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No means of financing it? You draw up a plan, which is some consultancy and legal fees. Then you pick out individual groups of plots that you can redevelop first into the final new building form. You only demolish what the city can take at a time. So long as the construction sector is confident that there will be a second, then a third, then a fourth project afterwards, it'll be happy taking the projects one at a time.
That's not financing. Who pays for drawing up the plan, the consultancy and the legal fees?
And even if you get past that stage, who pays for the compulsory purchase?
Financing is money, £ billions of it. That money has to be provided up front. The government doesn't have the money, and the private sector isn't going to invest because they won't see a profit.
You haven't explained about how even one penny of the cost of this is going to be funded.
You're saying it's not just DeepMind and you're right - it's all of the other DeepMind-like high paying companies spread around London, Cambridge and the wider area. If railway electrification was enough to make semi detached houses worth something like 50x normal salaries here, then that's only because it provided links to high paid employment.
Semi detached house prices are not 50x salaries, and, if they were, it makes the prospects of financing what you propose even more unlikely. The compulsory purchase cost would be higher and the profit from redevelopment would be even further into negative territory..
Denser buildings in the centre enable things like shops and restaurants and public transport, which then becomes available to people in the hinterland. Many of these shops and services basically pop up automatically once density grows but are otherwise interchangeable location-wise, like supermarkets.
This is completely wrong. Rampant construction inflation means that we need less new construction and more of making better use of the buildings that we already have. That's also good for green and climate considerations, because it uses much less energy and raw materials.
Back in Victorian times they understood fine well that houses might last 20 years before someone came along and replaced them with flats, when the surrounding area was still booming.
Again this is completely wrong. The Victorians built to last, and their buildings have lasted for more than a century. Almost nobody builds a house to only last for 20 years, especially when construction costs are high.
So you use the existing house as the starting point for a major renovation. The more walls you knock through and rear extensions you rebuild, the less of the original house remains.
Both of these are perceived disadvantages of the UK's property taxes. But on the other hand, they have provided strong incentives to increase housing capacity through extensions and upgrades of existing property, and in a way that is much less disruptive than what you are proposing. It also creates a big and liquid market for small businesses, who are not going to get a look in under your proposal. And it is much easier to extend or upgrade a house than an apartment. In Cambridge it is the 1960s blocks of flats that are the priority for demolition, not the Victorian houses, because they are impossible to adapt for modern needs.
If those perceived disadvantages of the UK's property taxes are regarded as a problem, then the solution is tax reform not CPO.
That's not financing. Who pays for drawing up the plan, the consultancy and the legal fees?
And even if you get past that stage, who pays for the compulsory purchase?
Financing is money, £ billions of it. That money has to be provided up front. The government doesn't have the money, and the private sector isn't going to invest because they won't see a profit.
You haven't explained about how even one penny of the cost of this is going to be funded.
Semi detached house prices are not 50x salaries, and, if they were, it makes the prospects of financing what you propose even more unlikely. The compulsory purchase cost would be higher and the profit from redevelopment would be even further into negative territory..
That's what the area around Cambridge station is already like. Have you ever been to Mill Road or Hills Road?
Most people regard Victorian houses as pretty and modern construction as ugly.
This is completely wrong. Rampant construction inflation means that we need less new construction and more of making better use of the buildings that we already have. That's also good for green and climate considerations, because it uses much less energy and raw materials.
Again this is completely wrong. The Victorians built to last, and their buildings have lasted for more than a century. Almost nobody builds a house to only last for 20 years, especially when construction costs are high.
Both of these are perceived disadvantages of the UK's property taxes. But on the other hand, they have provided strong incentives to increase housing capacity through extensions and upgrades of existing property, and in a way that is much less disruptive than what you are proposing. It also creates a big and liquid market for small businesses, who are not going to get a look in under your proposal. And it is much easier to extend or upgrade a house than an apartment. In Cambridge it is the 1960s blocks of flats that are the priority for demolition, not the Victorian houses, because they are impossible to adapt for modern needs.
If those perceived disadvantages of the UK's property taxes are regarded as a problem, then the solution is tax reform not CPO.
The financing isn't hard. It's actually the easiest part. Investors want opportunities to park their capital. Pension funds more than anyone else are looking for things to get a good, solid return on. They can't and don't want to put everything in the stock market, so they are already major investors in the relatively few large commercial residential projects which come up in the UK.
Councils already spend money on coming up with planning documents that are meant to set the parameters for any planning applications. The general principle is that planning applications are approved if they meet the requirements of these documents. It's not always as smooth as that, but that's the general idea. The only problem is that these council planning policy documents are deliberately conservative. They'll make a big song and dance about new development on an old hospital or factory site, but not much else.
The money to pay for a deeper, better plan comes from the future tax revenues generated by the development. When you flatten a street of semis and replace them with flats, you end up generating more council tax. You can work out how much more council tax they'll generate, and/or how much it'll allow the council to save money. Councils can and do spend borrowed money on investments like new, unified council buildings. It's just that they need to show a rate of return, like when they sell up old unloved council office sites to housing developers. The difficulty we're facing is that these easy wins have all generally been developed already. There may be sites left but the developers do now point out that they're unviable unless the council coughs up as well, so they don't get built.
The reason none of this happens today is that no private investor is interested in paying architects to come up with plans that will never be approved by planners. Since a complete rebuild of the Cambridge suburbs isn't in the planning docs, no one is going to spend a single penny on the idea. The knowledge that your plans won't be approved causes huge behaviour changes all the way down the pipeline. If it were clearer that semis could be knocked down and replaced with flats, then investors would be more interested in buying them (or options on them) up when they do naturally come on the market. Housing policy works over decades but so do investors. So long as you can rent it out in the meantime, it's not irrational to buy up houses with a plan to assemble larger development parcels yourself without CPO. It may take 30-40 years but eventually you'll manage to own them.
Ultimately the money for all of this, planning and constructing, comes from the people who will then live and work in Cambridge or anywhere else. If you're allowing more people to live there, and for there to be more jobs and opportunities, then you have more ability to pay. If you've got a solid, workable plan with state backing then you can go to the bond and gilt markets and get upfront funding for these projects. It's just bread and butter investing. Investors pour millions into companies who want to install a new stamping machine at their factory because someone has done the sums and it looks like it'll be profitable in the long term. Investors are happy to pour billions into new aircraft, or data centres, or just into company stocks and shares. None of this is new or exciting. The only thing which is renewed is the attitude that we can enhance our built environment and produce more wealth.
Again, the plans can be for decades. The private sector likes solid, workable long term plans. Individual home purchasers like knowing that something good will happen eventually. If you're designing a Cambridge Metro, then you can sketch out main route corridors that you don't expect to fully build out for decades. So long as these are credible plans, the private sector will work with you to align their plans alongside. In Edinburgh, all of the new flats in Granton have been built around the plans for the tram. The flats may come before the tram but the flats were designed to accommodate the tram later. People bought these flats on the understanding that some day, there'll be a tram outside. All of the big successful redevelopment projects in London have been the same. Battersea Power Station was planned alongside the Northern line extension, and Barking Riverside was designed around the Overground. There are buildings in central London which have had foundations designed around Crossrail since the 90s. The built environment doesn't change rapidly so these plans very rarely go to waste.
The reason you CPO is that you've worked out that it's the most profitable option available. If private investors have negotiated to buy up 9 of the 10 houses that need to be demolished, but the owner of one of them is being intransigent, then that's when you bring out the CPO cannon. The alternative is that the project can't go ahead, and that costs everyone. I'm thinking of a street widening project so that we can have cycle and bus lanes. If one owner refuses, then there's not much point widening the rest of the street if there's still a bottleneck. CPO exists as a tool to balance the needs of wider society against the needs of the private individual. It's perfectly legal. And unlike when we use it to build HS2 or a motorway, there's no real concern that the project will destroy the value of the asset the state just bought. If we're widening a street to put in nice trees and bus lanes and so on, then building nice new blocks of flats on the new property line, then the total value at the end will be higher. All pro-urban developments end up this way. The sites CPOed to build Crossrail are now worth a lot, lot more.
A £2m semi is 50x a £40k salary like you'd expect from a teacher. We have a biblical housing shortage which means that everyday workers are increasingly unable to live or even work in various parts of the UK. It's fine for some areas to be posh and expensive, but it's basically the whole of Cambridge which is like this now. It doesn't work. You need homes that are affordable for cleaners and supermarket workers and for those people who need help. Social housing is falling apart because councils don't give social housing free reign to ignore planning requirements, and the amount that governments are willing to pay for social housing is no longer enough to cover the cost of building and maintaining it. In essence, anything less than it being possible for a single minimum wage worker to afford a 3 bedroom flat represents a failure of housing provision. If you haven't reached this point, then all you can do is rob Peter to pay Paul, and that doesn't work. By making housing that available and affordable, you don't have any difficult conversations about taxing and spending any more. We can get there but it requires mass production to lower costs, just like how we've made cars so cheap. You'll never be able to give everyone a Rolls Royce but a modern day Dacia has more features than a Phantom did 20 years ago.
You cannot solve construction inflation by cutting back on construction, I'm sorry. This is an absurd idea. If nothing else, you cannot opt out of needing to do construction. Construction and maintenance are one and the same thing. Build costs are going up but so are the costs of maintaining what we already have. The same construction sector is used to build things we absolutely do need, like schools and hospitals. And our requirements for the built environment are changing, whether we like them or not. Retrofitting level access to existing buildings is construction, and we need level access for our aging population. We need to think about air conditioning to handle heatwaves like the one in England right now. The climate emergency means that existing housing no longer works as well because the climate it was designed for is gone. We need to use the construction sector to solve our sewage and flooding problems, and to enable lower carbon sources of electricity and heat.
Resisting change to our urban environment is deeply problematic for social reasons, because buildings represent a snapshot of society at the time they were built. Demanding that we keep buildings from 1926 around in largely unchanged form means demanding that life works like it did back in 1926. One clear and real and very serious example of this is that we now have widespread divorce and split families. Instead of needing one family house for every 2 adults, we're in many cases needing a full family house for every 1 adult, for the kids split their time between their mum's and their dad's. Staying in 1926 means families cannot afford to divorce because there simply aren't enough houses for the parents to live apart. You can say that this is a good idea if it limits divorce but you're going to have a bit of a difficult time justifying it to the electorate: only rich people get to divorce; poor women just have to put up and shut up because some boomers decided they don't like new houses being built and don't care that they get beaten at home. Disabled people now get to live life in a respectable home environment, which means we need a lot of adaptable and adapted homes. In 1926, disabled children were left to die, or rotted away in residential homes. Do you want that? No. So why do you want the built environment to reflect a society which didn't care about the rights of the disabled?
Victorian houses lasted because they weren't cutting corners to the same extent that builders are today. Our stupid planning policies mean that most of the budget people have for housing has to go on bureaucracy and satisfying the unsatisfiable. That new build estate on the outside of town is only affordable because the cost of transport is shifted out of the housing cost and onto the need for you to sign up for a PCP deal, as without a car you're completely stuck. Builders are in the business of building homes so they've tried to fix this by cheaping out and building houses which are worse every year. They're smaller and they're fundamentally less suitable for the long term. Timber frames just don't make sense in flats yet that's all the builders can now afford to put up.
If we took redevelopment seriously we could build up supply chains to build proper buildings again which will last. We won't build them out of bricks and massive lumps of wood, but we do have solid options. Most flats would be best off built like commercial buildings with concrete cores and floors, and more disposable wooden interiors for each individual flat. If you're designing for the long term you can justify putting up a core structure that will last 100 years or more, and allow the building core to be reused even if the use changes: like an office building.
We've already built most of the housing extensions we can. This is a real problem. In places like London, people are already maximising what they can do on their houses. The result is an absurd situation where a street of semis is increasingly becoming a terrace but without ever being able to start again to produce a coherent design. Once everyone has a side extension and a roof dormer and so on, and have paved over the grass at the front to provide parking, then you don't have a nice quaint suburban street any more. It's fine for one or two properties along a street to add an extension or two but once all of them have done it, it's a clear sign that the entire street is ripe for redevelopment. Otherwise, we spend an awful lot of time and money as a society doing lots of one-off extension jobs on houses which were deliberately copies of one another. The housebuilders of 1926 were not daft and they understood how to get economies of scale when building. We've just managed to un-learn that over the last century, to our cost.
Tax reform is necessary but the result of that tax reform will always be to push the balance even further in favour of redevelopment.
Small businesses have their job building bungalows on farmland. Large businesses can build the flats in the city centre. Everyone is happy, everyone gets to do what they want. Nothing complex about this.
This is like describing how capitalism works to someone in Moscow in 1950. It's maddening.
No the financing is hard, because investors don't just "park capital". Investors are seeking a financial return, either income or capital gain, or a mixture of both, also taking into consideration their appetite for risk. None are going to invest in a project that has no prospect of providing either income or capital growth, they will find other places to invest that actually meet their financial objectives. I studied economics and worked in the field of economics for 30 years: if you can't convince me of the financial viability of your project, then you are not going to be able to convince large scale investors either.
Pension funds more than anyone else are looking for things to get a good, solid return on. They can't and don't want to put everything in the stock market, so they are already major investors in the relatively few large commercial residential projects which come up in the UK.
This project does not provide a good solid return for pension funds, unlike commercial property. A pension fund had long term liabilities, which are the future pension payments to its members. Pension funds are increasingly moving into commercial property, because it provides a consistent long term income stream in the form of rents. Any residential component is usually a result of planning restrictions, without that planning input the developments would be 100% commercial. And where that involves demolition, it is usually on sites that were previously retail or industrial, or existing office blocks with low rental yield because they are no longer fit for purpose. Either way, that makes the site relatively cheap to acquire.
No it doesn't. The costs of the plan are up front, but, as you say, the potential tax revenues are in the future, a long way into the future. That gap has to be funded by borrowing, with an interest cost of 4-5% per annum. Furthermore, it starts by actually reducing the supply of houses, not increasing it, with huge consequential damage, including to tax revenues.
£2m semis in Cambridge are a figment of your imagination. There are a few £2m houses in Cambridge, but most of them are not semis, most of them are not in central Cambridge, and they are not lived in by teachers. There are still plenty of houses in Cambridge at less than £1 million, within range of couples on £40-50k salaries. Furthermore this wild exaggeration about Cambridge property prices makes the prospect of you project leading to anything other than a huge financial loss even more inevitable.
The reason you CPO is that you've worked out that it's the most profitable option available. If private investors have negotiated to buy up 9 of the 10 houses that need to be demolished, but the owner of one of them is being intransigent, then that's when you bring out the CPO cannon.
Turnover of properties is low. Lots of people live in the same house for half a century, and may then pass it onto their children without it ever reaching the open market. It would take a very long time to acquire 90% of properties, there is no prospect of assembling sites that are large enough quickly. There will be a few opportunities to do this in Cambridge, though not many, and the development corporation, if it goes ahead, will have the powers to do it.
Construction and maintenance are one and the same thing. Build costs are going up but so are the costs of maintaining what we already have. The same construction sector is used to build things we absolutely do need, like schools and hospitals.
No they are not the same thing, because they are done by different businesses, with different cost bases. In particular, businesses doing maintenance and extensions are predominantly self employed, and the capacity they provide cannot easily be transferred to larger projects.
I know how capitalism works thankyou, I studied it at university and worked in it for 30 years. Why you are finding this maddening is that your proposal has been comprehensively dismantled, by someone who knows what they are talking about, because it is based on a multitude of misconceptions, misunderstandings and contradictions, that I have set out in various responses above.
I haven't been to Moscow, but I have been to East Berlin, and seen their 1950s apartment blocks. If one of us is thinking like someone in Moscow in 1950, then it is you not me.
To end on a more positive note, hidden in all of this is an idea worth pursuing. Turning the question on its head, what is the way to develop a financial vehicle that encourages institutions like pension funds to invest in residential property?
The answer to that question needs to start where it has most chance of success, with land acquired cheaply and medium density apartments built for rent, not home ownership, giving the pension funds the stable long term income stream that will pay their future pension liabilities. The place to try that is new developments in places like Tempsford or Cambourne, not the middle of Cambridge.
No the financing is hard, because investors don't just "park capital". Investors are seeking a financial return, either income or capital gain, or a mixture of both, also taking into consideration their appetite for risk. None are going to invest in a project that has no prospect of providing either income or capital growth, they will find other places to invest that actually meet their financial objectives. I studied economics and worked in the field of economics for 30 years: if you can't convince me of the financial viability of your project, then you are not going to be able to convince large scale investors either.
This project does not provide a good solid return for pension funds, unlike commercial property. A pension fund had long term liabilities, which are the future pension payments to its members. Pension funds are increasingly moving into commercial property, because it provides a consistent long term income stream in the form of rents. Any residential component is usually a result of planning restrictions, without that planning input the developments would be 100% commercial. And where that involves demolition, it is usually on sites that were previously retail or industrial, or existing office blocks with low rental yield because they are no longer fit for purpose. Either way, that makes the site relatively cheap to acquire.
No it doesn't. The costs of the plan are up front, but, as you say, the potential tax revenues are in the future, a long way into the future. That gap has to be funded by borrowing, with an interest cost of 4-5% per annum. Furthermore, it starts by actually reducing the supply of houses, not increasing it, with huge consequential damage, including to tax revenues.
£2m semis in Cambridge are a figment of your imagination. There are a few £2m houses in Cambridge, but most of them are not semis, most of them are not in central Cambridge, and they are not lived in by teachers. There are still plenty of houses in Cambridge at less than £1 million, within range of couples on £40-50k salaries. Furthermore this wild exaggeration about Cambridge property prices makes the prospect of you project leading to anything other than a huge financial loss even more inevitable.
Turnover of properties is low. Lots of people live in the same house for half a century, and may then pass it onto their children without it ever reaching the open market. It would take a very long time to acquire 90% of properties, there is no prospect of assembling sites that are large enough quickly. There will be a few opportunities to do this in Cambridge, though not many, and the development corporation, if it goes ahead, will have the powers to do it.
No they are not the same thing, because they are done by different businesses, with different cost bases. In particular, businesses doing maintenance and extensions are predominantly self employed, and the capacity they provide cannot easily be transferred to larger projects.
I know how capitalism works thankyou, I studied it at university and worked in it for 30 years. Why you are finding this maddening is that your proposal has been comprehensively dismantled, by someone who knows what they are talking about, because it is based on a multitude of misconceptions, misunderstandings and contradictions, that I have set out in various responses above.
I haven't been to Moscow, but I have been to East Berlin, and seen their 1950s apartment blocks. If one of us is thinking like someone in Moscow in 1950, then it is you not me.
To end on a more positive note, hidden in all of this is an idea worth pursuing. Turning the question on its head, what is the way to develop a financial vehicle that encourages institutions like pension funds to invest in residential property?
The answer to that question needs to start where it has most chance of success, with land acquired cheaply and medium density apartments built for rent, not home ownership, giving the pension funds the stable long term income stream that will pay their future pension liabilities. The place to try that is new developments in places like Tempsford or Cambourne, not the middle of Cambridge.
What you're claiming is that there is just not enough demand for housing in Cambridge for it to be worth replacing 2 storey houses with 6 storey flats. This is not true. If the demand exists for flats or indeed any new housing in new towns like Tempsford or Cambourne, then the demand exists for flats in Cambridge itself. If you can sell semi detached houses for £2m then you can sell many more homes for £1m, and many more homes than that for £500k, and many, many more than that for £250k.
The only reason they aren't being built today is that our planning system operates on the luxury belief that the status quo in owner-occupied areas is absolutely optimal. We back this up by having chosen to have tax systems that penalise people for moving home, and don't provide any feedback mechanism against supply shortage-induced house price increases. These political decisions have always been a disaster and have gotten quite a lot of society into an almighty mess. We cannot fix our societal mess without revisiting both of these political decisions. The power to do so lies at UK government and Parliament level, while local vetos only exist because we have created them in laws tha we can change.
The test of whether housing policy is working is whether normal people who work clearly socially useful and necessary jobs are able to live somewhere. Can a couple made up of a firefighter and a nurse (swap in Playmobil career roles as appropriate) buy a home to raise a family? The critical time for family formation is age 25-30, and pretty much as soon as they buy a home one of them will end up on parental leave for possibly 5 years. So, in practice, you need to be able to fund the whole house on just one income. This is a good rule of thumb to allow for lifestyle. People don't want to spend every last penny they have on housing costs; they want holidays etc too in future. If you can afford the house on one income, then the second parent returning to work is more of a lifestyle decision rather than a brutal economic necessity; noting that childcare costs often wipe out most of their post-tax income anyway.
Social housing and redistributive measures like free childcare are critical but they cannot create houses out of nowhere. All they can do is reallocate. They have only ever really worked when there has been a significant surplus of the thing in the first place. Otherwise as I said previously, you end up robbing Peter to pay Paul. There is some unhappiness right now that working families like your firefighter+nurse might not earn little enough to qualify for various things, and so homes end up going to people they perceive deserve it less (like the unemployed or foreign/refugee groups). Housing shortages are socially destructive and society must avoid them at all costs if it is to survive and thrive.
The mechanism by which that firefighter+nurse couple might be able to buy today is inheritance. This is not a good solution. Fundamentally, any system that depends on older and wealthier people giving up their wealth (either voluntarily through gifts, or by the cold embrace of death) is not compatible with modern expectations of quality of life. No one is guaranteed an inheritance and we tax inheritance for that reason. Some people are genuinely unlucky. If you're a bright young thing who grows up to surpass the economic background of your parents, then you won't have an inheritance. Why should you be penalised because you don't have rich parents? And it's also a brutal way of punishing people for the crime of having multiple siblings and cousins. If you're the sole child of two parents and four grandparents, then inheritance means you get a windfall. If you are one of many, then the money you get is split between them. If the number of children and grandchildren is too high, then it's all diluted away. And, of course, if your grandparents or parents are unlucky enough to live long into dementia, then all of that wealth will be taken away and used to fund their social care until death.
Very seriously, any system that depends whatsoever on inheritance is putting society on a powderkeg that will eventually blow up. You cannot justify any system that means there is an individual, rational reward for senicide or fratricide. A system that means old people understand the best gift they could give their children is to go on a one way trip to Switzerland is not defensible. Society has only been able to stabilise on the promise that the world can get better and you can be better off than your parents were.
In the same plans that set out that inner suburbs should be densified, you also lay out plans for expansion into surrounding farmland. There is nothing controversial or difficult about this. The plans reinforce one another. The extra supply created by the totally new housing helps to provide a buffer to allow redevelopment in the centre. The plans to redevelop in the centre make it easier to justify building out in the outskirts. You can build better housing in the outskirts on the farmer's field if they are part of a plan to improve transport in the inner suburbs. If the inner suburban radial road leading to your new estate is going to be widened to provide dedicated bus lanes, then you know that bus journey times will be reduced. A farmer's field is much more useful for housing if you know it'll be a 30 minute bus ride away rather than a 45 minute ride. People are much more willing to invest their own money in these houses if they know they will be attractive in future. It might take a few years or decades but if the plans are trusted, they will work out. Just as all those flats in Leith and Granton got to be built on the promise of the Edinburgh Tram. No trusted tram plans would have meant less housing being built. And, of course, this inner suburban densification also means more offices and jobs.
None of this is profoundly interesting. It is the normal story of urban development that Britain and all other industrialised countries went through. It's just that in our case, just after WW2 we went about blowing up the planning system on an expectation that the population would decrease forever. People have basically lived their entire lives with our planning system, and assume it's some sort of rule of the universe. It is not. The UK has some of the strictest planning rules in the world. In normal countries, planning rules are far less strict and the result is generally far better. It doesn't mean you need to have a free-for-all but the principle in most countries is that normal people are allowed to just buy some land and use it to build a house. It is not normal that all development is legally forbidden unless expressly, individually given permission by some local bureaucrat. The UK essentially has a Soviet style centrally planned economy for housing and urban development, but without any actual central planning! The Soviet system was a failure but at the very least there was an understanding at the top level of the Soviet government that it actually was necessary to plan and deliver factories and new apartment blocks and the like. The UK system means that e.g. one arm of the government plans that it'll allow X number of people to move to the UK yet other arms declare that there will be 0 new housing built at the same time. If you want central planning you have to link the two up. We don't link anything up. If you don't want to link things up, then you have to loosen restrictions and allow individuals to make decisions for themselves. The only practical and legal reason that a council in Cambridge is allowed to say no to your house is because the central government expressly allows them to do so as part of its national housing policy, for which it is ultimately responsible.
And again, the bricks and mortar you're spending so much time defending are slowly falling apart, and are deeply unsuitable for the 21st century. I take it even you aren't interested in defending them for the point I made about accessibility. Today of all days, I'm sure you're able to understand the impact that the lack of air conditioning is having on them. Air conditioning can be neatly integrated into properties when they're built or deeply retrofitted. At this point, clinging onto 19th century buildings because we don't like change is just going to mean a lot of AC condensers will pop up like barnacles. The climate emergency means that life is changing whether you like it or not. If we want to keep the place looking like a heritage museum, then it is only rational that we stop people living there who might rely on AC for their health and wellbeing. AC is not a luxury because for the elderly and infirm, high temperatures are regularly a death sentence. Societal plans that deny the opportunity to install efficient AC are an egregious violation of their right to life. Efficient AC cannot be retrofitted to Victorian buildings which were designed for the climate of 1876 without ruining the aesthetics which seemingly justify their preservation in the first place.
The construction sector absolutely is shared between construction and maintenance. I'm sorry, but someone who claims to know this much about economics must understand this, no? The sector as a whole might be divided between small and large firms, but all of them are made up of people and skills. The sector is everything up to and including the 16 year old starting at college on an apprenticeship. Or, as is increasingly the problem, a 16 year old needing to chose another job entirely because construction wages aren't able to keep up because of their low productivity. Traditional building maintenance economics are already collapsing because very few 18 year olds are learning the traditional methods like slate and lime pointed brick. They're just not able to compete with modern approaches, so prospective apprentices are voting with their feet. The only saving grace is the sliver of listed buildings and grants which prop up traditional maintenance techniques but there are far more traditional buildings around than we can afford to maintain. That is, without wiping out the traditional things that make them desirable. Do we want to replace lots of slate roofs with concrete tiles? No. But that's how building economics have been pushing their owners for decades now. How worthwhile is it to keep a traditional building for aesthetics if even conservation area planning officers are giving up on enforcing rules on uPVC windows.
The way you make any economic activity scalable and able to produce wealth is by automating and standardising it. Anything we produce on a production line has been getting cheaper. We have decided to de-industrialise most housebuilding and maintenance by implementing destructive central anti-planning on it. If you want housing to be cheap, you have to build it factories. You can knock down an old Victorian house where nothing is quite square and replace it with one where every wall and floor panel has come perfectly formed from a factory and just bolted together on site. A deep retrofit might take months but a full demolition and rebuild with new modular components (like a Huf Haus) might be over in weeks. When we've got such a shortage of housing to begin with, the reduced time taken to get back to a habitable structure may end up being the most important cost saving of them all. Once you're already having to demolish as part of a standardised process (remember the whole street was built by the same people at the same time with the same faulty materials etc) you've already crossed the social disruption rubicon. Building bigger is the way that you can get the process to be worth our time and money, rather than putting something back which is no better than we had before.
What you're claiming is that there is just not enough demand for housing in Cambridge for it to be worth replacing 2 storey houses with 6 storey flats.
much of the existing stock in Cambridge is already mid-density, especially that in prime locations, so demolition and rebuild does not increase supply very much, if at all
prices of mid-density 2 storey Victorian terrace houses are sky high because most people prefer mid-density communities to be Victorian terraces not apartment blocks
buying at sky high prices, then incurring the costs of demolition and reconstruction, plus the financing costs, and delivering a product that will sell for less, mean that the financial loss would be substantial
demolition would reduce housing supply in the short term, and cause significant harm to the local economy
The reason that it is not worthwhile to replace 2 storey houses with 6 storey apartments is not lack of demand, it is because the financial losses would be massive, and the collateral damage to the local economy would be too great.
There is lots of demand for housing in Greater Cambridge, and it will be met by building on brownfield and greenfield land, as set out in the Greater Cambridge draft local plan, then enhanced by the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation (assuming it goes ahead), which will have compulsory purchase powers.
That is something that we can agree on, it is how the Victorian terraces were built. But the place to do it is on the brownfield and greenfield sites. It doesn't need compulsory purchase or demolition. All it needs is a building programme that's big enough, such as Cambourne and/or Tempsford.
I'm writing this in the middle of a red alert heatwave, with today's unsurprising news that our rivers are running low:
Only two rivers in East Anglia are rated as having "normal" flows.
www.bbc.co.uk
Five rivers have been recorded as having "exceptionally low" levels, sparking concern for wildlife and the future health of these habitats.
A recent Environment Agency report found the rivers Yare, Bure, Wissey, Ely Ouse, Waveney and Wissey, which flow through parts of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, were all at "exceptionally low" levels.
Only two waterways in East Anglia - the Heacham and Burn in west Norfolk - have normal flows following a period of prolonged dry weather.
Whatever the merits of different housebuilding policies, housing growth in Greater Cambridge is limited by the water constraint. For at least 10 years, until the Fens Reservoir is built and filled (not sure where that water comes from for that), it will be impossible to go any faster than what is in the draft local plan anyway.
And, if East West Rail goes ahead, them the area around Cambridge station will have two major construction projects in the next 10 years on the go too, the new east side station entrance and the redevelopment of Clifton Road. There won't be major demolition of much else in the station area until that is done.
So we can safely stuff this proposal into the back of the filing cabinet to gather dust.
To end on a more positive note, hidden in all of this is an idea worth pursuing. Turning the question on its head, what is the way to develop a financial vehicle that encourages institutions like pension funds to invest in residential property?
Are there any tax breaks which could be implemented to encourage residential development by pension funds?
(Kind of inspired by the "Gordon Brown went on a pension fund tax raid" story that I've heard a few times but don't know the details of as it's from around the time I was born... Basically is it possible to reverse whatever may have happened then?)
Are there any tax breaks which could be implemented to encourage residential development by pension funds?
(Kind of inspired by the "Gordon Brown went on a pension fund tax raid" story that I've heard a few times but don't know the details of as it's from around the time I was born... Basically is it possible to reverse whatever may have happened then?)
Pension funds used to be able to reclaim a tax credit on dividends.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a lack of money for residential housing, the inflation of house prices would suggest there’s plenty gone in. It’s how to turn it into more properties rather than more expensive ones.
much of the existing stock in Cambridge is already mid-density, especially that in prime locations, so demolition and rebuild does not increase supply very much, if at all
prices of mid-density 2 storey Victorian terrace houses are sky high because most people prefer mid-density communities to be Victorian terraces not apartment blocks
buying at sky high prices, then incurring the costs of demolition and reconstruction, plus the financing costs, and delivering a product that will sell for less, mean that the financial loss would be substantial
demolition would reduce housing supply in the short term, and cause significant harm to the local economy
The reason that it is not worthwhile to replace 2 storey houses with 6 storey apartments is not lack of demand, it is because the financial losses would be massive, and the collateral damage to the local economy would be too great.
There is lots of demand for housing in Greater Cambridge, and it will be met by building on brownfield and greenfield land, as set out in the Greater Cambridge draft local plan, then enhanced by the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation (assuming it goes ahead), which will have compulsory purchase powers.
That is something that we can agree on, it is how the Victorian terraces were built. But the place to do it is on the brownfield and greenfield sites. It doesn't need compulsory purchase or demolition. All it needs is a building programme that's big enough, such as Cambourne and/or Tempsford.
I'm writing this in the middle of a red alert heatwave, with today's unsurprising news that our rivers are running low:
Only two rivers in East Anglia are rated as having "normal" flows.
www.bbc.co.uk
Whatever the merits of different housebuilding policies, housing growth in Greater Cambridge is limited by the water constraint. For at least 10 years, until the Fens Reservoir is built and filled (not sure where that water comes from for that), it will be impossible to go any faster than what is in the draft local plan anyway.
And, if East West Rail goes ahead, them the area around Cambridge station will have two major construction projects in the next 10 years on the go too, the new east side station entrance and the redevelopment of Clifton Road. There won't be major demolition of much else in the station area until that is done.
So we can safely stuff this proposal into the back of the filing cabinet to gather dust.
Demand is sky high because cities are what generate economic growth and opportunity for individuals. Whatever job you have, the best version of that job and lifestyle should exist in a city. Even if you're just a cleaner, the quality of life that you can achieve in a city is far higher than you can anywhere else. From an economic perspective, basically all jobs are more efficient in a city because of density and competition. A cleaner in London could earn more because people are willing to pay more, and because there are more clients all within one shift's range of travel. As a cleaner, you could very easily spend a whole 8 hour overnight shift cleaning one large office building with many floors. Those 8 hours of solid work just don't exist to the same extent in smaller towns; there may be 8 hours of work but it'll be in places that aren't willing to pay as well. And once you're done at work, you have the highest quality leisure options and, in principle at least, the best possible schools for your kids to attend.
This applies to cleaners and and applies to everyone else as well. When people are rationally considering their options on where to live, for most people who are actively trying to earn money they would rather live in a city. The reason they don't is mostly because of lack of supply making it impossible for them to do so. Quite frankly, the only reason that people are interested in buying in towns like Cambourne is that they are priced out of Cambridge itself. Otherwise, why bother? If you just want a suburban noddy house you could live further away and save even more money. There are plenty of places with very similar natural environments which are even more affordable and the houses already exist. And if the answer is not Cambridge itself but the wider infrastructure like the ability to travel on the M11, then you've just proven the point. You need the infrastructure that only the city of Cambridge justifies, even if you don't plan to go into the city itself. Lots of people say they don't want to live in a city but they are perfectly happy to piggyback on things that only the dense city actually can enable. Rural Oxfordshire is lovely but the reason rich people want to live there is that they're a short drive down the M40 from Heathrow and London in general. The exact same quality of countryside is available in plenty of other areas but they are uninterested.
The mid 20th century was a low point for cities since they were dirty from coal industrialisation. Lack of transport and infrastructure options did mean that industrial activities that aren't really suitable for close proximity to people (e.g. tanneries, chemical processing) had been built there. But slowly once we got rid of these and/or moved them out to the countryside (e.g. big new coal power stations like Drax using the national grid to power a city) the cities stopped being dirty. The good parts of cities became uncovered again.
Unfortunately though, most cities got very stuck. The desirable residential bits generally didn't have major redevelopment, and so the Victorian buildings got to stick around and mature. If nothing else, the trees the Victorian housebuilders planted in the gardens as saplings ended up growing to be mature. They ended up looking permanent, as if they were always meant to be there. The incredibly poor quality of new housebuilding (in part caused by our terrible planning system) just reinforced this. And so, we're now in this state where people think the natural order of things is that cities are made up of Victorian houses. The aesthetics - fine - but the actual brick and mortar? It's comical. The Victorians did put up nice facades but covering structures they didn't really care much about. Almost all of the elements people like are industrial products. The cornicing? Made in a factory. But if you asked most people, they'd think that their own Victorian semi had been perfectly crafted by master builders as if it were Buckingham Palace, and so is deserving of protection. Most people don't realise that the lovely slow grown pine wood doors and skirtings and facings that they like to expose when they redo a place were actually the cheap option. The really posh people had other wood that the middle classes couldn't afford, so the builders just added varnish to make the pine look like it. We are, in essence, getting very enthusiastic about the old equivalent of a Barratt or Taylor Wimpey "executive" home with painted MDF skirtings and optional factory-made oak doors.
The existing housing stock in Cambridge is not as medium or high density as you think. It might be dense for a rural area in England but it is objectively not dense compared to other cities. Again, Cambridge and its economic opportunities put it in the same density tier as cities like London and Edinburgh, not a local market town in the Fens. The fact that anyone is talking about it proves this point. And overall density figures also ignore the accessibility and quality problem. You can have high population density by having a lot of incredibly small terraced houses, like you see as railway terraces around England. These tiny terraces are fundamentally incapable of being modernised with better insulation and accessibility, because they were designed to minimise cost back when they were built. You take away a few cm for internal or external insulation and the whole thing stops working. Even if you're trying to keep density the same, you still need to have a plan to replace these with more suitable accommodation. Mansion blocks or tenements provide the opportunity to retain a terrace style exterior while enabling homes to spread horizontally across a floor, and be stacked on top of each other with lifts and suitable stairwells.
And again, all you really need to prove this point is to release the planning restrictions and implement tax policies which discourage wasted land. If those £2m semis really are the best possible land use, then these policy changes would have no effect other than to confirm your thesis. But the extreme opposition that we see against proposals to change these planning and tax policies suggests that the opposite is true. If we removed the legal restrictions and fixed the tax system, then these properties would end up worth only what they are as redevelopment sites. People will react rationally in most cases and will sell up if it means they can make some money, or avoid the disruption of having the rest of the houses on the street redeveloped around them.
CPO is just what speeds up the inevitable and makes it straightforward for the railway or other infrastructure managers to work today. Knock down the houses next to the railway so you can build the station upgrade this year and not in 10 years once people have been worn down.
You're talking about plans for reservoirs as if they invalidate what we can be doing today. This is nonsense. Reservoirs and water infrastructure is just like the railway in that it's planned for decades and influences everything else. The same power and willingness to overturn local opposition to housebuilding is what you need for reservoirs as well. All of this development is all or nothing, in the end. Either you're progressing society or you're not, as it's extremely hard to pick and choose which bits are worthy even when some things clearly need it. This is a lot of the air conditioning problem. You can't magically and efficiently deliver air conditioning capability for the specific days and the specific people who need it to survive heatwaves without basically making it a widespread technology that people will turn on whenever they feel like it. We see this problem all the time, especially when it comes to developing countries. Plenty of people seem to think that it's perfectly possible to deliver shiny medicine cold chains for vaccines and the like to rural mud hut communities, without all that nastiness of an industrial revolution and increased energy use. Meanwhile, countries like China get to achieve rural healthcare because they are unrepentant about following through the entire industrial revolution including massive coal plant use.
In Victorian England and in China, they wouldn't hesitate a moment about digging massive new irrigation canals and desalination plants to provide more fresh water, if they had the technology. We need this same sort of bold thinking now if we're going to survive the climate emergency. The fact that it's new and disruptive and not in keeping with the historic way in which we did things (where historic = what boomers lived through) is irrelevant when we have greater societal needs.
Demand is sky high because cities are what generate economic growth and opportunity for individuals. Whatever job you have, the best version of that job and lifestyle should exist in a city. Even if you're just a cleaner, the quality of life that you can achieve in a city is far higher than you can anywhere else. From an economic perspective, basically all jobs are more efficient in a city because of density and competition. A cleaner in London could earn more because people are willing to pay more, and because there are more clients all within one shift's range of travel. As a cleaner, you could very easily spend a whole 8 hour overnight shift cleaning one large office building with many floors. Those 8 hours of solid work just don't exist to the same extent in smaller towns; there may be 8 hours of work but it'll be in places that aren't willing to pay as well. And once you're done at work, you have the highest quality leisure options and, in principle at least, the best possible schools for your kids to attend.
I’ve been wondering for a while why I’ve been so repelled by your description of what good is like, and this summarises it.
It is a purely economic definition of well being, lack any other concept of quality of life and treating economic output as the only value worth considering. In dismissing “1926 semis” it then adds insult to injury by presuming that only one type of accommodation can be of value, and then presumes to bend all policy to that end.
It’s a vision of hell, not paradise. It tears up communities in favour of economic units, placing output above all else.
It is also flawed in its own right. Part of the problem of cities like London is that the centres are over developed, and struggle for capacity to move people around. Not because public transport is deficient, but simply through lack of physical space to move in busy places.
This policy of concentration doubles down on that, removing the positive aspects of cities and leaving the least human ones.
As such, it is a demonstration of why CPO powers should be limited in their scope, and why democracy for all its flaws is a great deal better than handing everything over to experts in a specific field.
Are there any tax breaks which could be implemented to encourage residential development by pension funds?
(Kind of inspired by the "Gordon Brown went on a pension fund tax raid" story that I've heard a few times but don't know the details of as it's from around the time I was born... Basically is it possible to reverse whatever may have happened then?)
The planning system is the main restriction on residential development. There is no amount of tax break fiddling you can do to fix it. If the law of the land is that only a very small number of new houses can be built, then it doesn't matter how much money you can pour in. There's only a business in housebuilding if you're willing to do it forever. The car industry keeps going because cars eventually get scrapped but the development policy we have in the UK essentially assumes that houses can and should last forever. At current rate of demolition, we will have Victorian houses kicking around in 2000 years. The land underneath a house retains its value but the bricks and mortar slowly depreciate down to almost nothing. People are only interested in buying Victorian houses because they come with planning approval for a house to exist on that plot; some wealthier people are then willing to basically rebuild the whole thing in order to bring it up to modern standards. If you don't have the cash to rebuild it, then you're left living in what actually economically qualifies as derelict because the cost of keeping it up to modern standards (e.g. of insulation) is more than it is actually worth. Most of the demands for governments to provide grants for home insulation and energy upgrades are actually revealing that our existing housing stock is derelict and uneconomic. Grants are fine to solve small edge case issues but they cannot solve the problem of tens of millions of homes, when they represent almost all of the homes we have in the first place.
Democracy means that we have elections that decide national policy. If a government is elected on a promise to rebuild Cambridge and build new irrigation canals and desalination plants then it is deeply undemocratic for the local gerontocracy to veto it because they're old and they don't like change. As a property owner your only real right is fair compensation. Anything else causes society to grind to a halt.
I’ve been wondering for a while why I’ve been so repelled by your description of what good is like, and this summarises it.
It is a purely economic definition of well being, lack any other concept of quality of life and treating economic output as the only value worth considering. In dismissing “1926 semis” it then adds insult to injury by presuming that only one type of accommodation can be of value, and then presumes to bend all policy to that end.
It’s a vision of hell, not paradise. It tears up communities in favour of economic units, placing output above all else.
Well being is being able to walk through a beautiful urban park on your way to work rather than being stuck behind the wheel, burning money on a car that gives you no joy in life.
Well being is having the spare cash to be able to choose where you want to live. If you want to live in a city, fine. If you would rather live in the countryside, fine. You can use the money you earn in the city to also afford a place in the countryside to retreat to when you feel like it. The only economic system that allows a cleaner to afford a second home is one where they can have a good job in a city where they can do good work using high quality tools that get the work done quickly, safely and without causing them harm (e.g. good quality PPE).
This obsession with preserving 1926 semis is what is obliterating communities. Communities are by and large made up of young families with children. They cannot afford to live in most places where there are jobs. The result is that people are avoiding having children. The need for society to keep going by continuously producing children in happy families that can afford to do nice things is pretty much more important than anything else. Redeveloping 1926 semis is the only way of allowing retirees to continue living in the communities they have for life without forcing them to move in with their own children and grandchildren.
This is the legislative change that would be pored over by everyone. No party with that in their manifesto will get voted in. Try introducing such a government bill without a manifesto pledge and watch the government collapse faster you can say lettuce.
This is the legislative change that would be pored over by everyone. No party with that in their manifesto will get voted in. Try introducing such a government bill without a manifesto pledge and watch the government collapse faster you can say lettuce.
And why is this such a change in the intention of the policy? Councils used to use CPO powers even more. What changed was our political willingness to make alterations to our built environment, not the law itself. But the dam is close to bursting when it comes to all the changes we need to make to our built environment.
At the next election, we can see what happens when the "don't ruin our towns and cities with air conditioning condensers" party has to go up against the "build lots of AC and damn the aesthetics because I'm absolutely fed up of heatwaves" party.
Pretty much every societal problem we have has some root in our unwillingness to alter the built environment over the objections of NIMBYs. Most of the policing problems we have are in some way due to the lack of suitable custodial accommodation. Police aren't interested in catching low level criminals if they know they'll never spend meaningful time behind bars, as there aren't enough prisons. If you're not willing to CPO some land to build some prisons, disregarding the views of local residents in the process, then you can't claim to be tough on crime.
That is what Cambridge has got, lots of it. That's especially the case in the area around the station, which are literally railway terraces, but also in other parts of the city.
These tiny terraces are fundamentally incapable of being modernised with better insulation and accessibility, because they were designed to minimise cost back when they were built. You take away a few cm for internal or external insulation and the whole thing stops working.
Climate change means that Victorian terraces are actually much better suited to keeping cool in summer than apartments. I'm already very hot in my apartment, and it isn't 1100 yet, a 2 storey Victorian terrace will still be nice and cool. And wall insulation actually doesn't matter very much in terraced houses: they only have 2 outside walls, not 3 or 4. At the back is likely to be a modern extension, with insulation included at construction, the front will mainly be double or triple glazed windows. In a terraced house, the only bit of insulation worth doing is the roof.
The existing housing stock in Cambridge is not as medium or high density as you think. It might be dense for a rural area in England but it is objectively not dense compared to other cities. Again, Cambridge and its economic opportunities put it in the same density tier as cities like London and Edinburgh, not a local market town in the Fens.
Whether Cambridge is "objectively dense" or not is irrelevant to the lack of financial viability of your proposal. What matters is the marginal increase in density that can be achieved by demolition and rebuilding. In much of Cambridge that's negligible, because all you can do is replace densely packed 2 storey terraces with 6 storey apartments.
For your proposal to be viable it needs 2 key things, cheap land and a transformative change in density. In Cambridge it has neither, and is therefore a financial basket case.
The issues are more fundamental than tax. What matters is provision of a financial structure that delivers a steady high yield income that helps pension funds to meet their pension payment liabilities. I think that means that a rental income stream is essential, like with commercial property. But residential tenants are very different from commercial tenants, so another organisation is going to need to sit between the pension funds and the residents. That could be a housing association, or a private sector property management company. But I think that the pension funds would need to own the apartment blocks, like they would with an office block, to keep them off the government balance sheet.
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This is not correct, especially since local authority housing targets were reintroduced, requiring those local authorities to allocate enough sites for development in their local plans, and to meet targets for granting planning permissions that are compliant with the local plans.
Currently the main restriction is financial viability: lots of builders have sites and planning permissions but are not building because they think that they can't turn a profit. One of the problems is that private sector housebuilders have become addicted to government subsidies to first time buyers. The main beneficiaries of this are the housebuilders, not the first time buyers, because it enables them to set higher prices.
I heard someone on the radio recently say that it is only profitable to build in about half of England at present. That's because the builders can't charge enough for the houses to cover the land and construction costs, the latter of these having increased particularly rapidly recently.
And why is this such a change in the intention of the policy? Councils used to use CPO powers even more. What changed was our political willingness to make alterations to our built environment, not the law itself. But the dam is close to bursting when it comes to all the changes we need to make to our built environment.
At the next election, we can see what happens when the "don't ruin our towns and cities with air conditioning condensers" party has to go up against the "build lots of AC and damn the aesthetics because I'm absolutely fed up of heatwaves" party.
Pretty much every societal problem we have has some root in our unwillingness to alter the built environment over the objections of NIMBYs. Most of the policing problems we have are in some way due to the lack of suitable custodial accommodation. Police aren't interested in catching low level criminals if they know they'll never spend meaningful time behind bars, as there aren't enough prisons. If you're not willing to CPO some land to build some prisons, disregarding the views of local residents in the process, then you can't claim to be tough on crime.
CPO powers exist, and I’m perfectly willing to see them used for any number of reasons. What I’m not willing to accept is a carte blanche use of these powers, or that they should extend willy nilly to anyone who might want to generate business.
And that is where I absolutely do not accept the ideological hostility to what people have demonstrated by their choices that they wish to live in. I gave the example of the Southfields Grid upthread - a council wanted to do as you propose, and the residents fought against it because they liked the place they lived. Remove the threat of demolition, and the area has gone from strength to strength, and is much loved for young families - so much so it’s sometimes referred to as nappy valley. It’s an area that conforms to your definition of excellence - people do walk through the park on their way to work or school. It has shops that people choose to use, and doesn’t require that people have cars.
Extensive CPO powers threaten that because they threaten the certainty people have in the security of their homes. When I was a student, I saw that effect in inner city Liverpool where blocks had been purchased ahead of redevelopments, amplifying urban decay and creating black spots that hurt people’s lives.
You have one good observation - that there are too few homes, and especially too few that people want, where they want them. But you then build a panacea that won’t actually deliver the cure, while destroying what’s good. 1950s Moscow was mentioned; I’m reminded more of 1920s Leningrad and the failed experiment of communal blocks. And, as @Magdalia points out, it’s a vision that’s based on completely flawed economics.
That is what Cambridge has got, lots of it. That's especially the case in the area around the station, which are literally railway terraces, but also in other parts of the city.
Climate change means that Victorian terraces are actually much better suited to keeping cool in summer than apartments. I'm already very hot in my apartment, and it isn't 1100 yet, a 2 storey Victorian terrace will still be nice and cool. And wall insulation actually doesn't matter very much in terraced houses: they only have 2 outside walls, not 3 or 4. At the back is likely to be a modern extension, with insulation included at construction, the front will mainly be double or triple glazed windows. In a terraced house, the only bit of insulation worth doing is the roof.
Whether Cambridge is "objectively dense" or not is irrelevant to the lack of financial viability of your proposal. What matters is the marginal increase in density that can be achieved by demolition and rebuilding. In much of Cambridge that's negligible, because all you can do is replace densely packed 2 storey terraces with 6 storey apartments.
For your proposal to be viable it needs 2 key things, cheap land and a transformative change in density. In Cambridge it has neither, and is therefore a financial basket case.
The issues are more fundamental than tax. What matters is provision of a financial structure that delivers a steady high yield income that helps pension funds to meet their pension payment liabilities. I think that means that a rental income stream is essential, like with commercial property. But residential tenants are very different from commercial tenants, so another organisation is going to need to sit between the pension funds and the residents. That could be a housing association, or a private sector property management company. But I think that the pension funds would need to own the apartment blocks, like they would with an office block, to keep them off the government balance sheet.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
This is not correct, especially since local authority housing targets were reintroduced, requiring those local authorities to allocate enough sites for development in their local plans, and to meet targets for granting planning permissions that are compliant with the local plans.
Currently the main restriction is financial viability: lots of builders have sites and planning permissions but are not building because they think that they can't turn a profit. One of the problems is that private sector housebuilders have become addicted to government subsidies to first time buyers. The main beneficiaries of this are the housebuilders, not the first time buyers, because it enables them to set higher prices.
I heard someone on the radio recently say that it is only profitable to build in about half of England at present. That's because the builders can't charge enough for the houses to cover the land and construction costs, the latter of these having increased particularly rapidly recently.
I'm talking specifically about the bottom end of the terraced house design, like working class railway terraces where the front door leads directly into the living room because there's not enough room for a separate hallway. The pretty fundamental problem with the terraced house design is that it doesn't scale. If every home has to have its own front door to the street and its own staircase, then you end up wasting an awful lot of room on duplication. You can't increase internal volume without expanding the footprint (reducing area density) or adding floors, where each floor ends up wasting more room for staircases. A tenement or any other block of flats, on the other hand, scales just fine. Each individual property doesn't waste room on stairs or level differences. The shared stairwells can be larger and the stairs easier for people to manage, and you can feasibly install lifts to make upper floors fully accessible. The entire building can become trivially wheelchair accessible, while terraces make that complex and expensive. Larger terraced buildings provide more room for things like stairlifts or even normal escalators but you still end up with terrible space efficiency. People rave about bungalows being suitable for old and disabled people, and an apartment building just stacks them up on top of each other.
Density is only one side of the equation too. People per square kilometre is the metric you need for public planning of e.g. bus routes and sewage networks. But for individuals, they also need to think about people per square metre. A deep and fundamental reason the housing of 1926 or 1876 is no longer suitable is that expectations of privacy and space within a household have grown dramatically. People used to have much larger families in much, much smaller spaces. There was a time when a 3 bedroom home was seen as almost excessive, because it meant all of your male children could share one room while the females shared another. It used to be pretty normal for multiple family members to sleep in a pull-out bed in the kitchen. This level of space per person is no longer acceptable, but that means that buildings from 1876 and 1926 now house far, far fewer people than they were intended to. This has downstream impacts on public services.
Square metres per person isn't just a luxury either. Our response to Covid was hampered by our housing shortages. It's all well and good that young people might tolerate flatsharing before they've settled down, but that flatsharing was a bit of a problem when people were being told to self-isolate. Sweden had more success with less strict lockdowns in part because they just have more square metres of housing per person, so people weren't as forced to mix. You can make a pretty solid case now that you need at least two toilets when there are at least 2 people living somewhere, so that one of them can be dedicated to the sick person. Every little helps when it comes to handling disease transmission.
Also, that extra square meterage per person isn't restricted to home life. People also now expect to have more space outside of the home, like at work. People expect to be able to spend more nights in hotels now. The same densification principles that provide for apartments also allow for hotels, and hotels fulfil really critical roles in our society. Hotels also wipe out the notion that terraces will do, as clearly a hotel operation needs the building form of an apartment. Bed and breakfasts are too inefficient to run and aren't accessible or able to meet modern expectations of privacy and comfort.
If you want to maintain density per square kilometre while allowing higher quality of life by increasing square metres per person, you need to build larger, denser buildings. The benchmark I mentioned previously is that each adult should be able to get their own three bedroom home (probably a flat in most urban areas, but possibly a house if appropriate). If every adult can have a three bedroom home to themselves, then it means we no longer have problems for family formation or evolution over time. If a couple break up then if each parent can have their own three bedroom home, then they are both able to provide childcare in a split custody situation.
In Cambridge right now, do we have enough habitable square metres to provide a three bedroom home per adult? No, absolutely not. But if your solution is that we just build outwards and leave existing buildings completely alone, then to meet the requirements per person the overall density per square kilometre has to go down. This means existing density-based public service provision stops working: schools shut, etc. The reason people live in Cambridge and other places is that they desire the sort of lifestyle that higher density urbanism delivers. This means it's absolutely inevitable that demand will be higher, and so in any sort of free market the prices will be higher too (unless we ensure that supply is allowed to grow to match the demand). We can very quickly end up violating the enough-homes-for-divorce principle because if the only way for a split couple to afford it is to move away into cheaper areas, and so break up existing social ties including the schools the kids attend. Being able to retain social links with the community no matter what happens with your individual housing requirements is an absolute requirement that our housing stock from 1926 simply cannot manage. The existence of otherwise suitable houses 30km away is about as relevant as the fact that there are underoccupied homes in old mining towns. People don't want to move.
There is no reason an apartment has to be any warmer than a terrace. I really don't understand where you're getting this idea. Apartments can and will be designed with dual aspect and all the other passive cooling mechanisms required. The incredibly poor quality of modern construction and how it results in overheating flats is not fundamental to redevelopment. The more we redevelop, the more scope we have to build better solutions. Reversible air-to-air heat pump air conditioners coupled with ventilation systems are a good example of a technology primed to take over, but only really when you're building new. If our climate is headed more to continental norms then we must consider passive solutions like brise soleil and external shutters, and indeed designs that recognise sun paths and ensure that we have shade. The Victorians didn't really give a damn when they copy-pasted their designs to be both north and south facing, even though it completely changes how entire rooms can be used at various times of the year.
We really have to return to the point about housing depreciating over time. Even when you are correct that some Victorian housing is of the correct density and configuration for some areas (yes, this is true in places, but not where you can buy a semi for £2m!) the fact remains that the Victorian bricks and mortar aren't worth very much any more. I have already said that deep renovation of these homes to meet modern standards is now tantamount to full demolition. The gap between the Victorian construction techniques and what is necessary for modern standards is growing every year. Fixing even fairly minor issues can end up making it unviable to retain big chunks of a building.
There was a test project on Niddrie Road in Glasgow to upgrade a working class tenement to modern standards. They did some excellent work but it all just demonstrated really how futile it was to keep the building in the first place. For instance, the whole building had to be emptied and stripped back pretty much to the bare structure. Then, the structure still had to be modified. The joist ends had to be cut off and replaced because the new way the building would handle heat and moisture put the existing wall-joist joints at risk of rot. Since the external facade was to be kept, the insulation had to be added internally at the front, but that meant losing a few cm off of what were already not big rooms. It's worth noting as well with this project is that this is a building under council ownership which had already been heavily upgraded back in the 1970s with layout updates etc.
A recurring problem with deep building retrofits and upgrades is that there are many ways in which it goes wrong over time by breaking assumptions that were baked into the early building designs. Victorian properties were draughty on purpose because they used coal fires that needed a lot of fresh air to function safely. This draughtiness had the side effect of preventing build up of damp. Without central heating and with the ventilation, the interior spaces were rarely much more warm and humid than the outside air so condensation had little reason to land on walls. When people try to fit draught-free windows and central heating, they end up with damp problems. These can be fixed but only by reintroducing controlled ventilation, which means even more work. In a new build designed from the ground up to be as airtight as possible, it's worth installing MVHR systems to manage ventilation properly. In a Victorian house, it's unlikely to be worthwhile: you're better off just opening the windows. But then you have no choice but to run more heating at higher temperatures, more of the time. New builds can be designed with underfloor heating systems that operate at low flow temperatures, meaning that they are especially suitable for heat pump systems. Victorian properties can be fitted with underfloor heating but it's a painful process and has efficiency problems unless you also stop the draughts. In the end, the more problems you solve the less of the original structure is left. A Victorian floor joist might be able to physically take the load but the cost of employing the tradesmen to do all the work ends up dominating. Meanwhile, if you just knock the building down and start again, you don't have any of these legacy problems. If you keep the facade looking the same (relatively easy; it just acts like a thick outer skin of a cavity wall design) you get a Trigger's Broom house.
Can we afford to rebuild all of the houses? Not really. To make it affordable, we need to do it en masse to get our economies of scale. But that means people have to leave their home for a few months at least while the works are done. At that point, most people would be better off just moving into a new and finished home. The disruption is being forced to move out at all. If we don't do these upgrades, then we will be left with houses which are increasingly unfit for modern life. It's all fine and well for people to say that they're not keen at all on having their home upgraded as part of a wider government-supported scheme, but should they then be allowed to claim help for the problems their refusal caused? If 8/10 properties on the street have had the full refit done and the construction crews have moved on, it'll cost more to go and do up the last 2 homes than if they had done it all together. Should those 2 homeowners be able to claim government help when energy bills go up?
And again, we get back to the accessibility problem. Accessibility is now a major part of modern building regulations. Is it appropriate that we keep so many houses around which are fundamentally inaccessible and would never be allowed to be built today? Even if a semi is the right type of building, it doesn't mean that the Victorian attitude to level differences is. Our aging population and our embrace of rights and dignity for the disabled means we need a lot more housing which is fully accessible. A terrace where the living room can be converted to a bedroom might be better than nothing, but it is not an acceptable long term solution for a family with a disabled member. Dignity can only be achieved with full accessibility into all areas of the home, and that means a lot of expensive lifts - or a flat/bungalow situation. It seems absurd then that we would keep entire neighbourhoods of cities locked into Victorian attitudes. Why shouldn't a disabled person have the right to have an accessible home on any specific street? Again, disability can and will affect all of us at some point in our lives, so you have to be careful what you say when it comes to denying those rights out of political expediency. If you're knocked over and into a wheelchair by a bus tomorrow, do you want to never be able to go upstairs and put your kids to bed again?
One of the ways in which people do find the money to do major repairs and upgrades to their home is to take advantage of the opportunity to increase floor area. If you need to replace your roof anyway, then in many cases it is financially beneficial to do a major loft conversion at the same time. An unaffordable £100k roof replacement becomes a £120k job to add an entire master bedroom and ensuite which adds £150k to the value of the house. If you're building a rear extension and dealing with the cost of new foundations, then making the extension have two storeys rather than just one doesn't really add much to the cost. There are blocks of flats in London where people are adding entire extra storeys. The whole iceberg house basement digging extravaganza is a response to planning permissions making it easier to dig down than to build up if you want more room for a home gym etc.
But what do you do once the house is already upgraded? What's the efficient upgrade path for a street full of semi detached houses which have all had their full dormer roof extension/conversions, plus side return and other extensions? You can't add another floor because then you'd need to upgrade the core structure again and it would look too silly. The only real upgrade path would be to replace them with a block of flats.
It's a very good idea for pension funds to own residential property and rent it out. It's an ideal way of managing post-densification flats in cities.
Housing targets are not enough. I mean, you've just explained why: you can drip feed some planning approval in principle but if the housing will be too expensive to build, then it won't be built. If you're a council trying to split the difference between NIMBY locals and government targets then it's almost the perfect outcome. You don't end up actually building more housing, yet you can point to the fact you've done everything seemingly correctly.
Land banking is a response to the shortage of land with planning approval. A company like Taylor Wimpey wants to be able to continue operating indefinitely. They make money by designing and building and selling new houses. So, they can only exist if there are always houses to sell. If they were to build all of the houses they had planning approval for, then it would mean a few years of big sales. It would be great. But what happens when the current permissions run out? This is where the planning policy really becomes important. If you cannot trust that the same number of houses will absolutely definitely be given permission again in 5, 10, 15 years then you cannot base your business on them. Otherwise you'll have a big business that goes bust in spectacular fashion once the approvals dry up. But councils aren't being forced to provide enough approvals for the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years of building because they can point at all of the sites that they've already approved and aren't being built on. The councils fundamentally don't care that Taylor Wimpey or whoever would go bust if they did what they asked. The councils don't actually want there to be lots of new houses built with certainty because that's not what the NIMBY locals want. It's a disaster.
Volkswagen can justify investing millions and billions in new designs and factories because they know that their products will eventually rust and crash and be scrapped. They have all the data in the world about how many cars there are and what their projections are for long term car demand. They know that the new stamping machine will have a purpose in 10, 20, 30 years. There has definitely been a bit of a wobble more recently when it comes to internal combustion engines and related parts, as you can't now guarantee that a new engine plant will have work in 20 years, but most of a car doesn't actually change as part of the EV transition. A stamping machine will be pretty much as useful in 20, 30 years as it is now, even if it's later used to build robots or drones or whatever. And, of course, a factory in Germany can export cars so that even if German car demand drops, the factory can still be used to produce cars or components for other markets.
We want and we need the construction sector to be able to invest on that sort of timeframe as well. But today, our planning system does not give any such guarantees. And unlike the car factory case, there is no export market escape valve. No private housebuilder can justify investing big in labour-saving, cost-reducing, quality-improving technology like automated house component factories because there is no guarantee of a return. In 10 years we do not know where the houses are going to be built, because we have a strict planning system that requires councils to come up with those plans. And, when we sprawl out, over time we actually keep losing the best sites to build new housing because of that law of diminishing returns. Back in 1970 a housebuilder could justify building a factory when they knew that Milton Keynes will be built and need its output, but now we don't have another Milton Keynes to build.
I return to the 2000 year Victorian house problem. If we do not start radically increasing the rate of house demolitions and deep renovations that basically require demolitions, then we will have Victorian houses around when we have colonies orbiting Jupiter. This is quite simply absurd. We can keep Windsor Castle and Stonehenge but a few semi detached houses in Cambridge? That's moronic, frankly. Keep a few in a Victorian or 21st century living history museum but otherwise, no. The gap between the time the houses was built and what we have in the rest of society will continue to grow, but the houses won't keep up. If we start demolishing and replacing them in order to deliver those major quality upgrades, then we can guarantee the construction sector the demand they need to justify investments in production efficiency. They'll be able to build up statistical models of how many houses will need to be replaced in each part of the country each year, just as car makers do with cars. New structures can have a much longer lifespan than a car but it is still practically finite. The rail industry has always understood fine well that everything it builds will need to be replaced one day, and that process of renewal and replacement is just as critical to manage as anything else. I recall that it was only 10 years or so into the CTRL/HS1 operation that its owners started running their renewal process because they knew that it would be economically unmanageable if it waited for all of it to be old and then had to replace all of it in one go, rather than replacing a consistent chunk every month for the rest of time.
CPO powers exist, and I’m perfectly willing to see them used for any number of reasons. What I’m not willing to accept is a carte blanche use of these powers, or that they should extend willy nilly to anyone who might want to generate business.
And that is where I absolutely do not accept the ideological hostility to what people have demonstrated by their choices that they wish to live in. I gave the example of the Southfields Grid upthread - a council wanted to do as you propose, and the residents fought against it because they liked the place they lived. Remove the threat of demolition, and the area has gone from strength to strength, and is much loved for young families - so much so it’s sometimes referred to as nappy valley. It’s an area that conforms to your definition of excellence - people do walk through the park on their way to work or school. It has shops that people choose to use, and doesn’t require that people have cars.
Extensive CPO powers threaten that because they threaten the certainty people have in the security of their homes. When I was a student, I saw that effect in inner city Liverpool where blocks had been purchased ahead of redevelopments, amplifying urban decay and creating black spots that hurt people’s lives.
You have one good observation - that there are too few homes, and especially too few that people want, where they want them. But you then build a panacea that won’t actually deliver the cure, while destroying what’s good. 1950s Moscow was mentioned; I’m reminded more of 1920s Leningrad and the failed experiment of communal blocks. And, as @Magdalia points out, it’s a vision that’s based on completely flawed economics.
But how do we build more places like Southfields Grid? It was a railway development in the first place.
Society and civilisation is like a neverending optimisation problem. Everyone is always trying to find a slightly better way of doing things. We can tweak things a little and see what the impact is. If it's good, then we can keep going. If it's bad, then we can stop and reverse. This optimisation process seems simple enough but the world makes it really quite hard. This abstract notion of an optimisation problem is core to the biggest problems in applied computer science. When you train a deep learning model you want it to get better with each cycle of the training loop, by following gradient descent. But if you follow this blindly forever, you will probably end up in a local maxima. As in, a place which is strictly superior than anything else you can reach by going in any direction, but is not actually the tallest place.
For analogy, try to find the highest point on Great Britain by using an altimeter and walking around. If the altimeter goes up, then keep going in that direction. If it goes down, then turn back. If you start in Cambridge then you'll end up maybe somewhere in the Peak District? But this isn't the highest point in the British Isles, even though you always followed the right direction. Remember, when you're exploring the space algorithmically you don't know anything else about where the highest point may lie, and you have to find it by exploring. In order to actually find the global maxima (Ben Nevis) you may need to go up hills and then back down them even though that seems to be taking you further from your goal. How do you manage to find the Ben Nevis global maxima then? You need a strategy that accepts temporarily being in a worse place if it gives you a chance at finding a better maxima.
When we've restricted development so much, we've ended up in an almighty local maxima. Anything else, like redeveloping existing housing, does seem to represent a step down and is worse. But when we're clearly not at a global maxima yet, we need to have a strategy to explore. If we learn that it was a bad idea, we can always come back to where we were. The more we explore the more we learn and so we can prove and disprove more about the state of the world.
In urban development a rather unfortunate but very much true randomisation/exploration function has been war and destruction. By wiping out what was there before, it gives us the freedom to think again. In some cases, we rethink and realise that something else would be better. In other cases, we know that the right thing to do is to rebuild. Notre Dame went on fire but we knew pretty much instantly that we wanted to put it back the way it was. I've already said that the Luftwaffe helped to ensure that East London could develop modern office buildings by clearing away those which might have ended up being listed. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have, to all accounts, left the cities not really any worse off in the long term than any other Japanese city. 9/11 destroyed the World Trade Centre but also kind of revealed that the market didn't really care that much for that much commercial real estate in lower Manhattan. WTC2 is still just a stub almost 25 years on, and 12 years on from WTC1 reopening.
It wasn’t. It was the product of a number of small developers acting independently, and producing a development of workmen’s housing.
And those terraces that your intellectual predecessors wanted to replace with flats now go for upwards of £1m each - the house next door to the one I grew up in recently sold for £1.5m. They’ve grown from as built, with attic conversions and extensions to the rear absolutely normal, while some have excavated basements.
It wasn’t. It was the product of a number of small developers acting independently, and producing a development of workmen’s housing.
And those terraces that your intellectual predecessors wanted to replace with flats now go for upwards of £1m each - the house next door to the one I grew up in recently sold for £1.5m. They’ve grown from as built, with attic conversions and extensions to the rear absolutely normal, while some have excavated basements.
Yes, and because they go for £1m each they are now completely and utterly unaffordable to young families planning to have kids. That is, unless they both work at DeepMind or they have the Bank of Mum and Dad or Granny and Granddad to call upon. That window of 25-35 is critical for family formation and these houses are failing that requirement because they're too expensive. You can't have a Nappy Valley if the only people who can afford to live there are grandparents.
Another big chunk of the problem, and one that we cannot solve without the bulldozer, is that housing monocultures make change extremely difficult to manage. Let's say you did raise a family in Southfields Grid and you've built up a life there. But you want a smaller home to downsize into. Is there a smaller home for you to downsize into? Is there any building where the property is laid out horizontally rather than vertically, so that it can still be fully accessible even with mobility problems? If the entire place is made up of one sort of house, then it doesn't work. You can't find a better suited home configuration without moving out. If you don't move out, you have to put up with a less optimal housing configuration.
Part of the reason that these monocultures could exist in the first place was that household life was very different when they were built. There was so much labour burden involved in day to day running of a home (e.g. keeping the coal range going) that many household configurations were just impossible. You could only live alone if you were very wealthy and could afford to pay for servants to do all that work for you. Mundane tasks like washing clothes used to be an entire day's worth of work before the washing machine came about. So in that day, the grandparents wouldn't have ever taken up a home like this on their own. They'd live with their children and depend on the labour performed by their daughter or daughter-in-law. If they couldn't walk upstairs, then they'd just sleep downstairs, including in the kitchen - they may have grown up doing that anyway so it wouldn't seem absurd.
Would that be acceptable nowadays? No. Our expectations have moved on. 70 year olds do not see themselves as dependents. So how do you reconcile that with houses designed for them to be dependents?
The right way to have a neighbourhood is to provide basically every category of residential accommodation in close proximity - i.e. close enough to share facilities like post offices and shops and bus/train/metro stations and school/nursery catchments. Then as people make their way through life, they can move about into different accommodation types without breaking any of the social bonds that they want to keep. A conventional terrace/semi/detached home isn't a bad option for many families (although the option of living in a similarly large apartment must also be available). When your kids get to 18, it would be a good idea for them to move out to their own studio flat down the road; close enough to come home whenever they like but also independent. Then you want starter flats once they've started a proper job and maybe found a partner. Then a slightly larger flat once they have a baby or two. Then they can cycle into the conventional family housing and stay. Once their kids move out they can think about downsizing to a smaller house or to an apartment, but again within very short walking distance of their kids. Then if need be, they can move into accommodation which is increasingly suitable for them as their needs grow, up to and including a care home environment. Throughout all of this, there'd also be good hotel and self-catered temporary accommodation spread around so that it's easy for people to come and visit (e.g. the other set of parents when you have a new baby, without them taking up the spare bedroom). That short-term accommodation also provides space for people to move into temporarily while any disruptive works are done. Moving out means any building works or renovations can be much more efficient. Indeed, it's also a solution if there are noisy/disruptive works outside, like when the new Metro line gets built and there's going to be a loud weekend of overnight pile driving.
I'm talking specifically about the bottom end of the terraced house design, like working class railway terraces where the front door leads directly into the living room because there's not enough room for a separate hallway. The pretty fundamental problem with the terraced house design is that it doesn't scale. If every home has to have its own front door to the street and its own staircase, then you end up wasting an awful lot of room on duplication. You can't increase internal volume without expanding the footprint (reducing area density) or adding floors, where each floor ends up wasting more room for staircases.
Many Cambridge terraces started out like this, including the house where I was born. The front door opening into the front room is trivial, it is very easy to build a small square porch inside the front door, especially if the bottom of the stairs is opposite the front door. It has been done in Cambridge literally thousands of times. Stairs in Victorian terraces actually make very good use of space, because they are steep, and with a narrow tread on each step. They are usually straight, which makes it easy to install a stairlift if required. And furthermore, one of the great traditions of Victorian terrace living is the cupboard under the stairs, the place to store coats, outside shoes, cleaning equipment and sundry other paraphernalia. These are so important that my apartment has its equivalent of a cupboard under the stairs, even though I have no stairs.
There is no reason an apartment has to be any warmer than a terrace. I really don't understand where you're getting this idea. Apartments can and will be designed with dual aspect and all the other passive cooling mechanisms required.
There are two very simple reasons. One is that apartments are only on one level, and the other is that they only have windows on one side. I have lived in both a terraced house and an apartment with similar west facing aspect. Hot air rises, especially when introducing cool air from below. In my terrace, I could open the downstairs windows on the shady side, and the upstairs windows in the sunny side, creating a cool draught through the house. In an apartment I can't do that because there is nowhere for the air to rise, and I don't have anything to open on the shady side. It is simple physics.
No. Some are like me, born and raised here. Others come because of the work, or for the opportunity to study and lead the academic life. People who want the sort of lifestyle that high density urbanism delivers don't come to Cambridge, they go to big cities like London or Manchester, and Cambridge is never going to compete with that, especially with London being so close. Cambridge people who want high density urbanism move, usually to London.
The existence of otherwise suitable houses 30km away is about as relevant as the fact that there are underoccupied homes in old mining towns. People don't want to move.
Again you are wrong. Lots of Cambridge people move out of Cambridge to the Carousel towns about 20-30km away. The lifestyle of living in a market town and working in Cambridge is very popular. That's because, until a few years ago, Cambridge was still just a market town with a University attached, local people like market town life, and they don't like high density urbanism. Ely-Cambridge is the 13th biggest rail flow on the network with both stations outside London, comparable with Bath-Bristol, Newport-Cardiff and Durham-Newcastle.
Victorian terraced housing does not depreciate over time. It maintains and increases its value through upgrading and scarcity. It is apartments that are more like a car, quickly depreciating over time. That's because very few people want to live in an old apartment, whereas lots of people want to live in an old house. With increasing supply of apartments in Cambridge, my new apartment has lost at least 25% of its value in less than 10 years, in a rising market.
That window of 25-35 is critical for family formation and these houses are failing that requirement because they're too expensive. You can't have a Nappy Valley if the only people who can afford to live there are grandparents.
And you can't have nappy valley in an apartment block either. What's critical for family formation is houses. The obsession with building apartments instead of houses deprives parents of places to raise a family. I'm not usually a fan of anecdotes, but I'm going to make an exception. When I lived in a terrace, the adjacent house changed hands, and a young recently married couple moved in. The first two years were like watching two birds building a nest, only after they had the house the way they wanted did they have children. Prospective parents want to do that in a house, it can't be done in an apartment.
Land banking is a response to the shortage of land with planning approval. A company like Taylor Wimpey wants to be able to continue operating indefinitely. They make money by designing and building and selling new houses. So, they can only exist if there are always houses to sell. If they were to build all of the houses they had planning approval for, then it would mean a few years of big sales. It would be great. But what happens when the current permissions run out? This is where the planning policy really becomes important. If you cannot trust that the same number of houses will absolutely definitely be given permission again in 5, 10, 15 years then you cannot base your business on them. Otherwise you'll have a big business that goes bust in spectacular fashion once the approvals dry up. But councils aren't being forced to provide enough approvals for the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years of building because they can point at all of the sites that they've already approved and aren't being built on. The councils fundamentally don't care that Taylor Wimpey or whoever would go bust if they did what they asked.
Local plans give housebuilders the time horizon that should enable them to plan, the Greater Cambridge draft local plan goes out to 2045. The uncertainty comes from government policy, because no parliament can bind its successors, a new government can remove the targets. Another important consideration is the consolidation in the housebuilding industry, with a few oligopolistic suppliers and a high barrier to entry. That barrier is not insurmountable, but it is very difficult.
The rail industry has always understood fine well that everything it builds will need to be replaced one day, and that process of renewal and replacement is just as critical to manage as anything else.
Most railway investment is upgrading existing assets, there are very few instances of demolition and rebuild. Most of our railway is still Victorian, upgraded multiple times, just like terraced houses.
Society and civilisation is like a neverending optimisation problem. Everyone is always trying to find a slightly better way of doing things. We can tweak things a little and see what the impact is. If it's good, then we can keep going. If it's bad, then we can stop and reverse.
In order to actually find the global maxima (Ben Nevis) you may need to go up hills and then back down them even though that seems to be taking you further from your goal. How do you manage to find the Ben Nevis global maxima then? You need a strategy that accepts temporarily being in a worse place if it gives you a chance at finding a better maxima.
That assumes a degree of rationality and playing their part morally, which is not the case. They are capitalists, and damn them for it (semi sarcastic). Too much idealism will clash with the inevitable rent/profit seeking behaviour of those who you need to perform with honesty.
This is a a flat, or an apartment. This is the sort of thing I think would suit Cambridge very well. This is what I am proposing when I talk about flats and apartments. I am not proposing a communist housing block. This is a third floor flat of 277sqm on sale for offers over £1.2m.
It is located in the Moray Feu, at the west end of Edinburgh's New Town. It is in a Georgian building which is Category A listed, the equivalent of Grade I. It is part of a World Heritage Site. It is an absolute masterclass of urban form and design, blending parks and rationally laid out streets with what is essentially a tenemental building form.
Some of the buildings are still individual townhouses. The 9 bedroom 22 Moray Place was put up for sale at £4.5m back in 2022 as the city's most expensive home, and it's one of the smaller, corner plots. The full size ones are just physically too large to remain in use as townhouses, and have almost always been converted to commercial use or have been subdivided into flats.
The same basic pattern exists in London too, in the most expensive areas. Very large townhouses get split into flats which are individually very expensive. Sometimes a billionaire will go and buy up a whole building for their own use.
The basic premise though remains that you have a very large building and it gets subdivided into different chunks horizontally as well as vertically. There's a lot of flexibility within the buildings because they are so large. In this specific flat's case, it is actually made up of the topmost floor of two adjacent buildings. The topmost floor used to be the least desirable because it required walking up so many stairs to get there. From the layout, it looks like the left hand part would have been accessed by a small servant stair from the top floor of the townhouse below. The right hand part, on the other hand, seems like it was always a flat, or at least was always accessible from the main stair. They've just knocked through into the building next door to double it.
Oh, and look at this. The building is so large and filled with wealthy people that they seem to have even retrofitted a lift. A lift! In a Georgian Category A listed building! Easily done when the stairwell is sized for a building this huge, so it always had a big lightwell going down the centre.
What do we have here? Why, a two storey flat! A maisonette!
This building was purpose built to be a tenement. You can tell because of the door arrangement. The staircase is visible at the front behind the windows above the middle door. Looking at the council tax register, it seems that the building contains 40 (blue door, two storey), 40A (basement flat underneath), 3F1 and 3F2 (the first and second flats on the third floor) at 41 (cream door), 42 (black door, two storey) and 42A (basement flat underneath). 3F1 is the listing and appears to have had a dormer bay window added in the Victorian period, while 3F2 didn't.
So within this one, very large building form, we have two basement flats, two two storey main door homes, and then two two storey flats on top of them. It doesn't end there! Because this is actually a corner plot. 40A, 40 and 41 3F1 are dual aspect to front and back. 42 and 41 3F2 are dual aspect on the corner. 42A seems to have windows to the rear, I think? And around the corner, it gets even better. There are two small main door basement units at 1 and 3 India Street which seem to be commercial. In a 2008 Street View photo they were even being used as a Rettie office. I think they're probably short term lets now.
What these examples demonstrate is just how much flexibility you have with tenemental building forms. There's nothing stopping you having an English-style terraced house but you can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to maximise the value and the utility of the building. I didn't even go looking for an example of a lift retrofit and yet I managed to find one, which I love.
These are the sorts of buildings that would suit Oxford and Cambridge to a tee. They can be grander and fundamentally better than what was there before.
There's one last example which I think helps this discussion:
When was this built? 1800? No - the 1990s. It was the last remaining plot of the plan for the New Town that hadn't ever been built. So it was built with a perfect facade replica, using the exact sort of sandstone work that is required when any of its neighbours get repairs. Behind the facade it's a structurally modern office building.
We can do this! We could build modern commercial building structures, with the right floor to ceiling heights, and then clad them with traditional materials. All we'd really be doing is swapping out one cladding system for another. So long as a factory can churn out brick and stone and render panels which clip onto a concrete frame like a glass panel would, it makes no real difference to the end construction programme. That factory can justify employing artisans to produce very high quality details, using fancy machines to do all the heavy, dirty work and leaving mostly the artistic, fun part for the humans.
If you're redeveloping, then you can use the existing buildings as your quarry. Reclaim the old bricks and rearrange them onto your new facade panels. Take the sandstone and cut it so that it's just a facade element and not structural any more.
Oh, and gardens. Well all of these buildings do have their own private gardens at the rear. But residents of these buildings are also given access to their own private park across the road. Like a public park, but private. A private public park in the middle of a city, with professional maintenance.
Eligible for access to Moray Feu Gardens (subject to application and fee)
A particularly special feature is the access to the exclusive Queen Street Gardens, with a private gate located directly opposite the property, providing immediate entry to one of Edinburgh’s most sought-after private green spaces.
I understand that the tenement building form is not common in England. But it exists for a reason. It's a necessary development step for cities to grow. London ended up adopting it, through subdivided townhouses but also the mansion block. Eventually the benefits of having horizontally laid out units stacked vertically atop one another become too great compared to a world made up only of vertically laid out units arranged horizontally. How many English terraced houses have a stairwell so large that you can retrofit a lift into the middle of it?
No. Some are like me, born and raised here. Others come because of the work, or for the opportunity to study and lead the academic life. People who want the sort of lifestyle that high density urbanism delivers don't come to Cambridge, they go to big cities like London or Manchester, and Cambridge is never going to compete with that, especially with London being so close. Cambridge people who want high density urbanism move, usually to London.
Again you are wrong. Lots of Cambridge people move out of Cambridge to the Carousel towns about 20-30km away. The lifestyle of living in a market town and working in Cambridge is very popular. That's because, until a few years ago, Cambridge was still just a market town with a University attached, local people like market town life, and they don't like high density urbanism. Ely-Cambridge is the 13th biggest rail flow on the network with both stations outside London, comparable with Bath-Bristol, Newport-Cardiff and Durham-Newcastle.
Victorian terraced housing does not depreciate over time. It maintains and increases its value through upgrading and scarcity. It is apartments that are more like a car, quickly depreciating over time. That's because very few people want to live in an old apartment, whereas lots of people want to live in an old house. With increasing supply of apartments in Cambridge, my new apartment has lost at least 25% of its value in less than 10 years, in a rising market.
Cambridge is where the jobs are and so people follow. I understand that it's frustrating that your local market town happens to have a 13th century university in it which has produced some of the greatest minds who have ever lived, but the university was there before you. Same deal applies in Oxford.
Universities like Cambridge are where some of the most valuable things the UK can produce are produced. From a government perspective, denying places like Cambridge the ability to grow is like denying County Durham or South Wales or Lanarkshire the opportunity to grow and produce more coal. It might keep some local stakeholders happy that the world they grew up in isn't changing, but it has national consequences. Knowledge produced in places like Cambridge is as important to the national survival of the United Kingdom as the coal of South Wales was in the 19th and 20th centuries. AI might be correctly criticised as being as dangerous as nuclear weapons but both of them emerged from the research labs of universities like Cambridge. Holding back the university means holding back the UK's grasp of the top tiers of science. We can't afford that now that Tsinghua grads are dominating the world as much as Harvard or Princeton grads were back in the 20th century.
And you can't have nappy valley in an apartment block either. What's critical for family formation is houses. The obsession with building apartments instead of houses deprives parents of places to raise a family. I'm not usually a fan of anecdotes, but I'm going to make an exception. When I lived in a terrace, the adjacent house changed hands, and a young recently married couple moved in. The first two years were like watching two birds building a nest, only after they had the house the way they wanted did they have children. Prospective parents want to do that in a house, it can't be done in an apartment.
Glasgow was once the second city of Empire and yet was made up almost entirely of tenements. Flats might not be everyone's cup of tea but do you really think you'd struggle to raise a family in a £1m 277sqm flat in the Moray Feu? A pokey little studio, yes, but not a flat that's bigger inside than most detached houses are.
Local plans give housebuilders the time horizon that should enable them to plan, the Greater Cambridge draft local plan goes out to 2045. The uncertainty comes from government policy, because no parliament can bind its successors, a new government can remove the targets. Another important consideration is the consolidation in the housebuilding industry, with a few oligopolistic suppliers and a high barrier to entry. That barrier is not insurmountable, but it is very difficult.
The suppliers are oligopolistic because that's what the planning system creates. If every single housebuilding exercise has to go through a NIMBY and regulatory gauntlet, then only the largest, most horrible housebuilders survive.
If you want a dynamic property market then you need a planning system which makes housebuilding trivial. See land, buy land, build house. Plenty of everyday folk could do it. If there's a bottleneck on e.g. water supply then don't give any existing homes any more right than new ones. If there's not enough water, then just raise the water charges to cover it. Don't stop people building houses, or you are creating the conditions for the oligopoly.
Most railway investment is upgrading existing assets, there are very few instances of demolition and rebuild. Most of our railway is still Victorian, upgraded multiple times, just like terraced houses.
The renewals are the track and other components which are designed to be replaced in overnight possessions. We rip up the rails and sleepers and replace them with new ones. The old ones are taken back to be recycled. It's a pretty sensible idea, no? But yeah, bridges and the like will need to be monitored and replaced according to their expected lifespans. We do replace bridges on the network when they are life expired.
There are very few cases where anyone can afford to demolish and rebuild any houses. Financially, there would be huge losses in most cases.
If you can't afford to rebuild then we've got a very big problem. Sometimes houses need to be rebuilt. Like when they've been destroyed by a natural disaster. A lot of people in Palisades in California are now finding out that they can't afford to rebuild their homes. They had in many cases skimped on their fire protection insurance and were under-insured, so they're not getting enough money back to rebuild what they had.
If you can't afford to rebuild then you can't afford to maintain. If you have wooden windows, then you need to paint them. You will need to replace your roof coverings. Your boiler will last maybe 15 years? Kitchens last maybe 15-20. The interior design and layout decisions of the 80s and 90s aren't what people want any more. You want to be able to get a nice new bathroom.
To borrow your analogy, your proposal is a very much worse way of doing things, like tripping and falling into a deep ravine, with no way out.
The right place for that sort of experimentation is places like Cambourne or Tempsford, not Cambridge. But it is an experiment doomed to fail.
And even among those, it’s common law. These sorts of invasive changes will happen in common law countries last.
Tell us about the opposite, what community damage will happen under your plans which you seem acceptable.
That assumes a degree of rationality and playing their part morally, which is not the case. They are capitalists, and damn them for it (semi sarcastic). Too much idealism will clash with the inevitable rent/profit seeking behaviour of those who you need to perform with honesty.
How much community damage is caused when streets of houses designed for 30 year olds to raise a family are hoarded by 70 year olds?
If you believe that large, publicly listed companies are acting irrationally then you are free to trade against them and make money. They respond to the incentives set out by government and for housebuilders, the planning system defines everything else in their business. The harder we make it to get planning approval, the more power these companies have. Making planning rules easier and more predictable means that other people get to have a go as well.
Yes, and because they go for £1m each they are now completely and utterly unaffordable to young families planning to have kids. That is, unless they both work at DeepMind or they have the Bank of Mum and Dad or Granny and Granddad to call upon. That window of 25-35 is critical for family formation and these houses are failing that requirement because they're too expensive. You can't have a Nappy Valley if the only people who can afford to live there are grandparents.
Another big chunk of the problem, and one that we cannot solve without the bulldozer, is that housing monocultures make change extremely difficult to manage. Let's say you did raise a family in Southfields Grid and you've built up a life there. But you want a smaller home to downsize into. Is there a smaller home for you to downsize into? Is there any building where the property is laid out horizontally rather than vertically, so that it can still be fully accessible even with mobility problems? If the entire place is made up of one sort of house, then it doesn't work. You can't find a better suited home configuration without moving out. If you don't move out, you have to put up with a less optimal housing configuration.
Part of the reason that these monocultures could exist in the first place was that household life was very different when they were built. There was so much labour burden involved in day to day running of a home (e.g. keeping the coal range going) that many household configurations were just impossible. You could only live alone if you were very wealthy and could afford to pay for servants to do all that work for you. Mundane tasks like washing clothes used to be an entire day's worth of work before the washing machine came about. So in that day, the grandparents wouldn't have ever taken up a home like this on their own. They'd live with their children and depend on the labour performed by their daughter or daughter-in-law. If they couldn't walk upstairs, then they'd just sleep downstairs, including in the kitchen - they may have grown up doing that anyway so it wouldn't seem absurd.
Would that be acceptable nowadays? No. Our expectations have moved on. 70 year olds do not see themselves as dependents. So how do you reconcile that with houses designed for them to be dependents?
The right way to have a neighbourhood is to provide basically every category of residential accommodation in close proximity - i.e. close enough to share facilities like post offices and shops and bus/train/metro stations and school/nursery catchments. Then as people make their way through life, they can move about into different accommodation types without breaking any of the social bonds that they want to keep. A conventional terrace/semi/detached home isn't a bad option for many families (although the option of living in a similarly large apartment must also be available). When your kids get to 18, it would be a good idea for them to move out to their own studio flat down the road; close enough to come home whenever they like but also independent. Then you want starter flats once they've started a proper job and maybe found a partner. Then a slightly larger flat once they have a baby or two. Then they can cycle into the conventional family housing and stay. Once their kids move out they can think about downsizing to a smaller house or to an apartment, but again within very short walking distance of their kids. Then if need be, they can move into accommodation which is increasingly suitable for them as their needs grow, up to and including a care home environment. Throughout all of this, there'd also be good hotel and self-catered temporary accommodation spread around so that it's easy for people to come and visit (e.g. the other set of parents when you have a new baby, without them taking up the spare bedroom). That short-term accommodation also provides space for people to move into temporarily while any disruptive works are done. Moving out means any building works or renovations can be much more efficient. Indeed, it's also a solution if there are noisy/disruptive works outside, like when the new Metro line gets built and there's going to be a loud weekend of overnight pile driving.
So to avoid a monoculture, you create a different one.
I lived there, family do live there. People choose to live there because of the housing, and because of the area. They are confident to do so because they have security of tenure, and the community has built because of that. 50 years ago, none of that existed because the local council wanted to do more or less what you described, and that hammered down the prices. I mention the prices not because they are affordable (they aren’t for many) but because they demonstrate just how desirable “unwanted” houses are when the community they’re in is respected. As for monoculture, I don’t recognise one - there are plenty of people of all ages there and they make do when suffering the ravages of illness or age.
You also talk about apartments, and use the example of one in Edinburgh’s New Town. The implausibility of that as a pattern for ordinary life is just unreal. It’s even more hilariously incredible when partnered with a view of Glasgow that says “and Glasgow was built with tenements” - yes, some of the worst slums in Britain back in their day.
Another anecdote. My godmother lived in an apartment in Belgravia when I was a kid. I remember visiting and it was far from fun when my mother had to manage a buggy and three children. Lifts aren’t guaranteed and, where present, aren’t guaranteed to work 24*7*52 - and failures happen at inconvenient times.
I'm familiar with Edinburgh New Town thank you. I have stayed there, though not for a long while, because I can't do the stairs any more, and not all of the tenements are suitable for installing lifts. Edinburgh New Town is what it says on the tin, it was a new town, built near to the Old Town. Cambridge has done that with Trumpington and Eddington, and will do it again with the Airport site.
Another anecdote. My godmother lived in an apartment in Belgravia when I was a kid. I remember visiting and it was far from fun when my mother had to manage a buggy and three children.
I have worked near Belgravia. Edinburgh New Town is equivalent to Belgravia for London. Both are for the very rich. Cambridge has its equivalent too, but it is hard to see, because much of it it is hidden inside the colleges.
This sort of housing is irrelevant to Cambridge's needs, what it needs is the modern equivalent of Victorian terraces for what the politicians like to call hard working families. There won't be many nurses or bus drivers living in Edinburgh New Town.
No, the house builders are oligopolistic because of financial incentives that make growth through acquisition easier and more profitable than organic growth. That applies widely across industry, it isn't peculiar to house builders. Another example is the bus industry, where lots of small players at the time of deregulation quickly consolidated into a handful of big players.
If you can't afford to rebuild then you can't afford to maintain. If you have wooden windows, then you need to paint them. You will need to replace your roof coverings. Your boiler will last maybe 15 years? Kitchens last maybe 15-20. The interior design and layout decisions of the 80s and 90s aren't what people want any more. You want to be able to get a nice new bathroom.
This is incorrect, as years of history demonstrate. Renovation is far easier to finance than rebuild. Each property is a small scale project financed by each owner occupier, either by using savings or using a loan taken out secured against the value of the property. It is impossible to take a loan secured against the value of a property that you are going to demolish!
Another great advantage of renovation over rebuild is that its negative impact on the wider economy is tiny. People put up with a bit of inconvenience (pun intended) while the work is done without needing to move out. Residents carry on doing the same jobs and support the same local businesses.
It isn't necessary to have an elevator in a terraced house, much easier and cheaper to install a stairlift, usually with local authority or charity financial support. My apartment block has a stairlift for when the elevator breaks down.
Cambridge is where the jobs are and so people follow. I understand that it's frustrating that your local market town happens to have a 13th century university in it which has produced some of the greatest minds who have ever lived, but the university was there before you. Same deal applies in Oxford.
Universities like Cambridge are where some of the most valuable things the UK can produce are produced. From a government perspective, denying places like Cambridge the ability to grow is like denying County Durham or South Wales or Lanarkshire the opportunity to grow and produce more coal.
This is a complete contradiction. Cambridge definitely isn't going to the dogs, and that's the case for lots of other places too.
Cambridge is not being denied the ability to grow. Growth is constrained, primarily by lack of water, but it isn't being denied by by the planning system, which is working very well thankyou.
We have a coherent draft local plan to deliver jobs and houses in the period up to completion of the Reservoir in the Fens, and hopefully a Development corporation to address some of the longer term constraints.
But one thing you can be sure of is that Cambridge won't be addressing its housing shortage by demolishing large numbers of the houses that it has already got.
So to avoid a monoculture, you create a different one.
I lived there, family do live there. People choose to live there because of the housing, and because of the area. They are confident to do so because they have security of tenure, and the community has built because of that. 50 years ago, none of that existed because the local council wanted to do more or less what you described, and that hammered down the prices. I mention the prices not because they are affordable (they aren’t for many) but because they demonstrate just how desirable “unwanted” houses are when the community they’re in is respected. As for monoculture, I don’t recognise one - there are plenty of people of all ages there and they make do when suffering the ravages of illness or age.
You also talk about apartments, and use the example of one in Edinburgh’s New Town. The implausibility of that as a pattern for ordinary life is just unreal. It’s even more hilariously incredible when partnered with a view of Glasgow that says “and Glasgow was built with tenements” - yes, some of the worst slums in Britain back in their day.
Another anecdote. My godmother lived in an apartment in Belgravia when I was a kid. I remember visiting and it was far from fun when my mother had to manage a buggy and three children. Lifts aren’t guaranteed and, where present, aren’t guaranteed to work 24*7*52 - and failures happen at inconvenient times.
What monoculture am I proposing? The same basic building form can be scaled up and down. If market dynamics mean a street is only worth being 3 storeys tall then it can have conventional terraced houses and/or flats. You could have one consistent ridgeline and appearance along a street, with the front doors as the only real clue that the spaces within are split up differently. You could have the choice of arranging your family home across 3 levels stacked tightly, or 1 level spread out along the street but with neighbours above and below. If the building is constructed like modern office buildings are, then you could even chop and change them. If demand grows for flats vs terraces, you can rearrange the spaces internally by moving partition walls about and then adjusting what facade panels you use. This sort of chopping and changing is why the tenemental building form has worked so spectacularly well. The same building can be turned into flats, or an office, or combined with its neighbours to form even larger spaces like universities and schools.
This is a Haussmann building and it is the icon of Paris. He rebuilt Paris and it proved to be a glorious success. The wide boulevards he laid out proved to be ideal for the development of the Paris Metro and other critical infrastructure. Almost everything people associate with Paris nowadays is as a result of his work. The reason Paris has street cafes is that he rebuilt Paris so that most main roads were lined with mixed-use buildings with commercial on the ground floor and residential above.
50 years ago was a totally, utterly different world for housing in London. It was still at a point when the city population was below the level that its buildings and infrastructure had been designed for. People had been moving out of London and to some extent its suburbs because the place was dirty, and it looked like opportunity lay elsewhere. That meant land values were much lower than they are today. Redevelopment is about looking at land values, so for the Southfield houses to lose value it suggests the land values were very low indeed. Nowadays one of them can burn down completely and the plot will be worth almost as much as a complete house.
Now, everywhere in London is expensive, because so many people want to be able to live there. They want to live there because modern day jobs that pay the highest wages emerge in cities. This is a fundamental fact of economics that would be familiar to all ancient urbanised civilisations. The Romans were under no illusion that the best overall quality of life was achieved by living in Rome and not somewhere else. The illusion that lower-density suburban and rural life could be superior has come about pretty much solely as a result of the car, but it has been a mirage. Cars are great when you're the first family on the street to have one but they are absolutely awful as a day to day commuting mechanism once everyone needs one.
Ignoring all other factors, cars alone make a good deal of building replacement worthwhile even if you do want to keep the lifestyle and density the same? Why? Because the houses weren't ever designed to be occupied by four adults all owning their own car! At most, some Edwardian terraces were designed for you to have one small car like an Austin 7. They were not designed for 4 whacking great 5-Star EuroNCAP rated machines designed to handle an 100mph run down an Autobahn whether it's +50 or -50 outside! Electric microcars like the Citroen Ami mean we have a bit more flexibility now in terms of size but only by trading away some capability.
Car parking is now one of the biggest issues in your dense city streets. The shortage of housing means that adult children are now encouraged to stay home with parents until they've saved up enough to get their own place. Meanwhile, cars are cheaper than ever, and they're more important than ever because our anti-population-density policies mean that cars are required to get around a large part of life for most people. So the house that just about managed to host one car, and maybe a second one at a push, is now hosting up to 4 of them. The cars are wider and longer than before too. And the next house along, and the next house along after that, is ending up doing the same. Yes, it might currently be occupied by an old couple with one car, but when they sell up it'll end up owned by another family of 4 adults. Where do all their cars go? The ability to park a car at home is one of the most important things for most buyers.
We can fix this, while retaining the outline of the terraced, lower-density street. But only by rebuilding the street so that we can park cars underneath the house. It's a fundamental spatial issue. Cars can't go up and down stairs. They can go in lifts but car lifts are rare around the world for very serious safety, cost and space efficiency reasons. It's just more efficient to put the humans upstairs, but these houses assumed that the humans would live on the ground floor.
Those New Town tenements and townhouses actually provide a pretty good solution. You see, the entire street was actually raised up above ground level when they were built. The basement flats are on the true ground floor, and the main ground floor flat is actually +1 up. In many cases, the pavement outside is actually above an arched cellar that was originally used for things like coal storage.
If we want car storage to work in these communities, we need to rebuild the houses so that the cars go on the actual ground floor, but it can be sort of hidden like a basement. If the street is raised up to split the difference or bias to the new ground floor for people, then you end up with something that looks pretty normal again. Either cars have a ramp down from the street into the basement garage, or we design the street so that it actually acts like a deck above a controlled parking environment below. Then you also have somewhere to store all the other crap related to modern life like the bins. Dense cities end up developing networks of service decks and basements like these because they solve real problems.
Terraced houses aren't common in the US but they are extremely common in San Francisco. It does also seem that most of them have a garage on the ground floor with the living accommodation above.
Rebuilding a house so that it's one storey up seems extreme up until you realise that in many areas of this country, it's what we need for flood resilience. New builds are expensive to build because we do impose higher floor risk standards on them (in part because previous generations of builders and societies weren't daft enough to think that sprawling out onto floor plains was a good idea, and would instead just densify existing areas). In some places it's possible for us to protect a town or village by building flood barriers and the like, but these have a cost too. Just as with housing renovations, it's easy to do a little bit of upgrading but to get things sorted properly ends up being really expensive. It's not possible to keep redirecting flood waters elsewhere, without helping to inundate other people as well. In some places, the least inappropriate thing to do would be to raise up the level of the living accommodation so that it's above any reasonable flood, and keep the ground floor sacrificial for flooding. We already do this by doing things like wiring them down from the ceiling rather than up from the floor, so that floods don't knock out all of the electrics.
The same legal and conceptual principle applies everywhere. In some places we don't have the right sort of housing to manage our aging society. In some places we don't have the right sort of housing to manage the risk of flooding and other impacts of the climate emergency. We can't solve all of these problems by permanently deferring to the will of individual owner occupiers who just never want to be disturbed, ever. Disturbance is coming, and getting it from the government is a good way of ensuring you won't be too surprised when it comes from mother nature or random chance instead. Again, floods and a fall down your stairs don't care about what your opinions are on your house.
I don’t recognise one - there are plenty of people of all ages there and they make do when suffering the ravages of illness or age.
That's all well and good until they go to the council or government to demand help. We physically don't have enough carers to help all of the people who will need care. Why should other taxpayers provide a human being to help you up and down the stairs, so that you can live in the same bricks and mortar as you did when you were young and healthy? If you lived in a house that was actually physically suitable for you by not relying on stairs, then you might not need anyone to help you at all. That's better for you and your self-worth and it's cheaper for the rest of society. It's a win-win. Until you also reject the notion that we should knock down any of the houses near you to build them.
The ultimate form of this that we've seen is that old people who live in residential communities fight against proposals to build care homes near them. Yes, parking and so on and the normal issues like noise apply, but there's something fundamental here. If at any point you become so incapacitated that you cannot live independently, then you will be in a care home. You will not get any veto over this. If you do manage to make it home and then you come to harm as a result, then the state can and will put you in a care home for your own safety. So why do you not want a care home to exist somewhere near your current house, so that you can still be part of the same community? Rather than having to move elsewhere to somewhere unfamiliar, where your friends and family are not just around the corner any more. They may still visit, but they can't just pop in: they'll have to think about getting in the car to come and see you. So they will, at first, and then slowly find other things to do with their lives. A daily visit becomes a weekly visit becomes a monthly visit becomes an annual visit. And all because you refused to allow a care home next to your house?
On a psychological level it does really seem to be with all of this that there is just a deep refusal to countenance that that old people are getting old and will die. No amount of preventing change to our urban environment will make you young and spry again. The arguments I've been making are essentially about managing decline: in a flat you'll still be able to get about even if you can't walk up and down stairs any more, and you'll still be able to get to the shops even though you're no longer allowed to drive.
yes, some of the worst slums in Britain back in their day.
Slums are coming back. Very few families can afford to buy a semi detached house in places like Cambridge, in part because there are so many working adults who are desperate to be able to get jobs that they will house share. It's one thing when it's one or two but now, the housing shortage is so bad that you can turn any suburban house into an HMO and make bank. We have reinvented the single end, single room tenement flat but it now exists in a 1930s Metroland semi in Hounslow. Congratulations.
People might dislike change and reconstruction but I can tell you that they really, really don't like the idea of the semi through the wall being bought out by a slumlord and rented out to 5 different working adults on shifts. Planning rules stop building works but they don't stop slumlord landlords cramming in 5 or 7 shift workers to each room of a house. It's policy whack-a-mole trying to stop them: do you make it illegal for the nice old couple to take the offer of £800k from the slumlord's cousin's friend rather than the £650k that the young family have managed to scrimp and save together with a whacking great mortgage? A lot of people don't give a damn about anything other than how much they can sell their house for - maybe that's the real scary part of the Southfields Grid story?
Slums are not built as much as they emerge. The slums of Glasgow actually started off in some areas as higher end housing which then decayed over time because the city grew and the industry took over. And, then, rather than building more housing, we thought the solution was to implement rent controls and other economically ruinous policies. Rent control is like peeing yourself to stay warm in the freezing winter. It's warm for a little bit but then you're very wet and even colder and more at risk than you were before.
I'm going to bet that that lift in the New Town tenement works just fine, all of the time. Why? Because it's in a building where people care, and are wealthy enough to fix the problems. Lifts don't work in council blocks where they are used as public toilets by some of the residents and their guests. Council blocks have absolutely ruined urbanism and it is why this conversation is so hard with so many people.
If the building is big enough, then there can be two lifts. The more lifts we install, the cheaper they get. You want lifts to be as common as boilers are, so that every little neighbourhood has a lift engineer available to come around in 5 minutes if called upon. We're never going to get there unless we build a lot of new buildings. And your Stannah stairlift that might sometimes make it possible to go upstairs in your semi won't have anywhere near the same reliability. When it's not working, you can't go upstairs and that's pretty much the end of the discussion.
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