>Many parts of Britain suffer from an acute housing shortage, manifested in enormous gaps between prices and construction costs. Previous schemes aiming to resolve this issue have often failed, because the homeowners who make up two thirds of the British public have generally seen development as placing large burdens on them without any corresponding benefits. We need a scheme that creates more good homes and better places in a way that shares the benefits with existing residents and communities, so they may become enthusiastic advocates of building rather than vigorous opponents. We propose that residents of a street should be able to agree by a high majority on new strict rules for designs to make better use of their plots. A street of suburban bungalows, for example, could agree on the right to create Georgian-style terraces. In many cases, an adopted ‘street plan’ would greatly increase the value of residents’ homes, giving them strong reasons to agree on it.
>These proposals will foster gentle intensification within about half a mile of existing transport and town centres, creating better and greener places with more customers to support struggling local high streets. More people will be able to live in neighbourhoods that pass the ‘pint of milk test’, living in walking distance of somewhere they can buy a pint of milk, along with other essential social infrastructure. Older residents can agree to permit the creation of generously-sized and stair-free new homes that will meet their needs in retirement for decades to come, with supported living options as they age. Our modelling suggests that, even with extensive constraints and extremely conservative assumptions about build cost and aversion to change, this policy could create a further 110,000 homes each year for the next 15 years above current estimates, all with the consent of the existing residents, and none requiring a single inch of greenfield or greenbelt land. On streets that agree to allow typical forms of gentle intensification, the average participating homeowner would make £900,000, while the local authority would get an average of £79,000 for every new property delivered. The boom would mean an extra £34bn spent on construction each year, and it may generate as much as 0.5pp extra annual GDP growth.
>Our proposals include limits on the development rights that streets can allow themselves, designed to minimise impact on neighbouring streets: light plane rules, rules stopping ‘garden grabbing’, rules on height, and rules restricting how much onstreet parking new residents could use. Redevelopment of listed and pre-1918 properties would be prohibited, as would development in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Each scheme will need to ensure that residents who wish to return are rehoused in a high-quality home for the interim period of the construction on the original plot; the large economic potential should make it easy to fund such provision. We suggest reforms to ensure generous provision of social infrastructure, including schools, buses and GP surgeries, so that the needs of any new residents are met without placing pressure on existing communities. We propose Capital Gains Tax (CGT) be levied on the value uplift resulting from a street vote, and its revenues hypothecated to local authorities, as well as Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) being partly redirected, temporarily, also to local authorities.
>Modelling indicates that these measures would generate huge revenues for both local authorities and the Treasury, providing plentiful resources to improve services for the whole community. Revenues would also be hypothecated to the street for regreening and public space improvements. A net-zero whole life carbon condition would be imposed on all redevelopment of homes through street votes. Since existing housing stock is often poorly insulated and normally heated through gas, redeveloping into net-zero homes would constitute a huge improvement in environmental standards. Denser settlement patterns would support a shift away from car dependency. As future governments phase out gas boilers, street votes could provide the funds for existing homeowners to pay the costs of insulating and re-plumbing their homes to adapt them for heat pumps. ?>Unlocking community support for development could arrest the steep fall in homeownership among younger generations. It could yield beautiful and popular streets in the best traditions of British urbanism. It could relieve pressure on greenbelts for a generation to come. And it could generate an economic boom built on outdoor jobs that would reinvigorate the economy after Covid-19, just as the 1930s housing boom pulled Britain out of the Great Depression.
Personally I'm very suspicious of democracy. It doesn't seem to address the underlying problem that homeowners very much benefit from high house prices nor the potential for poorer areas to be arm-twisted into turning a street into a slum.
I'm sure urban planners will be equally annoyed and there's not a chance any of these new developments will be freehold.
>More people will be able to live in neighbourhoods that pass the ‘pint of milk test’, living in walking distance of somewhere they can buy a pint of milk
I didn't know this was a thing, but it makes a lot of sense. Where I grew up there was only The Shop, two pubs and a petrol station on the edge of the village, but over the years it sprawled out with a load of housing estates popping up in the surrounding area. You know how you get those empty roads between two suburbs, tucked between the motorway overpass and the train tracks? That sort of place.
I always wondered who on earth would want to live in them, it wasn't a particularly out of the way area, only ten minutes drive from the nearest city, and yet they somehow managed to build all these houses where it'd be about a 40 minute round trip to walk to The Shop, and and far enough to the pub you probably wouldn't bother. On paper they were in a really convenient area, but in practice really very isolated.
>>8487 I had the same reaction and as I'm searching for houses right now it is putting words to what I'm already doing. Property sites deliberately try to obscure this information but there's no fucking way I'm living far from shops now that I've done a few years of living minutes from a supermarket.
Just think about it, what if it's half 11 and I'm getting home from the pub feeling hungry - do they expect me to just get my chip pan out?
>two of these elegant new-build North Oxford town houses selling for around £2m each fit neatly on the plot of a 1950s bungalow selling for £800,000 fifteen minutes’ walk up the road
>On streets that agree to allow typical forms of gentle intensification, the average participating homeowner would make £900,000
Their plan to deal with the housing shortage is... to replace £800,000 houses with £2m houses. Brought to you by a thinktank co-founded by Michael Gove that coined the term "clean Brexit", proposed banning encryption and giving troops immunity from war crimes.
No. I read the document, that's their plan - building phenomenally expensive houses in posh areas to generate huge profits for old people. It's set out in black and white, they're not being coy about it. This isn't about building the kind of affordable housing we actually need, it's about continuing to inflate the housing bubble.
>>8491 I think the idea is actually to build multi-occupancy buildings so it's 2m / X. This is how the kind of stucco period buildings they suggest work in London anyway and I presume what developers wants rather than gambling on finding enough people with 2m to spare for a street. The problem I see is that the leasehold system is broken in this country rather than 15 or so families turning into 75 with no parking, outside space and never actually owning property in a proper sense.
Anyway the crimp it is looking to solve is local resistance so balancing that with a cash payment.
>>8485 Not reading all that, just build more houses in decent locations (not the armpit of nowhere). If I need cooking oil I don't start growing rapeseed in my back garden, for fuck sake.
>>8498 All posts on .gs eventually become reality because of the lensing effect that happens when a group of baldies reflect light. I'm still mad about that one lad who felt it wasn't hot enough and created a record-breaking heatwave.
I read a thread on reddit the other week about the eviction moratorium in the US and all the comments were weirdly pro-landlord, calling renters parasites and the like. Then today I read an article on FT about Buy-to-let landlords in London taking a hit due to the pandemic and the comment section on that was extremely left leaning.
What's happening to my social media lads? Has the magnetic polarity of the Earth's core inverted or something?
People are contrarian or enjoy trolling and understand they'll get a greater reaction if they take the opposing view from the typical readership of a platform.
>>8506 It may have been about 11 years ago. I'd just been to the Imperial War Museum in that London. I was walking back to Waterloo and passed a news-agent hoping to purchase some refreshment. The cheapest water was more than a pint of milk, so I bought myself a nice refreshing pint of milk and drank it whilst walking along the street. I think someone may have given me a funny look.
If you think the FT is politically neutral I can't imagine what kind of utterly brazen neo-lib worldview you possess.
I mean, I see where you're coming from, but it's not that they are neutral, it's just that they don't bother with the mask of pretending they're anything other than the voice of market cultist capital. They frequently say things other papers and politicians would dread to say out loud, because you're supposed to keep up a facade of caring about people and not just capital, something the FT has no pretence of.
The times where they say shit like "restricting travel would hurt the economy because it would reduce the availability of cheap workers" for example. Absolutely true, but you're meant to pretend that's not the primary reason for foreign labour.
The pretence is more politicised than the naked truth.
The FT is effectively a trade paper for the financial industry. Their readers have a professional and personal interest in knowing what's actually going on in the world. The Guardian is more neoliberal than the FT, because they help their readers to maintain the lies and hypocrisies that protect their upper-middle-class lifestyle.
FT readers don't pretend to be anything but capitalists and the paper doesn't offer any kind of moral defence for the status quo; The Guardian is propaganda for the sort of person that earns £60k in a cushy third-sector job but thinks of themselves as proletarian.
>>8512 >The Guardian is propaganda for the sort of person that earns £60k in a cushy third-sector job but thinks of themselves as proletarian.
What nonsense.
>>8514 Plus if they're using mean as a measure of average, it only takes a couple of DeLoitte Track and Trace subcontractors to skew high meaning that the greatest number of Guardian readers may well be berry pickers.
I'm afraid I'm going to need to see more demographic information before I decide what we do with the Guardian readers after the Revolution.
>>8509 So your argument is that FT, a newspaper that explicitly provides a special focus on economic affairs, focuses too much on objective criteria rather than feelings?
I'm not even a fan of the FT but it benefits from its bias being rather obvious and inoffensive enough to account for. It doesn't outright twist reality to fit its narrative as far as I'm aware and there's very good reason as it's readership need market information.
>>8511 Not him but argument of bias aside I'd argue Private Eye is a magazine rather than newspaper. Not least as it dedicates a sizeable portion of the publication to satire and journo gossip.
I'd get out more only my personal perception would introduce bias in how I understand reality.
>>8516 You're confusing personal and household. £59k is appreciably higher than even London on every way you split it.
Yes, you could have singletons earning that figure but that wouldn't, presumably, set them out from the population and still doesn't factor just how poor people are.
Clue me in lad. My understanding is that household income is the combined income of all the residents in a single household, so two with a personal income of 30k in a single property would have a household income of 60k?
Yes, but that assumes that 100% of Guardian readers are in a double-income couple. £59k is the average household income of all their readers - single people, double-income couples, single-income couples and retired households.
The mean and median household incomes in the UK are £35,900 and £29,600 respectively; A household income of £59k puts you in the top 10% of households by income.
The Guardian is easily the most left-wing of the major papers, but their readers are fucking minted. That speaks volumes about the state of left-wing politics today.
>>8524 This doesn't make sense to me because all the millenials I know are living in houseshares with multiple other people to make rent. If you sum the household income it would be well above the values stated.
No way are Londoners on median salary not sharing with at least 3 people which would inflate the number surely.
How can median salary for the UK be 30,800, but median household income be 29,000? This would require a nation of single income households which is just not the case.
Where does the gov get its data from regarding this? There are veritable hordes of struggling multiple income households which collectively take way more than the estimated average.
>How can median salary for the UK be 30,800, but median household income be 29,000?
Pensioners, students and dole scum. Many households don't contain anyone who is in full-time employment.
>Where does the gov get its data from regarding this?
The ONS perform a survey of households that are randomly selected but representative of the UK as a whole. They also collect an alternate dataset based on information from HMRC and the DWP. Both methods are imperfect, but the limitations of the data are well understood and they're close enough for most practical purposes. The DWP conduct their own survey using slightly different methodology which correlates very closely with both ONS datasets.
That makes a bit more sense, but considering income and not other assets is not a good measure of wealth/inequality.
Students tend to be still financially connected to their parents household, so counting them in these figures is not helpful.
I'd like to see how many of the randomly chosen households are HMOs and whether the representation of households is proportional in relationship to the population of the UK. If it's mostly pensioners in Staffordshire suburbs the data is going to skew much lower than what is reality for the liberal metropolitan elite gig economy gen z millennials what keep this economy moving.
It's a representative sample - the age, ethnicity, educational background, employment status and geographic distribution of the survey participants match the national averages as closely as possible.
The ONS collect some fairly comprehensive data on wealth.
Fucking hell. If as a median salary income earner I am in the top 10% of households, the UK must be a damn sight bleaker and more Dickensian than I previously thought.
>>8524 said:
>A household income of £59k puts you in the top 10% of households by income.
So me in a houseshare on a median salary with a couple other middle class people puts me in the top 10% of households by income? That doesn't sound right to me.
