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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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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Do we need to invest more time, thought and money on making communities work?

 The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has a survey on community and society - "Social capital, civic health, and quality of life in the United States". One of the researchers Samuel Abrams comments on some of their findings:

...when Americans live near a variety of public places and spaces – from cafes and bars to shopping areas and parks, playgrounds, or beaches – trust in others and sense of community increases, feelings of loneliness and isolation decline, and faith is local government is higher than in areas with fewer communal amenities. The data also reveals that these amenities can be regularly found throughout most residential spatial forms to varying degrees around the country from inner cities to small towns and suburbs; only rural areas tend to lack close proximity to these amenities en masse.

This is not simply about public sector provision but a wide variety of places where people meet and interact - "...grocery stores; restaurants, bars, or coffee shops; gyms or fitness centers; movie theaters, bowling alleys, or other entertainment venues; parks or recreation centers; and community centers or libraries."

Abrams focuses on voter turnout in local elections (and how dog owners are more community minded - I guess we'd better not mention the poo though) but at the core of this concern is the idea of trust with the research finding that people "...derive a sense of community from their friends, neighborhoods, and hometowns more than their ideology or ethnic identity. Regular interaction with friends and neighbors produces a strong sense of community."

Put simply, community matters. And this, a discovery that shouldn't surprise anyone, is something that too often takes a secondary place in public policy around crime, economy, health and welfare. All these policy areas run along separate lines with separate groups of experts many of whom see the issue as being about the actions of individuals or small groups of individuals.

What this research suggests is that having people living in identifiable, safe neighbourhoods should be a primary aim of public policy. And, while this chimes with some aspects of city-oriented 'New Urbanism', it also suggests that we should focus a little less on the economics of agglomeration and a little more on the sociology of neighbourhoods. We can agree about 'walkability', about the value of main street, and about how private amenities are as significant - perhaps more so - as public amenities, but not about the impact of city living on transience, loss of community and social isolation. It maybe shouldn't matter that in Manhattan and Inner West London the most common 'family structure' is the single person but perhaps this is an indicator of that social atomisation.

There is, in much of today's urban planning, not merely a disdain for suburbs (despite AEI's research showing suburbia is where there are the most high amenity neighbourhoods) but a somewhat inhuman utilitarianism focused on cramming the highest numbers of 'worker units' in the smallest space. There is a kick-back on all this with the idea that we can develop much more densely without losing the idea of houses or streets - the inner urban world doesn't have to crowded anonymity - but we still see suburban development dismissed sneeringly as sprawl.

At the same time the legacy of Ebeneezer Howard continues with the idea that the answer is new communities - 'garden cities' - are the answer rather than the modest extension of exiting suburbs, towns and villages that are already high amenity places. It's also why we should worry about the decline in our high streets, should stress the value of community centres and village halls, and should consider - for all their sometimes pettiness and nosy-parkering - things like Parish Councils and community associations as vital to a strong neighbourhood. And perhaps, when we're considering splashing public money on railways or huge new hospitals, we should ask whether putting some of that money into community amenities might just be better for society and people's well-being?
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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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"Hello I'm Unaccountable" - welcome to the guidance state

This happens in the UK too - administrative agencies and government departments from planning through the police to the NHS use 'guidance' to create rules without reference to democratic accountability:

Federal agencies issue memoranda, notices, letters, bulletins, circulars, directives, and blog posts (among other things) to evade the rulemaking process established by Congress in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Agencies euphemistically refer to these documents as "guidance." Guidance has been responsible for revoking permits to conduct business, barring Americans from working in their chosen occupations, prohibiting taxpayers from taking deductions, levying post-conviction penalties for crimes, and seizing property, without statutory or constitutional authority and without due process. Think of guidance as an off-the-books way for the government to ignore commonly held understandings of fairness. It's a shameless, unconstitutional scheme designed to skirt judicial review, avoid public scrutiny, and evade accountability.

Almost all planning processes rely on guidance with (often tenuous) links to the National Planning Policy Framework. ASBOs and PSPOs are framed in such a way as to make almost any action subject to arbitrary police intervention. My favourite in recent times was the police officer defending 'playing music' in a car as antisocial behaviour. I asked whether perhaps the choice of music might influence the decisions of officers to which he replied that "we would act according to guidance". Which could mean that playing The Grand March from Aida is OK but blasting out drill music isn't, we don't know because we (in this instance a Regulatory and Appeals Committee) don't have the guidance because it isn't yet written.

Among the most egregious examples of 'guidance' are in the field of human resources management and, in particular, what might be termed 'equalities'. Much of the growing denial of female spaces isn't based on regulation but rather on guidance vaguely linked to the Equalities Act and vigorously policed by campaign groups. Similarly we see gender- or race-based selection (of dubious legality) widely applied along with the active closing down of critical voices and challenges to this 'guidance'. Furthermore 'guidance' forms the basis for appeals, accusations and, too often, references to tribunal processes. And once the tribunal has decided to back the guidance (or more commonly the organisation caves in and settles) it takes on the de facto authority of a law despite never having been anywhere near the scrutiny to which laws are supposed to be subject.

The proliferation of executive agencies, public sector 'corporations' and assorted quasi-governmental partnerships has resulted in the collapse of accountability. And, with the lack of any challenge to administrative orthodoxies, the result is a system open to corruption, external pressure and a focus on 'lowest common denominator', super-safe management. The systems of scrutiny - local and national - are dominated by anything other than effective, focused scrutiny. These systems combine grandstanding politicians, policy-making by anecdote, sob stories and appeals to authority rather than a measured and analytical examination of the services supposedly being 'delivered' to the public.

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Cottingley - a planning fairy tale

A few days ago a local landowner and developer announced plans to build 155 homes on land near the village of Cottingley (yes folks the place where the fairies live). The site in question is in the 'green belt' although the owners have, I suspect, a reasonable chance under Bradford's local plan of seeing it allocated for housing. I'm also sure that the development will be fought tooth and nail by neighbouring residents.

The applicant knows that he has to make the case that there is an overwhelming need for the the homes such that the Council can set aside the current 'green belt' designation. They have this to say:

“We are aware of a very acute shortage of local housing and we are proposing to submit a planning application that not only delivers market and affordable housing to meet a local need but also propose very extensive areas of public greenspace to be enjoyed by all local residents. We are proud of our local business development achievements and have held this land for a considerable number of years."

We are then reminded that the Council has failed year after year to get anywhere close to the target set for new homes (it was over 800 short for 2017-18) and that there is a real shortage of housing as witnessed by the rise in house prices. I'll leave this to play out (I'm no longer Cottingley's local councillor) but my best guess is that, despite the lack of a five-year land supply, the development will be refused on 'green belt' grounds.

Instead I'd like to talk about Bradford's local plan and, more broadly, about the local plan process in general. Responding to the proposed development the Council says this:

“The proposed core strategy does not allocate any housing sites in Cottingley, however, the review is in its early stages and will be subject to consultation and examination. It could be several years before it is formally adopted.”

The first part might mislead - the purpose of the core strategy is to establish what housing is needed and where. It may not allocate housing sites but it does identify the amount of housing needed in places like Cottingley. Bradford Council formally adopted a core strategy in July 2017 and this tells us that Cottingley needs 395 new homes during the plan period. Given the village is entirely surrounded by 'green belt' the only place for this housing to go is on that 'green belt'. So the landowner has a point.

But Bradford Council, a matter of months after approving a core strategy and before it had got round to deciding precisely where it wanted the new housing (and other stuff) to go, has decided to review its core strategy. Ostensibly this review responds to changes in national planning policies such as a standard method to the calculation of housing need and adjustments to the definition of affordable housing. The Council also spotted - I made a lengthy representation at examination on this so it wasn't a surprise - that a lot of housing sites in the inner city are not viable and is saying now that "deliverability and viability" are central to plan-making.

So, while Bradford Council does have an adopted core strategy it doesn't have a completed local plan and is reviewing that core strategy. The Council say that formal adoption isn't expected until "early 2022" and this assumes the process runs smoothly, that there aren't further tweaks needed following national policy debates and that the politicians allow time. And only when this process is complete can the Council begin to look at actual allocations. It could be 2025 before the Council has a complete, examined and adopted local plan. The process of producing the local plan started in 2008 - seventeen years filled with consultancy reports, housing assessments, calls for sites and regulatory appraisal documents, examinations and political bun fights.

Am I alone in thinking this is no way to run a planning system and that it's no surprise to see landowners, house-builders and developers jumping the gun to push forward sites they want to develop - sites Bradford needs to meet housing requirements. And Bradford is not alone - by 2017 over 40% of English planning authorities had not adopted a plan and many began their process before Bradford. And, since this year's local elections, council after council is trying to pull their local plan (examples include Vale of White Horse, Woking, Guildford, Braintree and Uttlesford) because the new political leadership got elected off the back of opposing housing development. The system is a joke.

If a sensible government wants to improve housing delivery, save local councils money and have a planning system that is accessible then the best piece of advice I can give them is to scrap the local plan process. It is unwieldy, over-complicated and inefficient. It's reliance on a comprehensive evidence base is ludicrous because the time taken to gather the evidence and have it examined makes that evidence, in a dynamic environment, out-of-date. The result is Councils, Bradford is a good example, that do and redo strategic housing market assessments and land availability assessments in a vain endeavour to get an up-to-date plan. Great news for consultants but not for an efficient planning system.

We need either a much simpler and more broad brush system or else to deal with applications on a case-by-case basis using rules on rolling land supply (five years worth of housing sites, for example) alongside wider protections (landscape, heritage, ecology, etc.) to make decisions rather than wait for an allocations plan. Alongside sensible changes to national policies around 'green belts' such as excluding previously-developed land from 'green belt' constraint this could result in a planning system more able to meet need that the elaborate and expensive plan-led approach we use today.

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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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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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Forget the flowers, what you'll need in San Francisco is a load of money for the rent

San Francisco is a great city. Today it's a great city filled with billionaires, something that rather explains its problems (or why they're not being sorted out). But San Francisco, in one respect, isn't unique but just the best example of how to truly, utterly screw up your housing markets.

We arrived in San Francisco by train. Sorry, we arrived in San Francisco on a bus (an hour late bus) because the train doesn't go to San Francisco, it finishes in Emeryville on the other side of the bay. So we arrived at a bus station, a bus station without a taxi rank (I guess because the sort of people who arrive in San Francisco on a bus aren't the sort of people who use taxis). It seems that, for all its progressive credentials, San Francisco's relationship with public transport - at least the sort that brings people into and out from the city - is not great. As, it seems, Google employees discovered with their benign employer laid on buses to work.

Anyway. Having got a taxi (big thanks to the bloke in the bus ticket office who rang for one - pretty sure it's not the first time), got to our hotel and settled in by having some nice pasta and a hugely expensive bottle of white wine, we'd a city to explore. And what better way to do this exploring that by buying a bus ticket!

The Big Bus was great. For a couple of days we'd access (at a good San Francisco price) to their buses as they toured round San Francisco. And some of these buses have a guide - in our case a thirtysomething Jewish guy with a beard and ready wit. As we went round the city he described the sights, elaborated on the history and pointed out things we might not have otherwise noticed.

So the bus is going up Market heading towards the Tenderloin as our guide starts to talk about the rent - and why it's so damned high. All this is nicely mixed in with the history of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Pointing to some early 20th century apartment buildings, our guide, says: "there are SROs, let me tell you about SROS".

SRO is an acronym for 'single room occupancy' and it's a form of tenure where, for your rent, you get a room with a basin. Pretty good stuff if you're a single, sort of itinerant, construction worker looking for somewhere to sleep whilst you rebuild the earthquake and fire ravaged San Francisco. Cheap, fits the bill and better than a washing line. But in 2019?

Our guide asked us to guess what the rent is for one of these SROs. The usual to-and-fro banter ensued concluding with a shocked silence when he said; "$700-800 a month." If you want a room with a private bathroom, it's over $1000. It really is an obscene amount of money to rent a room in a boarding house. Yet this is the consequence of policies that prevent new high rise development, constrain the development boundaries of the city and provide a myriad of excuses and justifications for stopping or slowing new housing development. Unless - as our guide pointed out - you're rich enough to afford to pay the $7,500 monthly rent in a new development near the (splendid but ever-so-slightly pastiche) San Francisco City Hall.

There are a pile of reasons why the rent's so high in San Francisco but most of them are down to the combination of creating thousands of new, exciting and well-paid jobs but not building the thousands of homes needed to house the people who're taking up those exciting and well-paid jobs. This is why folk in Chinatown are complaining about the lack of housing, why there's twice as many homeless than in Chicago despite San Francisco being a third of the Windy City's size, and why folk in the Mission were stoning buses taking Google employees to work.

Just witness the madness of trying to get a launderette listed as a historical landmark just to stop a housing development!

The first hurdle came when the Planning Commission ordered a detailed historical review, based on a claim that various community groups had offices on the property in the 1970s and 80s, so the site might qualify for preservation. The resulting 137-page study cost Tillman $23,000 and delayed him an additional four months. It found that the laundry didn't merit landmark status.

But Tillman's project was still far from being approved. City law says that any individual or group, no matter where they live, can pay a $617 fee to appeal a decision by the Planning Commission. In this case, the challenge came from an organization called Calle 24, which declined Reason's interview request.

Calle 24 is one of several neighborhood groups determined to stop gentrification in the Mission, a neighborhood that's home to a working-class...

I'm not sure whether Tillman has got to build his apartment block yet but it beggar's belief that, in a city with an acute housing shortage, it can take best part of a decade to get permission to build some of those much-needed homes. When I talk of the stupidity of planning, this is what I'm thinking of - an endless parade of hoops and jumps that must be negotiated just to start digging the foundations for a development.

The city responds to its housing problems with a veritable first aid kit - rent controls, ordinances on building standards, grand affordable housing strategies and much else besides. Except, of course, for the thing that really would make a difference - allowing more dense development in San Francisco suburbs and using the city's economics and political clout to get more land released for housing in the Bay Area generally.

San Francisco is a particularly egregious example and, in its defence, is constrained by its geography - being stuck on a peninsula limits the scope for development. But the same issues - rents soaring, lack of development and lots of supposed solutions that don't actually face up to the supply problem - can be seen right across the world: New York, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Edinburgh, Auckland, Sydney, city after city where urban growth is bounded and reasons not to develop outnumber reasons to let people build. And in all of these places the result is high prices, rising rents, overcrowding and dissatisfaction with city and national authorities response to the problems.

If your policies for housing in a growing city don't include making more land available, allowing higher buildings and apartments in suburbs and ending daft zoning restrictions then you are failing - it shouldn't take a national government, as has happened in New Zealand and is happening in the UK and US, to tell local places that they're strangling their success with over-restrictive green belts, urban growth boundaries and that parade of reasons - environmental, heritage, landscape, bats, shadows, chimneys - not to develop. None of this will suddenly make these cities cheap places to live, the cost of success has always been higher rents, but it will start to make the liveable again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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Planning policy has caused "massive economic harm"

Great article from Sam Dumitriu at CapX:

By ignoring land prices, planners have tried to restrict the expansion of major cities, causing massive economic harm. There is an assumption by planners that large cities grow at the expense of smaller towns and create regional imbalances. This approach is mistaken because it fails to understand why people move to cities in the first place.

As Bertaud put it in a recent interview: “Sometimes when I read the papers of my fellow urban planners, I get the sense that they think cities are Disneyland or Club Med. Cities are labour markets. People go to cities to find a good job.”

Sam's core argument is that planning is a less effective means of determining and meeting housing need than a market. It's true that we've decided there are other considerations (primarily environmental) but, by placing restrictions on the ability of large urban areas to meet the housing needs of workers, all we have done is harmed the economy and made living in those cities a deal more unpleasant.

One concern, however, lies in the economics only view of housing supply as mere dormitaries for workers. I see this quite often from admirable campaign groups like the YIMBY movements. We really do - as happened with the growth of suburbs in the 1890s, 1930s and 1950s - need to allow for family life not merely pile up boxes for 21st century urban peons.

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"Hey, young people, give up on that dream of a nice house with a garden."

"Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City..."

The Antiplanner reports the words of a Los Angeles columnist. We are so familiar with this sentiment, not always expressed this way but always the same - suburbia is 'urban sprawl' filled with nasty motor cars and boring people, what we need is dense walkable cities filled with happy smiling young folk. And this planning orthodoxy is supported enthusiastically by the rich older people who live in those parts of the city's margins that, without planners, would meet people's dreams of a house with a garden in a nice area.

The first response to this criticism is, of course, to say that modern young people don't want to live in suburbs, they don't want a boring house with a garden but something altogether more funky. Think again:

According to NAHB’s study, 66% of respondents who were born in 1977 or later said they would prefer to buy a home in an outlying suburb or close to a suburb, while only 24% preferred buying a house in a rural area and 10% would rather have a home in the center of a city.

Review after review, survey after survey tell us that people's preference is for suburbia. For sure people also want to live a short ride from work and have access to entertainment but compared to lower crime, good schools, more living space and a private outdoors these things soon become less important.

The problem (which is the point of The Antiplanner's piece) is that the planning system - in the UK as much as in California - makes it very difficult to meet home buyer's aspirations affordably. And that this system's defenders often base their argument on misinformation or misunderstanding - here The Antiplanner points out some surprising facts about "Urban Sprawl Central" or Los Angeles as we usually call it:

• Many consider it sprawl, yet it is the densest urban area in the United States: 7,000 people per square mile vs. 5,300 for the New York urban area (and a national average of 2,500), so to become more like New York it would have to add 350,000 acres to its land area.
• Many think it has been paved over with freeways, yet it has the fewest freeway miles per capita of any major urban area: about 53 miles per million residents vs. 68 in New York (and 122 for the national average urban area), so to be more like New York would require building 188 miles of new freeways.
• Many think that all it needs is to build more rail transit, yet for every new rail transit rider it has gained, it has lost five bus riders, meaning rail transit is more harmful to transit riders than even Uber and Lyft.

Our misperception about how much land is developed for housing ('concreted over' to use the CPRE-approved terminology) perhaps rests on the fact that most of us live in urban areas surrounded by housing. What we seldom do is look at an actual map:



Harrogate District Council (for those who don't know, Harrogate is a wealthy rural district in Yorkshire, North of Leeds and Bradford) expects that all of its housing growth can by met by development near the circles on this map. The rest of the district, well over 90%, is open countryside. You could double the total amount of homes in this district and it would still be overwhelmingly open, rural and beautiful.

The unholy alliance between planners who think suburbs are bad and NIMBYs who want to protect their rural idyll (plus the inflated house prices) acts to prevent other people from having the homes they want - homes that, in times past, were affordable on average wages. Instead millennials are told that they must carry on living in rabbit hutches piled on top of each other in those delightfully walkable, cycle-friendly cities (with their air pollution, knife crime and dangerous roads).

There is nothing wrong with suburbia yet we live in a planning culture that, for huge swathes of the country, prioritises golf courses, race courses and airstrips over building the homes that people want to live in. Surrey famously has more land given over to golf than to housing (although it's an urban myth that the whole country does this) - if just 20 of Surrey's 118 golf courses were developed for housing that would provide close to 20,000 lovely suburban homes for tomorrow's families.

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