Here's why solving London's housing crisis will mean rethinking the green belt

By Jonn Elledge
London from above. Image: Getty.

BUILD ON GREEN BELT TO SOLVE CRISIS

So screams the front page of yesterday's Evening Standard. The crisis in question, predictably, is the one about housing, or more specifically the lack of it.

The story concerns a report commissioned by housing charity Shelter and written by consultancy Quod; and the Standard's headline is accurate, as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far, and the report's reasoning is a bit more complicated than the paper implies. (CityMetric, of course, would never sex up a headline in an attempt to grab readers’ attention.)

So, for your delectation, here's how our take on what the report says.

Choices, choices

The report, written by Quod director and occasional CityMetric map warbler Barney Stringer, starts out by noting the expert consensus that London needs to build 50,000 homes a year to meet demand for housing. At the moment, it’s consistently somewhere under half that. That's probably not the only reason why renting a small flat in zone 2 for a year now requires you to sell the next three generations of your family into slavery, but it's be naive to imagine it isn't a factor.

So, we need to build more, which, since houses can't hang in the air like balloons, means finding more places to build them. The report lays out a number of options:

• Tall buildings

• Greenbelt

• Garden Cities

• Estate redevelopment

• Adding density to the suburbs

• Transport corridors

• High density town centres

As well as the mysterious

• Other options?

Thanks to the laws of physics, though, we really only have three choices: build up, build out, or build in derelict areas that are effectively empty at the moment ("brownfield" land). For obvious reasons everyone wants to start with the latter.

There's just one tiny problem:

There isn't enough brownfield

Brownfield doesn't actually mean "derelict", but rather "land that has previously been developed". You know your home, where you live? That's brownfield. If you have a garden, that was brownfield, too, until recently (they've now changed the rules).

In fact, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of land in London is used for something:

A map, courtesy of Quod. Click to expand.

It's really only the pink areas on this map that are open to redevelopment:

Click to expand.

And, to quote Quod’s report:

About half of non-housing brownfield land that is currently in employment uses – the half that is most suitable for redevelopment – is already earmarked for change in the Mayor’s Opportunity Areas. Tens of thousands of homes are being built in places such as Kings Cross, Stratford and Nine Elms.

To sum up, building more on brownfield means demolishing stuff that's already there and putting it somewhere else. Or it means spending money on decontaminating ex-industrial land, or on "land assembly" (buying up enough small patches until you’ve got one big enough to be worth redeveloping). It's rarely an easy solution, and we’re already doing the bits that are relatively easy anyway.

As a result, the private sector has never managed to build more than 18,000 homes a year on London's brownfield land. Which isn't close to being enough. So, if we’re going to fix this mess, we need to look at other options

Build up

Actually, that phrase is a bit of an over-simplification for a range of options that involve "fitting more stuff into the city as it stands".

Building up could mean tower blocks. London isn't the low-rise city of the imagination...

Click to expand.

...and as many as 28,000 London homes are on the 10th floor or higher.

But a lot of people don't much fancy living in tower blocks. And pressure groups like More Light More Power and the Skyline Campaign show there's significant public opposition to them, too. So it's unlikely that solving London's housing crisis will mean turning the whole place into Manhattan.

There are other ways of squeezing more people into existing housing areas. We could redevelop housing estates:

Click to expand.

That's good, because the public sector already owns the land and it tends to have good transport links. But to quote Quod’s report, the problem here is...

...estate redevelopment is not a quick or easy solution. Good estate renewal takes many years (decades even) and a great deal of co-operation and effort. It also requires significant investment

The government has promised £140m to redevelop 100 estates nation wide. Quite apart from the difficulty of turfing people out of their homes so you can rebuild them, that does not count as "significant investment".

Or perhaps we could densify the suburbs:

Click to expand.

This sounds pretty positive: 20 per cent of London's population occupies 40 per cent of its residential land. Increase the number of people living in those areas by 10 per cent, and you could get 75,000 homes.

The problem here is that those suburbs are largely privately owned, in the form of nice little semi-detached houses. The government has limited power to compel residents to flog their land to developers, and even if most of a street were up for it, there's no guarantee everyone would be. What's more, the lowest density areas tend to be in the outer boroughs...

Click to expand.

...which are least likely to favour new homes, and also quite likely to be swing voters. Great.

So that leaves...

Building out

London could meet its housing need through new garden cities. But that means imposing new buildings on communities a long way from anywhere the mayor actually has power over, in towns and rural areas that probably have housing crises of their own to contend with. And it means forcing people to make longer commutes, damaging their quality of life and the environment all at the same time.

Luckily, there is an alternative. More than a fifth of Greater London (22 per cent) is classified as green belt. Fourteen London boroughs have more green belt than residential land. And while most of it is pretty inaccessible at the moment...

The accessibility of London's green belt. Higher numbers are better. Click to expand.

...the value of that land goes through the roof the minute planning permission is granted. If local authorities could capture that uplift, they could pump the money back into vital transport infrastructure.

This is why the topline of the report is that building on green belt has to be part of the mix. It's where the Standard got their headline from. Here’s the key passage:

Before the metropolitan Green Belt was established London saw unprecedented rates of development. Almost one in five of London’s current homes were built in a single ten-year period just before the Second World War. A much smaller and more controlled release of appropriate bits of Green Belt could be an effective way to deliver substantial numbers of new homes.

(...)

There is a legitimate debate about whether London’s Green Belt could be better managed, ensuring the protection of beauty and public access as well as providing new homes. The new Mayor will need to take a pragmatic rather that absolutist view.

But that, at the moment, is where it all falls down. All four of the major party candidates (Labour's Sadiq Khan, the Tories' Zac Goldsmith, the Lib Dem Caroline Pidgeon and the Green Sian Berry) have ruled out even touching the green belt. Given the public support for keeping it in tact, that isn't an irrational thing to do.

Nonetheless, a commitment to protecting London's green belt, come what may, is also a commitment to not solving London's housing crisis. Goldsmith and Khan may talk about protecting the green belt while campaigning. But will the next mayor be brave enough to break their promise and do the right thing in office?

Because we’re suckers for this stuff, we'll be publishing more on this report, written by Quod's Barney Stringer himself, later this week.

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To learn from their European counterparts, UK cities must compare like-with-like

By Hugo Bessis
Hamburg: better than Manchester, alas. Image: Getty.

For cities to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, and what policies might help them to grow, it is crucial that they can compare themselves to the performance of other places. However, making these comparisons can be very difficult, especially at an international level, as cities often struggle to find data that covers comparable urban geographies. And there's another more basic problem, given the hundreds of cities in the world that could be used as potential benchmarks: knowing where to look.

As a result, it is tempting for places to simply replicate well-known examples of “iconic” cities’ policies – such as Barcelona’s economic development strategy, Copenhagen’s green transports approach, Leipzig’s urban regeneration success, and Bilbao and its famous “Guggenheim effect”. However, what works in one place is dependent on specific social and economic conditions. That means policy replication is potentially ineffective unless you are comparing like-with-like.

Instead, cities need a better insight into which places they are closely related to economically, to understand what they can learn from their similar counterparts. That is why in our recent report Competing with the Continent, the Centre for Cities created groups of comparable cities across Europe based on their industrial structure. For each UK city we considered the share of jobs in each sector and looked for the continental cities with the statistically closest industrial mix.

Comparing the performance of cities that have a similar industrial structure is particularly useful, as it helps us to better understand the reasons for any differences between places that the analysis highlights. 

Take Manchester, for example – based on the proportion of jobs in each sector of its economy, out of all European cities, it is most similar to Hamburg in Germany. But although the economic structure is similar in the two cities, productivity levels are considerably different: the average economic output of each worker in Manchester was £43,500 in 2011, more than 50 per cent less than that of workers in Hamburg (£67,100).

What can explain such a productivity gap between two highly similar economies? Our analysis shows that one major difference between the two cities is the level of education of their resident population. Interestingly both cities have a similar share of high-skilled residents (31 per cent in Manchester and 32 per cent in Hamburg), but Manchester is home to a much higher sharer low-skilled residents than Hamburg: 34 per cent of the former’s residents had less than 5 good GCSEs as their highest education level, while only 15 per cent of Hamburg’s population had an equivalent level of education.

Another difference is the number of patent applications in the two cities. In 2011, there were around 24 patents applications per 100,000 inhabitants in Hamburg, but just 5 per 100,000 inhabitants in Manchester.

These comparisons suggest that the reason for the productivity gap between the two places is likely to be the contrasting quality of their economic output: although the overarching industrial structure in the two cities is the sames, firms in Hamburg are more innovative overall and have access to a higher-skilled labour pool, making them more productive. 

For Manchester, this means that the answer to boosting productivity does not necessarily come from changing its industrial mix, but rather from improving the quality of the goods and services it produces. Above all, to upscale their production, firms in Manchester need access to a more skilled -- and therefore productive -- labour force than is currently available.

Further investigation is required to fully understand local differences and potential policy implications that this kind of city-by-city comparison can offer. But comparing places based on their industrial structures provides a first step to more relevant city comparisons and better policy prescriptions -- a much more effective strategy than for cities to copy ideas from other places which their economic structure bears no relation to. To find out which of their continental counterparts each UK city is closest to, explore our data tool.

You can read about these findings in more detail here. Or you can head to our European Cities Data Tool to explore all our data on the 330 cities covered in the report.

Hugo Bessis is a researcher for the Centre for Cities, on whose blog this article originally appeared.

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