On that suburban livestyle dream (and why planners don't like it)

“Off they went, the two of them, both with their beautiful old houses and even more soulful gardens, on the emptiness of the suburban dream. All about what a crime the destruction of the countryside was, and not one word about what those houses, those small plots of land, might mean to those who owned them, let alone the fairness of distributing a little to many rather than sticking with a lot for a few.”

This quotation comes from a piece in LitHub by Suzannah Lessard entitled “Why We Hate the Suburbs” and describes a conversation in exurban New York with friends and neighbours. It captures for me the way in which a certain sort of educated, privileged person dismisses suburbia without realising how this isn’t simply an attack on the aesthetics of suburbia but assaults the lives and culture of the people who choose to live in such a place.

Lessard then observes how progressives share this hatred of suburbs with old money and the aristocrat and explores why this might be the case. For me the obvious truth here is that progressive thinking, especially in academia, is dominated by the privileged, progressives make common cause with an ancient feudalism because they are part of that feudalism, it is what made their idle, speculative yet well-rewarded life not only possible but esteemed.

Suburbia, and the portrayal of the people in those suburbs, has been a subject of sneering condescension since the first eager pioneers ventured out from the unhealthy and unpleasant European inner cities in the late 19th century – a departure made possible by the train and a liberalised land ownership. Places like Sydenham, Blackheath and Islington, for all that we now see their Victorian terraces in yellow London stock brick as iconic, were the subject of the same sneering outlook as Malvina Reynolds had for “Little Boxes” in 1962 and films like Vivarium do today. These critics are saying, “look at those dreary people in the suburbs” hinting that their lives are something shallow, selfish and inward looking. Historian, Simon Schama uses this sneer to put down columnist Rod Liddle: 'turn your suburban face away from the plight of the miserable'. It is the dismissing of little people by a grandee, a grandee who considers himself not just materially better but morally superior to a person from suburbia.

The elite view is that suburbs are shit. The Twitter account “Shit Planning” invests a lot of time into sneering at the aesthetics of house extensions, at pragmatic decisions that offend his eye. Interspersed with this is a steady stream of “look at this suburban development isn’t it horrible”



Despite this elitist disdain most of the critics, including Simon Schama, are the products of that suburbia. Some suburban experience will be from the peripheral council estates built after WW2 to replace cramped tenements, cold and damp back-to-backs and putrid inner city slums while others’ backstory will be of the 1930s three-bed semi that rolled out space and contentment across fields near railways into London. Yet still the distaste for the suburb persists, they’re places where people live out dull, ordinary lives, doing dull ordinary unexciting things like raising children - "raise the child and be released" is what the newcomers to Vivarium hear echoing that idea that bringing up children is a chore without reward done in a place without soul.

There is a disconnection between what people want and what the privileged, progressive and entitled believe we should have. As Joel Kotkin reminds us, suburbia reflects the reality of people’s choices – a house with a garden on a nice street with decent neighbours. The suburban dream may seem banal to grand people with grand ideas but that shouldn’t justify such people, as Kotkin remarks, imposing their bias on society:

“The urban gentry and intelligentsia, though, disdained this voluntary migration. Perhaps the most bitter critic was the great urbanist Jane Jacobs. An aficionado of the old, highly diverse urban districts of Manhattan, Jacobs not only hated trendsetter Los Angeles but dismissed the bedroom communities of Queens and Staten Island with the memorable phrase, “The Great Blight of Dullness.” The 1960s social critic William Whyte, who, unlike Jacobs, at least bothered to study suburbs close up, denounced them as hopelessly conformist and stultifying. Like many later critics, he predicted in Fortune that people and companies would tire of them and return to the city core.”

The old feudalism held that the great and good should direct the life and labours of the majority. Beyond a few personal chattels, this majority would not be owners, especially owners of land. Vast swathes of the country would be set aside as protected – not for the ordinary man’s pleasure but for those great and good to enjoy. Where people live wouldn’t be determined by their preference but by the requirements of the feudal lord or latterly the industrial mill owner. And those ‘mere uncounted folk’ as Kipling called them, would leave little mark on the world beyond, at most, a carved name on a gravestone now grown over with weeds.

Suburbia was the inevitable consequence of people choosing. I remember reading the biography of Body Shop founder Anita Roddick where she talked about always wanting a house like the one a child would draw and this reminds me of how suburban design (or at least the best of it) seems to mimic this childlike desire for a house that looks like a house. Those rows of identikit houses, those little boxes, aren’t soulless at all but express the reality of childhood dreaming. Yet the sneering classes still see suburban life, despite its desirability, as wrong – ‘ticky-tacky’:

And the people in the houses all go to the university
And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same
And there's doctors and there's lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
And they all get put in boxes, and they all come out the same

Your life, such people say to the suburbanite, is dullsville. What you do for pleasure – golf, caravans and the like – are naff and your tastes (Berni Inns, Pringle sweaters, patterned wallpaper) are low status. Yet this is not just the life most people enjoy but it is the life many others aspire to enjoy – room to breathe, a place to park the car off the street, a garage to fill with the kids bikes, power tools and old plastic toys, and rooms big enough for everyone to sit comfortably. People will fill these homes with the material possessions our progressive elite sneer at but still buy – giant fridge freezers, huge wall-mounted TVs, - and the things they like: bottled lager, wine boxes, good white bread and mature yellow cheese, chocolate and shop bought cake.

Suburbia works because it provides a scale and form that fits the way humans prefer to live – every time people are asked what sort of house they want and what sort of place they’d choose to live, a majority describe suburbia: a single family home on its own plot, good neighbourhood schools, plenty of activities, all close enough to the city so as to allow a trip into town for entertainment. Only the planning and architecture professions seem to believe that either this isn’t really what people want or else that this lifestyle is terrible for the economy or society or the environment.

Suburbia provides a compromise between the city and the countryside. The latter appeals as we drive through it and see the lovely old cottage in a little hamlet or the sturdy old farmhouse halfway up onto the moor. And this bucolia lasts until we want a doctor or think about schools or popping out for some milk. For the city, the buzz of a frenetic social life with bars and restaurants, theatres, museums, and people, lots of people. Then we look at the little flat we live in with the noisy neighbours and the constant drone of the streets, where you’d not let a small child negotiate a journey to school. Off to the suburbs where there’s enough population density to sustain places to eat out, cinemas and convenient shopping but it’s spread out enough you can live in your own space. Yes, you’ll be better off with a car to get about but this is OK and a small price to pay for a well-paced live, a stable community, and a place for your kids to grow up safely and your parents to age contentedly.

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"We don't like cities, oh no. We love 'em"

One of the concerns emerging from Onward's research into the 'politics of belonging' was a concern about cities:

71% of people think that “more people living in cities has made society worse”

We could, of course, explore what exactly we mean by city here but the sentiment is an important one given that, as Onward showed in earlier research, we don't want new homes built outside the city. At the heart of the sentiment is that people really do yearn for community and, rightly or wrongly, consider that the city does not provide for such neighbourliness.

Despite this finding people continue to move into cities and the larger the city the more attractive it is to the migrant.

The United Nations in 2009 and the International Organization for Migration in 2015 both estimated that around 3 million people are moving to cities every week. Approximately 54% of people worldwide now live in cities, up from 30% in 1950. Sources estimate this will grow to 2/3 of world population in the next 15-30 years. More than half of urban dwellers live in the 1,022 cities with greater than 500,000 inhabitants.

The reasons for this migration are primarily economic - the city is where the work is so you go to the work - but there are also a collection of amenity and social factors that perhaps get less attention. I had an unresolved conversation a while ago with former ASI research director, Sam Bowman about whether the wider amenity value of a place is factored into housing costs (there's more fun stuff in a city meaning that the value from the rent is greater). There are more social and business opportunities in a city making it more appealing as a place to live.

The problem is that this doesn't explain the disconnection between what people say they want (essentially suburbia) and what they actually buy (city living). There is probably a 'life stage' factor in all this with younger people and wealthy 'empty nesters' populating a largely child free city while those with families choose the suburbs but it also reflects how suburbia not only lacks the city's amenities but also lacks affordable places to live. In times past suburbs, even well-connected suburbs, were cheaper than the city (they were also cleaner and smog-free) but the virtual halt on expansion changed this pattern.

The policy challenge is, I suspect, less about housing than it is about the connectedness of housing to the city amenities and associated agglomeration effects. When we look at transport infrastructure we spend too much time calling for multi-billion investments connecting city to city rather than creating a more intensive network within a large urban area. When you have that connectedness (as London has) it is ridiculous to then have restrictions on development within easy access of that network (which London also has). Elsewhere the situation differs either because of dispersed populations or because of topography, fragmented political geography and underinvestment (Transpennine England is a good example here) - there is no network and without it less agglomeration effect and less successful cities.

The other part of the policy challenge relates back to people thinking living in cities makes society worse, to the lack of social capital in dense urban places, and to the transience of environments dominated by private rented property. Plus, of course, the persistent problem of affordability. The odd thing is that in a previous age we considered that as a principal means of providing housing, private renting was exploitative and we replaced it via municipal housing and the encouragement of home ownership. Today many urbanists seem to favour renting as an approach praising its flexibility and, of course, affordability.

Suburbia was our historical compromise between the city and the countryside - many of the amenities of the city and access to its agglomeration effect while maintaining a sense of space and an idea of community. We need to recognise that strategies to prevent the expansion of cities - for reasons of cohesion, environmental protection and snobbery - have contributed to a significant problem. Right now most of the land needed to accommodate expanding cities is non-urban and at the margins of the exiting built area. We are actively preventing development here - this needs to change. At the same time we need to look at strategies aimed at making the city itself more liveable - experimenting with flat pack housing and sky gardens or building more child-friendly environments within developments.

None of this precludes the need for more development land at the city margin or the requirement to spend money on the networks needed to integrate new development into the wider city but we need to get away from the rigidity of current plan-driven development models. We need to recognise that families need private outdoor space (and parks, while great, don't meet this need) and that cities do too little to make families welcome. This matters because families stay put for a substantial time - the demands of children (schools, childcare support and the activities of growing up) tend to keep people in one place for a long time, something that would allow for denser urban areas to develop the sense of community that transient singles really don't provide.

How our urban environments develop, whether or not we shape them in the manner of suburbia or as rabbit hutches for tomorrow's peons, is one of the big policy questions but sadly one mostly pushed aside by dominant obsessions with slaying perceived environmental demons. The decline in community is as big a problem as climate change yet we seem not to be thinking about how to restore trust, how to create stable neighbourhoods and how to get this without throwing out the social and economic advantages of the city.

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British and American suburbs are very different - we should remember this when doing housing policy.

 I am, as you know, a fan of suburbs. The best suburbs combine the attributes of the city - walkability, access to public transport (but not to the exclusion of cars), a variety of house styles and tenures build reasonably densely all combined with a sense of openness and access to clean, fresh air and even the countryside.

So it worries me when people write about housing development and, in doing so, repeat this sort of line:

“…sprawling communities of single-family homes that require a car to navigate are not what’s drawing people anymore. What’s popular now are places where people can live in mixed-use, multifamily housing—maybe an apartment building above a coffee shop—and walk, bike, or take transit to get around.”

Firstly this isn't true. Or rather it is in some places because that's all we're building. This quotation comes from Tracy Hadden Loh, Christopher B. Leinberger, and Jordan Chafetz - pretty much champions of dense, high-rise city development. My problem is that it's quoted in a piece about British housing issues. Plus is completely ignores what Americans say when they're asked about the place they want to live and the houses they prefer - and what they actually do when able to choose.

But first let's remember that British suburbs look and feel very different from American suburbs. You'll all be familiar with what American suburbs look like from just about every second thriller or romantic comedy - low rise, often single-storey, family homes built on large plots that feature huge garages, lawns and not much else. Often there's no pavement (as we Brits call it correctly) and the road space is wide.

You'll also know that, while there are some similarities, British suburbia doesn't look much like this. I was brought up in Beckenham which is pretty much an archetypal suburb and while there were some larger houses (and a few very large houses) most of it consists of three-bed semis or, in the older Edwardian parts, solid three-bed terraces.

Even in today's new build suburban housing, the style, size and spacing is completely different from just about anything you'll see built in US suburbia (and not just because we use more brick or stone and less wood). Yet the writings of US anti-suburb urbanists are taken as applicable to this completely different environment.

The development of Britain's suburbs did not sprawl out in an uncontrolled manner, nibbling away willy-nilly at the edge of the countryside. They were, from late Victorian times onwards set out in planned environments - visit the Cator Estates is South London to see how this worked before the first world war and any number of places from Shirley near Croydon to Pudsey in Leeds to see the product of the 1930s housing development boom. These suburban developments were connected to existing communities - helps sustain and expand the services those places provided and allowing for immediate access to public transport networks - and laid out to encompass open space, schools and those rows of local shops we all grew up knowing. The idea that these places weren't 'walkable' is manifest nonsense yet again and again we're peddled this myth that only crowed, dense "mixed-use family housing" can provide for this perfection of urban pedestrianism.

Finally can we just say 'no, not true' to this nonsense:

...because though city-loving hipsters tend to grow up, start families and even buy houses and cars, they’re not going to conform exactly to the lifestyles of their parents and grandparents

Whenever people are surveyed about their preferences, most plump for that familiar family home with a garden - ideally near good schools and not so far from a good link to the city. Perhaps with a good park nearby, a decent pub and some local facilities (post office, chemist, doctors). It remains the case that suburbia - the English sort of suburbia - represent best compromise between urban living and some sort of bucolic countryside idyll.

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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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Are NIMBYs killing your city?

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

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

As the evidence tells us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Government's deal with the public is broken - education, effort and achievement no longer guarantees you a real stake in society

I've felt for a while that the deal that successive governments did with the public - get educated, work hard, raise a family and you will be rewarded with a real, cash stake in society - has broken. And nowhere is this clearer than in our housing markets:

“Young people,” wrote Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century, “do not degenerate; this only occurs only after grown men have become corrupt.” By endorsing policies that restrict suburban development and home ownership, planners, investors, and the media are asking the next generation to accept conditions that their predecessors would never have tolerated.

This, says geographer Joel Kotkin, is a new feudalism where, despite the trappings of a good life and the promises of equality, we become little better than the peons of powerful oligarchies. For some, being part of the team is fine, the bread and circuses work - as Kotkin puts it, the oligarchs preferred solution is "...to have the state provide housing subsidies as well as unconditional cash stipends to keep the peasants from rising against their betters."

Elsewhere though people are looking for different answers - some see them in a cuddly green socialism that doesn't rock the oligarchs' boat too much but attaches faith-like to heterodox theories of government and economics as the basic for a planned utopia. Despite over 100 years of socialism's consistent failure its appeal persists. The oligarchs don't fear these middle class socialists because they know they can control them - America's tech billionaires are the main funders for progressive causes and for Democrat candidates, they also control the flow of political communication (the main reason why Mark Zuckerberg is such an enthusiast for online media regulation), no democrat will win a presidential election without this support.

Outside the wealthy halls of the dense urban centres, there's a different story with people in red baseball caps, yellow hi-vis jackets and check shirts asking - often angrily - why they are excluded from the society the urban elites have created. As I've commented before, the opening chapter of Robert Heinlein's 'Starman Jones' captures the sentiment:

"The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would."

A high speed train swooshing through Max Jones' world - not stopping just barrelling through carrying the rich and beautiful between the oases of urban wonder. And people who can leave the places inbetween do just that, decanting from Barnsley and Telford, South Bend and Flint to cram into overpriced and tiny rented apartments while working for the businesses those oligarchs own. For the rest, all the get is patronising articles about "the left behind" and kindly curated glimpses into the world of the city.

What we have isn't sustainable, the great cities of the west are parasites, humanity's dead end:

Because the great mass of the city dwellers can't afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don't provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up.

At the heart of all this is the idea that to maximise utility, we need denser cities and to get denser cities you have to stop people building suburbs. We know active regulatory intervention is needed by the city fathers because, left to their own devices, people will chose to live in suburbs, will prefer a family home with a garden, and will opt for comfort, safety and good schools over the excitement of a city's nights. What we're doing by stopping this happening is making such a life - once available to near all in society - something only the rich and powerful can afford.


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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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Without affordable suburbs cities fail...

Cities are great places to live if you're very rich. Cities also put a lot of effort into provision for the poorest. In between these poles - nah:

From 1990 to 2010, the number of low-income neighborhoods in Chicago rapidly expanded, high-income neighborhoods expanded and stayed strong, and middle-income neighborhoods almost disappeared. An economic neighborhood map of Chicago was the perfect way to begin the conference. It was the foundation of a subtle theme expressed throughout the day. Middle-income neighborhoods are the most fragile, the most difficult to create, and the most important to a city. It is the middle class neighborhoods that are the lobby for schools, parks, services, and amenities, areas often ignored by those in the poor and rich neighborhoods. Middle income neighborhoods are made up of people that make a city run: shopkeepers, small business owners, tradespeople, school teachers, firemen and police.

Without those dull middle-class suburbs - and by middle-class I mean folk like I was growing up not people with nannies who go on skiing holidays and pay school fees - cities don't work. Yet the policies we follow - densification, building a mix of very expensive housing and social lets,urban containment, restricting permitted development rights - are destroying those suburbs.

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Trains are not the solution to any of the UK's transport problems, they are the problem.

I've felt for some while that we have our transport planning, infrastructure, investment and systems all, as my mum would put it, kecky-pooky. Just to give one example - there were 5.2 billion passenger journeys on buses but just 1.9 billion journeys on railways, yet public subsidy for rail is double the subsidy for buses (including the cost of giving every old person who wants one a free bus pass). The problem is that, whenever there's a problem with rail travel - a method of travel that is never used by half the population and which accounts for less than 5% of total journeys - it's all over the news as pundits and politicians fall over each other to tell us that a couple of late, overcrowded trains is a national scandal.

The real national scandal (if this is the currency we want to deal in) has been the gradual depriving of many communities from anything that looks even remotely like a reliable public transport system. It's no damn good giving older people a free bus pass at enormous cost if there aren't any buses for them to make use of the pass. Yet that is the reality of the UK's upside down approach to investment on public transport. There's a £48 billion investment plan for the existing rail network plus the eye-watering £55 billion or more for HS2. And we haven't even got to such delights as Northern Powerhouse Rail or extending high speed up to Scotland!

By contrast, the road investment strategy amounts to just £15 billion (there's an additional £1.9 billion for cycling and walking - which add up to more journeys than rail) and there is a further £12 billion or so directed through local councils, regional mayors, LEPs and combined authorities. Bear in mind that 95% of all journeys and over two thirds of all passenger journeys take place on roads. Yet government - urged on by campaign groups like the Campaign for Better Transport - still bungs ever more money into rail networks.

The problem is that too many people have heard the words "modal shift" and think it's a realistic option to get more people "out of cars and onto trains". I've heard this at just about every single combined authority meeting without any consideration of how on earth an over-capacity rail network that amounts to less than 10% of miles travelled can provide this modal shift. Worse still we are stuck in a planning model that says people travel to work in central business districts - the curse of Christaller lingers in transport planning meaning that the reality of people's lives is not reflected in how systems are designed or, indeed, what sort of systems get built.

Here's a quote from Laberteaux, Lance Brown and Berger, writing in Infinite Suburbs about what they call Interburbia:

"...in documenting the actual quantities of population, jobs, and transportation movements, we reveal that a planning focus on the developing suburban nodes and their infrastructural linkages (rather than suburb to city core) would more closely match the urbanizing processes we confirm on the ground. A renewed infrastructural focus on intersuburban commuting along with parallel policy and design solutions could help create a better interface between the flexible, service-based economy of suburban environments and the majority of the US population who live and work there."

To translate this a little and by way of illustration, let me talk about my neighbours. Firstly, none of them use public transport to get to work. And the location of that work includes Halifax, inner suburban Bradford, Skipton, Cowling, Bingley and Otley. Only two people have work that takes them to the nearest city centre - the node around which transport planners will work - Bradford.

This pattern will be repeated again and again throughout the UK's urban areas - people don't live in suburbs and commute to inner cities, they live and work in suburbia. Even in London with perhaps the world's more extensive public transport network, the majority of journeys are by car and most people do not work in London's central business districts. Yet intraurban transport planning - look at Crossrail - is all about moving people to and from suburbs to the city centre. And interurban planning is about moving people from one central node to another central node.

The result of this is that expectations of transport investment from most decision-makers (MPs, councillors, government policy planners) are influenced by the loud voices of, mostly richer, people who use trains including, of course, the editors of newspapers and employees at the Department for Transport. Plus of course all those blokes who are still psychologically attached to their train sets. This means that the interests of road users - including those 5.2 billion bus journeys - are of secondary importance to those of rail commuters whinging about how much the tickets cost and that there's a delayed train because the engineering works over-ran.

With driverless options and the advent of a 3D transport environment (the current one is largely 2D), very expensive fixed rail systems - a transport form that takes people from one place they don't want to be to another place they don't want to be - become harder and harder to justify. Yet UK transport plans seem to be trapped into an accelerating investment in new and upgraded rail systems despite this not having the remotest chance of delivering modal shift at any scale.

Trains really aren't the answer to the UK's transport challenges - they ignore the reality of people's lives, fail to recognise choice, are expensive and inefficient, suck in subsidy that amounts to a regressive tax on the less well off, crowd out new and innovative options, and fail to encompass emerging technologies. It's not that trains aren't the solution, it's more that they're the problem.

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Cities, housing and the new serfdom

I am more and more convinced that cities and the fandom surrounding urban densification is the biggest threat to a fair, equal, open and decent society. Yet even the YIMBY movement seems to be trapped in the idea that we should cram more and more people into a tiny part of our land area leaving overprotected rural areas affordable only those fortunate to inherit, rich enough to buy or trapped in a marginal life renting one of the vanishing numbers of such properties outside the city.

The problem is that the idea of cramming more units into already dense places (and central London is, by almost any standards bar urban Spain, very population dense) simply doesn't resolve the affordability problem. Here's an illustration from California:

Dense housing is about three to seven times more expensive to build. Combined with the very high cost of land zoned for high-density development, market prices inevitably end up beyond the means of nearly all Californians. New publicly subsidized “affordable” apartments in one dense Bay Area development are estimated to cost upwards of $700,000 to build—more than the cost of two-thirds of all homes in California, according to our analysis of American Community Survey data for 2016.

The beginning of understanding our housing problems comes when we ask what kind of homes people want rather than asking how many 'units' we can shoehorn into the limited land supply local councils allow for building.

The suburban house is the idealization of the immigrant’s dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.

And it's not just the immigrant into California - such as the man who the above comment, Edgardo Contini  - who want to live in suburbia, it's most families everywhere. Not because they're selfish ingrates who want to spoil the environment driving their cars but because they want space, openness, light, air and land, all the things they can't get in the confining, claustrophobic inner city. It's something like this from geographer Anne Snyder :

“There is a growing craving for life to be lived offline, for human contact to be enjoyed with real handshakes, real meals around real tables, and real care for neighbors, knowing that in a pinch that neighbor will watch out for you in turn.”

Cities are exciting places filled with experience - everyone should perhaps have a go at living in one. For some, it is everything but for most there comes a point where the thrill of having the buzzing cultural brilliance of the city at their fingertips begins to pall - it's too ephemeral, insubstantial and, while great for grown-ups, no place to raise a family. Yet so many people are trapped - great jobs, fantastic social life, but no way to have a stake, to put down roots, to join a real neighbourhood. And this didn't use to be the case, in times past (and not really all that long ago either) people could have those great years in the city and then follow them with great years raising a family in a welcoming, neighbourly suburb. So you aren't going to have a family (or, rather, you keep putting it off):

Recent Harvard econometric research associated bloated house price increases with a reduction in birth rates among households that do not already own a home of their own. Similarly, high housing prices were cited as a cause to delay having children in a recent Bankrate.com survey. In places where housing prices remain around historic levels, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, Orlando, and Houston, birth rates are much higher.

Maybe you think us not having children is a good thing (over 70% of Inner London households are childless) but I've a feeling it's short-sighted, requiring the city to suck in more migrants from elsewhere just to sustain its appetites. And who is going to look after you when you need it? Cities are creating a society that sees short-term economic advance and personal utilitarian gratification as the only good. Community can be replaced by service contracts, neighbourhood by professional networks or 'corporate internal communities', and real social capital by the ephemera of social events.

“Zero” is also the most common response when people are asked how many confidants they have, the GSS data show. And adult men seem to be especially bad at keeping and cultivating friendships.

Our home is at the heart of all this and what matters here is that it's our home not some rented flat on a rolling short term lease. Yet so much of the debate about housing is stuck in an obsession with numbers rather than a discussion about needs or wants - all coloured by a cod environmentalism exploited by those who benefit from land values artificially inflated through the deliberate restriction of supply by government (a restriction eagerly supported by politicians with their cant about our "precious green belt"). And it gets worse - urban containment, densification and its consequential gentrification results in poverty:

High rents are leaving many at the brink of poverty. Adjusted for housing costs, California has the largest share of its citizens living in poverty—well above the rate for such historically poor states as Mississippi. And homelessness has surged in the priciest places, particularly in Los Angeles and New York City, which account for about 4 percent of the national population but 25 percent of its homeless population.

Our housing policies (and please let's not pretend the the UK's problems are so very much different from California's) are making us poorer, less happy, more dependent, tied to work and the work environment - a new bunch of serfs, highly educated with what seem great jobs, but with no stake in society beyond delivering the production business and government desires - serfs. As Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin conclude (and you should too):

The shift to an ever more unequal, congested, and feudal society is not inevitable. We have the capacity to expand housing opportunities for future generations. There is no reason that we need to surrender the universal aspiration that for so long has defined our society.

Build suburbs.

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