There cannot be a crisis because if there was we would be doing something different because that is what a crisis demands.
The UK has a manufactured housing shortage. Building houses caused it. Building more houses won’t solve it. This is because unlike Europe and other advanced nations the UK to all extents and purposes exclusively builds low rise car dependent houses colloquially known as “single family homes”. Built exclusively for the ambulant car owning sector of the population. It is a narrow housing offer based on a post war Boomer demand that is now over. However sufficient demand exists as much of our existing 26M houses is blocked by ageing Boomers with no realistic option to move somewhere more appropriate and stay within their community.
Some Background
Demographics, technology and the desire/ need for non car dependent lifestyle is ignored by UK politicians and developers alike. In Europe apartments make up 40 -60% of homes. It is probably no accident that the countries now struggling the most are those with a similar car-based low rise housing model. US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Countries wedded to the idea of the shortcake house with a lawn back and front.
It should not be a surprise that advanced states such as Germany, New Zealand and California are squeezing out houses and in Germany even considering banning them. Yet in the UK we trumpet and pursue this form of housing seemingly happy to be the world’s worst outlier in terms of housing. No state is as bad as the UK. No state so self-disillusioned to believe that its housing offer is the right one. No state happier pouring mindless volumes of concrete into the ground. No state placing ever greater demands on the future generation when its then smaller tax base will struggle even more than it does today. It is not as if we don’t have a choice. We do but seemingly don’t care about the future just today. Politicians gullibly support national house builders and fail to ask them why we have ended up where we have.
With a new government seemingly devoted to nett zero we have now arrived at The UK Housing Paradox.
“Pursuing Nett Zero whilst choosing to build Europe’s least sustainable housing (2x the EU average embodied carbon) that maximises embodied and operational carbon, transport poverty and car ownership.”
If there wasn’t choice maybe there could be some justification but there is and there isn’t.
Houses (Single Family Units)
Houses are expensive and even the UK’s smallest and cheapest is expensive compared to an apartment not withstanding that every house requires a piece of road in front of it. The UK ones are appallingly expensive, appallingly small and of equally appalling quality.
Apartment blocks need much less infrastructure in terms of highway, services, drains than houses. It is little wonder that not only are UK houses more expensive they have 2X the embodied carbon of the average EU Home. Houses generate more CO2 than apartments as the graph below shows.
What is clear that whilst other countries developed and broadened their housing offer the UK housing offer remained with a few noticeable city exceptions at 2 story’s. Medium rise (5 – 10 story) housing makes up between 40-60% of European countries housing offer. Affordable housing where a car was not necessary to live there. If you can afford a car you dont need affordable housing. A client recently noted that it was easy to spot UK affordable homes as they were the ones with new or expensive cars on the driveways.
Historically UK the housing model was largely the invention of London’s railway companies who invented the suburb. Expanses of low-density low-rise identikit houses. The result is that London has a population density less than half that of Paris. It was a model followed post WW2 and suited the Boomer generation and did not require skill or planning do deliver it and most importantly the least working capital. It fitted the British anti investment mentality. The pattern was set for the problem we have today.
Why didn’t it change?
About 40 years ago a property developer and fellow college student explained that what the UK builds is the most profitable for the developer (why would you build something that wasn’t?). Even a terrace is avoided.
The reasons are simply and solely for the benefit of the developer.
- It requires the least amount of working capital to develop a site. Apartment block and terraces needed to be finished before sales are completed. A house requires far less money before the investment is recovered.
- Production of houses can be adjusted to suit changing market conditions. The procurement system allows work to be stopped and started as required.
- Sites need to last 3-5 years whilst the next one is brought online; the sales/build rate is throttled by price adjustment to ensure that presence is continually maintained.
- It is a low-tech winning formula that makes money.
- There is almost no product liability associated with individual houses.
The result is houses. Lots of houses and little else. A sea of houses best summed up by an Italian colleague who on first seeing a UK housing estate remarked. “so many buildings so few people”. Houses are built only for profit and a narrow customer band. Developers are simply mining a diminishing market leaving people trapped in the houses they have previousl built over the last generation or two. It is little wonder that housing developments that offer nothing for the local population are so ardently resisted.
Two graphics below that both compare the UK with Europe illustrate the problem.
The first is from the Financial Times using ONS data on housing.
The one below the FT graphic is from the 2020 BRE report on UK housing stock https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the-United-Kingdom_Report_BRE-Trust.pdf section 5
The simple fact is that Europe has a wider housing offer with a lower financial entry level that is cheaper, faster and more sustainable to build. It is not a difficult correlation to make that countries with a higher proportion of apartments have less of a housing shortage. Our “only houses” offer is the problem. Building more of a failed solution is not going to fix the shortage.
Instead, we Brits satisfy “The definition of insanity is doing the same experiment and expecting different results.” ― Albert Einstein where we continue to perpetuate the construction of expensive carbon max (2X European average) pokiest housing where you have to own a car to live there.
The consequence of the narrow UK housing offer is that
- We have a shortage of affordable housing. It is madness to build affordable housing that still requires the occupant to commit 25% of their gross income to owning a car. Affordable cars that with will disappear with the last petrol and diesel cars (circa 2040) a mere 15 years away.
- It encourages house blocking compared to first world countries like Europe where there are generational options through life. There is no obvious progression from house to non-car dependent spacious apartment. We need housing close to established transport and amenity hubs and where no new infrastructure is required. Reusing existing embodied carbon economically and climate wise is the obvious best option. Yet we build the opposite. We could do it but we choose not to because those solutions rightly dont provide the maximum profits.
- The idiocy of the UK solution is the constant need to build schools as the older population blocks housing in school catchments. Converted schools litter the countryside.
- The average UK house has 1.2 cars per household. About 10T of embodied carbon plus operational carbon per house.
- The need for avoidable roads. Roads that use oil-based binders to create the surface. There is no credible alternative yet in sight. Will we return to cobbled roads and pavements?
- Income that could be diverted to jobs, diet, a healthy lifestyle and maintaining the economy of our high streets is instead used to pay for power, car insurance and loans. As an example, the cost of running a UK car is around £4K per annum, £5k before tax. If 1M non car dependent homes were built this would potentially release £5B a year into local economies notwithstanding the reduced demand on the NHS that a better lifestyle and greater disposable income would bring.
Houses won’t solve the housing problem because
- Changing demographics, old people don’t drive or do stairs.
- People want or can only afford car free lives.
- Nimbyism. They meet planning resistance because nobody sees the benefit. It just more of the same.
- Housing estates require new roads and infrastructure before house construction can start.
A thought:
The UK has 26M largely car dependent houses. Many of those built after WW2 and before 1976 are low quality and vulnerable to climate change. Between 1946 and 1979, a total of 5,804,150 houses were built in the UK.
Cornish Type 1 – worth keeping? No.
Observe the sagging ridge lines and know about the shallow foundations and well documented floor defects of these houses and bungalows and we know they are well past their design lives. The original TRADA roofs designed for light clay tiles are simply not up to the addition of PV (solar panels and insulation) let alone retiled with concrete tiles. A perverse action undertaken by many authorites where perfectly good clay tiles are replaced with concrete tiles. The recovered clay tiles then recycled to new expensive 3 and 4 bed houses.
It is irrational to try and improve such old buildings. The argument for improvement rather than a wider holistic consideration of housing in the move to nett zero seems vested in self-interests. Academic support of improvement of the existing housing stock ensures the perpetuation of the greenfield development model. We apply ridiculous values to the minimal embodied carbon of these houses and bungalows whilst building carbon intensive roads and bridges and massive concrete foundations under houses whilst the superstructures decrease in weight.
What these old buildings do have is roads and infrastructure. Usually within 1 or 2 km of the nearest amenity and transport hub. Built and ready to go. These houses and bungalows represent land that could be rapidly exploited. Require little planning effort and exploit the changing trends of demographics and society.
No complicated 106 agreements needed when the development consists of 4 or 5 properties assembled by the owners. 5 homes become 30 in 6 months. Why the owners? Because with £5.5T about to move generations as the Boomers die out why not harness that money with an inheritance tax concession that gives the whole country a stake in the solution rather than housebuilders shareholders.
How many homes do we need?
The UK estimates that we need 300,000 homes a year. That is 3M for the next 10 years.
Climate Migration
In addition to our normal housing demand, we might expect to see a further 30M MENA climate migrants (400M are running out of food water there) come to the UK. In order to house our population, we probably need around 15M homes. 30 to 40% wont drive.
Personal Transport
As we become too old and too poor to drive options like Zoox autonomous cars will become the affordable pay as you go transport of choice. It will drive the change that should already be happening.
Nimby verses Yimby
This apparent conflict is simply the result of the narrow UK housing offer.
There are two misconceptions in this artifical war.
1) A bunch of old people hold up the provision of new homes is perhaps the greatest misrepresentation of the housing industry. It is simply not true. The houses the Yimbys want and need already exist. What doesn’t exist is the route for the older parts of our society to get out of them and make them available whilst remaining in their communities.
2) Developers are some sort of benevolent altruistic organisations trying to solve the housing shortage. They are not. The shortage of affordable housing has been manufactured by the UK industry in order to maximise demand for the most profitable product – the 3 and 4 bedroom house.
The trick to freeing up housing in a community is not to build for the young but for the older increasing segment of society and those who would live car free lifestyles. The migration of the house blockers would provide the homes the Yimbys want.
What developers get from this conflict is to build more unnecessary but profitable 3 and 4 bed houses with government clearing away dissenters.
Rural Housing
There can be nothing more entitled than the demand for rural housing.
In the UK there is almost no need for anyone to live in the country. Across Europe we have seen the countryside empty. Not so the UK where it is nothing but a lifestyle choice; one that is subsidised by the urban population many of who are less well off than those that now live in the countryside. A situation that has reversed in the last 50 years due to the availability cheap of fuel and cars. A situation coming to an end and time for the countryside to return to its industrial agricultural use and become once again somewhere to escape from rather than a theme park to escape to.
Why subsidised? So called rural dwellers pay the same for utilities, water, they drive farther and have greater operational carbon footprints. How is it possible that a rubbish bin costs the same to empty in a village than a city estate? It is not possible.
Not only is rural housing environmentally and carbon wise the worst housing solution but Governments that seeks nett zero support this worst housing of all with additional financial support. Rural Housing maximises embodied, operational carbon and transport poverty. It seems to have missed the policy makers attention that universal car ownership will fall dramatically and many lifestyles dependent on cheap cars will no longer be viable. Politicians need to travel beyond the M25 occasionally.
A solution
Most countries dont see houses as a solution and neither should we. We need to stop building houses, increase the density of our population and not continue to build what amounts to some form of future open prison as demographics, migration and decreasing car ownership reshapes society.
https://www.refire-online.com/markets/single-family-homes-are-they-on-the-way-out
Replacing 3M of our substandard houses each with 6 apartments would generate the housing we need. Avoid 3M upgrade costs and create +15M new homes. This would save around 23,000 Km of new roads. 36M Tons of embodied carbon. It would create a fair and more inclusive society, yet no politician seems able to grasp simple demographics.
Imagine
15M homes (apartments) that would not require a greenfield site to be used or a new road to be built. It would reinvigorate our high streets using disposable income from carbon saving focused on local businesses.
15M apartments that would still leave the UK almost at the bottom of the EU table where the ratio of apartments to houses is concerned
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