Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery
economist.com
economist.com
Let's lift the restrictions and see if that holds true, shall we?
I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring as a result of the housing crisis, and the range of alternatives that would be considered an improvement for those people.
I'd rather live centrally. If height restrictions were eliminated and councils started building pretty much everybody who wanted to, could. The housing crisis was entirely a deliberate creation of both the Tories (and to an extent, New Labour).
>I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring
I think you're vastly overestimating the effect this would have on alleviating that.
Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational approach than this.
Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes from (both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them), doesn't this run afoul of parliamentary sovereignty?
If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes?
My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment. That's certainly not the only problem, but it's addressable relatively cheaply via macroprudential measures and tax law, so I'd like to see uk.gov start there and then see what further action is needed.
The money would come from "people's QE" and lifting the housing revenue account cap.
Building UP, as I mentioned before, is a better way of packing more people in than creating sprawling suburbs in the green belt. For a city its size London's density has been ridiculously restrained.
>both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them
Neither Blair's government nor the Tories have ever had any intention of building council housing, instead setting targets for the private sector.
>If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes
Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want.
>My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment.
The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.
Oh, yet more printy printy. Wonderful.
> Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want.
No, I wouldn't prefer that. I'd quite like an affordable home of my own at some point before I die, thank you very much. I believe social housing - free from the inflationary incentives of the PRS - has an important role to play in keeping the PRS honest, much like (AUIU) the NHS does a lot to keep the UK's private health sector honest compared to the situation in the US. But after the past few decades I don't trust uk.gov to treat social housing as an asset in the long term.
> The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.
I don't think that's at all obvious. When some "investors" are buying houses and leaving them empty while they appreciate, that seems to demonstrate that this is at least as much a demand-side problem as a supply-side one. Where I live, new high-rise housing is going up everywhere you look, and prices for a 1-bed are still stuck at around 15x average earnings.
I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" - it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services and reduce taxes by cutting red tape and reducing government waste" - sounds nice, doesn't frighten anyone, but if it were really that easy you'd think it would have actually happened the last 20 times someone said it.
Of course it frightens people. Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that.
I've watched this madness for 20 years as well and it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice. The "crisis" made the ultra-wealthy very happy and a large part of middle England were fairly okay with it too.
Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt. Nobody is terrified of brownfield, which is why I strongly suspect that brownfield alone isn't going to make a damn bit of difference; to steal a phrase, "if building on brownfield changed anything they'd make it illegal".
> it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice
Yes, very obviously. And not just in the obvious "pandering to donor builders and smug homeowners" sense, either; debt creation through mortgage lending is at the heart of UK monetary policy now. Probably the most extreme example I've ever seen of jam today at the cost of long-term disaster.
The kinds of the people who start looking sideways at the greenbelt (the Economist very much included) implies to me that it's more about building big expensive houses for the wealthy in a nice green area than it is about building affordable housing for Londoners.
The very fact that the Economist would lobby for this while simultaneously slamming the "ultra left wing" Corbyn policy of "just build more council housing" ought to be a sign that something is amiss.
Does this mean you think that supply is adequate and the only issue is that? We have been running a deficit of 200,000 units of housing a year for over 30 years. The shortfall has been made up, in London at least, by turning flat living rooms into bedrooms and splitting up housing into smaller and smaller units.
Also 200,000 units over 5 years is not impressive it's downright pathetic. We used to build 200,000 units of council housing a year as well as 200,000 units of private housing a year.
I don't care if a party gives away the housing as an electoral bribe down the line I just want the housing to be built now and continue to be built to keep house prices from ever going up.
If only I'd written a second sentence directly after the one you quoted which could have answered such questions...
I want lots of housing built too, and I want prices to collapse and stay collapsed, and I want Mark Carney tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, but as you say we seem to have become congenitally useless at building houses in this country.
By all means let's work on improving that, but we're probably looking at more decades even in the best case. I think the sentiment and finance and speculative aspects of the problem could be tackled much more quickly if the politics align to allow it.
In the best case if developers were forced to build once they had planning permission rather than sitting on land and the government built houses like it used to the problem would be mostly gone within a decade.
High-rise buildings are a hugely inefficient use of land and energy. 5-6 storey mansion blocks would be the optimum.
But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.
We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt. In a country of ~20m homes, that will necessarily have a huge effect.
If we can break free of the notion of UK property as an ever-appreciating safe investment, we may also deter some speculators and crater prices entirely.
High rise buildings are MORE efficient, not less. The more dense the city, the more energy efficient it is: http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-gr...
>But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.
You just have to look at the number of people packed into a smaller area in Manhattan to see that that isn't true.
>We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt.
You could also build millions of apartments inside it and then maybe people wouldn't have to live in Uxbridge and Barnet AND you wouldn't have to make air quality in London even worse.
So yes if we opened up the green belt it would be built on but it wouldn't achieve anything to alleviate the housing crisis.
And before you say anything I am a late 20s person living in London without any hope of owning my own house.
Finally sprawl is a massive issue and encouraging sprawl over densification will only make the situation worse.
It would be more accurate to say:
> I'm just realistic about what the government will do. If you look at the long running trend in the granting of planning permissions since the second world war, the government has allowed roughly 200,000 units a year to be built.
The private sector builds as many houses as it is legally allowed to do so. This is, as you note, an insufficient number. And yes of course, when they're not allowed to build enough houses to meet demand, they will prioritize building the most profitable ones.
> The private sector will only ever build for the top end of the market and never in the quantities actually needed to reduce house prices.
Yes, we've passed laws to make damn sure of that.
> So yes if we opened up the green belt it would be built on but it wouldn't achieve anything to alleviate the housing crisis.
It's quite possibly true that focusing on denser, brownfield developments is a better idea. But it's rather absurd to suggest that building more houses isn't going to help with the problem of there not being enough houses.
Utter nonsense. Vast swathes of the green belt around London are within walking -- or a short bus journey -- distance of rail stations providing very reasonable commute times into central London.
You mention the failure of private builders to meet demand for new houses. Why do you think that is?
Do you think it might be something to do with inflated land prices and onerous planning restrictions? The green belt, for example?
No I don't think that's true. If you look at the number of privately built units of housing it has been remarkably consistent at about 200,000 units a year since the second world war. Now are you going to tell me that the regulatory regime has been the same the entire time?
I'd have more sympathy for your arguments if the biggest complaint from councils about new housing was that they give planning permissions and then developers just sit on the land and send in further speculative planning applications.
Between 2006 and 20015, planning permission was awarded in England for 2,035,835 housing units. That is an average of 204,000 per year.
> I'd have more sympathy for your arguments if the biggest complaint from councils about new housing was that they give planning permissions and then developers just sit on the land and send in further speculative planning applications.
That is something they complain about. The data does not support it.
You've completely missed my point. The private sector has been building 200,000 units a year since the second world war. So if the planning regime is holding them back it's been doing it since the second world war. But we haven't had a housing crisis since the second world war because we used to build enough houses. The difference is that in addition to the 200,000 privately built housing units we used to have 200,000 units of government built housing a year. That stopped at the end of the 70s and we're paying the price of 30 years of shortfalls. There's only so many living rooms that can be turned into bedrooms before it comes to a head. What I want is for councils to be given the money to build housing again. They used to do this but then the funding was cut in the very early 80s.
> That is something they complain about. The data does not support it.
http://www.local.gov.uk/documents/10180/11831/Unimplemented+... This report from local governments shows that around 50% of granted planning permissions are still waiting to be built. Additionally it says that councils approve 9/10 planning permissions really suggesting that the planning process is not at fault here.
Right, so government stopped building public housing, but didn't allow private sources to fill the gap. That seems clear enough.
> This report from local governments shows that around 50% of granted planning permissions are still waiting to be built.
That's not at all what that report says. Again, in the past 10 years permission has been granted to build over 2 million homes; the overwhelming majority have been built. Planning permissions are the most critical input in the house building process; of course builders keep an inventory on hand. That inventory ballooned a bit during the crisis; as your own link notes, it's now falling again, and only amounts to about a 12 month supply.
> Additionally it says that councils approve 9/10 planning permissions
The existing rules are pretty clear, and obviously people don't apply for permissions which they know will not be granted. I mean, this entire thread is on the context of loosening restrictions; you're surely not claiming that 90% of applications to build in the greenbelt would be granted?
What would be relevant - and what is crucially NOT in your link - is evidence that there are building sites for which planning permission would be granted, if anyone applied, but for which no one is applying. But what seems to be the current status (and which your link supports) is that the supply of building sites for which permission can be obtained is about 200k/year, of which the overwhelming majority are 1) applied for and 2) built upon.
Housing is something that is too important to leave to just market forces because it isn't really a market. Land is scarce and you can't import to make up the shortfall. Additionally the government has committed to providing housing for the less fortunate which means that they now have to pay market rents further inflating prices. Everyone is better off if they just go back to building houses.
Just saying build in the green belt will not achieve much. It'll divert developers from building on brownfield and lead to even more of a sprawl than there currently is in cities like London.
Planning permission is a thing. Again, do you have evidence that there is a significant number of planning permissions going begging that no one is applying for?
> What you're claiming is that the planning permissions were tightened just enough so that despite twice the demand there was no real increase in housing built?
Yes? I mean, it's pretty obvious that's what happened, right? It's right there in black and right when you graph it. There has been no radical increase in the granting of planning permissions.
> Housing is something that is too important to leave to just market forces because it isn't really a market.
Given the hash of it the government is making, I think there's a much stronger argument that it's too important not to leave it to the market. Something which, moreover, hasn't been tried; there's no functioning market due to the planning permission system.
Again, if you pass a law saying that needed houses cannot be built (which has been done), and then the houses aren't built (which they are not) how can you point fingers at anything except the law?
> they now have to pay market rents further inflating prices.
Only because they've choked off the supply. We don't complain about welfare inflating food prices, because we don't pass laws stopping farmers from growing food. Food is cheaper now than ever before, not despite the fact that food is supplied by market forces, but because of it.
> Everyone is better off if they just go back to building houses.
Or they could just let other people build houses. You know, like how every single country without a housing crisis does?
> Just saying build in the green belt will not achieve much. It'll divert developers from building on brownfield and lead to even more of a sprawl than there currently is in cities like London.
The government building houses will add to the sprawl too, of course.
But what really matters isn't who builds it or where, it's that units are built. And that means identifying restrictions and removing them.
The urban developments this pieces glorify, like New Islington, compound the problem by being completely unbalanced towards the young and childless: small flats built for profit, not for people to live in with kids. Medium- and High-rise are also very much at odds with typical English individualism, and people simply won't live in them if they can afford anything else. A lot of these fancy new towers around Manchester are half-empty.
What we need up North is a serious policy of brownfield cleanup. Give local authorities more money to dispose of all shit resulting from 200 years of environmental abuse, instead of enabling more abuse on what little good greenfield is left.
When you view it like that then you see how silly this whole article is.
We need greenbelt, even the crap that PEOPLE don't like, wildlife does, especially on the stuff that dog walkers avoid. It's full of rabbits, badgers, invertebrates etc.
Because it certainly isn't the rest of us, who have no prospect of ever buying a home, or getting a pension, but are still expected to pay hundreds of thousands in taxes to subsidise over our lifetime the retirement of the aforementioned baby-boomers, while listening to their lectures about how we don't work hard enough, and don't value the precious green belt that keeps their house prices buoyant.
England is ~10% urban[1]; the figure is even lower in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The green belt isn't about protecting some dwindling remnant of unspoilt land, it's about propping up the house prices of people too stupid and selfish to even admit to themselves how stupid and selfish they're being.
It's curious how the 0.1% can mysteriously grow fabulously wealthy, cut pensions that older people rely upon, cut NHS funding which older people rely upon, jack up tuition fees, jack up rail prices, trigger the largest financial crisis in decades, price younger people out of the housing market and yet still manage to convince the younger generation that their own parents are obviously the ones who ripped them off.
(Disclaimer: I have been guilty of anti-boomer rhetoric elsewhere lately, but I read your post and you are probably right.
It is still frustrating, though, to hear older people, comfortably retired mortgage-free in houses with 3+ spare bedrooms, tell us that if only we worked harder and didn't eat out occasionally we could surely save up for a house)
Hectares of barren grassland don't magically cleanse the fumes.
You can already build in the city. In fact, New Labour put in subsidies and incentives to build multi-storey houses, which are probably still in place. So why don't developers just go and replace low-rise with high-rise? Because nobody really wants to live in flats in England if they can avoid it. It's a cultural thing and it has nothing to do with land scarcity, it's probably a result of the failed '70s projects mixed with the hardcore individualism that emerged since then. This drives down prices of flats to the point where it's not appealing for developers to build new ones (except in the immediate vicinity of SW1 or other areas that are attractive to singles and childless couples, who can be persuaded to fit into tin boxes). What sells is low-rise suburban, for which they are running out of space; hence the push for greenfield liberalisation. Everything else is divide-et-impera rhetoric, boomers vs impoverished etc etc.
You can't knock down buildings here. They're all listed. Where they are allowed to they build flats which go for half a mill (and are sold out before building completes - so much for your claim about people not wanting to live in flats). House building is cheap - it's the land that's expensive and it's only expensive because it's illegal to build anywhere outside of town.
There are sleeper villages all around the town. It's an insanely inefficient configuration only propped up by house owners' short-sighted interests.
I disagree. Those sleeper villages exist because people don't want to live in cities. If they wanted to, they'd be elsewhere; but until very recently, you couldn't pay people to live in central Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham.
If you think developers want the greenfield to build high-rise, you're sorely mistaken. They will build more and more low-rise suburbia, because that's what people want.
I live in London and this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've ever read about it.
You only have to look at the prices to see that people want to live here.
This is the problem with housing policies in England: they are all designed around London and the South West, with little regard for the rest of the country.
Is this a real, widespread, problem, or does this only apply to a small number of expensive properties in the most desirable parts of London?
I can't afford a house in the city I work in. Everyone I know lives outside and commutes by car which is a waste of time for everyone (add cost of petrol, pollution etc.). This is stupid.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...
https://andreaskluth.org/2008/11/20/why-the-economist-has-no...
Generally, I imagine they're reputable enough that they should disclose any conflicts of interest, but who knows...
Personally I think raising taxes on second homes, rentals, etc would free up a lot of housing to purchase. Do we want to do that? Are people happy renting and not buying? I'm not sure.
Why would they be trying to advance these policies?
2) The price of the land is passed on to property buyers in its entirety.