Well, on (b) I'd suggest that if planning policies mean we don't end up with the built environment people need, and one that is in particular unsustainable for young people, then the question of affordable housing should be part of the FH Soc remit.

The point about CIL and the Localism Act is relevant to ( c) - well planned development should bring in funding for enhancements to amenities. So another reason the FH Soc should have a positive view on higher densities.

On d), there may well be equality of opportunity within the Society, but is FH Soc is to act for the whole area rather than just for its members' interests, it should ask itself if it provided equal opportunity for future generations and current renters.

This post was last modified: 13-11-2012 07:49 PM by Tim Lund.

OK - that's a fair enough point, although I think what you quote are clearly follow on questions from what is fundamentally a yes / no question, as in the thread title. It was and still is open to you to answer yes or no to it, and then say if there are any ways in which you think what FH Soc could use its influence on planning issues to make a difference one way or another.

Apologies - that really was not clear.

My main interest is in the general policy of housing density, and allowing modestly higher development, which should be clear, and I would hope an Amenity society could support this.

When it comes to where, the confusion arises from whether this is thought to mean specific locations - which is where I think an Amenity society will inevitably find it difficult; it would risk exposing itself to endless criticism and get bogged down in unnecessary detail. That would be best left to the Council, developers and associated professionals. The sort of 'where' I had in mind was more general, such as 'large higher rise developments on what available brownfield sites there are' or my preferred options 'conversions and upwards extensions'. I think these should be seen more favourable because otherwise the 'where' we get will be more obtrusive high rise or 'garden grabbing'.

Ok, no worries Tim. Thanks for the clarification.

Though I am not speaking for them, I suspect that the FHS probably do support that in principle. I do not see why they should state it as a blanket objective however. This is much too strategic and wide-ranging an issue for them to take such a stance and in any case, I suspect they would lose members if they did so. Local government are much better placed for this sort of work and are much more accountable in that regard.

This seems topsy-turvy to me. I for one, value the fact that we have a local society capable of getting involved in the detail of individual applications where it may have positive or negative wider implications. If you are not Council, a developer or planning professional but are affected by a planning proposal then the whole process is daunting so say the least.

The need for more housing is a strategic, London-wide issue, best left to professionals. Local issues are best dealt with by local people and their representatives, which can often include local societies.

Your stated preference for "conversions and upwards extensions" is probably a part of the mix required but is surely not a silver bullet. There are also historic and geological reasons why the local townscape isn't generally more than a few stories - this is South London not Kensington.

I happen to agree with you when it comes to garden-grabbing. I wish that this wasn't so easy to do. However, the planning rules allow this, or at least the interpretation of them, and there seems to be little that can be done locally to mitigate this - once again this is more strategic and driven by London/National agenda.

In summary, I believe that this all resolves to a disagreement about what the pupose of a (local) society is. As michael said, the issues you raise are far from simple. If however, you can put your ideas across in a more accessible form, why not start your own society and see how you get on?

This post was last modified: 15-11-2012 03:09 PM by lacb.

Today's Observer moves me to revisit this one



First you have the former Poet Laureate throwing up his hands in horror at the idea of more homes in the countryside, and then you have an architectural critic - Wikipedia doesn't reveal if an Old Etonian like his brother, ex Telegraph editor - rather distressed about more housing in the centre of London.

Such are the opinion formers in our wider society, who chose not to think about where people should live, or how much they should have to pay for it.

To answer your various points, lacb, I have no disagreement on what the FH Society does on specific planning applications. The problem is how it impacts on what we agree is the 'strategic, London-wide issue, best left to professionals'. Earlier in this thread I developed an argument as to why any democratic local society is likely to be biased against development in its area, to the detriment of outsiders and future generations. In the Rowan Moore article in the Observer, he identifies weak local groups as one of the reasons developers can get away with these skyscrapers in Central London, which suggests that the relative strength of local groups is biasing development towards the centre.

The FH Society is also involved with plans to set up a Neighbourhood Plan, under the terms of the Localism Act, in which there is the clear intent that Forums putting forward such plans should consider higher housing densities. It seems clear to me that, for all its strengths, FH Soc and similar amenity societies, are evading the wider social responsibilities which their effectiveness should entail.

There's an interesting paper published recently by Prof Henry Overman of the LSE, entitled "The UK Housing Crises". His conclusion is simplicity itself: "The real solution is straightforward: build more housing." Some things, you think, you shouldn't need a professor to tell you, but it should help to beat down all the plausible special pleading one hears.

What interested me most in the paper is the light shed on the politics of it all, and the current move to 'localism'

He welcomes this move to localism, but is he aware of how completely local authority identified representatives of local opinion take no notice of the incentives to allow more housing in their areas?

Did anyone else pick up on the news item this morning about a borough-wide scheme coming into force today in LB Newham requiring all private sector landlords to be licenced? Obviously there are rogue landlords, and Councils are probably the part of government best placed to deal with them, but I wondered whether this extra bit of regulation was sensible; was this perhaps LB Newham trying to push the bottom end of the private rental market, with its associated social problems, onto other boroughs? Did Newham and other boroughs not have enough powers to deal with bad landlords already? Wouldn't the effect of this extra regulation, with associated costs, be to make responsible private letting that much less attractive, and so few properties being made available to let at a time of housing shortage? With headline grabbing quotes about the horrors of bad landlords, it seems to feed the narrative that the private sector is part of the problem, when it should be part of the solution.

I think there is a danger of all that, but it may actually be part of a thought through approach, since it emerged - according to this report in the Guardian - from what seems to me a very sensible report by an academic at the University of York Centre for Housing Policy, "The Private Rented Sector - its contribution and potential". I really like this from the "Executive Summary"

Not surprisingly, the policy is backed by Shelter, and on Newham's own web site, its Director of communications, policy and campaigns urges other local councils to follow Newham's lead. I think this would be welcome - even though in itself it will do nothing to increase the overall supply of housing, so making it more generally affordable. For that, in the same spirit as the report this policy comes from, there needs to positive encouragement of the private rented sector.

This post was last modified: 01-01-2013 07:17 PM by Tim Lund.

From this evening's Standard

Of course, FH Soc is not part of the problem, but it would be nice to see it try to be part of the solution.

This post was last modified: 04-01-2013 10:58 PM by Tim Lund.

. Today, it carries a report of an upcoming speech from Nick Boles. Some selections follow ...

It is “immoral” that young people are being priced out of the housing market because of a lack of cheap homes [and] the housing shortage is a bigger threat to “social justice” than poor education and unemployment ...

“either they will spend their retirement propping up their kids and their grandkids, or they can accept more development so their grandkids don’t have the problem”.

“I genuinely think that the single biggest way in which we are failing to deliver social justice in this country at the moment is unaffordable housing – more than schools, more than jobs, more than benefits,” ...

it was simply “immoral” that young people had to wait for so long to save a large enough deposit to buy a home.

... we have a simple choice. We can decide to ignore the misery of young families forced to grow up in tiny flats with no outside space. We can pass by on the other side while working men and men in their twenties and thirties have to live with their parents or share bedrooms with friends.

inflation in house prices in recent decades has been unacceptable and was caused by artificial restrictions on building ... if the price of food had risen in line with housing over the past 30 years, a chicken would cost £47 and a jar of coffee £20.
“In the 1990s, the average person setting aside five per cent of their income each week could save up a deposit on a house after eight years,” he will say. “Today it would take the same person 47 years.”

“We have comprehensively failed to persuade people to embrace the level of house building that is required. We are in this terrible vicious circle where we have built ugly stuff, which does not involve local people and does not bring them any benefit in terms of improved local infrastructure or anything else. They hate it and so they fight any further proposals tooth and nail, perfectly understandably. And the process of fighting it means much less land gets planning permission and the value of land goes through the roof. So the cost of building becomes completely unaffordable, so people build c--p.”

Under plans to be announced on Thursday, local people would keep up to 25 per cent of revenues from a Community Infrastructure Levy which builders pay to win planning permission to spend on community projects,

“Work out what you want, where you want it, what you want it to look like, the money that enables you to reopen the municipal pool,”

...

“I was a Nimby once, and my entire family were,”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/...-new-homes

£300K does not seem much, but I like the idea that agreeing to a higher population density went hand in hand with significant extra funding for local education, health transport and jobs creation etc.
It would have to be cast iron agreements though, with no 'greyhound' type mischief.

Indeed, but it we should be careful in using words such as 'mischief'. Earlier on this thread I wrote

This post was last modified: 11-01-2013 04:54 PM by Tim Lund.

There was an interesting presentation at the FH Assembly last night from Lewisham's Head of Strategy about the Council's budget saving proposals. The question which struck me was whether proposals which would lead to increased revenues are considered in the same process - and here I think mainly of getting more development, hence more revenue from Council tax and new homes bonus, finding places for people to live, as well as stimulating the local economy. Obviously there's a point when you have to set aside such higher level considerations and make those hard decisions about what services get cut / what entrenched inefficiencies need to be dealt with, but the Council should surely be able to balance the unpleasant business of explaining the bad news with an account of what they are doing to get some better news.

I also saw an article on the Homes & Property web site in which "Leading architect Terry Farrell tells ... why Britain is cursed by housing myths and meddling politicians". Lots of interesting stuff in there, including this

which I don't quite believe. Later in the article he says that we in Lewisham could get 3,000 new home at Convoys Wharf in Deptford, but, as I understand it, the problem here is very much a planning one - the developers want to build a Hong Kong style tower, but the planners - not just in Lewisham - do not want this. I hope it's clear that I too don't much want such towers, but I would like to see planners and developers somehow getting to yes.

Terry Farrell also writes "what’s in the middle, stopping it? It must be to do with finance. Finance, and a muddled marketplace." which has some sense in it - in other parts of the article he describes the difficulties which the speculative element in house prices bring, but he also goes on to say how there is finance, albeit from overseas, and how, even if this money comes in as an investment, it still results in more properties where people can live. Given that the boom in London property is so much driven by people wanting to come to live here, it shouldn't be a big problem that the new housing being built in response to this demand are the sorts of flats for rent that this newcomers to London will typically want.

Terry Farrell doesn't make the further point that if such new properties are built for this market segment, it will free up other existing property, so making it more available, and more affordable for existing Londoners

Good piece by Ferndinand Mount in the Standard last night, for instance this

But I am bothered by his assumption that we have to build on greenfield sites, not so much because I have any good argument against it, but because, if it is true, it will be because we have developed our cities and suburbs in such a way that they cannot be redeveloped to accommodate the central pull of London. So we end up with unnecessarily dispersed settlement patterns, with much greater environmental impacts. We should think of houses as we do other consumer goods, as potentially recyclable, and not speculative assets.

If Ferndinand Mount it right, it also means that suburbs like Forest Hill and Sydenham will miss out on the greater economic vitality which new development will bring.[/quote]

Who is this idiot who thinks that every American lives in a house as big as the entire universe?

Thanks for rejoining the discussion, Michael, and I'l try to avoid antagonising you too much ... but I do think picking up someone writing in a popular newspaper for that sort of exaggeration is another instance of evading the important issue.

[We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming]

Not quite sure what your point is, BarCar ... do you have a view on whether you want more affordable housing?

Tim,

Can't answer for BarCar but I did find his input quite amusing. Less like "rejoining the discussion", more like daring to interrupt the polemic monologue. You must admit, you do seem to be mostly having a discussion with yourself!

Please accept my comments in the best of humour. You can carry on now. :-)

Does that make sense?

lacb

lacb has interpreted my point pretty much exactly and elaborated earlier in this thread when they also said:

This thread is, to me, about as inaccessible as it gets. I think the participation levels in the discussion are probably indicative that I am not alone in forming that opinion.

You asked:

I would agree that more affordable housing is desirable in principle but I'm not arrogant enough to presume that my personal opinion will have a significant influence on policy.

Since local amenity societies are self-selecting and volunteer in nature I think it's unrealistic to expect them to operate on the more strategic level you seem to think they should. That's not to say that they shouldn't I just can't see it happening since many of us are time- poor.

We are all, of course, free to stand for election to the FHSoc board to persuade it's members of the need to think more strategically.

What, like a caravan? I like it!
If there is a massive housing shortage in Lewisham which is almost certainly true, and local groups are looking after their own interests which they most probably are, then if say Hornimans was turned into a caravan site, that certainly would focus attention on the issue.

Either areas allow measures to be taken to increase the population density and take their fair share or they may find a string of caravans parked in their road. As a slogan, it needs some work, but morally if people are living in cardboard boxes and families sharing living space with alcoholics and psychotics then there is no debate.