Without the state

Do we really have too much development in the UK?

Think your country is crowded? These maps reveal the truth about population density across Europe

Alasdair Rae, Author provided

Alasdair Rae, University of Sheffield

It’s often said that England is the most densely populated large country in Europe – typically in discussions about the nation’s rising population, and the growing strain on public services. But it’s not true.

With 426 people per km², as of 2016, England is densely populated when compared to most other European countries. But it’s not as densely populated as the Netherlands, where there were 505 people per km², or a much poorer country such as Bangladesh, where there were 1,252 per km².

The truth about how crowded your country is. World Bank

Yet simply dividing the number of people by the land area of a country is not always the best way to understand population density. Consider a country such as Russia, where urban density is high, but there are vast swathes of empty land. The figures will tell you density is very low (eight people per km²); but this it not what most people in Russia experience in their daily lives. The same is true of Australia, Canada and other large, highly urbanised nations.

That’s why I set out to understand the topic in more depth, using alternative measures of population density. I looked at 39 countries across Europe and came up with a set of statistics to help us understand settlement patterns in a more nuanced way. If you are interested in looking at this issue globally, I recommend Duncan Smith’s World Population Density interactive map, or the World Bank’s data comparison tool.

A bird’s eye view

To begin with, I took Eurostat’s population density grid data for 2011 and mapped it. This divides Europe into areas of 1km², and then gives a population count for each area, so that we can compare like-with-like across Europe. As you can see from the map, it provides a good overview of where people live, and where they don’t live: notice the sparse settlement pattern in the Alps or northern Scandinavia, or indeed much of Spain.

European population density. Data: Eurostat. Mapping: by the author

This bird’s eye view helps us to understand the wider context. For example, we can see an area of high population density extending in a rough arc from north-west England down to Milan, with a little break in the Alps. This is the so-called “blue banana”, or dorsale européenne (European backbone), identified by French geographer Roger Brunet in 1989, and it is home to more than 110m people.

But we can get further clarity still by honing in on “built-up” density, which takes into account only those 1km² areas with people living in them. I call this figure “lived density”, since it provides a way of seeing the kinds of population densities that people experience in their day-to-day lives, within built-up areas.

The Spanish distribution

A good way to understand this measure is to look at Spain. It has a population density of 93 people per km², giving the impression of a sparsely populated country. This is borne out in the map, where much of Spain appears to be empty; much more so than any other large European country.

The reasons for this date back to Medieval times, as Daniel Oto-Peralías at the University of St Andrews has explained. Yet characterising Spain as a sparsely populated country does not reflect the experience on the ground – as anyone who knows Barcelona or Madrid can tell you.

Spain contains within it more than 505,000 1km squares. But only 13% of them are lived in. This means that the “lived density” for Spain is in fact 737 people per km², rather than 93. So even though the settlement pattern appears sparse, people are actually quite tightly packed together.

In fact, Spain could claim to be the most densely populated major European country by this measure, despite its appearance on the map. This also helps explain why Spain has the most densely populated km² in Europe; more than 53,000 people inhabit a single 1km² area in Barcelona. France also has an area with more than 50,000 people in a single km², in Paris.

Barcelona from above: possibly the most densely populated km² in Europe. Author

There are 33 1km² areas across Europe with a population of 40,000 or more: 23 are in Spain, and ten are in France. England’s most densely populated km², in West London, has just over 20,000 people in it. Globally, the highest figure is close to 200,000, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

See for yourself

When we look at “lived density” across Europe, it’s fair to say that England is a densely populated country – but it still sits behind Spain and the Netherlands on the list of major European nations, and below the microstates of Monaco, Andorra and Malta. The lived density figure for the Netherlands is 546 people per km², compared to 531 for England, 204 for Wales, 200 for Scotland and 160 for Northern Ireland.

Although these population numbers are a little dated now (they are based on 2011 data), they can still demonstrate how population density figures might differ from what we experience in our day-to-day lives. Arithmetic population density measures can be useful, but on their own they don’t always help inform public debate, or match up with our perceptions of urban density.

I have provided the data for all 39 countries, where available, so you can compare the figures for yourself. By using a more sophisticated measure, we can gain a more nuanced perspective of settlement patterns and relative densities and, hopefully, better capture the reality on the ground in towns and cities.

Population density metrics. Data: Eurostat. Calculations by the author.

Note: the final column shows how many 1km cells have people in them, but within that the level of density also varies, so this is not a “percent urbanised” measure.

Alasdair Rae, Professor in Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Public housing needs radical reform: here's how - republished from 'The Conversation'

Public housing needs radical reform: here's how

Ben Allan/Unsplash, FAL

Matthew Thompson, University of Liverpool

Britain’s housing system is well and truly broken. House-builders sit on land already granted planning permission and drip-feed the market to keep supply low and prices high. Despite the coronavirus crisis, house prices continue to soar, excluding most from ever reaching onto the property ladder.

Tax subsidies help speculative landlords exploit “generation rent”, who face a future far less secure or prosperous than that of their parents – or even their grandparents. As the welfare state is hollowed out, property assets replace retirement benefits, deepening deprivation and inflating property bubbles.

Widening inequalities collide with privatisation of public housing to exacerbate the homelessness crisis – despite thousands of homes lying empty across the country.

The UK’s housing problems are also grossly unevenly distributed. In economically depressed regions such as Liverpool, where I’m based, the state has been demolishing “obsolete” houses owing to “housing market failure”.

Yet only a few hundred miles away lies the epicentre of the property boom, London, where demand and financial speculation are so intense that local authorities engage in the creative destruction of ex-council estates. Thousands of tenants are displaced, often out of London, to clear sites for lucrative redevelopment as private flats with minimal affordable housing.

In both London and Liverpool – two extremes of Britain’s polarised housing market – activists have been busy re-imagining the future of public housing. One way this is being explored is through the use of community land trusts (CLTs), a form of collective ownership of land for affordable housing and other community uses, innovated in the 1960s American civil rights movement. I’ve been studying them over the past decade and recently published a book on the topic.

In London, led by East London CLT in Tower Hamlets, the CLT model has been used to contest the adverse effects – gentrification and displacement – of housing markets becoming “too hot”.

In Liverpool, a city where housing markets are “too cold”, having lost close to half its population in the second half of the 20th century, communities facing forced eviction and the state-funded demolition of their neighbourhoods have come together to campaign for CLT alternatives. Granby Four Streets and Homebaked are the country’s very first to pioneer the model for inner-city regeneration in contexts of urban decline.

Community alternatives

Granby Four Streets won the Turner Prize in 2015 – the first architectural project ever to do so. The award recognised the creative work of architects Assemble in bringing residents together in a democratic do-it-yourself rehabilitation process – what they call “community homesteading”.

This built on years of residents’ hard graft – and creative craft – to resist the bulldozers since the 1990s and transform their neglected neighbourhood into a horticultural wonderland, with street planters, vegetable plots, climbing flowers, garden benches and artistic murals; hosting a popular street market once a month.

Such guerrilla gardening was inspiration for a vision to establish a CLT in 2011 to restore derelict properties as decent affordable homes. Some were too dilapidated to save, transformed instead into a beautiful Winter Garden with subtropical plants, an artist studio and community meeting house.

A view of the winter garden. © Matthew Thompson, Author provided

This is about more than just bricks and mortar. The CLT is revitalising Granby’s struggling local economy through providing a permanent home for the street market, creating space for new businesses and community enterprise, providing new jobs as well as public space and community facilities for residents to engage in festivities and the collective management of their neighbourhood.

On the other side of the city, right opposite Liverpool Football Club, is Homebaked. This started life as a public arts project funded by the 2010 Liverpool Biennial called “2up2down”, which invited residents to re-imagine the terraced house.

 

Having successfully campaigned to save the local bakery and its terraced row from demolition, 2up2down evolved into Homebaked CLT to take on the ownership of the buildings and bring the bakery back into use. Plans are now afoot to renovate the terrace into cooperative housing and, on the ground floor, provide space for community enterprise, including their sister organisations Homebaked bakery co-op and Homegrown, a food growing and beer brewing collective. All of this is part of a long-term vision to democratically transform the neighbourhood.

Stronger foundations

CLTs such as Granby and Homebaked provide an inspiring blueprint for reconstructing public housing on stronger social and economic foundations.

They are legally incorporated with an “asset lock” which protects the land from being sold off and ensures that all surpluses from renting buildings get reinvested for community benefit. They are governed democratically through a trust structure with board members elected by the wider CLT membership, open to all local residents.

This also enables a public-common partnership approach with local authorities. In return for public land transfer and development expertise, CLTs make their permanently affordable homes available to local people in need.

But Granby and Homebaked remain artistic exemplars – too few and far between to make a huge difference to widespread housing problems. These extraordinary practices need to be replicated across Liverpool, London and beyond through radical new initiatives, so they become more ordinary features of public housing.

Learning from Liverpool

Public housing in the UK is witnessing a revival. Tight borrowing constraints imposed on councils have been loosened to enable the construction of new council housing for the first time in decades.

Yet it is vital that local authorities don’t repeat past mistakes. Bureaucratic and paternalistic management of council estates and the undemocratic commissioning of alienating designs, unresponsive to residents’ needs, inspired a backlash from tenants and gave hostile politicians the ammunition they needed to systematically privatise public housing.

By outsourcing public services to unaccountable firms seeking higher profit margins at all costs, privatisation paved the way for the Grenfell Tower tragedy, when 72 people lost their lives. Learning from more imaginative and democratic alternatives to this broken system is urgently needed.

Matthew Thompson, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Coping with climate change

Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report into practice will no doubt take more time, but each year we delay, means a continuing waste of resources.

Obsessed as government is with Brexit, I'm not optimistic that the policy changes we need will be implemented. The recent viral video from the US shows how hard it will be to get politicians to give up their entrenched positions.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,”

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1099075460649107458/video/1

As Bill McKibben, puts it in the New Yorker

The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.

 

 

 

A vision for social housing

The graph above is taken from the recently published report by Shelter. It shows the parlous state of social house building since 1923. I've written quite a lot about housing on this blog but this report makes it clear that things are as bad as ever.

From the Second World War up to 1980, we were building an average of around 126,000 social homes every year. Last year, there were only 6,463 new social homes.

...

If we continue as we are, only half of today’s young people are likely to ever own their own home – and a generation of younger people and many who are retired will spend their lives struggling with insecure, expensive renting. Over the next twenty years, hundreds of thousands more people will be forced into homelessness by insecure tenancies and sky-high housing costs.

We can't afford to continue as we are. The collapse of social housing began with the Right to Buy enshrined in the 1980 Housing Act but has continued through successive governments of both main parties and during the coalition period. The ballooning welfare bill is not down to the recipients of housing benefit, Universal Credit or any of the other myriad forms of support available, in theory anyway, to those who can navigate the bureaucracy. It is because those successive governments have simply ignored the problem, the Tories giving way to nimbyism while Labour targeted Tory voters by shifting right and embracing Thatcherism.

According to the background research for the report (pdf):

• We estimate that public expenditure on housing in England was £26.8 billion pounds in 2016-17.
• Public spending on housing has lagged behind expenditure on other public services over the past twenty years and the focus of spending has increasingly been on housing benefits rather than investment in new social or affordable housing.
• Real terms housing benefits payments in England have been on a long-term upwards trend, more than doubling since the start of the 1990s. The increase is mainly due to rising housing benefit payments per caseload as real terms rents for all tenures have increased. However, an increased reliance on private rented sector tenures has also raised the housing benefit bill and the cost in rents to tenants.
• Reduced investment has lowered the number of additional social rent homes being delivered each year. Social rent housing additions have fallen by 79 per cent since the first half of the 1990s.
• Grant funding for social housing has been limited since 2011. Instead, the focus has predominantly been on making funds available for affordable rent homes or the Help to Buy equity loan scheme.

In another background paper, Shelter provides estimates of existing unmet need for housing:

Homeless in temporary accommodation	79,900
Rough sleeping and hidden homelessness	128,000
Overcrowded	240,000
Living with poor conditions in the PRS	631,000
Ill health/disability	194,000
TOTAL	1,272,900

On top of that they estimate a need for a further 1.2 million homes to address the anticipated increase in existing and newly forming lower income young households who are not expected to be able to afford home ownership in their lifetimes and some 690,000 homes for older (aged 55 and over) households on lower incomes currently in the private rented sector (PRS).

According to Shelter, this 20-year programme will provide a return on investment in 39 years, and would cost £10.7bn a year on average. However by reducing the demand for housing and other benefits by reducing housing costs this would be reduced to £3.8bn a year. It isn't a part of the Shelter proposals but these savings would be significantly enhanced if these new homes were built to the zero energy standard described in this earlier post

We are now ten years on from the financial crisis, and a worsening housing crisis is affecting more and more people. Adding this to the social polarisation triggered by Brexit it is clear that we need a new political consensus. Building such a consensus around an ambitious commitment to improve social housing offers a way out of that divide.

Core Housing UK style

In an earlier post, I proposed an adaptation of the core-housing approach adopted in developing countries, with serviced plots on which would be constructed a basic unit of one living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. The plots would be big enough to allow extensions and additions to this core provision as the owners needs grew and changed, without the need to move and incur estate agents and legal fees. The original planning permission for the site would allow for the construction of a dwelling over no more than a fixed proportion of the plot area, without requiring anything other than Building Regulation approval. This would probably done by creating a Local Special Development Order setting out some basic parameters, such as maximum plot coverage and storey limits plus perhaps some rules about development at the boundaries.

In this post I’m going to look at how this could work through the stories of six different households.

Alfred and Grace Hitchcock

…are newly married. They are currently living in a small flat with no outdoor space, a tiny shower room and minimal cooking facilities. They have very little savings. Both are currently working, Alfred is a mechanic while Grace is an administrator in a local doctor’s practice. They fully intend to have children, but don’t want to do so while in their present flat.

James and Gloria Stewart

…have been married for about 7 years, Their son, Harvey is about to start school and Gloria is looking to get back to work part time. They do not intend to have any more children. James works in IT management. Before Harvey was born, Gloria had been working in a local architectural practice as a CAD technician and graphic designer. They currently live in a 2 bed flat, rented from one of the partners in the architectural firm where Gloria worked. He is looking to sell and they need to move within the next 12 months.

George and Stephanie Lucas

…are on the point of retiring. They have a large house and garden, with no mortgage, but Stephanie is in poor health with a progressive illness and they recognise the need to move to a smaller house that can be adapted to meet their needs. Before she fell ill both of them enjoyed their garden and want to retain some outdoor space that can be easily maintained. George is an engineer, while Stephanie taught French and Spanish at the local secondary school. They have two grown up children, both married, each with one child

David Lean

…is divorced, in his early 40s. He has no children. He is a plumber and general builder. He currently rents a flat and a separate lock up in which he keeps his tools and materials. He also plays in a band in the evenings and weekends and enjoys a full social life.

John and Mary Ford

…are in their 40s with two children, girls aged 12 and 14. They currently live in a standard 3 bed semi built about 15 years ago. As their children get older, they would like to provide them with space to do school work and to socialise with friends in ways that don’t disrupt the house for their parents. John is a butcher with his own shop, while Mary works part time as a teaching assistant. She would however very much like to get back to making pottery, having studied ceramics at university and worked for a while as a studio assistant to a well known artist.

Alice and Carol

…are two students at the local university.

***

For the purposes of this post, I’m assuming each plot has a road frontage and provided with all mains water, electricity and if available gas, plus phone line and broadband connection. Basic provision on the site will be the core unit of a single room plus a kitchen and a bathroom. Foundations will be adequate to take a two story building in traditional construction. All purchasers will be provided with a pack showing full details of all services plus technical details of foundations and a site survey at sufficient detail for setting out any further building work. Constructional details for a range of extensions will be available for purchase from the developers. First occupants will also have the option of a 'turnkey' deal for the construction of any extensions.

The plots vary in size but all are large enough for a two story family house.

***

With very limited money Alfred and Grace decide to live in just the basic unit but they buy the constructional details to add a bedroom when they are ready. The basic unit is about the same size as their present flat, but they will have the full plot available on which they intend to grow their own fruit and vegetables while they save.

Next door, James and Gloria need to build additional space from the start. They extend sideways and build a new storey above both the basic unit and the extension. On the first floor they create two bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs they extend the kitchen into the former bathroom and open it up to the room adjacent. The extension becomes their new living room.

George and Stephanie decide to keep their new house on one floor. They extend in both directions to create two new wings at right angles to the core. In one wing they create a large bedroom and a fully accessible wet room, with space and storage for equipment such as hoists to cater for Stephanie’s needs as her illness progresses. The new bedroom opens directly onto a small garden space with level access for a wheelchair. In the other wing they create two rooms. One is a guest bedroom with a shower. This will also be available for live in carers to use if need be. The other is a small office/studio space that Stephanie can use to take private students for language classes either individually or in small groups. It has its own door accessible from the street so that students can come and go without disrupting the rest of the house.

David Lean decides not to extend for the moment but to build a two storey detached building with the aim of storing his tools and materials on site. He builds this on the boundary with a garage and store on the ground floor and an office and music room above, incorporating high levels of acoustic insulation across the whole building. Before buying he has checked that the planning permission for the development allows for the possibility of running businesses such as his.

John and Mary extend in a similar fashion to George and Stephanie, in both directions, although they also build upwards. On one side of the core unit they build a wing with two bedrooms accessed off a third room across the front of both. This provides a shared living space for their two daughters and incorporates a bathroom and toilet. They allow for an independent entrance into this area, but do not construct it yet. On the other side they build a two storey extension. On the ground floor they create a ‘parent space’ with a bedroom and bathroom on the first floor. The core unit becomes a large kitchen-dining area.

After about a year;

Alfred and Grace decide to construct the additional bedroom, using the pre-purchased plans, which will effectively double their living space. As the work is about to start, they discover that Grace is pregnant, so requiring a hasty revision. They subdivide the new bedroom to the rear by creating a small room to use as a nursery. They make sure water and drainage services are available to this extension since they are not sure what its long term use will be.

After a couple of years;

Alfred and Grace decide to have another child. They have both had promotions and are financially more secure. Alfred is now workshop manager and Grace has become Practice Manager. Their daughter is also growing and needs more space. They decide to build a new wing on the other side of their living area with two bedrooms and a bathroom. The small room used by their daughter will become an en-suite bathroom and the core unit will become a single kitchen-dining area.

James has become disenchanted with working for a large company and wants to set up on his own account. He decides to set up as an IT trainer. He only needs an office at home since most of his work will be on the clients premises. He builds a simple freestanding garden office. Gloria will work with him as a trainer from time to time, but she is looking to develop her own career.

David decides he needs a larger living space. He is now engaged and with his new partner gets finance to build a new two storey extension. The ground floor will become a new kitchen dining area, with a bedroom and bathroom above. The old kitchen and bathroom will be stripped out and large new glass doors put in to give access to the garden, so that the whole of the original core unit becomes a living space.

After another few years;

the Ford’s children have now left home. They could downsize, but Mary’s mother is becoming frail and needs support. She moves into the space that had been used by the two girls and they insert a tiny kitchen for her, as well as opening up a separate front door.

Gloria Stewart and Mary Ford have decided to go into business together as a design consultancy. David has given up his business and now works for a local builder's merchants. He rents out his old office and store to Gloria and Mary, putting in an outside staircase to give him a separate access to his music room.

Stephanie has died and George is finding the house too large for him. He decides not to move however but instead subdivides his house, selling the space that had been used by the carer in Stephanie's last years to David and his new wife living on the adjacent plot, to incorporate into their own house to give space for his expanding family. He retains his old kitchen dining area and bedroom/ bathroom, in the knowledge that as he grows older it will continue to be usable.

After the death of Mary Ford's mother they let the small flat as a separate unit to Alice and Carol, a couple of students at the local university. Alice works part time for Gloria and Mary, while Carol provides care and domestic support for George and some other elderly residents in the area.

After a few more years;

George has now died while David and his wife have moved away. George’s children buy back the portion sold off to David and reinstate the original house which they then sell to Carol and Alice who are after graduation have now married. Alice is now a journalist and freelance writer while Carol is working as a physiotherapist, working from the space Stephanie had used for language classes.

David’s old house is sold to Penny and Albert Marshall. They are a middle aged couple whose children have left home. They have no need for the music room so sell the whole building to Gloria and Mary whose design consultancy is growing and needs more space.

***

I could continue in this vein, but my aim is not to tell family stories but to illustrate how designing for flexibility in use and the creation of a liberal enabling framework for small scale developments can generate both social and economic benefits. I’m not suggesting it is a model for everyone. Some people would rather move than build while others will need to relocate with new jobs. Nor is this about self build, although there is no reason why it could not be done that way. It might even be easier, with the site and core accommodation secure.

If however we are to tackle the real crisis in housing in the UK and the exclusion of young people from secure access to housing, then we need a radical rethink. All too often a so-called starter homes is simply very small. The approach described here allows that initial tiny property to grow and adjust to changing family circumstances without the disruption and loss of community caused by having to move elsewhere.

The idea of core housing and adapting the concept for the UK

Back in the late 1960s, while still a student,  I came across a book by Charles Abrams, a UN advisor on housing matters. In that book, Man's Struggle for Shelter in An Urbanizing World, Abrams describes how people living in the shanty towns of Latin America or Africa create housing for themselves. These areas are known by a variety of names – 'barrio or 'favela' in Latin America for example.

The first step was to acquire a piece of land, not necessarily legally. On that land a very simple single room dwelling would be erected, using whatever material could be acquired. As money becomes available the dwelling is extended and upgraded. Plastic and cardboard is replaced by concrete blocks. More floor space is added. A first floor is constructed. Gradually the building consolidates itself on the plot.

Because so often the occupation of the site was illegal, this dwelling would however have no water supply, no sanitation or power. Conditions in the neighbourhood would be squalid and unhealthy. Because the site has been grabbed from whatever is available access for vehicles may well be impossible. There is little incentive to improve the house in these circumstances.

The typical state response to this is clearance. There are many disadvantages to this of course. The redevelopment schemes are expensive and can only house a fraction of the people living in these illegal settlements. As those who are rehoused are moved out, their places are taken by new immigrants and the problem persists. Frequently those moved out are unhappy too. They may be miles away from their place of work and either lose their job or are forced to make long and complicated journeys. In both cases they are usually worse off financially. It isn't unknown for the displaced residents to move back to their old neighbourhood. (Although not something I'm going to pursue here, these were of course similar to the problems experienced by residents in the so-called slum clearance areas here in the UK in the '50s and '60s.)

Abrams proposed an alternative that he believed would be cheaper and better meet the needs of the impoverished families involved. He wanted to harness the energy and commitment of the residents of the 'favela', already demonstrated in their willingness to move from impoverished rural locations to live in squalor in exchange for the chance to improve their lot.

He suggested a formalisation of the process already going on, by setting out a grid of serviced roads and plots, each with water, sanitation and power connections available. On these plots could be erected a simple one room dwelling as before. This could be done by the occupier or by the state. He called this ‘core housing’. Although the space available would be as restricted as before, because minimal infrastructure was in place, the living conditions would be significantly improved.

As before, as money became available, residents would be able to enlarge and extend the house to meet their specific needs. Rather than being displaced to an inflexible high rise block where they lost all control over their surroundings, they would remain in control of their lives. They could grow food to support themselves or for sale or exchange with neighbours. They would have a secure tenure and could pass the property on to younger generations.

This isn't a new process of course. It is what happened with the homesteaders of 19^th Century America, it happened in the whaling settlements of Nantucket and it happens traditionally in Malaya. (Images from ‘How Buildings Learn ’ by Stuart Brand)

 

Closer to home it is what happened in planned mediaeval settlements here in the UK and in English controlled France. There is a good list in the book 'New Towns of the Middle Ages' by Maurice Beresford, originally published in 1967. That list places as varied as Devizes, Hungerford, Thirsk, Uxbridge, Boroughbridge, Wokingham and Truro. Another example is the Chequers area of Salisbury. Chequer has the same root as 'quarter', in the sense of an area of a town. It also gives us the word chequerboard for reasons that should be clear from the image below (taken from Beresford above).  In these planned towns or plantations, roads would have been set out and plots sold or let subject to covenants covering the broad form of the development to be built. Typically there might be a requirement to build in brick or stone, limit the height to no more than 3-4 stories, to build across the entire frontage and limiting the uses that could be carried out on the plot. Out of these simple rules came the endless variety of the English Market Town.

In the next post I’m going to look at how these ideas might be adapted in the UK.

Shelter? or Investment?

It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?
Abraham Maslow

Back in the 1940s, psychologist Abraham Maslow postulated a hierarchy of human needs. His argument was refined over the next 30 years, but essentially can be boiled down to the idea that basic physiological needs like shelter and food are physical requirements for human survival. If these requirements are not met, the human body cannot function properly and will ultimately fail. Physiological needs are therefore the most important and should be met first.
It seems to me that in this simple statement we can find some clues to what is happening in the housing market, and by extension in society as a whole.
The finance of housing is predicated on a basic assumption that the house in which we live, from which we gain that basic physiological requirement of shelter, should be treated instead as a speculative resource. By speculative I don’t mean the normal activities of business in building and supplying houses. I mean instead the process by which people are encouraged, almost required, to risk all – food, family and economic security in pursuit of illusory capital accumulation. I say illusory deliberately because vast increases in the capital value of property benefit no one except the mortgage purveyors, property lawyers and estate agents who are parasitic on the housing market. The rest of us cannot realise that increase except by reducing our stake in the market in the form of a smaller house or by moving to a cheaper area. In other words by relinquishing the security the property is supposed to guarantee.

Filed under: Housing Tagged: hierarchy of needs, housing, housing finance, housing market, maslow, psychology

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Housing – bibliography

In preparing this series of posts I’ve consulted lots of documents. I’ve given a partial bibliography below, which includes I think all those cited. Any additions can be found here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47807417/housing%20bibliography.doc

A Haunted Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, Karen Keaveney, Cian O’Callaghan, National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, 2010; http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/research/documents/WP59-A-Haunted-Landscape.pdf

Abundance of land, shortage of housing, Kristian Niemietz, Discussion Paper No. 38 Institute of Economic Affairs, 2012; http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Abundance%20of%20Land%20Shortage%20of%20Housing.pdf

Affordable Housing Supply England, 2011-12, Department for Communities and Local Government, 2013; https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/14664/2247515.pdf

Development Plan rezonings: the political pressures, Lee Komito in Promise and Performance: Irish Environmental Policies Analysed, John Blackwell and Frank Convery (eds). Resource and Environmental Policy Centre; University College, Dublin, 1983. pp. 293-302; http://www.ucd.ie/lkomito/rezoning.htm

How Buildings Learn, Stuart Brand, 1997; http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0753800500/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0753800500&linkCode=as2&tag=panchromatica-21

Ireland’s Ghost estates, Peter Geoghegan, LRB Blog, 17 January 2013; http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/01/17/peter-geoghegan/irelands-ghost-estates/

Ireland’s housing boom: what has driven it and have prices overshot?, David Rae and Paul van den Noord, OECD Economics Department Working Paper No 492, 2006; http://search.oecd.org/officialdocuments/displaydocumentpdf/?cote=ECO/WKP%282006%2920&doclanguage=en

Man’s Struggle for Shelter in An Urbanizing World, Charles Abrams, 1964; http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262010100/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0262010100&linkCode=as2&tag=panchromatica-21

Mind the Gap – housing supply in a cold climate, David Pretty, Paul Hackett, Smith Institute Town and Country Planning Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009; http://www.tcpa.org.uk/pages/mind-the-gap.html

National Housing Development Survey, Summary Report, November 2012, Housing Agency, Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, 2013; http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/DevelopmentandHousing/Housing/FileDownLoad,31621,en.pdf

New estimates of housing demand and need in England, 2011 to 2031, Alan Holmans, Town and Country Planning Association, 2013; http://www.tcpa.org.uk/pages/new-estimates-of-housing-demand-and-need-in-england-2011-to-2031.html

Politics and Clientilism in Urban Ireland, Lee Komito, Doctoral Thesis 1985; http://www.ucd.ie/lkomito/thesis.htm

The Containment of Urban England, Peter Hall et al, 1973; Vol 1 – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Containment-Urban-England-Metropolitan-Megalopolis/dp/0043520405/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383925743&sr=1-1&keywords=containment+of+urban+england

The Containment of Urban England Peter Hall et al, 1973; Vol 2 – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Containment-Urban-England-Objectives-Operations/dp/0043520413/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383925743&sr=1-2&keywords=containment+of+urban+england

The Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett, 1970; http://www.amazon.co.uk/Uses-Disorder-Personal-Identity-City/dp/0393309096

Unfinished estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland,Rob Kitchin, Cian O’Callaghan, Justin Gleeson, National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis 2012; http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/research/documents/NIRSA%20working%20paper%2067%20-%20Unfinished%20estates%20in%20post%20Celtic%20Tiger%20Ireland.pdf

Unlocking public land for housing supply, Town and Country Planning Association, 2007; http://www.tcpa.org.uk/pages/unlocking-public-land.html

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Housing - the Irish experience

Brown lawn means jail time - St. Petersburg Times

Brown lawn means jail time - St. Petersburg Times.

On Friday morning Joseph Prudente put on a pair of shorts and his "Grandpa Gone Wild" T-shirt. He took off his wedding band and put his heart medication in a plastic Wal-Mart bag. Then his daughter drove him to jail. Grandpa had time to do.

His crime? - He had disobeyed a court order that he sod the lawn at his Beacon Woods home.

His bail? -  Zero.

Prudente 66 must stay in the Pasco County jail in Land O Lakes until the required sod work is completed under a September court order signed by Circuit Judge W. Lowell Bray.

...and from the comments:

50 years ago, instead of taking him to court, the neighbors would have gotten together to fix his yard for him.

which leads to this...

[Law] got a guy to let him borrow a machine to remove the old grass. Two companies donated sod. Soon, the yard was full of people. Pasco County Commissioner Jack Mariano also read the story, found the house, canceled a speech and went to work.

"I've never seen someone so important get dirty," said Jennifer Lehr, 32, who is Pat's daughter and calls Joseph her dad. Lehr, her husband and their two young daughters moved into the house two years ago after barely scraping by on their own.

Jennifer and Pat kept trying to feed the strangers working on their lawn, but they kept saying no, to not spend their money.

A man came to fix the sprinkler. People dropped off checks. A neighbor looked at all the work being done and cried because she felt her faith in humanity restored.

How far is any of this likely in the UK? Thankfully we don't have HOAs with this sort of power, but some local authorities are getting pretty close in their behaviour over things like bin collections, ASBOs etc.

House prices - a different perspective from Chris Dillow

Housing crash: why worry?

1. Many men have borrowed thousands of pounds to buy an asset that’s fallen in price. We call them car-owners. No-one worries about negative equity in the car market. So why worry about negative equity in another consumer good?
2.  Sure, some people have lost money because they over-invested in housing. But why should we care about these any more than about those who over-invested in Laughing Boy in the 3.30 at Wincanton? It’s not the government’s job to bail out bad gamblers.