Since buildings sit on it and food is grown in it, the last two chapters lead us towards another socionatural resource: land. Five topics seem relevant here. We deal with housing and urban density in this chapter, transport, flooding and waste in the next.
Britain has a higher population density than most European countries. If you took its 60 million acres and divided them between 40 million adults, the resulting 1.5 acres per person is equivalent to a box with sides that are 255 feet long. In fact, as noted in Chapter Two, Britons are packed into a space narrower than this for three reasons.
First, large parts of the country are owned by very few, whether corporations, such as the National Trust or the Crown, or family estates (since the Norman Conquest, in some cases). One-third of UK land is owned by just 1,200 families (Cahill, K., 2006, pp 308-9; 2010). Second, the countryside has been relatively protected from development. Third, as the rest of us make do with the leftovers, pressure on space obviously builds up. The domestic residences we occupy are distributed either via housing markets (private residences and rented accommodation) or assessments of need (social housing). Over the last four decades the balance – including planning and regulatory frameworks (Luhde-Thompson and Ellis, 2008, p 47) – has shifted in favour of housing markets, permitting those with the financial resources and political voice to occupy greater space and more desirable locations.
We have encountered housing already in Chapter Three (place poverty) and Chapter Six (energy efficiency). How does housing relate to land? More houses obviously means more of the country is carpeted not just with buildings but also with the public and private infrastructures needed to support them. Furthermore, the number of single-occupier UK households looks set to grow. The question of urban density therefore arises, and we explore this shortly.
In this chapter we look at the social and environmental impacts of the housing market. What effects do those markets have on the rates and nature of UK poverty?
Do housing markets contribute to unsustainable urban densities? How should we explain these effects, and what solutions might be proposed?
Housing and poverty
The British obsession with property has deep foundations. Asa Briggs (1990) records how industrialisation and urbanisation first created slums and then a sense of revulsion against squalor on the part of social philanthropists, enlightened employers, charities, civic reformers, revolutionaries (such as Friedrich Engels),
trade unionists, political campaigners and even, it seems, Queen Victoria. The dream of living somewhere better than what Nye Bevan condemned as ‘rabbit-warren accommodation’ (Foot, 1975, p 56) motivated the post-Second World War social housing programme that he initiated. Unfortunately, Bevan’s emphasis on housing quality would be overtaken by a quantity-led approach, epitomised by stack-them-high tower blocks promoted by local governments too often mesmerised by modernist images of ‘cities in the sky’. What Thatcher skilfully did after 1979 was to rearticulate those historical desires, turning them against the legacies of a social democratic politics that had grown lethargic, by exploiting disaffection with social housing and uniting individuals’ aspirations to new visions of Britain as a post-industrial economy whose wealth would come from financial services and speculation. Share ownership and home ownership would be the New Jerusalem, delivered through the private sector.
The long-term consequences of this drove, and reflected, the shift in social values associated with economic liberalism.
Desert is now less a question of being than of displaying the outward manifestations of personal worth – conspicuous consumption, jobs, holidays and
‘location, location, location’. You are what you are perceived to be by others in a marketplace. In previous, less affluent eras, you could be in need and still be judged as deserving. The respectable poor were valued, or at least patronised. But with the merger of ‘worth’ and ‘wealth’, to be in need increasingly became a sign of personal failings. If you need help, then clearly you are not working, or not working hard enough, and so, by definition, you don’t deserve any help. Even belonging to groups formally exempt from disapproval is no longer a guarantee of immunity. A child from a deprived neighbourhood might be feral. A person with a disability might just be ‘pulling a sickie’. The causes of, and barriers inhibiting solutions to, poverty barely register with two-thirds of the public (Hanley, 2009).1 Poverty is regarded not as a series of awful – although often temporary – episodes that afflict millions periodically, but as a demon which, stalking our free market utopia, has to be exorcised again and again and again. The wealthiest have accelerated away, and if you cannot follow them financially at least you can assert your status by mimicking a widespread moral and cultural disdain for the disadvantaged. The poorest are punched and then blamed for their bruises.
That the welfare state has struggled to keep pace with these economic and cultural injustices can be seen in the area of housing. By 2013 the Housing Benefits bill stood at £23 billion,2 with over five million claimants, making it a frequent source of moral panic and inspiring the benefit caps and ‘Bedroom Tax’ mentioned earlier in Chapter Three. Stripped of context, those statistics lead easily to salivating headlines in a popular press that also stamps its foot menacingly when the obvious alternatives (such as rent control) are proposed. The fact that Housing Benefit goes into landlords’ pockets matters little, not when it is easier to rage at the (very rare) family living in mansions at taxpayers’ expense.3
That context goes unmentioned for the simple reason that it consists of the property boom from which millions have benefited. Development land is now 200
times more valuable than agricultural land (Evans and Unsworth, 2012, p 1166).
This is not to view people as selfish, necessarily. With the state pension withering, it is understandable that so many have sought to finance their retirement through housing. You climb the housing ladder – buying low, selling high – before retiring, releasing the equity, enjoying the proceeds and bequeathing some to the children.
With millions playing the same game, this propels house prices upwards. And the more people play the game, the more the game is worth playing. No wonder that housing markets are sometimes described as pyramid schemes (Mulheirn, 2011). You might even become a buy-to-let landlord; with rising prices come rising deposits, meaning millions are forced to rent. The buy-to-let market takes properties off the market, demand outstrips supply even more, fuelling ever higher prices and deposits and rents. It’s a win-win merry-go-round.4
Except for those on low incomes and no ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ to help.
Before the 1980s housing subsidies were directed at bricks and mortar (Webb, 2012, p 9). Since then, it is demand that has been subsidised to help tenants keep pace with soaring costs. Even with low take-up (up to a million people do not claim Housing Benefit), such entitlements led to the benefits bill that conservatives condemn (Fitzpatrick, 2012, pp 226-8), poverty traps being due not to low wages, but to ‘lazy people staying in bed while the rest of us leave for work at 4.30am’, etc, etc. Yet there is only so much that benefits can do to compensate for housing markets that powered the fantasy economy which crashed in 2007–09.
Overall, then:
• 43 per cent of social renters are living in poverty after housing costs;
• 38 per cent in the private rented sector are living in poverty after housing costs;
• 37 per cent of homeowners are in poverty if their imputed rent (see below) is not included in measures of household income. If it is included, few homeowners are in poverty (Tunstall et al, 2013).
Bramley (2012, pp 141-4) finds that, like poverty in general, there is quite a lot of ‘churn’ when it comes to housing needs. Most housing problems tend to be temporary because people:
• trade down to cheaper housing;
• adapt their spending to their income and/or housing needs;
• accumulate debt or run down savings;
• accumulate arrears on mortgage payments or rent;
• apply for state assistance;
• dissolve and/or become reliant on family support.
Yet these strategies may have adverse, knock-on consequences and, even if they are successful, problems can recur in later years:
... households with a current affordability problem ... are five times more likely to find hire purchase repayments a heavy burden, four times more likely to spend more than 40% of their net weekly income on food, and 1.7 times more likely to have no car. They are also slightly more likely to say that they have not bought any of a list of consumer durables over the last year. (Bramley, 2012, p 142)
Not surprisingly, problems are correlated with low income, few assets, high rents and lower security of tenure: ‘Private renting has the highest incidence of problems, and owner occupation the lowest, with social renting occupying an intermediate position’ (Bramley, 2012, p 144). Lone parents, single-person households and younger people are particularly disadvantaged.
In addition to benefits, other aspects of the post-war system remain. Good quality, low-cost housing still exists with the social housing sector, accounting for 18 per cent of all households, having a fairly redistributive effect. Through area-based initiatives and urban regeneration, New Labour sought a ‘neighbourhood renewal’ (Cole and Goodchild, 2001). It also required builders to include affordable housing in their development plans in order to receive planning permission (Monk et al, 2006).5 This was not simply about ensuring a supply of good, low-cost housing, but about trying to facilitate social integration through a mix of tenures.
One effect of the 1980s sale of council housing was that it helped to disperse different housing types into separate social spaces (Lee, 1994), although this point about social distancing should not be overstated. Clarke and Monk (2011, p 422) warn against making simplistic associations between spatial deprivation and concentrations of tenure. The vast majority of social housing residents
‘live in areas with between 10 and 60 per cent social housing.’ Although areas with high proportions of social rented housing suffer disproportionate levels of poverty, tenure is only part of the problem, and we should not equate ‘poor neighbourhoods’ with ‘socially rented housing’. Targeting residualised areas makes no sense when there are few such areas to be found.
That said, there is little to challenge the thesis, evidenced in earlier chapters, that Britain is a more disconnected country than it once was, with housing reforms adding to the cumulative effects of low wage employment, education reforms and rising inequalities. For several decades after the Second World War there was much less disconnection:
... 55% of British people born in 1946, and 48% of those born in 1958, spent at least some time in social housing in their childhood.
(Lupton et al, 2009, p 3)
But the explosion in home ownership and the evisceration of local authority housing reversed this trend (Beaumont, 2006; Lee et al, 2006), aided by changes to labour markets (Hills, 2007). The North–South divide is largely due to property prices, with low-skilled and public sector workers in the South increasingly
disadvantaged (Strelitz and Darton, 2003, pp 91-4). This divide should not blind us to intra-regional variations yet, overall, there are fewer in-between neighbourhoods than was once the case.
That bifurcation then becomes a source of the simplistic and highly politicised associations that Clarke and Monk warn against. New Labour’s attempt at neighbourhood renewal was a worthy but tricky undertaking (Bretherton and Pleace, 2011; see also Darcy, 2010). Researchers disagree about its accomplishment, with some calling it a qualified success (Shaw and Robinson, 2010) and others more sceptical, arguing that, despite welcome extra finance, New Labour fuelled the demonisation of those seen to have excluded themselves from social norms (Mathews, 2010).
According to the Conservative-led Coalition government, most social problems are due to 120,000 ‘troubled families’ (Casey, 2012).6 Thus social housing has become associated with ‘sink estates’, antisocial behaviour and benefit dependency.
When political parties talk about troubled families we all hear the dog whistle and know who, and where, they mean (Hanley, 2007).
Housing and the natural environment
In addition to its social effects, housing has implications for the natural environment, as we saw in Chapter Six. Those impacts can be direct (housing developments) or indirect (resources diverted away from ecological sustainability).
Ten buildings do not necessarily have a worse impact than five buildings. Quantity matters, but what matters more is the geographical distribution of those buildings.
There is disagreement about how much sprawl exists in the UK. Officially, about 9 per cent of England’s land area is urbanised (Stratton, 2012), but the Campaign to Protect Rural England contests this: ‘the UK National Ecosystem Assessment shows that 14.6% of England’s land area is already classed as urban – the third highest figure in Europe after Belgium and Holland.’7 It depends on where you perceive sprawl as ending. A road takes up a fixed area, but the noise and pollution it generates spreads farther. The trend everywhere, however, is towards more sprawl. Since the 1950s,
European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. (EEA, 2006, p 11)
Even so, 14.6 per cent hardly seems like much. Due to restrictions on development, builders economise on plots: ‘… the average size of new homes has got smaller, so that the smallest new homes in western Europe now appear to be being built in England’ (Evans and Unsworth, 2012, p 1166). If what counts as ‘high’ or ‘low’
density varies from place to place (Cheng, 2010, pp 13-16), perhaps Britain is already dense enough. So why be concerned?
The consensus is that, beyond a certain threshold, lower density housing is worse for the environment than higher density housing (Bulkeley, 2013, pp 64-5,
119-21).8 This challenges the ‘garden cities’ approach of Ebenezer Howard (1985, p 11, emphasis in original): ‘Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.’ But by and large, most regard higher densities as desirable:
With low population density there are simply not enough people to make public transport a viable alternative to cars. We need to achieve a density of 50 homes per hectare as a minimum sustainable density to support a regular bus service…. Existing areas of terraced housing and low- and medium-rise blocks of flats normally far exceed this density, reducing energy use in transport, encouraging local shopping and offering easier conditions for high-efficiency renovation. Higher density also helps social integration and reduces isolation by supporting mixed uses and better services. Existing suburbs in cities and towns have an average density of 35 homes per hectare or less. They could be made more environmentally sustainable through subdivision of property and infill building, creating enough density to support local services and public transport within walking distance. (Power, 2008, pp 4489-90; see also Power and Houghton, 2007, pp 108-9)
If Power’s minimum threshold is correct, then parts of the UK need to achieve higher densities.9 Even central London is nowhere near the ‘superdensities’ of central Paris and Barcelona, for instance (Kohn, 2010, pp 50-7; see also Wyatt, 2008). In short, higher densities involve:
• lower consumptions of fossil fuels as people travel across shorter distances, often on public transport;
• more efficient heating and cooling systems (shared walls and floors/ceilings, urban heat islands; see Kohn, 2010, pp 37-41) (combined heat and power systems become more viable, as do district cooling networks);
• fewer cars, as well as more walking and cycling, often in shared public spaces that can facilitate social capital, communal integration and cultural diversity.
Higher densities can yield ecological, health and social benefits. I say can because we should be wary of making casual generalisations. As Mitrany’s (2005) research in Haifa suggests, much depends on planning and design; high density in residential areas alone was widely perceived as negative, but in public and social areas, the response was more positive. Inputs from users and residents also matter. Forsyth et al (2010) draw on evidence from the Corridor Development Initiative, in Minneapolis-St Paul (Minnesota), to show that with community participation and control in the planning process, support for high-density housing can be built (see also Bulkeley and Mol, 2003). But the nature and efficacy of the planning system will itself depend on broader socioeconomic structures and political processes (Winston, 2010). Quastel et al (2012) show how ‘densification’ in Vancouver
has a distinct class dimension, benefiting homeowners much more than renters.
Poor, working-class and ethnic communities have been displaced from inner-city neighbourhoods (the process known as ‘gentrification’). Thus, densification has been separated from environmental concerns (reductions in emissions) and social concerns (social housing needs) (see also Rachel Lombardi et al, 2011, p 292). Unsworth (2007, pp 741-2) found similar limitations in Leed’s ‘city living’
apartment schemes.
Therefore, higher density per se is not a magic bullet.10 As we saw in the last chapter, there is a need to reconnect people to the food chain, something that is central to the garden cities vision (Vale and Vale, 2010, p 24). And all cities require a degree of unplanned spontaneity, of chaos and excitement, where people encounter unknown others, and the identities of communities are open and organic (Heng and Malone-Lee, 2010). The needs for privacy, for contact with nature and to control spatial boundaries must be part of any higher density aspiration (Lawson, 2010). Nor should higher densities compromise the need, discussed in Chapter Three, to allow the poorest more domestic space than many of them currently have. Resentment, anxiety and social conflict can be the result of forcing people together. And while public spaces and parks are vital, Stenner et al (2012) and Coolen and Meesters (2012, p 65) suggest that private domestic gardens are both desired and desirable.
This more rounded appreciation of what urban reform could mean often motivates the drive for ‘transition towns’ in which all parts of a community work together to address climate change (Lockyer, 2010, pp 208-14; Bulkeley, 2013, pp 217-23). This means supporting local economies, for example, local food chains, energy generation and local currencies, building self-sufficiency and resilience, and experimenting with new communal and civic projects.
Similarly, many search for an ideal that combines features of both compact cities and garden cities. Holden (2004, p 106) refers to this as the ‘decentralised concentration’ of small, high-density cities with short distances between housing and services. Such ‘polycentric cities’ imply either dense centres within large cities, or groups of compact towns, although that is not our concern in this chapter.
If housing density lower than a sustainable minimal threshold is ecologically damaging, what should our response be? What creates low densities exactly?
Let’s first dispel the opinion that we are powerless to do anything about sprawl.
Gordon and Cox (2012, pp 567-8) argue that urban planning policies have relatively little impact given the workings of market forces, the inertia created by political-legal systems (based on private property rights) and the importance of cultural norms and standards; for example, it is easier to get Europeans into cars than to get Americans out of them. Increasing sprawl has been a feature of European and American cities for generations, they observe. Cities sprawl because that’s what a capitalist economy requires. Gordon and Cox therefore salute the free market, anti-government bias that has characterised much (but not all) of the US experience.
But where other socioeconomic principles prevail, planning does make a difference (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003, pp 142-3). According to Evans and Unsworth (2012), after 2001 housing density increased in England compared to Scotland due to planning guidance issued in the former but not the latter.
But where other socioeconomic principles prevail, planning does make a difference (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003, pp 142-3). According to Evans and Unsworth (2012), after 2001 housing density increased in England compared to Scotland due to planning guidance issued in the former but not the latter.