Affordable Housing

Never say never again?

Jock — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:08:37 +0100

I feel I've been tagged in a strange sort of a meme for my thoughts on Oxford's recent local election results by Antonia [From Oxford elections round-up]:

We await with bated breath the thoughts of Stephen Tall, no longer Lib Dem councillor for Headington, his colleague David Rundle, and the third-placed Lib Dem candidate for Headington Hill and prolific blogger, Jock Coats.

Well thanks, she just had to rub it in by mentioning that third place. I am embarrassed and humiliated to have come third. There are of course official post mortems to come yet on the campaign, but whatever their verdict, one simple fact is that I am a "bad candidate". Whatever fresh ideas I may have brought to the council (and I doubt my Labour victor will be doing much of that, sad to say), I cannot escape the fact that I hate knocking on strangers to talk politics with them. So for me, the literature and word of mouth amongst people who have met me outside that context is more crucial than for most. Such glad-handing ought to have happened long before the campaign proper started with voter ID canvassing in late March. And been followed up with a leaflet introducing me properly and extolling my virtues before the cross city campaign started with its more party led focus on whole city issues.

Then there was "that leaflet." On the last weekend of the campaign I had the dubious honour of having a Labour leaflet, apparently partly delivered by Mrs Dromey (I rather hope, Antonia, that you were unaware of that leaflet's existence when we exchanged pleasantries on the Friday evening), using quotes from this blog about drugs policy obviously intended to give the impression that if I won I would probably be found standing outside the primary school handing out various narcotics to the year sevens, or perhaps to their parents! Several opponents have commented that they thought it was one of the worst personal attack leaflets they had seen. I suppose I ought to feel flattered that Labour were sufficiently alarmed by my candidacy to feel the need to drag the contest into the gutter.

You can read it for yourself here. By my reckoning, it at least breaches copyright law (my moral right not to have my copyrighted work treated in a derogatory fashion or in a way designed to be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director), if not possibly electoral law. Enquiries are ongoing. I am not a sore loser, but I was upset by it. I know it cost me both votes and reputation, even amongst my deliverers.

Anyway, enough of the campaign itself. Will I ever try again? I don't know. For many years, since in fact I was last on the council in 2002, I have wondered whether the present system of local government is fit for purpose. As an ideological descendent of the individualist-anarchists and a mutualist, I find the state, in all its guises, terribly coercive. I believe sovereignty should lie with the individual and he or she should only cede power upwards to representatives over things that they cannot arrange for themselves or in small groups or local communities. Local government is so tied down by Whitehall and Westminster that the current arrangements simply cannot be responsive enough to local peoples' needs.

The main reason I wanted to be on the council was to continue to promote, from the inside as it were, my mutualist agenda of hiving local authority functions off onto social, community led partnerships. The more things compete for the crumbs of council budgets within the tight control of Whitehall oversight the less satisfactory the outcome. Leisure services for example cannot hope to compete in quality at least with private providers while it is within the constraints of council budgeting. Similarly, whilst more difficult, I think the solutions to our housing problems are community led, rather than council, landowner and planning led.

Every time I've lost so far I've come out of the contest wanting to do other things that will make a difference one day outside the council structure. Almost as if to prove we can cope without the psychopaths who are so good at saying the right thing at the right time to get themselves elected. This time it is to continue to promote the social enterprise "alternative" for producing social and public goods and to work on promoting local community e-democracy.

It will be interesting to watch Labour finally explain where they think there is a "£5m cash crisis" at the city council - reading the latest annual accounts I cannot see it myself. But there's another argument for local government reform - despite us being the tax payer/employers their finances are even more opaque than any company's I've ever seen.

It will be fun to see Maureen Christian defend the Northway Playing fields from something or other she seems to think threatens them (certainly the only "threat" i heard was my own idea to see if we could fit a cricket square on there by budging up the two football pitches and see if we could get a local cricket team going).

I think it will be a retrograde step if Labour succeed in removing planning decisions from area committees. They were not perfect there, but I have always maintained that was as a result of the bad legal advice that both sides in any disputed application had the right only to speak for five minutes each - where they have open discussion at area committees they manage to get better decisions and more fruitful interplay between applicant and objectors and a better outcome for both.

It will also be interesting to see whether the Tories, who, despite not winning a single seat managed to come in second in many wards, and at least the ones in which they tried to put up a full campaign, will be able to keep up that level of work, for example, next year, when their declining reputation in control of the county is up for defending.

And it will be interesting to see whether this marks the high water point for the IWCA, who lost two of their councillors.

But I also don't really expect the city council, under any party, to set Oxford on fire with bright new ideas that will markedly change the quality of life for its citizens.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas about what little thank you gifts I can get for two teenaged Muslim boys who managed throughout to deliver most of the half of the ward for which we did not have regular deliverers - not a happy situation to be in at the start of a campaign and one of the first things I hope to put right for next time - I'd be very grateful to hear them! Their father has resisted all my requests for his advice so far! read more »

Two local examples of why land (and planning) reform is needed

Jock — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:45:50 +0100

Quite by chance, as if on order to make the local elections more exciting in my ward, two local planning issues have suddenly popped up (not entirely unexpectedly it has to be said) that are likely to cause a deal of controversy when they get to decision-making time. I don't want to talk about their planning merits or otherwise on here. But I do want to use them because they are very good examples of why I am so passionate about land reform.

The first, in the ward in which I am standing is an application for new student residences adjacent to the site on which I am a warden proposed by my employers, Oxford Brookes University. To be fair it will make more of an impact on residents in the neighbouring ward, but it is the economics of it all I want to look at not the planning, to show why land value tax would be such a benefit to the community.

The second, just over the main road in the neighbouring ward but which will make a significant impact on neighbours in both wards one way or another is the news today that Tesco have bought up a local former pub building from a local bar/restaurant entrepreneur who had seemingly been knocked back in the early stages of planning such that he no longer felt it worth fighting for his ideas for the site. Here I want to look at how the planning system seems to favour the bigger developer with the financial clout and how this affects the fairness of land law.

But first, the new proposed halls of residence. This site is approximately quarter remaining of a site the university acquired from the Department of Social Security about seven years ago now. When I was last on the council, just at the end, they had owned the site for about six months, if I remember correctly having bought the whole thing for either eight or eleven million pounds through a charitable trust set up for the purpose and were just getting outline planning consent.

The entire site had been only about a quarter used for several years since most parts of the DSS had moved out. And even when at "full capacity" it had been an egregiously inefficient use of a piece of prime inner suburban land - even for offices - since it was half car park and half single storey nissan hut type buildings.

Since it had been government owned, effectively there was no income to the public purse from this land. Once it was owned by a charity the empty land has generated no receipts to the public purse in the form of business rates. The charitable trust sold off about a quarter of the land to the adjacent Oxford International Centre for Islamic Studies, first for use as a contractors car park and now it lies more or less empty. A hectare of prime city centre building land. The university built nearly seven hundred student rooms in new halls on half of the original land and these were opened five years ago now. But it is the effect of this last quarter of of the site I want to examine and show how failing to encourage optimal use of land where it is available is a disaster for the rest of us.

The site is about a hectare. So if the original purchase price for the entire site was the higher of the two figures I remember hearing at the time - eleven million pounds, its share would be two and three-quarters million. The current application is for 335 study bedrooms and since the student halls market has changed out of all recognition in those seven years, commercial firms are willing to pay it is rumoured up to £45,000 per room for suitable land, as a site alone it would be worth more like fifteen million pounds.

Point one: whilst the local authority has received virtually nothing for this land in rates, the owners, either the university or the charitable trust, have effectively got a book profit of £12 million - a four hundred per cent return in seven years.

335 study bedrooms would, if theory, allow some 83 four bedroomed family homes to be freed up from the current student private rented market somewhere in the city assuming student numbers overall remained static. That's 83 largeish families who have been otherwise excluded from the housing market in Oxford for seven years because these halls did not exist. At its worst, that means that the tax-payer, through housing benefit, has spent upwards of ten million a decade supporting those households in private rented accommodation while they wait for "affordable housing".

Point two: the cost to the tax-payer of that piece of land laid idle and not producing any local taxation has been at least ten million in housing benefits to private landlords while the owners have made that massive book profit.

Now imagine if that land were taxed on its value at its most productive use - that's currently the £15 million or so a commercial halls of residence developer would pay for it. A ten percent land tax would now be yielding the public purse £1.5 million a year, and more importantly would have been liable for that tax all the while it has been so underused. No owner with any financial sense would have kept that land out of productive use with a tax bill like that. The land would have been brought into its best use long ago, either as housing itself or freeing up those equivalent 83 units for family use instead of student private lets, and the tax-payer would not have had to support 83 families to the tune of that £10 million pounds a decade in supported housing.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am neither criticising my employer nor demanding ten storey blocks of flats on every vacant site. But I am illustrating the cost to society of holding land out of use, and the unfairness where, in doing so, the owners have made a vast profit at the direct expense of the tax-payer. It's the system that causes this, not the participants in that system who are only following the rules everyone else plays by.

Now to the "Tesco pub". Some time ago this down at heel local pub was closed, its future uncertain. A well known local restaurant and property entrepreneur bought it up and a few months ago publicized his idea for turning it into a row of three shops and some flats above in a "landmark" new building. But with an ambivalent local reaction and, it seems, less than enthusiastic reception from the city's planners to the idea, this chap pulled his plans and decided to look around for a buyer. The land registry records show that the property had cost him £400,000 and that it was mortgaged so he had financed it empty for seven or eight months developing his ideas and the prospect of a long uphill struggle into the unforeseeable future in the planning system means he would be financing it empty for many months, if not a couple of years to come.

It is opposite a long established and not so long ago refurbished and extended local Co-op store (where I joined as a member of the Co-operative and where I shop several times a week in preference to all the other supermarkets around I could potentially choose from) and a less long established Costcutter store that houses the local Post Office and a similarly aged Chemist shop that replaced a locally owned and well patronized cycle and fishing tackle shop and an electrical retailer. It is, to put it mildly, on an awkward site, at a very odd junction just at the point the Marston Road becomes a dual carriage-way "boulevard" and buses turn right against the traffic whilst the off-road cycle lane comes to an end, the road splits into two lanes prior to a busy and slightly awkward double roundabout junction. There is just enough parking in the lay-by outside the existing shops for their customers and nowhere else for cars to park.

The site might have been viewed as ideal for shopping or catering uses complimentary to the existing neighbouring shops. Extending the range of goods and services people could get in a single visit to the local shops. All very sustainable. And contributing to the local economy and the success of local entrepreneurs - all of which tends to keep more money in circulation more locally in Oxford, making us all better off.

But now Tesco have the site. Obviously, they are in competition with two of the existing local stores. For many, they will do a better job of supplying their grocery needs and at lower prices. That too is good for peoples' pockets and therefore local wealth retention. But since, if they've borrowed to buy it at all, as opposed to taking the purchase price out of the weekend's take from the nearby Tesco out of town superstore, it's probably a tiny dent in their current income rather than a major liability as it would have been to the local entrepreneur who had borrowed to buy it as a significant chunk of his portfolio. And they can afford to sit on it until the planners give in, until attrition of any opposition to the idea gives them an easier ride in the planning process.

At the moment I wouldn't dare to have made up my mind about the idea of Tesco Express there. On the one hand, competition is good for the consumer. On the other, Tesco has such financial clout that it could send its competition to the wall and leave it eventually and open field to increase prices because of its local monopoly. And there again, whilst as a member I would be very sad to see either of the two existing competing stores fail, they would almost certainly then be occupied by some other, and probably local, entrepreneur with another great idea that would compliment rather than compete in its turn with the Tesco store. Again, this increases the range of goods and services a person can get in one trip to the local shops.

But all I am highlighting is that because the planning system causes a proportionately greater opportunity cost to fall on the smaller businessman it actually favours the big financial muscle of large corporates who can afford to take the risk for longer. It is not a level playing field. But, as in the previous story, it's the playing field on which all would be developers have to play. On the other hand again, it would be quite wrong for the planning system to become a tool of protectionism, benefitting one business or businessperson over another by preventing competition. Perhaps in an LVT based system the tax payable on a site should be suspended for the time during which the planning bureaucracy was deciding on a proposal to concentrate the minds of planners on getting the best deal for all parties in the minimum time possible and enabling people to get on with running their businesses, extending their homes, or whatever the application was for.

Anyway - all that was a bit of a marathon use of two local and serendipitously current issues illustrate quite well some of my hot button issues on land reform, free trade and anti-protectionism and localism. read more »

Incentive to win? Or definition of insanity?

Jock — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:54:48 +0100

Anyone who's read any of my blog will know of the work I do on affordable housing through Oxfordshire Community Land Trust in my spare time. After five years of work, persuasion, lobbying, all for nothing, we have the opportunity, thanks to a very generous elderly lady who has settled all she wants to on her children is willing to swap us her house and its plot in return for about half its value and a smaller home carved out of half her existing cottage so we can at last get a site on which to develop a few affordable houses and prove the concept to the communities of Oxfordshire who would like to be able to do similar.

The trouble is that to be viable we have had to buy about half each of the two neighbouring gardens and are likely to try and get another adjacent one. And so, with the efforts of a very energetic fellow board member's contacts in the Society of Friends we have raised a decent chunk of this. Nevertheless we still have to fund the borrowing on about £170,000 worth of loans starting from the end of May when we are due to complete on the first two slices of adjoining land.

Anyway, it works out that in the worst case we probably need to fund interest payments of around £1000 per month until we either get planning consent and can realistically borrow against the land to develop or till we can raise the remainder as gifts and pay off the loan that way, whichever is the sooner.

So we have a variety of ideas about how to scrape together this sum, one of which is a commitment by me that, if in May I were to find myself in receipt of a small additional income, say from a councillor's allowance, the 90% of that I am not already committed to giving to the party to help me pay for Focus leaflets and campaigning in the ward will go to the charitable associate of OCLT, the Stonesfield Community Trust that is fronting our land purchase, to help pay that interest bill.

So, not only do I now have to win for Headington Hill and Northway, its residents, this and next year's new students, freedom and the Liberal Democrats, but also for OCLT and affordable housing in Oxfordshire!

Mad eh? We'll, we've got to pay for it somehow to prove the whole idea to skeptical councillors, the media and bureaucrats? What better a way if it works out right? I am standing in this election at least partly to promote my ideas for innovative financing of things like affordable housing. I'm sure there's not a household in the ward doesn't feel or understand the effects of the gross deficiency we have in Oxford and Oxfordshire of that. read more »

Housing policy: backing a lost cause!

Jock — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:00:14 +0000

So, I made my first federal conference speech this morning. And what a one to choose! Called immediately after former housing spokesperson Andrew Stunell's opening speech I was asking conference to reject his paper with a wide range of what are probably pretty popular measures in it because it lacked one measure - LVT. And boy did the assembled throng let me know how wrong they thought I was - I reckon I counted half a dozen votes at most to reject the motion . Maybe that's some kind of a record or something for a maiden speech?

But it had to be said. There is no getting round the truth - you cannot create affordable housing through the sort of policies that are regularly bandied about, including in this motion, without subsidizing landowners. Your taxes and mine are being committed to buying back the land for the needs of the community. How arse about face is that? As the quote from proto-liberal John Locke said in the quote at the top of my blog:

'It is very clear that God, as King David says, "has given the earth to
the children of men"; given it to mankind in common'. (John Locke, Essay
on Civil Government, 1690)

Why do we not instinctively know this nowadays? And why is it so difficult to explain to fellow liberals who, as Andrew said at the beginning of his speech, should be really angry about the effects of homelessness and overcrowding on the rising generation and prepared to countenance bold, perhaps even unpopular, poicies to address this fundamental inequity.

Interestingly, I was told yesterday that there is a move by the International Georgist Union to lobby to have "access to land" added as a funamental human right. And there can be no greater right in my opinion - we are all born here. There is no other planet we can go to just because someone already 'owns' every part of our existing planet. Of course it is a fundamental human right to have equitable access to what nature has made available to all of us - it is the basis, frankly, even of the "right to life".

Some day, maybe, even the Lib Dems will understand the importance of it. Most everyone I speak to, just as Lembit did at the summation to the debate and Vince did last night in the ALTER fringe, acknowledges that we are onside in principle with land reform, but we must adopt practical policies to implement it if it is to be any more than howling in the wind. read more »

Singapore buys a bit of British democratic history

Jock — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:10:15 +0000

Apropos of nothing in particular, this little snippet of news...

The government of Singapore has built up a 3 per cent stake in British
Land, the FTSE 100 property group that has seen its market value dive
with the rest of the UK property sector.

...prompted me to mention something that many might not know and that I discovered while researching the history of things that could loosely be linked to community land trusts or mutual housing schemes that I am working on elsewhere.

British Land plc is the successor of something called the National Freehold Land Society, which was founded by nineteenth century liberals, foremost amongst them Richard Cobden and John Bright, as a way of subverting the restriction that only those with freehold property had the vote. They would club together, buy up swathes of land around inner cities and parcel it off to households at a minimum nominal value of the £50 you had to be worth in land to vote.

Much of the familiar nineteenth century townscape of Britain was developed by this and other temporary building societies and similar vehicles, including a less successful one established by the Tories that I think also has a successor plc today (Slough Estates maybe?).

Quite often, if you see streets where every other house is of a slightly different nineteenth century design you will find that many of these were built by these mutuals. Members would get allocated their land and then the whole mutual would save money until they could afford to build a house, then the whole process would start again until all the members were housed. read more »

Nick Clegg on Affordable Housing and LVT

Jock — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 23:32:24 +0000

I got an email late today from an LVT supporter saying that Nick Clegg had spoken about the role of LVT/SVR in enabling more affordable housing in a BBC panel discussion after the Queen's Speech today.

I've not been able to find it via the BBC website (it doesn't help not actually knowing what the program might have been - I'm guessing it was Daily Politics). So did anyone happen to see it and either point me to a "watch again" URL or explain what he said, specifically about LVT and housing. Because it would be quite significant since even LVT supporters in the higher echelons of the party have so far not been keen to discuss it as anything other than a taxation base and this could be the first time that someone has shown they understand it's got a whole greater relevance than that.

South Central Regional Conference: Community Land Trusts, Land Value Tax and Affordable Housing policy

Jock — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:43:46 +0100

Tomorrow is the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference at Newbury. Since there is now a leadership election, and both candidates (I still hope for more but it's looking increasingly a remote possibility) will be there and will effectively make a first "hustings" in the campaign the other bbusiness of the conference may well get curtailed. I was hoping to have the floor in the Affordable Housing debate, so in case I do not get to speak after all I thought it worth while putting my three minutes' worth online. So here it is:

"Make no mistake, colleagues, I do not believe it is ultimately possible to have sustainable, equitable and affordable housing without radical land reform, by which I usually mean Land Value Tax. There is no shortage of land - if all of us in this region lived at the same density as the population of Singapore or New York City we'd all fit easily onto the Isle of Wight. And, by and large, there is also no real shortage of housing; the vast majority of households in housing need are in fact housed somewhere, just it is often either beyond their means, hopelessly cramped, or both. And yet up to 45% of our housing stock is UNDER-occupied while 2-3% is over crowded. Only LVT can solve this kind of mismatch. And trying to build ourselves out of the problem in popular areas is going to do nothing longer term for regional equilibrium as it increases the capacity in, for example, the south east, to absorb yet more of the rest of the country's economic activity.

But there's another, more localized, land reform that could help. It's party policy, though hasn't received much promotion or support, and our local councils do not seem to be encouraging it terribly enthusiastically. Community Land Trusts are a practical and immediate measure that party members can take home from here today and get their members and councils working on. A Community Land Trust is a vehicle established to hold land on behalf of a defined community - it could be a city, an individual neighbourhood, a rural parish or a countty-wide umbrella organization. The idea is that we acquire land, either through the planning process, by outright purchase or donation by philanthropic land owners (there actually are such creatures!) and lock it up in a trust. This way we do not need to pass the cost or developed value of the land onto the buyers of the housing we build on it, built, always, with community buy in and if possible self-management of the specification and design process.

We then bundle the whole development up and turn it over to a "Mutual Home Ownership Society" which the occupiers join by paying a share of the borrowing used to develop the properties. The share they pay is based on what they earn, not the housing they need and they don't pay any extra rent as with shared ownership schemes. If the development is itself large enough, we hope the incomes across all the households involved will between them cover the repayments, and each gets a share they can sell when they want to move on based on the proportion of the borrowing they have committed to, plus (or minus I suppose these days) an adjustment based on an agreed local property index. When they want to sell up, they need to find a buyer for their share. If the incoming household has not as high an income, they can place the balance of their share with other member households whose incomes have risen since they joined - and who by the terms of their lease are bound to buy additional shares when required up to a commitment of around 30% of their household incomes.

The model can be tweaked for use in many different scenarios - a small scale rural exception site where there is as yet no subsidy for developing social rented housing, an urban development where we want 100% affordable - as in sub-market - housing instead of 50:50 posh:poor for the same land cost, or even an existing mature suburban neighborhood willing to club together, pool the new found wealth of their existing housing equity and take charge themselves of the regeneration of their neighbourrhood, instead of leaving it to the buy-to-let absentee landlord or the local developer of flats crammed into the corner plot.

Schemes can be financed by conventional borrowing backed by the freehold land value, or, we hope, by a new vehicle christened an "Open Capital Partnership" which would allow ordinary investors to yield an index linked return for investing in their local communities. As a side-bar at that point to finish with, we might want to look at Building Society legislation: being a mutual ownership system many of us CLT promoters would like to work with mutual financing organizations, but your local Newbury Building Society tells me they are prohibited by law from investing in something that is not an individual taking out a mortgage for a single house, despite the movement's origins as mutual savings clubs building local neighbourhood housing."

Oxford deserves better than unholy alliance of naive council and rent-seeking landowners

Jock — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:46:26 +0100

Depending on what side of a fractious political divide in Oxfordshire you sit, news that the South East Regional Plan as amended by Whitehall will next week recommend a review of Oxford's Green Belt and the development of 20% more new housing over the next twenty years than proposed at Oxfordshire Structure Plan level will be seen as victory or worst case scenario.

Whilst some, such as City Council leader John Goddard quoted in the linked Oxford Mail article, point out that we are looking at developing just 1% of Oxford's Green Belt, the true story is that the total number of new housing units demanded of the county in the next twenty years is more than an entire new city the size of Oxford. The fact that it appears that most of the additional units recommended by Whitehall planners seem to be destined for edge of city development, the grandiosely termed "Central Oxfordshire Sub-region", suggests that the city itself will be required to grow by at least 20% in twenty years. A handful of land owners will each trouser nine figure windfalls for their land currently worth about one hundredth of that.

The existing Green Belt, the nation's second oldest only after London, took forty years to agree - talks began in the late 1950s and the boundaries were only finally fixed in the Oxford Local Plan 1997. So, unless the process of redrawing the Green Belt boundaries is going to be railroaded through with all the attendant risks of riding roughshod over dissenting opinion, it seems highly unlikely that development would be able to start on any of these major sites inside a decade at the very least.

Now, I'm no great fan of the protectionist Green Belt policy in the first place - it has just as often worked as a "choker" than a belt. In Oxford's case, its main raison d'être was to preserve the historic character of Oxford. And I have often observed that the real, human historic character of Oxford, of "poor scholars and clerks" here to study and the attendant infrastructure that makes the city's very purpose in the world possible, is itself compromised by making housing unaffordable to those very people. I have also consistently pointed out that fulfilling even the government's latest plans for three million new homes over twenty odd years would require just over half of one per cent of England's non-urban land so this is not a NIMBY or "BANANA" anti-development rant.

Mistaken interpretation of needs data.

But I do rail against inappropriate development wherever it surfaces. And I completely believe that this "Central Oxfordshire Sub-regional Growth Zone" is inappropriate. And unnecessary. For a start the housing need data on which it was largely based are just plain wrong - well, more wrongly interpreted I suppose. In 2004 Fordham Research produced a Housing Needs Assessment for Oxford City Council that concluded that 750 units of additional affordable housing were required every year for the next decade just to stand still. Delivering such a requirement with the current maximum affordable-market priced housing quota of 50:50 would imply development of 15,000 new homes in a decade, which is clearly not even in the thinking either of the City Council's planners nor of the South East Regional Plan, even as amended by Whitehall.

However, that figure of 750 affordable units is naively misleading at best, utterly mistaken at worst. For 75% of all the people represented by that annual need are currently housed in the city. And whilst some of them are in unsuitable or overcrowded housing and by definition all of them in unaffordable housing for their incomes, it equates to an overcrowding rate of around 2% of households. Whilst anything up to about 40% of housing if it follows the national pattern is underoccupied. The naive extrapolation from these figures, which is what has been pushed as the "growth zone" option, is that most of that 750 a year requirement can only be met by creating net additional housing units as near as possible to that 750 figure. But, since 75% of them are already housed in the city, such a solution in reality means not merely housing those in housing need in the city, but growth of the "greater Oxford" population to the tune of 20% in twenty years.

No consensus on large scale city growth.

And the one thing we have not had is a debate about whether such overall growth is justified or necessary. In fact, the whole debate, driven as it has been by high housing costs for people already in the city mainly (and quite rightly in many ways - for that is the pressing problem) has not really discussed growth so much as an imperative to get housing costs down for existing residents. For a start, such a rapid rate of growth is likely to cause all sorts of demographic and other social problems that cannot be planned for through mere spatial planning policies. Oxford does have a shortfall of resident working age population compared with the number of jobs in the city, but in the context of a county town in a predominantly rural county that is actually a good thing. If we suddenly meet the employment requirement within the city or on its near borders we risk the economy of the rest of the county insofar as it relies on people earning money in Oxford itself and thence able to support the smaller county towns and villages.

The cost of urban extensions.

Further, concentration on developing virgin edge of town land and new additional housing abandons existing housing to its inexorable decline. One of the most naive, I feel, enthusiasts for the Whitehall changes to the South East Plan, Labour City Councillor Antonia Bance, who positively whooped with joy in her blog the other day when the news broke, represents a ward, Rose Hill, that illustrates quite nicely both the pitfalls of the growth plan and the better solution to the housing need. Tagging new estates onto the edge of the city is no great answer. As Rose Hill shows, such marginal land housing tends to be taken up by the least well off, people who actually could do with being closer, not further, from centers of employment and social interaction.

One can only imagine the potential effects of plonking another 3,500 homes on the edge of the most deprived wards in the city. Optimists will say that it will drag up the fortunes of its neighbours, making it more likely that that whole swathe of post-war development on the edge of the city will attract the infrastructure is still needs to become prosperous and desirable. But the history of such developments tends to prove the pessimist more likely to be right. Indeed, the same was said of what is now Northfield Brook ward - that the new mixed tenure housing of the eighties and nineties in Greater Leys would pull the whole area of the Leys up out of the doldrums, yet just a few years on and Northfield Brook has made its mark as being the newest most deprived area of the city. At the very least, it proves just how long it takes to create new, vibrant communities - a generation and more.

Redeveloping existing urban areas the better alternative.

So, if we are likely to take a decade to get started on these new developments if everything goes well in the Green Belt review, and in the process negate the very ethos of Green Belt - that it should be as permanent as possible and not seen as a stock of land on which the city can call every few years, we should also make attempts to look at other mechanisms for delivering more affordable and more appropriate living spaces for the current needs of the city first and foremost before we plan for topsy growth.

And here, Antonia's ward also proves that it can be done. The Rose Hill redevelopment program proves that where there were 138 housing units of very low, almost derelict, standard you can provide 238 brand spanking new homes better matched to today's household composition and importantly energy needs. Of course I believe it's been badly handled - handing over nearly half of them all to private sale is the equivalent of enclosing half of what up till now has been land held in trust by the council for the people off Oxford, and the resulting housing will not be what it could have been in terms of 21st century energy efficiency. But the principle is correct - and all over Oxford we have lots of twentieth century housing that is not now, or will soon not be, appropriate or efficient in an era of high energy costs.

What Fordham showed was that we need to make around 600 existing units of housing more affordable each year, plus plan for more modest demand of about 180 units a year for people who aspire to move into the city. We can achieve this without wholesale estate building, by redeveloping existing estates (including the private inter-war housing estates in the inner suburbs), But to do that we need to transfer our property tax from taxing both land and buildings to taxing just land. This will relatively penalize underoccupancy and encourage redevelopment of areas that are below the optimal density. In the process more of our existing housing land will be equipped for that low energy 21st century living. And the additional units that can be incorporated by increasing densities will mean that newcomers slot into existing mature communities.

LVT the 21st century radical key to urban regeneration/redevelopment.

Much of Oxford's development in the nineteenth century was the work of Liberals and Radicals through vehicles such as the National Freehold Land Company which, amongst other things, was a mechanism for enfranchisement of the working classes before universal suffrage was enacted. It was a model for social change built, if you pardon the pun, on the idea that land ownership was what made a person free and give them full citizenship. What we need now (and what more fitting a tribute to the recently late Brian Hodgson who a few years ago got the county to investigate LVT's effects on a part of the city) is for that Liberal-Progressive coalition at the Town Hall to demand the right to try out this approach which has recently been making such a vision as I have given here possible in cities across the United States, such as Philadelphia and Harrisburgh, before the bulldoizers move into South and West Oxfordshire and land owners pocket several hundred millions of pounds at our expense.

Finally, if none of that works, I will consider supporting some edge of town new development if we find a way of using the land owners' unearned increment from their rent seeking to create a light rail service from Shipton right round to the Cowley works, taking in all the proposed new estates and employment growth areas such as the Oxford Science Park and the Oxford Business Park. Only with such a piece of infrastructure will these potential new estates be anything other than marginal. At the moment it takes over an hour to get by bus from Kidlington round to Headington for example. Such travel times are unacceptable for estates that would be intended to supply housing for workers in the main employment areas of the city.

The OCLT Blog

Jock — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 22:16:07 +0100

The OCLT Blog

The Housing Bubble Blog

Jock — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 22:15:43 +0100

Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.