Tom Chance
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Comment on: Mixed-up policies
This study by Paul Cheshire is worth a read:
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19446/1/Segregated_neighbourhoods_and_mixed_communities_-_a_critical_analysis.pdf
He suggests that "mixed communities" treats a symptom of inequality, not its cause, and that they can make life difficult for people on lower incomes and shops and services cease to serve their needs. -
Comment on: The rumour mill...
Colin,
The buildings "crowding" St Pauls and the Tower of London have nothing to do with brownfield first, they are office buildings in the City that are never going to be built anywhere else. There are a few medium-rise blocks of flats going up alon and just away from the river in Southwark, Tower Hamlets, etc, but that's exactly what you should have in a central London area with excellent transport connections. -
Comment on: German Lessons
Very interesting summary, thanks.
Do you not also think we need to look at our tax and mortgage system as well?
One other interesting point to consider is that regulations force a much higher level of skills. To over-simplify, we spend money on civil servants drawing up complex codes and assessing conformity but do little to ensure homes are actually built well, while the Germans have relatively simple and robust standards and train their workforce to meet them. -
Comment on: Select committee #fail
I'm not concerned about the morgage drought so much as the irresponsible mortgate glut in the last decade that pushed prices up. And I'm a frustrated priced out rented wanting to buy to give my family some stability.
Actually in the really long term, land values have barely risen in real terms.
I would recommend reading Matt Griffith's recent work for the IPPR on problems with the house building industry. You let them off the hook by suggesting it's all about land release.
Looking back over the last century, the best housing policy we've ever had was council housing. That's the only time we've built enough houses, and they were secure and affordable. If we had got spatial planning and architecture right, and hadn't flogged them off in the 80s and 90s, we'd be in an even better position today. I would much rather that as a solution to housing than the unreformed market with an unreformed building sector and a weaker planning system that can't contain sprawl or guarantee decent room sizes.
Maybe if we reformed our taxation system to stop treating land like capital, and tax land and capital instead of or more than income, the market might function more as means of delivering housing rather than investments. Imagine people buying up clothes to sell on at a profit in later years, forcing more and more people to rent them because they can no longer afford to compete with speculative clothes buyers! -
Comment on: Select committee #fail
Colin, the current draft of the NPPF is weaker in a number of respects. I agree that it should be "weaker" in protecting pony fields and low value pesticide-soaked farmland from new home building, but that is one among many concerns that NGOs and sustainability experts have. It's also far too complicated and lengthy. But I have no faith whatsoever in planning authorities up and down the land applying the NPPF to deliver sustainable development, i.e. traffic reduction, high quality homes, etc.
The other point you've not mentioned, which you're of course aware of, is that the crazy house prices (land values) have a lot to do with other factors such as loose credit in the noughties, a developer market too reliant on a few big builders who have shown themselves to be incapable of unwilling to build more homes, and a regulatory system that encourages an investor mentality rather than a "I want a home for my family" mentality.
As FXT says, leaving housing affordability to be solved by market mechanisms would lead to massive environmental and social implications. Supply is part of the answer, planning reform of some sort may be part of the answer, and I think the committee was fairly balanced in saying that.
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