Tag: Housing

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Yimbyism is a broad church and it should be

Let’s face it: we, as a country, have royally screwed up on housing. Decades of bad policy, bad ideas, and sometimes even bad faith, have led us to one of the worst housing crises in Europe.

We’ve finally reached a stage where almost everyone accepts that there is a problem and that the cost of housing is simply too high. Unlike almost every other type of product or service money can buy, the price of housing to buy or rent has gone up in real terms. Young people are spending tens of thousands of pounds more in rent throughout their twenties than earlier generations did, and their likelihood of becoming homeowners has plummeted.

It has also become more widely accepted that one of the key causes of this is that we have, for decades, failed to build enough homes. Study after study after study after study has demonstrated that supply is a key determinant of housing affordability. Social housing has particularly strong and well-targeted affordability benefits, but it extends to all types.

Enter PricedOut, which is England’s national campaign for more affordable housing. We push for more housing, more affordable housing, a better private rented sector, and a more effective and equitable system of property taxation. Our focus on building more homes places us squarely within the pro-development YIMBY (“yes in my back yard”) movement.

One of the things that has amazed me since getting involved in the YIMBY movement is the broad political spectrum of the people it attracts. PricedOut enjoys the support of committed socialists, steadfast centrists, and outspoken neoliberals. More or less anybody who looks in detail at the housing crisis will eventually conclude that there simply isn’t enough housing. I’m not sure many other ideas have such widespread backing.[1]

We must be very careful to keep it that way. Although they might make different arguments, anti-development NIMBYs (“not in my back yard”) can be left- or right-wing. NIMBY talking points run the gamut: the simple self-interest of preserving high property values, heritage preservation, a somewhat misguided understanding of environmentalism, or even the old classic “we don’t want people like that moving here.”

I’ve sometimes been surprised to meet people who see themselves as progressives lobbying against new development. This is often couched in anti-gentrification terminology and focuses on the fact that the new homes are too expensive. It is absolutely true that new homes are too expensive. That is because all homes are too expensive, because they are in short supply, and land values are accordingly high. New homes are built to more modern standards than our shockingly aged housing stock. They are also inflated by government policies like Help to Buy and therefore attract a premium.

Imagine you had a village of 100 homes, and 100 households. People move around between these homes periodically. The child of one of those households, a high-earner, grows up and is ready to move to her own place. If there isn’t a 101st home, she will simply outbid a poorer household on a home that becomes available. That poorer household will be forced to leave the area, or share with another. Pretty soon the area becomes “gentrified”: having higher rents, relatively more high-earning households, and any low-earning households will live cramped together. If that sounds familiar, you may live in London. The conclusion is of course that you don’t stop gentrification by not building the homes, you stop it by building them.

This is especially the case given that the supply of social housing is largely dependent on supply of private housing. About half of new affordable housing in England is delivered as part of a planning obligation. These are agreements, as part of a planning permission, between councils and developers that a certain proportion of new homes will be affordable. Additionally, affordable housing developers will generally cross-subsidise new social homes through profits generated from private sale homes. It’s unfortunate that this process is sometimes accompanied by hand-wringing and portrayed as a necessary evil, or outright attacked as a “loss of social purpose”.

For the reasons discussed above, developing private homes is agood thing. That is not to say that we don’t need drastically more government funding for social housing, because we absolutely do. But you can get more bang for your buck by cross-subsidy, and we need more of all types and tenures of housing. Having varied types of housing on one scheme also gives developers a real incentive to build the homes faster, because they don’t have to worry about loads of one type of home flooding the market at once.

It is fortunate, then, that market and social housing are not at odds in the UK. I suspect this is part of the reason we can attract such a broad spectrum of support for PricedOut. It also helps to explain one of the things our planning system is really good at: avoiding massive mono-tenure estates. I met a housing campaigner from San Francisco last year who was amazed to find beautiful social housing estates right in the middle of central London, opposite swanky executive pads.

To him it was unthinkable that poor and rich neighbourhoods weren’t totally separated. It’s widely observed that poor people get poor services: worse access to healthcare, fewer free services, and sometimes few amenities at all. But it’s much harder for this to be the case when poor people live in the same neighbourhoods as richer people, which I think tends to be ignored in the gentrification debate (poor people like nice things too!).

My surprised San Franciscan friend was even more surprised to learn that UK Yimbys tend to support the development of social and market housing, and that they were not opposing goals under our planning system. In California, it seems that the more market-orientated Yimbys find themselves opposed to “Phimbys”: proponents of “public housing in my back yard”, who lobby against private developments in favour of affordable housing. The resultant gridlock probably helps in part to explain why San Francisco is one of the few places with a worse housing crisis than we have.

It is to our benefit that we don’t have this problem, at least to that extent. But as I’ve mentioned, it’s not unusual to see apparently progressive people baulk at the notion of increasing housing supply. Sometimes this counterproductively leads them to oppose developments. Sometimes, to my shock, it even leads them to oppose majority social housing developments such as the Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford, which has fortunately gone ahead despite some aggressive opposition.

Yimbyism’s strength lies in its strong evidence base , which allows it to attract support from across the political spectrum. At PricedOut, we want to preserve this. It’s essential that we don’t allow Yimbyism to become too heavily associated with either end of the spectrum, lest it become captured by that movement and anathema to the rest. This means we need to be very clear that opposing the development of new homes, private or otherwise, is not progressive.

PricedOut is England’s national campaign for affordable house prices. We call for action from government to build more homes and reduce the cost of decent housing. We fight for everyone who wants to be a homeowner but can’t afford to, and everyone who wants to move closer to work or amenities but can’t afford to.

<strong><span class="has-inline-color has-accent-color">Anya Martin</span></strong>
Anya Martin

Anya Martin is Head of Policy at PricedOut, England’s national campaign for affordable house prices. She also works as a researcher within the social housing sector where she has published on a range of topics including housing supply, welfare, and low pay employment. 

In 2018 Anya won the Thinkhouse Early Career Researchers Prize for her paper on ‘The impact of social housing on child development outcomes’, which compared cognitive, health, emotional and behavioural development outcomes between those living in social housing and private rented accommodation.

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[1] Perhaps aside from drug liberalisation!

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Why solving the housing crisis requires planning reform

The UK has entered and will leave this pandemic while experiencing a decades-long housing shortage. The country will soon begin to repair the harm done to the economy and society by this disease, but it cannot continue to afford this housing crisis. The inequality it fuels and the damage it causes to national and local economies are too great to bear. We cannot go back to how things were before.

At its core, ending the housing shortage requires more homes. But where new homes are built matters. Yet at present, not enough houses are built in some cities, and arguably too many are built in others. This mismatch emerges as the design of the planning system means it rations the supply of land available for new homes. Ending the housing crisis will therefore require reform of the green belt and a new, flexible zoning planning system to build enough new homes.

The housing crisis is local, not national

The reason why the planning system is so important can be found in the geography of the housing shortage. Some cities have far greater affordability problems than others. For example, while in 2019 the average house in Barnsley cost 5.3 times the local average income, in Brighton that ratio rose to 13.5 times local average incomes. Despite their higher average wages, prosperous cities such as York and Bristol are generally less affordable than places with struggling economies and lower wages such as Dundee or Blackpool.

So solving the housing crisis therefore requires a focus on the most expensive cities with the worst affordability problems. But currently, as Fig. 1 below shows, there is no link between cities’ demand for housing and their supply of new homes. Many expensive cities including Oxford and Bournemouth are building far fewer homes than those which are more affordable such as Wakefield or Telford. The supply and demand of new homes have been disconnected.

Source: EPC Domestic Register 2019; Census 2011; ONS, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2011; Land Registry, Price Paid Data 2011

The planning system disconnects local housing supply from local demand

This decoupling of supply from demand originates in the planning system, as the amount of land it makes available for housing is rationed. Development of new homes normally cannot proceed unless the council decides at their discretion to grant a planning permission to a site. Measures such as the green belt block new homes across large areas of land adjacent to many cities and railway stations, including Bristol, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, and London.

The rationing of land, not prices or affordability or need, ultimately decides how many houses cities build. It explains why some cities which have low demand build more than the average city, and far more than some very unaffordable cities.

The planning system prevents redevelopment in large parts of the existing suburbs

The planning system’s rationing of land can be seen in how it warps the supply of new homes within cities. Consider Exeter, an expensive city which is building lots of new homes above the average rate for cities, in Fig.2 below. A substantial number of homes have been built in the city centre (8 per cent growth since 2011), and there is a cluster of new homes being built on the eastern outskirts of the city, including near the brand new railway station of Newcourt.

Fig. 2 Housing supply in Exeter from 2011-2019

Source: EPC Domestic Register 2019; Census 2011

Nevertheless, 48 per cent of suburban neighbourhoods in Exeter are building less than one house a year. 14 per cent of suburban neighbourhoods in Exeter have actually built no new houses over this period, including a built-up area close to Digby & Sowton station. Even though Exeter has built lots of new houses, the amount of land which has been made available for development has still been subject to rationing.

These dormant suburbs which make little or no contribution to new housing supply are not unique to Exeter. 51 per cent of all suburban neighbourhoods in England and Wales built less than one house a year, or zero, from 2011-2019, providing only 2 per cent of all new suburban homes over that period.

This national pattern across cities emerges from the design of the planning system. As the supply of new homes is controlled by the discretionary granting of planning permissions by elected councillors, it is both uncertain for developers to navigate and sensitive to political pressure from anti-housing activists. The result is that as so much of the suburbs and unremarkable green belt land are off-limits to new homes, new housing supply is forced into easy-to-develop pockets on the outskirts of cities, and pressure for redevelopment is put on city centres and locations such as social housing estates and offices into flats.

Local shortages which emerge from the planning system make inequality worse within and between cities

By stunting the supply of housing in expensive cities, the planning system creates two different inequalities.

First, it drives inequality in housing costs within prosperous cities between renters and homeowners. As rents rise due to the shortage of homes, so does the wealth of homeowning neighbours as through their housing equity.

Second, it drives inequality in housing wealth between homeowners in more prosperous and weaker economies. From 2013-18, average housing equity per house in Brighton rose by £83,000 – but in Doncaster it rose by just £5,000. By preventing new homes from being built in the most expensive cities to stabilise local prices, the planning system reinforces economic inequality in them and across the country.

Ending the housing crisis requires a new flexible zoning system for planning

Solving the housing crisis and tackling these issues requires reconnecting local supply to local demand, and that entails reform of the planning system. Green belt reform is one area where this is needed, and Centre for Cities have calculated that 1.7 to 2.1 million new homes could be built on less than 2 per cent of the green belt within walking distance of railway stations outside Bristol, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester and London.

More building by councils and housing associations can play a large role here. However, the root cause of the housing crisis lies not in a specific lack of social housing but in the institutional design of the planning system. For instance, England still has one of the largest social housing sectors in Europe, at 17 per cent of all housing stock, yet it also has one of the continent’s most dire housing crises.

Ultimately, the design of the planning system must change. Building more homes in the most expensive cities will require a shift from its discretionary model towards a flexible zoning system, as in Japan and certain US cities.

This approach, where planning permission legally must be granted if a proposal complies with a national zoning code and national building regulations to ensure the structures are safe, is compatible with more social and council housing. But it would fix the institutional problems the private sector faces by reconnecting local supply to local demand, and end the housing crisis by building more homes in the least affordable places with the greatest need.

<strong><span class="has-inline-color has-accent-color">Anthony Breach</span></strong>
Anthony Breach

Anthony is an Analyst who has worked as part of the research team at Centre for Cities since 2017, where he focuses on housing and planning. He won the Thinkhouse Early Career Researcher Prize 2019 for Capital cities: How the planning system creates housing shortages and drives wealth inequality.

Anthony has also worked on research on commercial property in cities, services exports, productivity, and manufacturing. He also has a particular interest in lessons for planning, housing, and UK cities from Japan and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Previously he worked at the Fawcett Society as a Research Officer.

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Fire safety still a major concern for residents three years after Grenfell tragedy

The Fire Safety Bill has passed its second reading in Parliament but not without bringing the fears of multi-occupancy residents back to the centre of the housing safety conversation.

The bill seeks to amend the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, to clarify which parts of buildings are covered by requirements to manage and reduce the risk of fire by responsible owners. Whilst the bill makes necessary changes to fire safety law, it does not go far enough to meet the Government’s pledge to prevent another Grenfell Tower tragedy.

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has published the findings of a survey into the progress of remediation work to improve fire safety in residential buildings.

The survey found residents continue to face bills of thousands of pounds for remedial or safety measures for a range of issues including combustible cladding, inadequate fire breaks and timber balconies or walkways. It also found that out of 1,352 respondents, 70% said they still had combustible cladding on their building.

Residents of multi-occupancy households have called on the Government to go further in its efforts to improve fire safety. Further to the £1 billion Building Safety Fund announced in the 2020 Spring Budget, residents have called for a pledge to ensure that all forms of dangerous cladding be removed and other safety defects dealt with.

During the 2nd reading of the Fire Safety Bill, I raised concerns of a constituent who had expressed fears to me regarding a tower block in a neighbouring constituency that was covered in combustible cladding which the landlord was refusing to remove.

The survey conducted by the HCLG committee has given us an insight into the reality of the fear thousands of people face across the country following the Grenfell Tragedy. As we have seen in the previous three years, where a loophole exists some will exploit it, despite the risk posed to residents.

One respondent to the survey said:

“I have highly flammable insulation, missing fire breaks, missing compartmentation, poorly fitted fire protection to the structural steel and poorly fitted fire doors. I fear for my life on a daily basis.”

As many raised during the Fire Safety Bill debate, the Government needs to do much more to ensure the safety of residents in multi-occupancy residences. Like many colleagues pointed out in the debate, the Grenfell Tower tragedy was one that should have been avoided.

As part of my role on the HCLG I will be continuing to hold the Government and industry to account over its failings to support residents in feeling safe in their own homes, so that we never have to experience such a devastating and preventable loss of life again.

<strong><span class="has-inline-color has-accent-color">Abena Oppong-Asare</span></strong>
Abena Oppong-Asare

Abena Oppong-Asare is the Member of Parliament for Erith and Thamesmead. She was elected as MP in December 2019 and has since been appointed to the Shadow Treasury Team as PPS to Anneliese Dodds.

Abena also sits on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee with specific interests in affordable housing and local government funding.

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The five Australian housing system frailties laid bare by COVID-19

by Peter Mares and Hal Pawson

Much as in the UK, the past few weeks in Australia has seen housing policy innovation and emergency expenditure on a remarkable scale. State governments that have historically treated street homelessness as a low priority issue have suddenly found tens of millions of dollars to create pop-up accommodation or book rough sleepers into hotel rooms. Since March literally thousands have been rescued into temporary shelter.

Similarly, panicked by the vision of abrupt mass unemployment triggering a new homelessness crisis, state governments across the country have legislated evictions moratoria.

Federal government has also bolstered the ability of households to meet their housing costs, through the crisis by temporarily doubling the rate of the normally miserly Jobseeker unemployment benefit, and introducing a temporary Jobkeeper wage subsidy to help struggling employers retain staff.

But the need for such short-term fixes also highlights the entrenched failings of Australia’s housing system. This crisis has laid bare five major vulnerabilities.

The need for short-term fixes highlights the entrenched failings of Australia’s housing system. Read how this crisis has laid bare five major vulnerabilities in the latest #redbrickblog

1. Street homelessness has become a significant problem

Before the pandemic, street homelessness in Australia was affecting about 8,000 people on any given night, as indicated by census data, and up 20% in the last five years. But this is almost certainly an underestimate.

Recent UK research showed the number of people sleeping rough in any given year was five times as many as captured in census-type snapshots. There’s no reason to think it’s much different in Australia. And many more people are on the fringe of street homelessness — couch surfing, for example.

2. More than a million pushed into rental stress

Australia’s second housing system vulnerability is the body of people – far larger again – living in insecure and unaffordable rental housing. Even before this current crisis, unaffordable housing costs had pushed around 1.3 million into poverty. After paying rent they didn’t have enough money left for essentials like food and electricity.

Now many of these renters will have lost jobs or work hours. Government schemes like JobKeeper and JobSeeker will temporarily help only some — temporary migrants and many casual workers are excluded.

Measures like the moratorium on evictions are welcome (provided they prove robust). The same goes for mortgage pauses by the banks, which might help property owners avoid having to sell if tenants can’t afford the rent.

But these are only stopgap efforts.

3. A shrunken social housing sector

The third vulnerability is the shrivelled state of Australia’s social housing, a sector only a quarter the size of its UK counterpart. With virtually no new construction for most of the past 25 years, stock levels have flatlined. Proportionately, it has shrunk from 6% to a meagre 4% of all housing. More importantly, relative to population, the number of properties let by public housing agencies and community housing providers has halved since 1991.

Across most of Australia, waiting lists for social housing are huge. In most jurisdictions the sector lacks the capacity to offer long-term housing to all the rough sleepers and others currently in hotels. Other than through emergency unit acquisitions or head-leasing of privately owned properties, it is hard to see how this will be possible.

4. A mountain of debt

Australia’s fourth housing system vulnerability is the scale of housing-related debt. If the pandemic-induced downturn persists and unemployment stays high, this could make the recession much worse.

In the early 1990s household debt equated to about 70% of disposable household income. In March 2019, the Reserve Bank of Australia warned the debt-to-income ratio had risen to 190%. The increase was mostly due to increased borrowing to buy homes and investment properties.

Even before the pandemic, one in five mortgage holders were struggling to meet repayments. If large scale unemployment were to force mass property sales, this could compound the crash as homes flood the market. Given that Australian banks are more highly exposed to residential property than their counterparts in other OECD countries, this also poses a wider financial risk.

We know from the GFC experience in the USA, Ireland, Spain and elsewhere that a sharp fall in property prices can have severe and long-lasting economic consequences that worsen inequality. In the USA, vulture landlords stepped in to buy up large numbers of distressed properties and create rental property empires. Renting from owners of this kind is not an attractive prospect.

5. An unbalanced housing system

Australia’s housing system is vulnerable to shocks because – much more than in the UK – it is unbalanced, our fifth system frailty. Residential construction depends almost entirely on private developers building for sale to individual buyers.

These buyers are highly sensitive to the outlook for property values. The resulting herd mentality magnifies booms and slumps – a particular problem when they are totally dominant in the market. A magnified downturn can bring residential construction to a grinding halt. And while quick to shed labour, construction is slow to re-employ because of risk and long project lead times.

Construction normally employs more than 1 million Australians with a range of skill levels. It generates many more jobs through the building materials supply chain as well as in real estate, property management and financial services. This helps to explain why the traditionally antagonistic Master Builders Australia and the building union CFMEU have united in a call to government to invest in building 30,000 social housing units as part of Australia’s post-COVID recovery.

The need for a national strategy

Australia’s housing system needs more than a one-off crisis boost. The pandemic policy jolt is an opportunity to put Australia’s housing on more stable footings through a Commonwealth-led bipartisan, long-term, national housing strategy.

A key part of this should be routine social housing construction on a scale that at least keeps pace with population growth. That’s up to 15,000 homes a year – around five times the current number. This may sound ambitious, but it’s below the levels regularly achieved between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s.

And this doesn’t have to mean a return to the post-war approach when state authorities provided public housing. Not-for-profit community housing organisations can now take on the major new supply role.

But we do need a post-war level of ambition. Government has two immediate roles to play in linking housing to a post-pandemic recovery.

The first is to help avoid a house price crash that will deepen an economic slump. Co-ordinating action with mortgage lenders could help minimise repossessions and avoid a glut of discounted properties on the market. Governments may also need to take on distressed projects from private developers. The New South Wales government has already flagged such action.

The second immediate role for government is to support residential construction as the motor of economic revival by investing in social housing as the central plank of a stimulus package. Government-owned sites and developer-owned landbanks can be used to kick-start activity more quickly than other major infrastructure projects. Community housing providers – especially some larger faith-based players – also have shovel-ready sites.

These should be the prelude to a national housing strategy, something that has been – remarkably – absent in Australia since 1945.

A key strategic objective should be to diversify both housing supply and demand. Alongside a greater role for community housing providers, this could include a build-to-rent sector commissioned by institutional investors to build market rental blocks as long-term, income-generating assets. This development – currently impeded by tax inequities – would benefit tenants and the economy, by smoothing the boom-bust cycle of residential construction.

As we argue in our recent books, a national housing strategy must also thoroughly overhaul national, state and territory tax settings. Many of these have greater housing policy impacts than any spending program.

Reform of this kind – especially to phase down the vast and untargeted tax subsidies enjoyed by small-scale landlords, and to replace stamp duty with a broad-based land tax – could make Australia’s housing system both fairer and more efficient. It could dampen the speculation that fuels rising prices and debt, while raising the revenue needed to provide decent, affordable housing for all Australians.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The Conversation (Australian edition). Read the original article here.

<strong>Hal Pawson</strong>
Hal Pawson

Hal Pawson is Professor of Housing Research and Policy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He retains a Visiting Professor position at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh where he was based until 2011. He is also an associate of Sheffield University’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a Managing Editor of the international journal, Housing Studies. His latest co-authored book ‘Housing Policy in Australia: A case for system reform’ was published in 2020.

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<strong>Peter Mares</strong>
Peter Mares

Peter Mares is program director at Monash University’s Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and a contributor to Inside Story magazine. Peter is the author of three books: No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s Housing Crisis (2018); Not Quite Australian: how temporary migration is changing the nation (2016) and Borderline (2001). The former brodcaster for ABC releases his 4-part radio series, Housing the Australian Nation, on Earshot via ABC Radio National. Available from Saturday 30 May.

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Domestic Abuse #MakeaStand

<strong><span class="has-inline-color has-accent-color">by Alison Inman</span></strong>
by Alison Inman

Alison was President of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). She is a Board Member at Saffron Housing Trust, Colne Housing Society, TPAS, and is a co-founder of SHOUT. Her previous roles include being Chair of Colchester Borough Homes and the NFA. Alison is a former member of the Labour Housing Group’s Executive Committee.

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I’ve spent the past few years talking to the social housing sector about domestic abuse, why it’s an issue for them, and what they can do about it. The starting point for any discussion is usually that an average of two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales, a figure that hasn’t really budged for years. Or, it hadn’t until a few weeks ago. Since the lockdown started domestic homicides have soared, and the number of reports of abuse made to the charity Refuge has increased by 49%. This pattern is being repeated around the world; domestic abuse is itself reaching pandemic proportions and we must make sure that social landlords play their part in tackling it.

It has taken the lockdown to persuade the Government to agree with a coalition of homelessness charities, the women’s sector, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the NHF and many more, that survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence should automatically qualify for priority need when applying for housing. Good news, but too late for too many women who have had no choice but to return to their abuser rather than face life on the streets.

It is hard to completely disentangle domestic abuse from the wider housing crisis. Acute housing stress means that people often start living together far earlier than they would if there were other, affordable options. And when a relationship breaks down lack of alternative accommodation means people are forced to stay together. Labour’s commitment to a massive programme of social house building will help but there is so much more we need to do. And many women and children do not have the luxury of time.

Work done by the domestic abuse charity Safe Lives for the Sunderland social landlord Gentoo (2018) estimates that approximately 13% of all repair jobs, and 21% of repairs spend, could be attributable to domestic abuse. This shows the business case for Councils and Housing Associations stepping up and making domestic abuse their business. It’s shocking that most victims of abuse first come to the notice of their landlord when they are themselves reported as a perpetrator of noise nuisance. Just think about that for a minute. And almost two thirds of women with significant rent arrears are experiencing abuse in the home. Domestic Abuse really is a housing issue.

The work of the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance has been key to the understanding of the relationships between physical, emotional and financial abuse and the housing system. They have free resources on their website and their eight stage accreditation guides landlords through a whole range of issues from case management to dealing with perpetrators. The CIH #MakeaStand campaign has hopefully shone a light on the issues for the sector, DAHA accreditation will make sure that local authorities and housing associations adopt the very best practice.