The availability of quality affordable housing in London is undoubtedly the biggest threat facing the city, but it can also be the catalyst for an unprecedented economic boom. The Mayor of London produces a fairly comprehensive annual report (here:
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/defa...ondon_2020.pdf) into the state of housing in London. It underlines a lot of the key issues; namely supply doesn’t meet demand. Some select screenshots from the report:
There is no simple single solution to this multi-faceted issue that has built up over the past 30+ years. Some of these solutions require at least a decade to have an impact (e.g. training/sourcing more bricklayers, building concrete plants, etc…). There needs to be:
- A root-to-branch review of how and where homes are built (including planning, raw materials, resources, etc…)
- An increased focus on providing the necessary infrastructure and amenities to avoid increasing the burden on existing facilities
- Reform of the property taxation system
- Break-up of the housing developer oligopoly
- Increased focus of Transport for London to become a developer (e.g. Hong Kong’s MTR), etc…
Pressure can also be relieved by better utilisation of existing stock:
- Some 175,000 family homes in London are occupied by retirees due to an extensive shortfall in retirement properties
- 44% of family homes are under-occupied whilst one-bedroom homes are overcrowded
- A further 71,670 homes are empty
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Originally Posted by 10023
The problem here is that English people all want to live in houses, rather than apartments like most Europeans, and so providing enough housing units affordably means low quality construction and covering every square inch of open space with grotesque cul-de-sacs. There is a lot of London that isn’t historic housing and could and should be demolished to make way for 6-8 story apartments built up to the lot line (including most of the areas where these 1930s semi-detached houses were built).
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There is certainly a reluctance or hesitation to replicate the family-focused apartments that proliferate across the continent. Some of it is undoubtedly psychological, i.e. a home is where you have your own front-door (irrelevant of whether it is a terrace, semi or detached); as the saying goes,
”an Englishman’s home is his castle”. That thinking has percolated through the demand-side, legal apparatus, planning system and property finance sector. Flats are viewed as a launch-pad for home ownership, those just out of university, young couples and those on lower economic profiles.
Before Grenfell, I’d say the rather negative view on flats was evolving (choice and availability), but the scandal around deficient construction, not just of flammable cladding, but insufficient internal firewalls, etc… has not done the dwelling type any favours.
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Originally Posted by biguc
Not to mention that the rings of low-density sprawl hemming in so many cities are part of the reason they're expensive. If London could go ahead and build actual city on the edge of the actual city, sure that would help--it puts housing where people want to live. But you can built whatever you want at the outer edge of the sprawl and it's not going to make things better for people who want to live in the city.
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Building on the Green Belt to create a new urban ring around Outer London creates its own problems, most notably the vast increase in infrastructure required to move people around. It can’t be overstated just how important the Green Belt is burnt into the national consciousness; the level of opposition to building on this area would be simply unimaginable.
The only exception that to building on Green Belt or redeveloping Outer London plots that could work is a focus on existing under-utilised or enhanced infrastructure. Crews Hill station on the northern periphery of the London Borough of Enfield comes to mind; see below image. It is sits in the Green Belt, but not much is there except for gardening centres and fields. If considerate development was focused around the station, then you would get a win-win situation.
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Originally Posted by Commentariat
This picture illustrates everything wrong with housing in the UK - tiny houses with wasted backyards, and the only possible densification opportunities are to cram more people in to what is already there or illegally rent out a shed. It’s total madness. Small developers should be able to buy a few adjoining properties, knock them over and build low rise apartments. But that form of infill is basically banned across the UK.
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Those rear gardens are a bit of an anomaly for the dwelling stock in the picture and not really typical of the majority of semi-detached dwellings which appear to be the focus of the conver.
look to be on the upper end of the scale and/or outer reaches of London, so redeveloping them might not bring sustainable gains.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
I wonder why, back in the 19th century, the UK didn't develop the model of Schrebergärten, which are those little garden colonies with sheds you see on the fringe of cities in Germanic (and I think Nordic?) Europe.
When Germany was urbanizing/industrializing in the 19th century, the new apartment dwellers bought mini-plots of land in larger fringe community gardens, which ended up being lifesavers during WW2, as urbanites could still grow their own food. And the sheds serve as mini-getaways, like man caves or she-sheds in the U.S.
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Allotments in the UK date back some 300-years, and like Germany during WW2 helped feed the population. There are some 36,000 sites in London, but they are in high demand with waiting lists in the tens of thousands.
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