Let them build houses
We live in some of the world’s oldest and most expensive homes, says James O’Shaughnessy, and it is time to do something about it When President Chirac criticised Britain’s cuisine we could afford to smile. Not only does London boast a greater variety of first-class restaurants than just about any city on earth, but the last decade has seen a blossoming of interest in both cooking and the quality of the food we eat. Brits may not have as illustrious a culinary tradition as the French, but there’s no doubt that we’re catching up.
If Jacques Chirac had really wanted to induce a cultural cringe, he should have asked the question that highlights a much bigger blot on our quality of life: why is it that one of the most affluent countries in Europe has some of its worst housing?
The average home in Britain is more expensive, smaller and older than its Continental equivalent. Expensive? Prices in the South have risen faster than earnings, which means that millions of people are unable to afford the standard of housing their parents could, even though they are wealthier. Small? We have the third smallest dwellings in Europe. While other countries are increasing the size of their newly built dwellings, our new homes are the smallest and getting smaller. Old? Nearly 40 per cent of our housing stock was built before 1945, with Denmark and Spain our only European neighbours with older homes.
So why is this? We are building far fewer homes than there is demand for — at our current rate of building it will take 1,200 years to replace our housing stock. Because the supply of land is highly constrained and there is enormous pressure to build on brownfield sites, those dwellings that are being built are increasingly being provided in blocks of flats. As recently as 1990 only about an eighth of new dwellings were apartments, but by 2004 this figure had risen to nearly a half.
But is this what we really want? According to a MORI poll in 2005, 95 per cent of those questioned favoured a house of some kind and just 3 per cent wanted to live in flats. Another survey, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, found in 2004 that, when asked about development in their area, people preferred houses to flats. The type of housing people disliked most was blocks of flats of four storeys or more, yet this is what’s being built.
For many years there has been a consen sus that the building of high-rise housing estates in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies was a huge mistake. Not only are they unpopular, hard to maintain and breeding grounds for crime; there is also a broader critique which argues that residential accommodation of this size and scale is dehumanising. Recently, however, the tide has started to turn. There is a new vogue for commercial skyscrapers in London, energetically promoted by Mayor Ken Livingstone who, with characteristic understatement, describes opposition to these new towers of commerce as the ‘biggest threat to the economy of London since Adolf Hitler’. Already there are indications that an unholy alliance of developers, politicians and architectural trendies is seeking to extend this fashion into the sphere of housing provision, in clear contradiction to the wishes of the public.
None of this inner-city megalomania troubles most of the defenders of the status quo — owner-occupiers, conservationists, nimbys. They are all too happy for the tower-block utopians to provide an intellectual justification for this development craze, giving cover to their own rather more selfish arguments against building on greenfield sites. But these arguments are hoary myths that are ripe for debunking.
Rising house prices are not the boon they appear, benefiting only a small minority older home-owners trading down. For others, rising prices prevent them from buying or renting accommodation of a similar size and quality to that which their parents could afford. There is a macro-economic impact too, as constraints on the supply of housing accentuate the instability of the economy and make Britain a less attractive place to do business.
Groups like the Campaign to Protect Rural England argue that we live in a small overcrowded island and that we should build denser towns and cities in order to ‘save’ the countryside. Yet just 8 per cent of land in Britain is urban, half the figure in the Netherlands (which nevertheless builds new homes 50 per cent bigger than the UK’s) and also less than Belgium, Germany and Denmark. Meanwhile 78 per cent of British land is in agricultural use, more than in any other EU country.
The anti-development lobby also argues that its stance is better for the environment. But research in Germany has shown that low-rise, low-density housing is actually better for the environment than monocultural farmland. According to the Royal Horticultural Society, ‘gardens are England’s most important nature reserve’, but we are building all over them in order to save green fields which are farmed to promote one species at the expense of all others.
How many suburbs — composed of exactly the kind of green, low-density housing that is best for the environment and preferred by the public — have been despoiled in recent years by infill developments? Instead of building outwards and creating new suburbs we have presided over the eradication of acre after acre of allotments, playing fields and large gardens in existing suburbs. It’s a safe bet that those suburbanites who owned the land that was bought by developers didn’t hang around. Their windfalls were probably invested in country estates or Tuscan villas.
Our Soviet-style planning system has meant that the standard of architectural design has also suffered. We are confronted with the rotten fruits of postwar social housing every day, but a system that constrains supply is also one that discourages design and innovation. Such is the level of unsatisfied demand for housing that whatever is built sells. Design comes a distant second to the pure physical fact of having a place in which to live. Some of the new developments in the Thames Gateway area — heralded as a major zone for housing growth are little better than prefab rabbit hutches with Legoland features. Not homes for heroes but homes for zeros.
We want to start a debate, to get people to look at the houses and estates they live in and ask themselves Loyd Grossman’s famous question: ‘Who would live in a house like this?’ We live in some of the oldest, pokiest and most expensive homes in the world. It is up to the voters to decide whether they are happy to pay this price, but they at least deserve to know the truth.
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