My father, Alan Evans, who has died aged 85, worked throughout his career to find solutions to the problem of unaffordable housing. His research focused on the realities of greenbelt areas, and on the inflation of house prices and the pricing out of people in areas where there are employment and opportunity.
In books and papers published in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Alan highlighted that many greenbelts do not preserve biodiversity because they are largely used for monocultural farming, or are fenced off by wealthy landowners. He argued that artificial market conditions created by conserving greenbelt land made accessible green spaces in cities, such as parks and gardens, more likely to be built on – increasing homelessness, poverty and poor living conditions in urban areas.
Alan was born in Purley, south London, to Harold Evans, a chartered accountant, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Surrey). He attended Charterhouse school and worked briefly in his father’s accountancy business before studying philosophy and economics at University College London.
He was a lifelong fan of jazz, and one of his proudest moments was meeting Duke Ellington after a concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1960s while studying the economics of urban planning on a scholarship at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His other proudest moment came in 1964, when he married Jill Brightwell, a lecturer and administrator in further education, after they met as students at UCL. She was the child of Jewish refugees, and he was always committed to supporting immigration and diversity.
After graduating, Alan worked as a lecturer at the University of Glasgow (1967-71) and the London School of Economics (1971-77), and then moved to the University of Reading, where he was professor of environmental economics from 1981 until 2007, including periods in the 90s as pro-vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor.
While at Reading, he wrote a number of texts about the effects of planning restrictions on land use. His textbook Urban Economics was published in 1985, and in the 1990s and 2000s he wrote several papers – such as Unaffordable Housing (2005, with Oliver Hartwich) – that were aimed at a more general audience and argued for changing housing policy. He was often playful in his writing: his 1988 paper, No Room, No Room! borrowed its title from Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter.
Alan was predeceased by Jill in 2011, and by his grandchild Fergus in 2017. He is survived by his sons, Christopher and me, and his grandchildren Jonah, Fred and Owen.
