, then the most important issue is not zoning but flood control, which requires resilient systems.

So sprawl ain't so bad after all. Indeed, it might just be a good thing. Let's start with a look at South London. This is part of Beckenham, the suburb where I was brought up (my old primary school is featured as is the house where Mary Finnegan - and David Bowie - lived):



The striking thing about this image is the presence of so many mature trees and so much undeveloped space (OK planners, I know you call a garden development). Across the vast acres of London's suburbs this is the norm - even in Croydon. Suburbia is a lot greener - and more environmentally sustainable - than most urbanists and planners credit:

“We’ve all grown up thinking that urban density and verticality is a good thing but there has never been a study that has really looked at this in any detail; they’ve all been generic studies, based on large sets of generalised data. So we thought we should undertake a more focused study to prove it. And the results have been quite the opposite to those we thought we would find.”

And what did they find?

The high-rise residents energy consumption was 27 per cent more per person than the suburbanites, and even per average square metre of space, consumption was 4.6 per cent higher. Remarkably, the suburban homes involved not only had a typically larger floor area and greater surface-to-volume area (e.g. higher ceilings, roof cavities, etc.), they were also wooden-framed and significantly older – nearly 100 years old on average.

Some of the greater energy use in the high-rises was due to the lifts and the lighting and heating of common spaces and amenities. But on the “embodied energy” (in construction and materials) measure, the high-rise buildings required 49 per cent more embodied energy per square metre, and 72 per cent more per resident.

Piling people up in tall towers feels like better land use but it turns out to be the wrong idea if we want a more sustainable urban environment as well as some children (and let's not get started on safety). And, if you're concerns are about social sorting, - planners are always on about mixed tenure and social mobility after all - densification is again a bad idea:

One important point that needs to be taken into account when studying this phenomenon, is just how steeply “exclusionary” a city is “by location”. It has often been noted (e.g. by the authors of the “Costs of Sprawl 2000” study) that the higher house prices are (e.g. expressed by a median multiple) in the entire urban area, the stronger the “drive to qualify” effect. Chicago is actually significantly cheaper in all housing options than Australia’s main cities. Explicit anti-sprawl growth boundary policies exacerbate this “spatial sorting by income” effect, inevitably forcing up the price of all urban land and housing of all types in all locations.

It seems that, far from suburban sprawl being a bad thing, it is instead pretty much essential if we want sustainable cities. Urban containment policies everywhere have failed (check out Auckland's homelessness, London's beds in sheds and Seattle's inward migration crisis) but despite this planners are still churning out strategies for cities based on 'green belts' and urban densification. The reason for this isn't because we want to protect environments but rather because we've convinced ourselves that suburbs - sprawl, to use the pejorative term - are unpleasant places filled with dull people.

We need to change our thinking and rediscover the joy of suburbia not just because suburbs are great but because not building them is making our cities less sustainable, more crowded, unfriendly to children and shockingly expensive. So let's start with a correction on the environment - here's one of the editors of Infinite Suburbs:

One of the consistent themes in the book, and what gets me most excited as a landscape scholar, is the virtue of low density and the ecological potential of the suburban landscape. Environmentally, suburbs will save cities from themselves. Sarah Jack Hinners’s research in the book really surprised me. It suggests that suburban ecosystems, in general, are more heterogeneous and dynamic over space and time than natural ecosystems. Suburbs, she says, are the loci of novelty and innovation from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they are a relatively new type of landscape and their ecology is not fixed or static.

Yet - and these editors observe this - the planning and development profession still "overwhelmingly vilify suburbia and seem disinterested in significantly improving it. Robert Bruegmann’s essay in the book reminds us that those who consider themselves the intellectual elite have a long history of anti-suburban crusades, and they have always been proven wrong."

Much of the NIMBY argument - albeit from people already in suburbs - is made easier by the willingness of planners to argue that dense urban development will work. We've got to a stage where words like "brownfield" and "regeneration" dominate the case made by the likes of CPRE rather than the reality of that case as 'we don't want any more houses round here' and little else. This urban redevelopment argument (and it is one of the five purposes for the UK's 'green belts') acts as cover for a policy that is responsible for much of London's housing crisis.

I can understand how someone who has enjoyed a field view for years might be put out by it being replaced by an estate of family housing (and I know how developers like to push the country aspect - one development in Cottingley had hoardings with a picture of horses proclaiming "meet the new neighbours") but I also feel that we shouldn't let such sensitivities dominate the system to the point where:

Around 9,000 illegal “beds in sheds” housing tens of thousands of people have sprung up across London over the last five years, a report says today.

Do we seriously think that protecting someone's open view across a not particularly special field should prevent us building the homes we need to prevent people ending up in cramped flats or on a bed in a drafty wooden structure down the end of an inner city garden? Especially when building tower blocks is expensive, environmentally-damaging and unsafe?

It is time to get less precious about those fields, to end planning micro-management of housing delivery and to get back to the sort of build rates we saw from the private sector in the 1930s (when lots of those lovely London suburbs were built) - touching 300,000 in 1937/8. Suburbs are great - you can call them what you like, even 'garden cities' - and we need more of them. The best way to do this is to put the planners back in their box and let people get on building the homes they (and we) need.

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Brownfield Green Belt: A glimpse of the stupidity of England's planning system

Those of you who watched the Tour de Yorkshire might have caught a glimpse of Denholme as the cyclists swished through the little South Pennine village. It's not going to win any prizes for prettiness but nevertheless its a great little community. Now what you won't have spotted is this:



This, you'll agree, is a bit of an eyesore. A few years ago is was a stone mill owned an operated under the name Denholme Velvets but that business finished and the mill has gone - another footnote in the decline of traditional manufacturing employment up here in the South Pennine hills. Here's what it looked like.



The reason the site was cleared was because its owners had applied for and obtained planning permission for housing. This permission wasn't obtained in the teeth of NIMBY opposition but was welcomed as a good use of a site that wasn't going back to being a textile mill any time soon. One other thing - the mill (and subsequently the cleared site) are wholly in Bradford's precious 'Green Belt'. The problem is that Bradford's sluggish development market, the location and the site's size meant that the housing permission didn't get developed. Like a lot of undeveloped planning permissions in these sorts of place, this is about viability and demand rather than the evils of 'landbanking'.

Zooming forwards in time we get to the stage where a developer is now interested in the site to build forty or so affordable homes for rent and shared ownership. Just the sort of development that we're told we desperately need in a place where there isn't (unless I'm very mistaken) going to be any but the mildest of local objection. But there's a problem. The planning permission has expired and the now cleared site is in that precious 'Green Belt'. So the initial planning response goes like this:

The site is previously developed land; however the existing development is a cleared site (albeit with some relic structures including a hardstanding and parts of walls). Now that the old mill has been demolished any new houses on the site would have a greater impact on the openness of the Green Belt and the purpose of including land within it than the existing development.

I'm not criticising the planner who wrote this - he is just presenting what the rules say. As a cleared site in the 'Green Belt' you can't build on it without very special circumstances - but:

Very special circumstances’ will not exist unless the potential harm to the Green Belt by reason of inappropriateness, and any other harm, is clearly outweighed by other considerations. This is a very high bar to pass and it does not seem plausible that it could be passed in relation to the proposed development/ site.

We've a housing shortage (or so we're told all the time). We're urged to use previously-developed ('brownfield') sites rather than undeveloped ('greenfield') sites. And we hold a special love for affordable housing. Yet an unloved, unattractive site on the main A629 from Keighley to Denholme can't be developed despite ten years ago having a huge stone mill on it.

This may all get sorted out (we get to occult planning things like 'five year land supply' and 'SHLAA' considerations as well as the emerging local plan 'Allocations Development Plan Document') but it does remind us that our planning system is, at times, utterly and completely stupid.

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This could be the London or the Home Counties

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The obsession of London's politicians with their 'green belt' really is a crying shame. But, as this quote from Joel Kotkin tells us, it's not a problem unique to the Home Counties:

To meet the needs of its increasingly diverse population, and particularly the next generation, California needs to reform its regulations to more fully reflect the needs and preferences of its citizens. Once the home of the peculiarly optimistic “California Dream”, our state is in danger of becoming a place good for the wealthy and well-established but offering little to the vast majority of its citizens who wish to live affordably and comfortably in this most blessed of states.

When you have to pay half a million pounds to buy an ex-council flat in Stockwell there is something wrong. Seriously wrong. And anyone who tells you the planning system - the means by which we decide which chunks of land can have houses built upon them - is not the main reason is simply deluded.

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The Adam Smith Institute should start with reading planning policy on Green Belt

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I have some sympathy for the view that London's Green Belt needs an extensive and comprehensive review. And I know this is difficult - politically and practically - given the range of differing interests and the multitude of interested public bodies (starting with over 50 local councils). Indeed the scale of the requirement is such that, however much Londoner might whimper about localism, conducting a review would have to be under the direction of national government.

Various organisations are chuntering about the need for change and the Adam Smith Institute is at the forefront. The problem is that the ASI appears not to have done the basic first job of reading the actual reasons for having a 'Green Belt' in the first place:

The research done by bodies such as the Adam Smith Institute and London First contradicts the popular image of the Green Belt as green and pleasant land. Far from the daisy-strewn meadows and woods teeming with wildlife that the term suggests, much Green Belt land is farmland, with monoculture fields by no means friendly to wildlife or accessible to people.

The first step in re-evaluation might be to classify Green Belt land into the different types that comprise it. There is genuinely green land, the fields and woods that everyone likes. There is damaged or brownfield land, partly made up of abandoned buildings, gravel pits and the like. And there is farmland, much of which is not environmentally friendly.

It is very good of these people to do this research telling every planner and most local councillors exactly what they already knew - that the 'Green Belt' is not either all green or entirely worthy of protection on environmental grounds. But what we also know - which the ASI seems to have missed - is that prettiness (for want of a better word) is not the reason for having a 'Green Belt'.  The policy gives five reasons:

To check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
To prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another;
To assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
To preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
To assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land 

None of these reasons relate to the use of land in the 'Green Belt'. The fact of needing to achieve those five policy objectives is met by controlling the uses to restrict those that do harm to the 'Green Belt'. And that 'harm' isn't some form of torture but rather anything that runs counter to the five reasons set out in policy. In simple terms the primary issue is 'openness' not the aesthetic of that openness.

We have a 'Green Belt' primarily in order to control the development of urban areas. This isn't about protecting special places in the countryside - we have other designations from 'Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty' through to 'Regionally Important Geological and Geomorphological Sites' that are intended to protect places we think are beautiful, ecologically-important, historically significant or otherwise somewhat unusual or unique.

London has a problem with housing supply - we all know that. And reviewing the 'Green Belt' would be a good idea in helping to meet that problem (although I wish those charged with review well and hope they have very thick skins). But the ASI's approach is completely misplaced - the 'Green Belt' isn't about protecting woodland and flower meadows but about making sure we concentrate development within existing settlements rather than allowing those settlements to extend to the point they lose their identity and become just a part of the London built-up area.

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Is this the option of laissez faire planning? And will any planning authority take it?

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It seems a minor comment from a junior minister but this comment from Brandon Lewis is very interesting indeed:

‘Somewhere could conceivably decide that they don’t want a local plan and they will rely on the NPPF,’ Mr Lewis stated. While this would not be ‘necessarily ideal’ there would be ‘no role for the government’ if such a decision was taken, he added.

Now bearing in mind that the requirement for a local plan and the NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) are provided by two different acts of Parliament, what Lewis is saying is that a local planning authority can simply adopt the NPPF as its local plan.

At the moment local planning authorites are going through a long, painful and politically-sensitive process of preparing that local plan - here in Bradford our approved draft is almost due for submission (we approved it in December 2013 and it will go for inspection in December 2014 which indicates the bureaucratic stress in preparing these plans). Would it not have been far simpler to say "were's the national policy folks, we're going to use that to make our planning decisions."

Significantly, this approach still requires the local council to agree housing numbers (this is in the NPPF in the form of having a five year land supply for housing) or rather, it says that not having such numbers means that land-use designations (including 'green belt') carry less weight in determining applications for housing. The government may have tightened up regulations on 'green belt' - meeting established housing need no longer counts automatically as fulfilling the 'exceptional circumstances' needed for development to be permitted - but without identified land elsewhere that fits this need, adopting the NPPF as the local plan introduced a laissez faire planning system.

No-one will take this option but, as important planners keep observing, where a local planning authority hasn't adopted a local plan or got a five-year supply of houisng land identified in existing plans, the NPPF is de facto the local plan.

Mike Kiely, chair of the Planning Officers’ Society board and head of planning and building control at Croydon Council, said that there are a number of councils that ‘haven’t got a plan in place and there is no obvious prospect that they are going to any time soon’. 

Laissez faire planning may be here. Is it what we want?

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What would a world without planning be like?

Now I'm not sure about the planning regulations in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe these days but, as you wend past the slopes overlooking the Danube from Slovakia and Hungary, it is striking that the hillside is dotted with houses - mostly fairly modern looking and all different in style (other than in an enthusiasm for capturing the view). I'm also guessing that the typical western town planner would characterise this development as sprawl and, supported by enthusiastic environmentalists, would seek to prevent people simply buying a plot of land and building a house on that plot of land.

So rather than the rather attractive smattering of houses seen in the picture above we might get a glorious green hillside free from untidy housing. A situation described here in California:

The reason for all of this ostensibly is to preserve open space. This is a worthy goal when kept in perspective. But in California, NO open space is considered immediately acceptable for development. 

The consequence of this approach is dense, unhealthy urban concentration. We sneer at the old Eastern European apartment blocks ('Stalinist Baroque' as one Hungarian tour guide dubbed it) but fail to realise that our planning policies lead to the same conclusions. Indeed, in the article from which the quotation above is taken, the author shows two aerial photographs at the same scale - one of Soweto in South Africa showing the crammed consequences of racist housing policies and the other of a Sacramento suburb showing how the 'build absolutely nothing anywhere' approach to open space creates almost identically crammed housing.

But in some ways the Californian place is worse since, not only is the housing crammed and over-dense but many working-class Americans couldn't aspire to buying the property because it is too expensive. The Soweto properties have the merit of affordability whereas the Sacramento shacks are selling at $250,000 each. With the result that, to house the poor, governments end up building stuff like this:

Now it may be that this is exactly what the poor want! Except that, when Slovaks and Hungarians get a bit of money they buy a plot of land and build a house on it. Suggesting that the poor don't want to live in high density housing estates - they live in these places because it's what they can afford. Or rather what the government, through its control of development, allows them to afford.

We are slightly terrified (and living in the protected 'green belt' as I do, I understand this terror) of a relaxed planning environment. What we don't do is ask the logical question - what would a world free of planning controls be like? Would it be a 'development free-for-all' as rapacious housebuilders concrete over every last inch of green field in the pursuit of profit? Or would the absence of planning simply change the model - since development land would be less scarce might we get better space standards and improved build quality? Given lower land prices would there be more individual properties built - a bit like that Slovakian bank of the Danube?

What disappoints me in this debate is that the study of these matters at universities seems incapable of speculating about a world free from planning. Instead, the more typical response - especially in the UK - is to call for a more 'plan-led' system topped up with generous dollops of taxpayer cash to fill in the cracks created by that 'plan-led' system. I guess I should accept that someone who studies 'planning' is likely to be a fan of planning but, given the manifest failings of the system (and of endless attempts to improve it), asking what would happen if it weren't there would be a useful academic exercise.

Above all else, asking this question allows us to consider whether our current system helps create some of our manifest social problems by, in effect, concentrating poverty. This allows people (who should know better) to claim a neighbourhood effect in health and poverty rather than seeing that our dysfunctional planning systems (not just in land use but in housing, in health and in employment) might create the problem. Put in simple terms, people aren't poor because they live in Easterhouse. People live in Easterhouse because they are poor. Even with a less extreme example - look at any good-sized English town - you'll see the same effect with the less well-off concentrated in one part of town and living in poorer quality housing.

As Ed Ring concludes in his article about Californian planning control:

The victims are the underprivileged, the immigrants, the minority communities, retirees who collect Social Security, low wage earners and the disappearing middle class. Anyone who aspires to improve their circumstances can move to Houston and buy a home with relative ease, but in California, they have to struggle for shelter, endlessly, needlessly – contained and allegedly environmentally correct.

Now ask the same question about London?
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Housing affordability and the consequences of containment

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Let's begin with a graph:

And then let's ask a question - why is this the case? Why are those places so expensive? Perhaps:

...as urban containment policies have been implemented in some metropolitan areas, house prices have escalated well above the increase in household incomes. This is exactly the effect that economics predicts to occur where the supply of a good or service is rationed, all things being equal. 

The result is something of a trap. Containment policies become popular (and the bigger that multiple gets the more popular they become) leading to a preference for 'densification' strategies. However, as we have seen with proposals for downtown Hollywood, such policies are predicated on a growth in high net worth, childless young professionals when the population growth is in lower income families.

The problem - according to Alain Bertaud of the Stern School of Business at New York University and former principal planner of the World Bank - is resolvable if planners reprioritise:

...if planners abandoned abstracts and unmeasurable objectives like smart growth, liveability and sustainability to focus on what really matters –  mobility and affordability – we could see a rapidly improving situation in many cities.  I am not implying that planners should not be concerned with urban environmental issues.  To the contrary, those issues are extremely important, but they should be considered a constraint to be solved not an end in itself.

Even in a policy framework of contained cities, the mission creep of modern planning contributes to unaffordability and this could be altered with a more focused policy.

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More daft 'Green Belt' nonsense...

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Planners have got something of a reputation for being sticklers for the finest detail (unless of course it's a large industrial operation that's planned for that Green Belt of course) and this is a fine example of such clipboard love:

A grandmother who spent £10,000 turning a field into a landscape garden has been ordered to rip it up because it breaches greenbelt planning rules.

Planning bosses said the garden, home to fish, frogs, newts, birds, insects and a variety of plant life, 'erodes the character and quality of the area' and is 'inappropriate for the greenbelt'.

Now before we start tearing planners to shreds, let's be clear about the regulations. A garden is 'development' and therefore not permitted (without special circumstances) in the 'Green Belt'. This isn't an anti-garden thing but a protection - because the garden is 'development' this changes the status of the land and raises the possibility of it being developed for some other more permanent and intrusive use.

However, this argument (one that the planners will have waved about in this case I don't doubt) is a weak one. The land remains 'Green Belt' and the strictures on openness and the restriction on development still pertain. But, as usual, the top councillor demonstrates a worrying ignorance of the regulations and simply says:

Council planning leader, Cllr Eddie Boden, said he 'appreciates the position' the family is in but added 'planning requirements have to be obeyed'.

He said: 'No special circumstances exist to justify what has to be considered to be inappropriate development within the greenbelt.'

This statement is, quite simply, wrong. Councils have discretion, the concept of "exceptional circumstances" is not defined and councillors can override the constraints of 'Green Belt' in circumstances like this - I know this to be so because I have argued this case before planning committees and won permissions for local residents in Bingley Rural.

Mrs Bailey should submit a planning application, get her neighbours and the Town Council to turn out in force and perhaps shame this idiot councillor into allowing her to keep her garden.

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Greenfield development is bad for the economy?

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The rhetoric talks about using housing development as a trigger for economic growth - all that spending on architects, builders, plumbers and estate agents acts as a stimulus. And this means we have - as Nick Boles observed the other day - to stop being quite so BANANAs about 'green belts' and England's open countryside.

Short-term this might be true. In terms of equity it certainly is true. But when it comes to longer term prosperity there's a doubt. Here Richard Florida writing about dense cities:

Density is a key factor in both the growth of cities, the happiness of cities, and the wealth of nations. And cities and regions where density is more concentrated near their urban cores — appear to gain the biggest economic advantage.

Check that out - it means that, rather than building on the edge of cities, extended the suburbs and developing exurbs (even with super-fast trains), we should be focusing on the urban core, on city living, on dense urban environments because these are where innovation happens, where creativity springs and where economic growth begins.

It's a thought.

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