My heart sank when I read the Labour manifesto on housing. A litany of proven past failures is presented as the shining future. For instance, the party wants to build high-density housing on brownfield sites – which has meant erecting tower blocks set in open spaces. This kind of housing has proved a social nightmare outside cities as various as Paris and Seoul; elderly people suffer from isolation, the middle-aged spend long hours commuting to work, and adolescents are more prone to the ills of drug use, depression and lack of exercise than in inner-city neighbourhoods.
The manifesto also recommends building entirely new towns, as though the way to fix a problem is to start over from scratch. The new-towns impulse has deep roots in Britain, going back to the garden city movement, but, since their beginnings, these places have struggled to become proper towns. It takes generations for a town to put in place schools or social care homes, develop a local economy of pubs or shops, and weave the complex web that is a neighbourhood. A town cannot be conjured into life with the stroke of a pen.
Although these manifesto policies are proven failures, and though I am a Green supporter rather than Labour, I am sure those proposing them are people of good will. So why the lack of imagination? Part of the trouble is that Labour is still in thrall to its heroic age. After the second world war, the Labour government, which created the NHS, built mass housing for bombed Britain. The sheer urgency of shelter demanded instant if crude housing – and the architects and planners of the time met this challenge pretty well. But now is not then. “Now” means buying into expensive but poor quality housing in spaces that will never become socially and economically sustainable places.
What would I do instead? First, work with realities on the ground. Which may mean dealing with the 270,000 abandoned properties in the UK which could be reconditioned. Much of this abandoned housing is physically OK, and has been let go for financial reasons. And though dealing with mould is not as sexy a proposition for planners as imagining a new town, it is a quicker fix. I would also emulate the efforts in New York to turn offices into residential spaces. Huge office compounds such as Canary Wharf in London and the Noma area in Manchester are currently half-empty ghost towns. It’s tricky to convert bulky office spaces into flats, but Wall Street has done it in New York; so could we. More largely, the guiding idea should be to intensify life in cities rather than evacuate people to the periphery. A good city resembles a pizza, not a doughnut.
We need to rethink the very idea of “housing”. In an earlier era, it meant single units endlessly repeated in terraces along streets or strung up in towers. This kind of self-contained house suited nuclear families that were separated from work and emotionally inward-looking. That way of life is waning, replaced by single parents, elderly people on their own, gay and straight couples without kids; most importantly the line between home and work is blurring. These changes require a new kind of housing, which I’d call sociable housing. In La Borda, a co-housing development in Barcelona, people of all sorts and ages share the same open space. Elderly people in small flats can look after the children of working parents. You can create clusters of such buildings, as the Barcelonans do in their “superblocks”.
Sociable housing of this sort has an economic value, since costs for things such as heating and water become cheaper when shared. And it can be built so that people have shared spaces in which to work, rather than logging in to the office from their bedrooms. People can still own their own turf, as in the condominium arrangements on New York’s Roosevelt Island. At the moment, I am trying to work out how sociable houses might be built so as to enable young people to get on the property ladder – but there is also a solution to the housing crisis that doesn’t require a single new brick.
That is to impose real price controls in the private rented market (which has just been shown to have reached record highs in Britain). Then a landlord could not treble or quadruple rents on a whim, nor sell beyond the advertised price to the highest bidder, nor “flip” a small commercial space so that suddenly in place of your shoemaker you have another Starbucks in the high street. Like water or the trains, housing is a communal good, rather than an anything-goes market commodity. But price controls are the children of socialism … a word from Labour’s heroic age that is seldom invoked today.
Richard Sennett chairs the London Centre for the Humanities
