If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'

Some of that vital, precious 'green belt'

Last night was shockingly cold and damp in Leeds yet, as usual, the streets of the city centre were dotted with the homeless. Most seemed almost too busy not freezing to death to hold out that familiar battered coffee cup in the hope of a little change. There were, to be fair, rather fewer aggressive drunks than normal but, for all the buzz of a city in the last few days before Christmas, it is sobering that we still have so many people camped out on the street without a home or even the hope of a home.

There are good people, far better and kinder than me, who help these homeless people - providing them with hot food, running hostels and pointing them towards places that can help with problems other than simply not having a home. But this work is just a sicking plaster over a seeping gash in our civilised society. In a world were we say we care too many argue for and support policies that would, for all their apparent goodness, just act to make things worse. We see calls for rent controls without seeing that big US cities with those controls - San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles - are homelessness crises far worse than the ones we have in Britain. And we see people pointing to a host of other problems, from addiction and mental health to the jobs market or bad landlords - almost never housing supply let alone the planning system.

But in the end the main reason for homelessness - whether its an ex-serviceman with PTSD bunking down in a Leeds shop doorway or a family crammed into a damp and mouldy B&B - is the simple fact of not having a home. Yes it's true that sometimes the actions of the homeless have contributed to their circumstances - financial crisis, debt, drugs and booze, violence - but it's also true that, in the end, the way to stop people being homeless is to get them a home. So the fact that there aren't enough homes doesn't just matter because Zeke and Jocasta can't afford to buy a house, it matters because if we don't get more homes we aren't going to stand a chance of finding a home for those sad men and women on our streets, for the family huddled in a bedsit or the young couple in South London cooped up in Mum's back bedroom because there's nowhere they can find to rent.

Lots of words have been poured our describing how we might resolve the problem - not everywhere but certainly in London, Bristol, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester - of there simply not being enough housing supply to meet the demand for housing. And remember that this isn't about shortages in one or other tenure (not enough social housing, too few hostel places, no affordable homes to buy) but about the whole supply, all the homes. Turning some of those homes from one tenure to another or taking up scarce housing land for new council housing simply doesn't solve the problem it just shifts it to another part of the market.

Everyone with their brain switched who looks seriously at the problem comes to the same conclusion. The problem lies with our planning system. Sometimes this results in things that increase supply but at a horrible cost in civilized living while in other places we get a new generation of soul-destroying, anti-family high-rise living. We see people saying we can meet the need without changing how we draw up plans - essentially by getting the houses built somewhere else. Usually this refers to a mystical thing called "brownfield land" - acres of previously developed land across our cities on which giant skyscrapers can be built into which all the poor peons and saps of city living can be crammed. All this so a fortunate few can look across a dull piece of agricultural monoculture devoid of most of its historic wildlife and utterly lacking in any amenity value beyond being there and being a field.

"Save the Green Belt" proclaim the leaflets of candidates from every political party. "Brownfield first" scream politicians from left and right. Even the housing "sector", dominated by local council officers and folk from social housing businesses, doesn't mention planning reform - just give us billions of other people's money, say Shelter, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation, and we'll solve the housing crisis. But they won't because all they'll do is take housing land that's already allocated out of the market and build homes for social rent. Without more land all we do is move the problem about. For sure we might fix the problem for the poorest and most vulnerable (a good thing) but at the cost of making it even less likely that young people with good education and good jobs can do what their parents did and buy a house.

I don't hold out much hope that government will come to its senses and reform the planning system but let me give them a way to do it. We'll start by accepting that all those MPs and councillors elected on the back of "saving the green belt" aren't going to roll over and agree to scrapping our disastrous policy of urban containment. So let's reform it. And the simplest way to do this is to change what 'green belt' means - not the five purposes (three of which are essentially the same thing) but the manner in which we treat applications on that green belt. Right now a 'green belt' designation comes with a presumption against development (or a presumption that the 'openness of the green belt' will be preserved) - if we removed that presumption and treated 'green belt' as a significant material consideration instead then it would be possible to prevent unnecessary sprawl, avoid the merging of communities, protect important environments and encourage the reuse of redundant developed land but not at the cost of constraining land supply to the point where it creates a housing crisis.

If you want - and I do - to live in a society that values everyone and where we can house the homeless so as to support them into a better life, then you can't be a NIMBY, you can't go to the barricades to prevent Barratts or Wimpy building a few hundred houses on the fields over the back. If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'.

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

The precious green belt that we must preserve at all cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their conclusion?

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

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

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

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In which some architects discover some reasons people object to housing development

 At a time of housing crisis, at least in some parts of the UK, it is amazing that groups of planners and architects can still find time to argue against building houses, or in this case building them too fast:

Eurocell says although homes are being built quickly in response to the housing crisis, there is 'almost no consideration' for the infrastructure needed to support them.

 The basis for this claim is a survey:

 ...it found two thirds of people felt there was too much focus on construction of 'homes rather than communities', and seven in 10 thought there was not enough provision of educational, health and sports facilities

 Colour me surprised. People always argue against new housing on the basis of pressure on or lack of social infrastructure: "the school's full", "there's no playground in the park", "you can't get a doctors appointment". The system we have largely mitigates these effects - in the past through s106 payments and now via Community Infrastructure Levy. Moreover, the impact on existing social infrastructure is almost always over stated even with very large developments.

The right response to the argument here isn't to slow down development but rather to direct land release and development towards existing communities with established social and transport infrastructure. Indeed, increasing housing numbers in smaller communities could make the differences between these places losing or keeping their post office, chemist, pub or local shop. The dominant obsession with 'new towns' and 'garden villages' should be challenged for the obvious reason that it is easier, cheaper and more efficient to develop existing infrastructure than it is to build new infrastructure. This is the core benefit of suburbia - it is iterative allowing for communities to absorb development rather than trying to create community spirit in an entirely new place.

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Opposition to urban sprawl is as much about snobbery as self-interest

The standard narrative about urban containment - the "green belt" as we call it in England - is that is persists because of the economic self-interests of homeowners in communities at the margins of urban conurbations. These are the NIMBYs and they have driven the policy of containment to the extent that large, growing cities - San Francisco, London, Barcelona, Sydney, Auckland - have their economies hobbled by the growing unaffordability of housing in these places. And its true that the politicised planning system - government telling people what they can and cannot do with their property - is too often captured by these NIMBYs. But there's a second bunch of people who are just as important, especially where the setting of national policy is concerned. Let's call them "urban snobs". Here's one of them quoted by Joel Kotkin:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I’m happy for them,” snarks Elizabeth Farrelly, urban and architecture critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. “Even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

What we're told we need is high rise living, a sort of urban wonderment of pokey little flats inhabited by the childless young (and increasingly not-so-young). Except for the fact that, contrary to the snobs argument, cities are not an environmental blessing:

Suburban detached houses, according to one Australian study, use less energy per capita than those of inner-city urbanites. California, the hotbed of climate lunacy and forced densification, has reduced its greenhouse gases between 2007 and 2016 at a rate 40th per capita among the 50 states. It has succeeded, however, in driving up energy and housing prices well above the rest of the country; the world capital of the elite tech economy also suffers the highest cost adjusted poverty rate in the nation.

So we have a rootless, childless, kidult population flitting around the big city doing achingly exciting jobs in tech or politics or law and pretending that this is the good life, far better than suburbia's boring, plain and predictable world. We will soon reach a point of confrontation between suburbia and the big city as those suburbs realise they have political power and can challenge the anti-car, anti-family agenda of the urban snobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Whose beauty is it? If you want housing people like and want to live in you have to reform the 'green belt'

Jack Airey the housing expert from Policy Exchange has a piece on Conservative Home about how the prime minister has said that we should “emphasise the need, the duty, to build beautiful homes that people actually want to live in, and being sensitive to local concerns.”

Hard to take any issue with this except in that, as ever, it is difficult to say what is or isn't 'beautiful'. Airey argues that:

Despite existing to enhance public welfare, we seem to have created a planning system that sucks in money and productive energy at exactly the wrong points of the development process. Instead of being spent on beautiful design and good quality construction materials, huge amounts of money is spent by developers on consultants who can navigate the statutory thicket of our planning framework and on the acquisition of land at prices that are artificially inflated by local authorities rationing developable land.

There's no doubt that the cost of land - a direct consequence of planning rules that constrain its supply - has a profound impact on what gets built. Not only does it drive greater densities resulting in a less pleasing environment with narrower streets, smaller gardens and more hard surfaces but it affects the willingness of developers to build more attractive housing. And Airey is also right that the entire planning process gives little attention to aesthetics. Furthermore the nature of our planned system supports the dominant "buy-build-sell" development model rather than the idea of stewardship. The relationship between the developer and the buyer ends once the snagging list is complete.

My concern in all of this is mostly whose idea of beauty we are using? The urban design and architecture professions are filled with people who have a sneering, bien pensant attitude to suburbs - sprawl as they like to call it. At the same time the likes of the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), true to their Howardian roots, argue for new towns and new villages rather than the modest expansion of the towns and villages we already have. And at the back of all this sit the NIMBYs, most starkly typified by the CPRE and their argument we should "build more densely on old industrial land in the city".

The essays in Policy Exchange's work on "The Duty to Build Beautiful" include some interesting discussion of the role for communities in determining what is appropriate for their places. There's one essay suggesting that (as most communities faced with new housing would confirm) a lot of so-called community consultation is a sham - the developer has already agreed with planners how many houses there'll be and what they will look like. The problem is, however, in most cases - given almost all the most desirable development land has a 'green belt' designation - the very principle of development is contested. Even where that community has set out a neighbourhood plan this will often duck the issue of housing or propose unrealistic (and too dense) developments with the objective of minimising land release from that 'green belt'. In one of my neighbouring villages the Parish Council is consulting on whether people want large houses built - the PC's view is that big houses are a bad idea despite this being precisely what developers want to build.

Airey's article welcomes the proposed "total review" of planning regulations but I'm probably not alone in suspecting that this won't extend to considering the huge economic and social damage that is done by the urban containment policy we call 'green belt'. This isn't to say we should throw out all of the principles enshrined in the 'green belt' idea - recycling land, avoiding the merger of communities, environmental protection - but rather to argue that a blanket urban containment is the most damaging way to achieve these admirable aims. Moreover, the 'green belt' strategy doesn't, in most peoples' minds, perform that function but instead institutionalises 'not-in-my-backyard'. This acts to create, through regulation, artificially expensive housing in places where people want to live - I look with interest at proposals for land value capture but don't see anyone proposing to tax the main beneficiaries of urban containment, the people who live at the urban fringes or within the 'green belt'.

If we don't reform the supply of land and then insist on beautiful homes, we will struggle to meet the real aspiration of most people to own a house with a garden. Instead we will return to the planners' and architects' dream:

The way in which building design evolved in the 20th century led us to this place. It is driven by the manner in which Le Corbusier and others took an entirely functional view of humanity - folk to be stored, moved smoothly from workspace to homespace. The aesthetic wasn't scaled at a personal level but with reference to masses - how do we house millions efficiently, how do we make workplaces for thousands, not how do we make great homes for Mr & Mrs Smith. The result of this is our obsession - straight from Le Corbusier's soulless authoritarianism - with density and the sacredness of the countryside.

In the end, as I've written before, we need to reform the 'green belt' - make it smaller, allow greater weight to housing where need is clear, and exclude previously developed land from the category. Without this sort of change as well as a recognising the importance of space, especially garden space, we will continue failing to meet housing demand and, even if they look a little better, what homes we do build will satisfy planners not people, fund managers not families and investors not individuals.

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The planning system is a big reason for Britain's sluggish economy - reform it

This can't be said to often - we have a dysfunctional planning system that sits right at the heart of our economy's sclerosis and underperformance. If you want places to grow and succeed you need to sort out the planning system, especially for housing.

From Sam Bowman and Stian Westlake:

The undersupply of housing, whose root cause is a dysfunctional land use planning system, is the UK’s biggest problem. It slows productivity growth by preventing people from moving to get better jobs, forces them to spend more on housing costs than they need to, and to have fewer children than they would like, at a later age than they would like. It creates a brain drain from deprived parts of the country, because only the most talented people can afford to move to prosperous cities, exacerbating regional inequality, and means that many of the income gains from the slower productivity growth we do get accrue to existing landowners in the form of higher rents and housing costs, instead of higher living standards for everyone.

Despite this, every political party is proposing housing policies that at best change none of the fundamentals and at worst will completely destroy the last vestiges of a functioning housing market. The Labour Party talks about rent controls, right-to-buy for private rentals and more vaguely about building lots of council houses. While the latter might help a little, it doesn't address the real issue which is that younger people in productive cities cannot afford to buy a house - or, for that matter, a converted airing cupboard pretending to be a studio flat. Labour's policies would see the complete collapse of the private rented market, a massive increase in homelessness and no increase in the rate of build for market housing and they remain completely wedded to a 'plan and provide' approach that simply doesn't work however much you tinker with it.

For the Conservatives, wedded as we are to the ideas of classical liberal economics, it ought to be simple - make lots more land available in places like Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire for people to build homes on. Instead we're either (and Bowman & Westlake fall into this trap) proposing massive densification as the solution - huge blocks of flats near to suburban railway stations - or else using false incentives like Help to Buy. Think-tanks like Onward have engaged in massive contortions to come up with housing policies that don't change the fundamentals of our planning system - indeed while they mention planning they hide behind opinion polling showing planning reform is unpopular to ignore the damage it is doing.

There are 118 golf courses in Surrey each of which could provide between 2,000 and 3,000 homes at suburban densities - just having 98 courses would allow for 60,000 new homes. We can then consider redundant airfields and other previously developed land as well as stopping the ridiculous block on what got called 'garden grabbing' where houses on huge single plots (something there's plenty of in the Home Counties) get redeveloped at more normal suburban densities of 20-25 homes per acre. To achieve this you don't need to scrap the 'green belt' you just change the rules to mean that previously-developed land (including those golf courses, gardens and airfields) falls outside those green belt protections unless there are exceptional reasons otherwise.

The second change to planning would be to alter the basis on which assessments of housing need are made. These "objective assessments of housing need" (OANs) are a core reason for our delivery problems. Supposedly these assessments are made on the basis of projected population growth adjusted to acknowledge economic factors (these are always upwards - nowhere admits to their local economy shrinking). The problem is that OANs point to a precise number for housing need - 43,500 for Bradford - and planners therefore identify and allocate a similarly precise acreage of land on which those homes will be built. In areas with growing demand, all of this will be developed meaning that there is no market for development land and the constrained supply - just the bits the planners have shaded in - results in higher land prices than would be the case if, for example, planners identifed land to meet twice the OAN housing number.

Finally we need to review the basis for green belt policy. If we hold to the five reasons set out in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) there is no reason why the scale of Britain's green belts cannot be substantially reduced while still preventing the merging of communities, discouraging unmanaged sprawl, protecting the environment and encouraging the re-use of previously-developed land. We also need to get away from the foolish and expensive obsession with building new towns and new villages rather than extending the towns and villages we already have. Existing places already have the physical and social infrastructure of highways, hospitals, schools, water, sewage treatment and things like pubs, post offices, shops and parks. These existing places are also linked into existing rail, bus and urban transit networks.

I recall listening to the Leader of Lincolnshire County Council explaining how the main barrier to delivering some of the county's big sites was that the service undertakers (electricity, gas, water, etc.) didn't have the resource or investment finance to get the new towns 'wired up'. If, instead of this, the focus was on smaller urban extensions most of these problems would be managed more easily.

The UK's housing policy is a mess and this is entirely the consequence of policy-makers ignoring the simple fact that it is the planning system that causes most of the problem. This isn't to say we shouldn't have more social housing or that there aren't arguments for reforms to how the private rental sector operates but most of Britain's housing problem is people who want what their parents had - a nice house and garden is a decent suburb connected to 'town' where they can raise a family.

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Councillors and MPs objecting to housing developments? Don't be the Grand Old Duke of York

Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

The Duke of York in question is most commonly said to be Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany who wasn't a very successful military commander:

When war broke out between Britain and France in 1793, York was put in charge of a military expedition to Flanders. He took control of the port of Dunkirk but was then pushed back in a battle at Hondschoote on 6 September. His troops – a mixture of British and Hanoverian forces – performed well but were outnumbered three to one, losing their siege guns during the retreat.

Over the following months, he marched his army back and forth between ineffective minor actions, inspiring the nursery rhyme. Meanwhile, Britain and her allies lost control of Flanders, and in July 1794 York and his troops were evacuated.

The futility of the action is what we remember hence the nursery rhyme. And, for me, the lesson for us all is not to offer a community great victories then march them up and down, backwards and forwards before admitting defeat. In this spirit, I'm offering some advice - based on 24 years experience - on responding to unpopular housing development proposals.

What happens in too many cases is that local politicians (and MPs - often the worst offenders), faced with opposition to a development from residents, do precisely what the Grand Old Duke did and march randomly from one possible objection to the next. And its wrong to march a community, banners waving, up to the top of the hill when you know you'll just march them back down, banners furled and defeated, in a week or so. Too many politicians, having got the votes nicely parcelled away, fall back on "well I tried but the planners and developers you know..."

So lets look at what you should do.

The first question you should ask is whether the site for the proposed housing is allocated for this purpose in the development plan (there are various iterations of these but these days we're mostly talking about the local plan). If the planning authority has allocated the site for housing, they have already accepted the principle that new houses will be built on the site. Trying to overturn this principle is futile and local politicians should be honest enough to tell concerned residents the truth - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

If it's not an allocated housing site, you need to look at whether it has some other designation - green belt*, employment land, flood plain or a variety of environmental, ecological and heritage protections. If it doesn't have any other designation and protection, it's just a piece of 'white land' on the local plan map, then, again, you tell the community - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

Where it does have protections or other designations then the principle of building housing isn't established allowing you to say that the designation or protection in the plan outweighs the need for housing. It's worth remembering that the only sustainable basis for a refusal is to demonstrate that the principle of housing is not established, any other basis for refusal can be mitigated by a developer (whether they want to afford this is a different issue).

Residents will raise a consistent set of objections to housing development, the more common being:

1. It will negatively affect house prices (or 'we already have too many houses')

2. The schools are full

3. You can't get an appointment at the doctors

4. It will remove our views of something

5. Bats or badgers or rare orchids or unusual amphibia inhabit the site

6. There are too many cars and this will make it worse - children will be killed

7. The site is crossed by ancient footpaths or bridleways

8. Seasonal flooding affects the site

9. There's all sorts of significant historical or archaeological stuff on the site

10. Trees

It's worth noting that some of these will never be used for a refusal. This includes school places, doctors, house prices or numbers, views and footpaths. We have a long established system through s106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levy to mitigate impact on things like education, heath and community facilities, and house prices or your view are not the concern of the planning system. For flora and fauna there are very few circumstances under which, on a large site, these can't be mitigated, either through relocation or specific protections. It's great that you can get bats, trees and rare blue butterflies protected through the planning system but you're not going to get the housing stopped on this basis. The same goes for archaeology since, if the site is known to be important it will already be protected (see designations and protections above), and most developers are content to allow archaeological work given that they're going to dig up the site anyhow.

This leaves us with highways and flooding. And yes, you'll be pleased to know, developments on designated housing sites do get refused because of how they impact on road safety, congestion, drainage or flooding. But this only happens when the developer ignores highways advice and the expectations of water and environment authorities (whose responses to consultations will, in most cases, carry greater weight than what local residents say).

For highways the system as a whole has the capacity to accommodate the traffic generated by your development (I know you don't believe this but it is what the planning system assumes so you're stuck with it) so you have to focus on specific pinch points, junctions and stretches of road. Highways planners have standard measures for assessing junctions, the need for crossings and whether parking restrictions or other traffic controls are required. Remember that, if you're stood by the side of the road with traffic passing, 30mph is very fast meaning that, when residents tell you about the awful speeding, the chances are there's a lot less of it than you think. In the end, if a highways development control officer says a junction has the capacity and is safe, then the planning committee is likely to take this assessment as true even if your residents think it's a joke. In these circumstances you are better looking for mitigation - yellow lines, warning signs, pedestrian crossings - than trying to stop the development.

Fields (especially here in the glorious South Pennines with our topography and copious amount of boulder clay) suffer from seasonal floods. If you drive around during the winter months you'll see low lying parts of fields filled with water, often with ducks, too! It's standard for residents to point at a proposed development site and say; 'look it floods, you can't build on it'. Again it doesn't really work like this because, if it really is flood plain, then it's unlikely the principle of housing would be sustained (see designations and protections above). Your site probably isn't flood plan so the principle, in very simple terms, is that the development should not have a negative impact on drainage. This pretty much means that the flow of water through the site has to be the same (or better) after development as it was before development. There are a lot of rules about sustainable urban drainage (delightfully shortened to SUDS) and the developer will want to resolve the issues with areas subject to seasonal flooding but if the overall drainage through the site is unaffected then you've not really any grounds for refusal.


There are other things that might result in objections (from loss of agricultural land or lack of affordable homes through to arcane discussions of who owns the land) but these describe the majority of reasons local people will raise in objecting to new housing.

It's easy politics to oppose housing development and it's easy to whip up opposition, to march the community up to the top of the hill. But the honourable course is to look the community in the eye, as I did when we had an application for 250 new houses in Cullingworth, and say "these houses will get built, we should screw as much benefit for the village as we can from the development". We got a new village hall and pre-school.

*Following a suggestion on Twitter here's a note setting out the difference between 'green belt' and 'greenfield'. Green Belt is a planning designation designed to prevent what is perjoratively called 'urban sprawl' it doesn't mean that the land with this designation is actually green. Greenfield simply describes a site that has not been developed previously. A site being greenfield doesn't provide any protection at all. For completeness, 'brownfield' simply refers to a site that has been previously developed. There are lots of brownfield sites that are Green Belt.

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Housing should be a national priority but we don't need loads more council houses.

Council housing is 100 years old. Well actually it's quite a lot older than that and social housing provision goes back to the middle ages but let's stick with the anniversary of the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1919 which provided subsidy to local councils wanting to build houses - the original "Homes for Heroes". Local councils quite rightly celebrate their contribution to better homes for working people - from Bradford's Chain Street, built for Irish labourers to the massive Beacontree estate in outer East London.

People point to later actions such as the decision by the 1950s Conservative government to build new houses at a time when, despite its promises and commitment to socialism, Attlee's Labour government had failed to respond to an acute post-war housing shortage. Our 1950 manifesto proclaimed:

Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by crowded houses. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.

It was a great achievement to oversee the building of more than 300,000 homes each year from 1952-55 and it met the post-war need and the related desire to use the opportunity to build new towns - better places to live in the manner of Ebeneezer Howard's 'garden city' ideal. So it's understandable that, looking back into this history, people cry out for a new generation of council homes to meet today's housing need - even down to a fêted TV architect going back to his roots with a campaign for these new council homes. After all the market hasn't provided these homes so government must step in again and spend billions on new homes - £146 billion according to the Chartered Institute of Housing and housing charity, Shelter.

The two examples above were driven by the consequences - and the economic disruption - of war. The 1950s housing crisis was largely caused by the Luftwaffe but was captured early on by social engineers who saw it as a chance to end what they saw as the tyranny of private rental and provide working class people with those 'homes for heroes'. The passion of these social engineers continued into the 1960s and 1970s as 'slums' were cleared to be replaced with grand cities in the sky - rows of walk-up blocks interspersed with huge tower blocks. Millions of people changed tenure from private rented property to council housing. And millions of kids - like George Clarke, our TV architect - were brought up on these estates.

But while George and others were growing up something else happened - more people began, despite the limitations of mortgage finance, to buy their own homes. Why move from one rented tenure to another when you could buy your own home. Alongside those newly built council estates, people saw rows of private homes being built, each filling with clerks, supervisors and administrators, with the growing lower middle class of an expanding service economy. Home ownership became the aspiration of most people, an aspiration that those living in council housing felt cut off from. In twenty years from 1958 to 1978, UK home ownership levels doubled leaving Britain as a country with two tenures - council housing and owner occupation.

The widespread view in the 1970s was that the next generation would not need council housing as rising incomes would enable them to buy their own home. The problem was that over a third of the UK's housing stock was council housing and, if future families weren't going to need those council houses, what would become of them? In London the GLC and some boroughs like Bromley and Hillingdon began to look at selling council homes to their tenants (this has been Labour Party policy in 1959) both as an effective political pitch and to begin resolving the mismatch in supply between councils housing and private housing. Right-to-buy was born and quickly became the Conservative Party's flagship housing policy - over 2 million people switched from being council tenants to living in a home they owned, as Michael Heseltine remarked, "no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people".

Councils - or most of them - hated right-to-buy and hated the mission to remove government from the provision of housing for a mass population. During the 1980s and 1990s Councils dragged their feet, finding ever more creative means to delay right-to-buy sales. Despite this, right-to-buy was a huge success - by 1987 over 1 million homes had been sold to their tenants, billions in state assets transferred to the people.

With other legislation encouraging councils to transfer all their housing into new associations, there was a further reduction in council housing stock as housing associations became the government's preferred means of providing social housing. While some authorities retained their housing, by the 1990s the age of council housing as a monolithic tenure - the only alternative to buying a home - had finished. Councils could concentrate on their strategic housing role - making sure land is available for new housing, providing services and support to the homeless, and working to ensure that the quality of the overall housing stock remained good.

So what has changed? Why do we now have people advocating another massive splurge of council housing building - 300,000 a year for ten years is George Clarke's campaign target? It's not that, as many tenants in my experience could attest, councils were brilliant landlords, quite the opposite. And council housing seems to be a step backwards from a world of home ownership especially given the scale of economic betterment since the 1950s. The answer lies in those numbers, in the fact that from the end of the 1990s to today we have built fewer homes than we needed as a nation with the result that, from 1997, house prices rocketed and people whose parents bought a home no longer feel able to do so. Once again we have a large and problematic private rented sector with the same exploitative practices ended by a combination of regulation and council house building in the 1960s and 1970s.

The problem here is that, for all that we could build nicer council housing than the flats thrown up in the 1970s, people want to buy their own house. The shortage, in most places, isn't a shortage of social housing but a shortage of affordable homes for families to buy. Building lots and lots of council houses reduces the pressures but doesn't resolve the problem especially if, as Clarke and his fellow campaigners want, right-to-buy is abolished. A more interesting argument might be to call for councils to build on an explicit rent-to-buy basis but this wouldn't suit the municipal authoritarians who dominate public housing policy in the UK.

This isn't to say that councils shouldn't build new homes but it is to argue that if there's £146 billion in public subsidy knocking about, using it to buy already overpriced land so as to build homes to let as subsidised rents isn't a great strategy. Indeed, if councils want to contribute to solving the housing supply problem they have the ability to do so now through their local plan process. Land prices are high because there isn't enough housing land to meet demand - a dramatic increase in housing land supply would reduce those land prices and have a beneficial effect on housing costs all without the government having to cough up a penny in subsidy. As we've seen in Sydney, once the poster child of inflated housing costs, once you allow development at scale, you get development at scale - and housing costs fall.

The nostalgia for council housing is understandable but the reality for many who lived in it wasn't the idyll that some make it out to be and it featured poor, slow maintenance, lengthy waiting lists with obscure points systems, management 'discretion' allowing councillors to deliver political favours through queue jumping, and rising levels of crime and disorder as the more successful moved into the private sector. To suggest that the only way to resolve our current housing problems is the mass building of council homes is to acknowledge that councils - and councillors - don't have the balls to face down the NIMBYs, put a rocket under the planners and apply some creativity to meeting housing need. It's so much easier to simply say; "here's billions of taxpayers cash, go build some houses" and then build homes that people don't want (they'd rather buy), in places isolated from work and where folk would rather not live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Some thoughts on reforming planning to support housing need

With the Mayor of London joining other 'progressive' mayors in places like New York, Berlin and Auckland by opting for rent controls over building houses, we are reminded that every politician is prepared to ignore economic reality in the search for short-term electoral benefit. Since nearly every serious economist says that rent controls are a bad idea, you have to wonder why they are so popular?

The problem - whether in London or San Francisco - is that politics removes the solution to rising housing costs that actually does make economic sense. Rent controls are the inevitable consequence of housing policies directed by the political power of NIMBYs. Here's housing economist Professor Paul Cheshire being interviewed by Ahir Hites, a senior research officer in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Research Department:

“Britain imposed its first Green Belt in 1955 and now, if re-zoned for building, farmland at the built edge of London has an 800-fold mark-up. There was no secular trend in housing land prices in Britain until the mid-1950s, but after Green Belts were imposed real prices increased some 15-fold. More than houses because you can substitute land out of house production. There is a similar pattern in Canada, New Zealand or the West and East coasts of the United States where policies restrict land supply.”

It's true, and some politicians try to hide behind this, that agglomeration effects in successful cities also provide upward pressure on housing costs (in simple terms people can move to a place faster than you can build homes to accommodate them). But when the gap between population growth and housing supply growth is negative for decades - as is the case in places like London and San Francisco - the result is utterly unaffordable housing. The case against urban containment boundaries, at least in terms of its effect on housing costs, is now as uncontestable as the case against rent controls.

One policy response popular with mayors (and local government in general, at least in the UK) is to argue that the problem isn't that we're not building enough houses but rather that we're building too many of the wrong sort of housing - expensive homes for rich people and especially rich overseas investors. The solution proposed - and the UK's Chartered Institute of Housing rather egregiously supports this - is that enormous amounts of government subsidy, £146 billion they say in the UK, can be used to build homes "to rent or buy through shared ownership".

Now it's probably true that the UK needs 1.45 million new homes building but is it really the case that the only way to do this is through a huge programme of, in effect, building council houses? Yes we need social housing because there are always going to be people who can't afford the rent for whatever reason (and paying full market rates in the private sector is expensive) but the gap in our housing markets isn't social housing but market housing - people who would like to buy a house (like their parents probably did) are unable to do so:

“The cost of a middle class lifestyle has increased faster than inflation. Housing, for example, makes up the largest single spending item for middle-income households, at around one third of disposable income, up from a quarter in the 1990s. House prices have been growing three times faster than household median income over the last two decades.”

While lots of other things from transport to food have been getting relatively less expensive, housing has headed in the opposite direction. Why? Because government has artificially constrained the supply of land, set down an ever more involved obstacle course for developers - just today the UK government added some new hoops, and made the process of buying and selling expensive through taxation and regulation. It's not that all these limitations are unnecessary but that that combining heavy regulation with a deliberately constrained supply can only result in higher housing costs.

The problem is that reforming urban containment policies and green belts is seen as political suicide. Even though I spent more time at planning committees arguing in favour of green belt development, the immediate and visceral response of the people I represented for all those years is still "no we don't want any more houses building". Since the logic of abolishing green belts is not politically possible (even though there are plenty of other protections for places we consider important environmentally, ecologically or in terms of heritage) we have to ask how we improve the availability of land in and around successful towns and cities.

The first option would be to review the reasons why we have green belts - this could be a national review conducted under public enquiry terms with the aim of deciding the principles for a green belt. The five purposes currently are pretty clear but we might want to consider the weight given to the policy - at the moment there is a presumption that there won't be any development unless that development has no impact or else literally cannot go somewhere else (e.g. a quarry). The simplest reform here would be to argue that housing need gets greater weight than green belt, a process that would provide more incentive for councils to allocate land rather than rely on strict green belt interpretations to save them from public opprobrium.

The second outcome of a review could be that the size of green belts could be limited - this could allow for the continued prevention of merging between communities, for example, but allow for more flexible development on the fringes of existing built-up areas (e.g a buffer zone where small scale development is permitted).

A further change might be to look at how housing development is used as a political campaigning lever - by every political party. We could consider, for example, applying the same strictures to representation on planning applications as apply to representations for licencing. Only those people directly affected by a proposed license - essentially immediate neighbours - can make representation to the licencing authority. Furthermore, local councillors and MPs can only make representations in support of someone directly affected. Applying something similar to planning would make organised campaigns against development - especially smaller scale developments - less powerful and would reduce pressure on planners and planning committees while protecting the rights of adjacent property owners.

The biggest weakness in our current planning system is the local plan process. Just consider that Bradford started preparing its local plan in 2008 and still, eleven years later, does not have a completed plan with land allocations. And this is not unique, two of Bradford neighbours (Kirklees and Calderdale) don't have a plan in place and Leeds is driving a coach and horses through theirs by changing the assessment of housing need (aka "the housing numbers"). Elsewhere local plans - even given the legal 'duty to cooperate' - are drawn up on small geographies with scant regard for the needs of neighbours and where one council (Stevenage, for example) can only meet housing need using allocations in neighbouring councils the result is a long-running political scrap.

A reform here might be to lift the planning process (as opposed to the development management system dealing with day-to-day planning applications) up to a county level, make it much more strategic and 'broad brush' and rely on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and existing land protections and regulations such as AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) and flood plain controls to deal with the detail. The expectations on evidence and precision in the current local plan system inevitably leads to delay and also means that most of the time plans are out-of-date by the time they're published.

Our planning system serves us badly but has become - especially around green belts and in the way it makes developers ask for permission - something of a sacred cow. It is time, however, to recognise that it's not enough to keep saying we need lots more housing but then keep responding to essentially NIMBY arguments and refuse developments. Which brings me to my last suggestion one that I've wanted to happen since private pressure on John Prescott resulted in him preventing the redevelopment of Odsal Stadium in Bradford despite universal local support for the development. We should remove the power of the Secretary of State to overturn the decision of a planning inspector or the decision of a local council - this stops egregious backroom lobbying by MPs and gives us the confidence that decisions really are based on the regulations that parliament has approved.

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Want to solve your city's housing crisis? Simple - build more houses, any sort of houses

So much angst is being expended on trying to solve London's (and other places too - Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and so forth) housing problems. It seems that the solution is rather simpler than all the think tanks, planners and mayors suggest:

It is not some magical mystery as to why Sydney's rental prices are declining. And it's certainly not due to rent control. It's because Sydney's seeing a building boom. The size of Sydney's apartment market has doubled in two years, and landlords have had to drop rents in order to get tenants.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported over the weekend that the city has seen more than 30,800 multi-unit dwellings built last year, a record for any Australian city. And there still are nearly 200,000 additional dwellings in various stages of development. The city is seeing a glut driven by investors. And those investors are now leasing out the apartments.

So it's easy. Allow more development. And to do this you have to encourage speculative investment:

About half of Australia’s apartments are likely to be owned by an investor. And lending to investors in NSW, rose sharply a few years ago, fuelling a real estate investment boom that created this massive rise in rental stock, Ms Owen said.

There are risks here but primarily (as connoisseurs of Spain's 2000s housing boom will know) for the investor not the renter or the taxpayer. So why is it that governments are stopping things that drive this investment (foreign buyers, Airbnb, liberal planning regulations) and then complaining that there aren't enough houses? Or, worse, blaming high rents on those investors - look at Barcelona's Airbnb protests - rather than on the failings of mayors and local councillors.

I appreciate that mayors want to placate the NIMBYs (remembering that current residents have votes while possible future residents don't) but if, in doing so, those mayors propose counterproductive ideas like rent controls, foreign investment controls and height limits then they should be bundled out of office for being dangerous fools.

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Whose idea of beauty is it? Thoughts on why new homes don't look great.

My friend and former colleague, Huw Jones is your go to man for knowing about back-to-back housing and, in particular, the plethora of such housing in Leeds. It looks like this:



Most of these homes were thrown up to house the poor in Leeds and over 20,000 of them remain. Outside West Yorkshire (Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees all retain them albeit not so many as in Leeds and stone not brick) all the back-to-backs have gone except for a few specially preserved historical relics in Liverpool and Birmingham. Leeds, however, is the only place to have back-to-back housing built after 1909 (indeed the most recent of Leeds' back-to-backs date from 1937). There's a reason for this, of course, because the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 prohibited the building of back-to-backs. Leeds found a loophole by claiming that the homes already had approval at the time of the Act.

When we look at these homes and especially those built, as in the picture above, in long streets, we see the classic image of England's inner city slums - narrow streets, homes opening straight onto the pavement, shared middens and little fire safety. But as Huw Jones was wont to observe, as a built form, these homes use land efficiently, were built well enough to last longer than many homes built more recently, and provided a not unattractive street scene.

This isn't an argument for us building back-to-backs again but rather a chance to raise a question as to what constitutes beauty in housing and to ask further why so many of the homes built today by mass house-builders are at best boring and at worst downright ugly. Here's some built, unlike the back-to-backs in Leeds, to house people well enough off to afford to live hard by the RHS gardens at Harlow Carr on the edge of Harrogate:



When I posted this image and asked these questions on Twitter, I received a variety of responses pointing to potential causes - greedy developers, planners and the planning system, the clunkiness of building regulations and that consumers care little about beauty preferring functionality. The thing for me is that, for all that these things might be causes, there is a depressing similarity between cheap homes for the poor built using a loophole in regulations and new homes for the middle classes in North Yorkshire.

Just as some people look immediately to the supposed greed of these developers, my instinct is to look at our planning and land supply systems. Builders cut corners (my Twitter question produced a lot of 'forget what they look like, look at how badly they're built' responses), use cheaper materials and have 'cookie-cutter' designs because it's the only way they can build the homes at a low enough price. Most of the development cost is sunk into buying the land, getting planning permission, paying exceptional costs demanded by planners or regulations and coughing up for the new development tax, Community Infrastructure Levy.

But there's another thing here - what we're told is beautiful (or great architecture or brilliant design) is what we believe is beautiful. And beauty matters because, as Richard Florida says, beautiful cities are more successful. But what is beautiful?

I go on to explain that they’ve been so propagandized to see it as the quintessential work of art that they never really look at it. “Do you know what ‘sfumato’ is? What makes La Gioconda (what its called in Spain) better than this (I toss up a portrait by El Greco) to you?” The classroom usually breaks out, mildly, into chaos, as students actually begin to think about what they are seeing.

Our aesthetic judgements are, like so much else, guided by received wisdom. And the received wisdom for the design of cities isn't the anonymous developers who built Parkside Terrace in Cullingworth:



No, our urban aesthetic is set by architects and those who write about architecture. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons - advocates of pragmatic, functional, utilitarian buildings. This approach - most obvious in America's ubiquitous 'prairie style' housing - is what we're seeing in those houses built in Harrogate: functionality, utility, value. To return to our example, it's not that the Mona Lisa is objectively the greatest painting but rather that we've all be told (over and over again) that it is the greatest painting.

The article with that Mona Lisa comment goes on to argue that places (Rational Urbanism uses is Springfield, Massachusetts) need to argue for their own beauty not simply try to copy the received idea of beauty. We're told that New York is more beautiful and that the weather's better in Florida but never step back and ask if this is really the case.

So perhaps the reason for those Harrogate homes is that design guides, the architects and planners beliefs - that received wisdom - lead us to this look: pragmatic, functional, utilitarian homes intended to meet the needs of middle-class homeowners in terms of parking, storage, heating, room layout and garden space. The consumer is not buying frills and don't worry about there being no chimneys, no bay widows and a more-or-less eaves free (and therefore sparrow and swallow free) roofline.

The way in which building design evolved in the 20th century led us to this place. It is driven by the manner in which Le Corbusier and others took an entirely functional view of humanity - folk to be stored, moved smoothly from workspace to homespace. The aesthetic wasn't scaled at a personal level but with reference to masses - how do we house millions efficiently, how do we make workplaces for thousands, not how do we make great homes for Mr & Mrs Smith. The result of this is our obsession - straight from Le Corbusier's soulless authoritarianism - with density and the sacredness of the countryside. Even when, as is the case with those homes in Harrogate, we take a small part of that sacred green belt, it's done as a minimum and as densely as possible to meet the dominant aesthetic yet cater to actual human desires.

The irony in all this - and the failure of the utilitarian approach - is that, given a choice and the opportunity, most people don't want to live in dense, crowded, impersonal spaces:

...the main finding of nearly every survey on the subject is that millennials mostly want to live in suburbs, and as they grow older that preference increases. There’s hardly any evidence at all suggesting that there’s a huge pent-up demand for city living that’s going unmet.

To better meet human needs and to repersonalise housing and development, we need to look again at the dominant aesthetic and perhaps to step away from the internationalist, skyscraper style that dominates our ideas of urban goodness. We need to stop speaking about sprawl and ask again how we build suburbs - you can call them garden cities if you wish - that work with the natural environment as well as with most folk's desire for a house with a garden somewhere nice. And that somewhere nice will, in our minds, look and feel more like those Leeds back-to-backs or Cullingworth terrace (for all their lack of outside private space) than it will resemble the great modernist towers that are their modern equivalent.

If you've to consider beaty in the built form, does it have to look like this?

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Yes we need to build a million homes but we don't need £146 billion in public subsidy to do so

Some of the beautiful 'green belt' that CPRE want to save

It beggars belief really. The National Housing Federation along with Shelter, the CPRE and the Chartered Institute of Housing propose, as their solution to the housing crisis, a programme costing £146 billion over ten years to build 1.45 million homes - that's a public subsidy of over £100,000 per house. These self-serving institutions have not specified where they'll build these homes but you can bet your bottom dollar that, with the involvement of those NIMBYs-in-chief, CPRE, the homes won't be troubling the residents of nice leafy suburbs very much.

I'm guessing that the target for developing these homes will be all that brownfield land in inner cities - where else would we put all the poor people, eh? You know the former industrial land that requires millions in decontamination, the scraggy bits of wasteland inside industrial estates and other sites currently languishing in deriliction because nobody can develop them viably.

It's not that there's no case for new social housing but rather that these proposals, by including intermediate market solutions, will act to further screw up a housing market already made sclerotic and inefficient by the worst ravages of our strategic planning system.

There are two models for delivering homes in volume - the 1930s models and the 1950s model. This bunch of self-interested organisations want the latter approach - massive government investment - because it suits their business model and expands their power and influence in the housing market. Back in the 1950s, in a war ravaged nation with millions of destroyed and bomb-damaged homes, there was a justification for that government action. Right now there is no justification beyond the self-harm inflicted on our housing markets by government regulation and the planning system.

The involvement of the CPRE in these proposals tells us that the main aim isn't to solve the housing crisis but rather to preserve the green belts that represent 13% of England's land - mostly in the very places where people would like to settle down and raise a family. Rather than pleasant suburbs close to the countryside and linked by good public transport to city and town centres, we're going to get high rise blocks on constrained sites in inner cities, unpopular housing crammed into hard-to-access sites and maybe a couple of high profile whole estate developments that will merely repeat the mistakes of the 1970s by putting the least well off far away from the snug middle classes.

The housing crisis is, in large part, a crisis caused by the inability of the emerging young middle class - all those millennial professionals in good London jobs - to afford a home with a garden like the ones they were raised in. The only way to resolve this problem affordably is to significantly increase the supply of land in places where those millennial professionals want to live. And this is not in a shared ownership development in Lambeth.

It is perfectly possible - the 1930s prove this - to build the homes we need without extensive public subsidy. What's required is that we make major reforms to our planning system - returning green belt to it's original purpose of preventing ribbon development, doubling the supply of sites with potential for housing and scrapping 'community infrastructure levy' as it is simply a tax on building houses. If there's a case for spending £14 billion then its on providing the schools, railway stations, bus routes and road improvements those new homes will need.

For most rural - exurban really - places with 2,000 of more homes, a 20% increase in this supply will not destroy them or the countryside in which they nestle. Rather that increase will improve the chances of them keeping the post office, a good local store, the chemist, a couple of pubs and the local primary school. And with this provision safeguarded these places remain communities (especially if some of the new housing is social housing) rather than dormitories for the urban wealthy.

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

A bit of that countryside the CPRE wants to save

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

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

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

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

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The real population timebomb - and why we need a more family-friendly society

Depopulating trends are global, across the developed world. After decades of worrying when Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” would go off, we are seeing a rapid decline in child-rearing, so much so that, for the first time, there are more grandparents than grandchildren on the planet. The lower birthrates are leading some demographers to suggest that global populations, instead of growing into the next century, will start to decline as early as 2070.

There is a profound and growing population crisis in the developed, urban world and it isn't what most of you think it is - we are no longer, indeed haven't been for a long while, replacing ourselves. It's not just headlines like the one about there being more grandparents than grandchildren but an accelerating decline in communities outside big cities and, without immigration, the growing inability to provide the care and support those grandparents will require.

Here's what it means:

According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.

From the 1850s through to 2004 the population of the village always hovered around the 80 to 100 mark, but since 2004 the population has dropped to 50 and only 20 of those are under the age of 60.

Those living in the village are losing hope that the village – and indeed all of rural Ireland – can be saved.

In Hara-izumi, there's no worry about an influx of foreigners. There are no immigrants here, nor the prospect of any. A bigger issue now is wildlife: The village's population has become so sparse that wild bears, boars and deer are roaming the streets with increasing frequency.

The Alpine hamlet of Albinen is so desperate for new residents that it has voted to offer $70,000 for a family of four to settle in the southern Swiss community.

In the first referendum of its kind, 100 of Albinen's 248 residents showed up to vote Thursday, and 71 approved a proposal to pay $25,000 to each adult and $10,000 per child to live in their picturesque village.

"Only the elderly stayed behind, the parents of those who left, and over time they grew older and died," he said as he stumbled across rubble to reach his dilapidated former office. He said Kalna's population had shrunk from 4,000 to 1,000.

Just take the figures: 85 out of the town's 820 houses are empty. The town had 3,000 inhabitants not too long ago, but now there are only 1,900. When elderly citizens have passed away, there has been no one there to replace them.

"Nobody lives there anymore either," Daum says, pointing to a mint-green single-family house. The industrial bakery moved to the east, he explains, and the area in front of the former garden furniture factory is full of dandelions. The Edeka grocery store closed its doors for good last year, and no trains have passed through the town since 1994.

I could continue - these examples from Italy, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Serbia and Germany could be joined by others from Poland, from Canada and from the USA. Our cities are, where they've sustained their economies, thriving but the people making that thriving possible are the ones who've left these small towns and rural villages. All this sits against a background of concern about immigration and integration for the people who - because there's far fewer young people in these rich nations - are filling the gaps left by those empty villages.

Eighty percent of US counties, notes a study by Economic Innovation Group, with roughly 150 million people, have seen their labor force decline in the past decade. The demography of the United States will become more difficult in the next quarter century, with an increase in the working population (15-64) of 18 million projected to be swamped by 28 million new senior citizens, according to the United Nations.

For Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, whose article the quote above comes from, the problem isn't how you square the need for labour with local resentment of immigration but rather how we create a society and economy that allows population replacement. Not the explosive population growth of the past 200 years but a recognition that, if we're to continue the betterment of humanity, we need to achieve a steady state. Kotkin & Cox point to housing policies as a key component but we should also ask questions about policy and attitudes towards families, to childcare and to a more dynamic work environment allowing people to move in and out of paid employment. Above all we need to recognise the value of family and that it cannot really be measured in purely economic terms.

We need to place community and family policy right there alongside climate change, the impact of technology and long term healthcare as one of the 21st century's biggest challenges. If we don't we will see more and more of these shattered, even abandoned, communities, places filled with old people trying their best to look after very old people.

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A reminder that, if you don't allocate land for housing you get a shortage of housing

The thing with housing crises is that, to solve them, you probably need some more houses. This simple fact seems to have passed by councillors in North Ayrshire in considering the matter of why people working on the island of Arran can't afford to live there:

The group, made up of local business people and community activists, believes houses on the island are among the least affordable in the UK. Arran’s average annual wage is £24,000, but average house prices are eight to 10 times that, giving it an affordability ratio nearly as bad as in London.

The problem, we're told, is that Arran is a lovely place meaning that lots of housing has been bought up as second homes and holiday lets. Now this can prove something of a problem but only when the planning authority decides that, in effect, nobody can build any new housing for sale anywhere on the island. I exaggerate but not much. Here is the new housing allocation for Arran in the North Ayrshire Council local plan:



Yes folks. Now you know why there is a crisis (the "total" there is for the whole of North Ayrshire Council). So much of Arran has special planning protections that the council can only find enough land to build 60 houses - despite the suggestion that nearly a quarter of the homes of the island are holiday lets or second homes.

Now it's also true that Arran has a pretty special geology and, as a result, there's a desire to protect its landscape and heritage. But somewhere between almost no new housing and covering the island with houses there's a compromise and it's more than 60 (I'm guessing there's some existing allocation as well but the draft local plan isn't very helpful here).

So what's needed? Assuming the population is intended to grow a little and there's a current shortage, the number of homes probably needs to grow by about 25% (allowing for replacement of homes lost to holiday lets). Arran had, in 2011, just over 2000 homes meaning it needs about 300 new ones. If we take a density of 30 homes per hectare (pretty generous - you might get 40 per ha.) then we need 10 hectares - we've already got two of them in the allocation, so 8 hectares.


Arran has 43,200 hectares to go at - we need just 0.02% of the island. Does anyone really think this can't be done?


To give the Council's leader some credit he realises that the proposals from the local campaign group aren't good enough:

He said the extra homes would not solve Arran’s problem entirely, so the council would need to consider relaxing planning rules on the island to increase the availability of land.

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