Really!? Gove!? and a sensible suggestion!? Inner city housing

[orangeleavesinautumn]

Gove appears to be making the first sensible suggestion of his career - more housing in inner cities, relaxing planning laws to allow this to happen.

This is desperately needed - we are in a vicious circle of needing parking because people can't live close to where they work, then people not being able to live close to where they work because so much space is needed for parking....

We need to get out of this, we need to put an end to the culture of driving in to work, and get rid of the inner city car parks, and put the land to better use.

We also need to get rid of the on street parking, and the awful concreting over of grass to park on front gardens, and start to scale back on the need and expectations of car ownership altogether.

More housing where it is actually needed is the first steps towards that - decades late, but better than nothing

So lots of building being proposed in cities/towns but none in the country. I guess in the future that would mean that there will be no young people left in villages as there would be no affordable housing just a glut of holiday lets and 2nd homes.

@Theunamedcat

Basically we need to redesign the UK from scratch or stop implementing policies that assume your in London with good transport systems

Nail on the head. We need different planning policies for different regions. One size DOESN'T fit all, and we need politicians and decision makers to start to understand that the country doesn't consist solely within the M25!

I would rather see very tough penalties for bad landlords (local councils are among the worst) via vigilant inspections and vetting. I have a friend and a family member who buy and renovate derelict properties and turn them into really lovely homes. They charge a reasonable rent and look after the properties promptly and carefully. One place needed adaptations - a walk in shower and grab rails, ramp to front door. Everything done properly and quickly. There are good landlords around and those rental properties are needed. Not everyone needs or wants to buy a property and have all the expense and hassle of repairing and maintaining it.

Not just in the country. "Touristy" towns and cities are already getting bad with holiday lets owners buying up whatever properties come on the market to rent out for tourists. Even worse are the Uni towns and cities where student rental landlords buy up all the local homes to rent out to students.

We need either laws to stop landlords/holiday let owners buying up homes or they need to be taxed until the pips squeak to try to stop them doing it.

In some towns and cities, it's literally impossible for young people to rent or buy homes and they're ending up with stupidly long/expensive commutes or having to do flat shares - that's if they can actually get viewings and get accepted by the seller/landlord. My son has had to offer 12 months rent in advance AND pay more than asking rent to get his flat - agent said there'd be no hope if he didn't as the demand was so high and others were offering higher rents and payments in advance. What hope is there for those without savings if payments in advance is now the norm in these "popular" places?

I suspect WFH might solve some of these problems. There will be loads of empty offices. Before Covid companies had traditional offices. They are now realising that paying rent on buildings, and lighting and heating, so that people could sit together staring at screens and market stuff, or do reports, or prepare legal documents like wills for people who may not even be in the same city, is a waste of money when we now have cheap laptops and broadband.

Loads of empty office buildings with few companies wanting them. They will be converted into houses and flats.

Nimbys and planners are seemingly still against though. My local town has had a run down, semi empty, town centre space for years. It's become run down because as companies move out, they are boarded up, as it's been in the pipeline for so long. And years go by. And it's one of the most expensive part of the country to rent or buy. But the locals don't want it to be built up. Oh, it's not in keeping...... what? This area was all built in the 50's and 60's and desperately needs updating, but no...... we want to keep it.

So almost past the post until the last local elections when there was a concerted effort by all parties to say they wouldn't trust the others. Result is that all the independents lost (they wanted some changes, then were going to give permission), the Conservatives lost (they were going to give permission), and the Lib Dems won, and they are against. Great. Well done everyone. No new single dwellings in the town centre for key workers, right next to the train and bus station then.

I do agree with this.

Don't want to try to comment too much on specifically what Gove has or hasn't said, not having pored over the detail, but one thing they seem to forget with plans to get developers to chuck up loads of housing is that all those residents needs facilities........ Schools, Doctors, dentists, shops, hairdressers / barbers, community meeting places for everything from toddler groups right through to dementia groups, stroke clubs, lunch clubs etc, including Scout huts, playing fields, a hall for choirs to rehearse in for people to knit and natter in or people to play badminton in or organise a residents association or a Cllrs Ward meeting, or a Christmas Fete in. Grass to kick a ball about on, or just sit out and breathe. Sports pitches and space to run or to learn to ride a bike,

We seem to have forgotten how to build flats for living in.

We own a 2 bed flat in a1930s block - we have a large communal garden, big private balconies, garages and all flats have plently of built in storage. We hardly get any of the fabled noise as the flats are a solid as hell.

As for leasehold "ripoff" - well leasehold/commonhold/whatever if you own a flat you do have to have some way of organising and paying for the repair and maintenance of communal areas.

I think Gove is a slime and disagree with him on many many things, but on this particular point, he’s right.
I wouldn’t trust any Tory government to deliver it though, and I doubt they’ll have time to before they’re booted out. He probably knows that. The truth is that it’s far more profitable for developers to develop open fields than brownfield sites.

This is exactly why we need good planning laws and not less though. Decent planning regulations can account for the extra pressure on the local services and community and either put requirements into the development specifically, or require them to channel money to the local council.

Of course British people tend to aspire to houses.

Because we build hutches with paper thin walls instead of the good quality, well sized, well soundproofed apartments Europe often does so well. We have a whole batshit leasehold system that in many cases means buying a flat is taking a greater financial risk than buying a house. We've lumbered tens of thousands of flat owners with a cladding fiasco that makes their properties essentially unsellable. Then we also had lockdowns that meant access to public outdoor leisure spaces was withdrawn or severely limited, whereas people with a private outdoor leisure space were able to carry on using it- and not all flats lack gardens and not all houses have them, but there's a definite correlation.

Which has all combined to mean flats have been a demonstrably worse bet than houses over the past few years. And naturally, people respond to those incentives.

When we first moved here I said to DH it was a shame all the old grand building with shops often at ground level going to rack and ruin - they could be flats as near train station several cities are very commutable.

Since then a quango was set up to do just that and there are now many flats in town center - they do rent or sell for a pretty penny but the building have had remedial repairs made so should last longer.

Where I grew up brown field sites have been cleaned and built on for decades - suppose high house prices help recoup costs there. There had been a big industrial estate at end of nearby town to village I grew up in got cleaned up and build huge estate there - then farmers between that and village sold up - and now there're building in-between.

Near IL there a brown field site next to a country park took multiple planning applications and an appeal to Secretary of state to get permission for an estate - which does now have pretty much everything schools hotel business park.

So I think this has been happening for a while - but there's can still be opposition to it.

@StormShadow Not all flats are new build and not all new builts are terrible - there are lots and lots of solidly built blocks of good sized flats - lots from the first part of the twentieth century.

Constantly referring to flats at "rabbit hutches" is a bit ignorant and pretty insulting to those of us who have build decent lives in a flat.

Absolutely agree @Hufflepods

Near where I live, the City Council turned down a developer's proposal to build 800 houses on a golf course, only to have it overturned by National Government. So that is going to be probably 3000 more people not able to get registered with a dentist, or a Doctor (or to be able to get an appointment, if local doctors are forced to take them), people complaining about not getting school places etc. as well as a busy city losing hundreds of mature trees, and just green, breathing space.

I wish we had FAR more stringent planning laws, compelling any new developments to include green spaces, community meeting spaces, and proper facilities that every community needs. Plus enough parking, rather than just pretending nobody will use a car if they don't build communities with enough parking space.

Nah, it's not. We do build rabbit hutches with paper thin walls. I used the present tense there for a reason, and you talking about what we used to build reinforces my point. If we did still make them like that, if you could point to that quality of development now, the situation would be very different. But it isn't.

Fwiw, I have actually lived in said rabbit hutches. It sounds from this like you live in a rather nicer standard of flat?

I do live in a nice flat yes - and would love to see that standard of building come back for flats. The problem is because flats are seen an an inferior option or a temporary pit stop in life then they don't get built properly. It is a self fulfilling prophecy.

As for paper thin walls - I have to use a hammer drill to put up curtain rails. 😂

Well, take it from someone who did live in multiple examples of poorer quality newbuild flats, rabbit hutch with paper thin walls is a painfully accurate take on some of them!

The idea that correctly describing them as such means flats don't get built properly is a pretty far fetched one, though. If anything, downplaying the situation is more likely to do that. We build the rabbit hutches because it suits developers. Of course they'd like the idea that there isn't a problem because hey, some of the older flats in this country are great quality, and the people who live in them are pleased with them. Nothing to see here, let's keep being shit!

I want to see less ownership of second, third, multiple homes. Stop being so greedy and selfish people!

@StormShadow Oh I agree - I jut get ittitated by the assumption that all flats are "rabbit hutches" some of it is true and some of it is just born of snobbery.

The problem with poor build quality isn’t restricted to flats- houses are just as bad. But as PP have said, leasehold makes getting anything sorted in a flat far more difficult.

What we need is a proper mix of housing. Large family houses, small family houses, large apartments and small apartments. It should be a legal requirement that every home has access to private outdoor space, even if only a small balcony (but a proper one, not the Juliet kind). We need to be more creative and inspiring with the way new builds are done. Some of the developments around Manchester in the last few years have been really interesting, especially where old mills have been converted and have included lots of communal space- gardens, gyms, laundry areas, big entertaining spaces that residents can borrow. But at the same time they still throwing up horrible multistorey shoeboxes with no balconies. And I completely agree that we need to stop the sale of proper to people not resident in the UK. Our land should be too important to us for it to be crammed full of giant Chinese and Russian piggybanks.

I am not sure leasehold makes getting reapairs sorted in a flat harder - you need a legal system to collect money and define responsibilties for repairs. It doesn't neccesarily have to be leasehold but you need something.

You clearly don't live in an inner city because if you did you'd know that the few bits of green space we do have are really precious and if you are going to stick families in buildings cheek to jowl you have to give them some outdoor space. Overall this is a terrible idea. There's far more green space outside of cities that would be far more suitable and the only reason the Tories are suggesting these is because they know all the Nimbies vote Tory and inner cities tend to vote Labour.

It’s a topic I’m pretty ignorant on tbh, but I’ve seen Gove drawing praise from across the political spectrum re. housing for a few years now.

Is this really a British obsession? British homes are famously small.