The future of housing in UK

[Arnoldthecat]

When you look at much of the housing stock in the UK, a lot of it is old and in need of work or better still, demolition.

The only thing that is preventing the demolition of old houses that are long past their best is that they are retained as a tradeable asset. There are too many vultures who need them to make a living off them.

If ou had a car and it got so old that its paint was faded, it was damp,leaked in water, and was rusting would you continually patch it up to keep using it and try to retain its value? No you wouldnt. You'd scrap it and get a new modern one.

Modern new housing should be factory engineered to high standards. Super insulated and assembled on site on an insulated concrete base.

The days of men (and women) gluing clods of clay together on some rainy windswept site must surely come to an end! It is truly ridiculous. Its labour intensive, its archaic, there is too much variability and lack of quality control and its expensive.

For the future, where we seek to be cleaner, greener and more energy efficient, we must look toward engineered, system built homes. Made in the comfort of large factories hat can replicate high quality structures day in day out at much reduced cost and assemble them on site quickly.

They tell us they wish to stop using gas boilers and fossil fuels and we must all have heat pumps. HPs work best in well constructed, well insulated homes. Not houses that are 70 plus years old and are ready to tear down. I accept there are plenty of exceptions.

Of course this doesnt suit the agenda of having houses as a tradeable asset class.We must artificially hold the cost of housing high . Bricks and mortar have replaced the gold standard.

Good idea. All you need to do is get the government to back ‘non-standard’ construction mortgages. These mortgages are currently prohibitively expensive. Also need to think about the materials, in order to avoid a repeat cladding situation nightmare.

Full scale demolition and new builds tends to be very energy and resource intensive compared to refurbishment. In some places it's needed, but I don't think all houses over 70 years are ready to tear down and a lot of recently built homes are hardly fit for purpose with the desire to squeeze as many tiny homes on a plot of land as possible (a smaller home footprint does not mean a smaller energy or resource footprint - we're significantly smaller than Sweden, Germany, and Denmark which are all known for greener homes). I think we're storing up issues with the current knock it down and rebuild more onto the same plot of land (or just leave giant holes when they can't get planning permission or want to wait until the land is worth more).

There has been a lot of moves from green activists to get the government to reduce the VAT on revocation and alternations to empty residential homes to match new builds zero-rated to encourage the bringing back of empty properties.

While I agree that the UK is very odd on it's single minded towards bricks, there has also been a lot of debate on the greenness of concrete in new builds.

When a whole swathe of houses were legally defined as defective back in the '80s, the government put in the money for repair schemes that went well into the '90s. There are currently multiple government back schemes for environmental improvements and, if there was public and political will beyond their value, these could be expanded to more thoroughly renovate homes and other buildings to be more suitable for the future. Some may involve home owner financial contributions - as happened with the previous repair schemes - but there are a lot of options that should be more fully considered when it comes to the future of housing.

Bricks are a very good building material for our climate , they can last for hundreds of years with little or no maintenance.

Sorry but I think new build homes these days are mostly crap. I’ve been round modern new build houses and most of them are falling apart, have damp and mould issues, have cracks and settling foundations, or have a tendancy to flood because they’re built on historic flood plains.

I personally think my 200+ yr old farmhouse is much better built and designed.

If you are interested have a read up on modular housing in the UK, and read up on MMC lots of versions of pre fab technologies all aiming to use factory methods for housing production. It was largely the way the construction industry was going until Grenfell.

Grenfell reversed most of the thinking and reduced the materials that can be used in construction. Brick is back en vogue as a result of its properties in relation to fire and environmentally it is better than many alternatives. It is also manufactured of a plentiful material readily available in tbe UK, we have lots of quarries which rely on the use of bricks also.

In regards to existing housing stock there are various advantages it isn't all about making money. A big one is environmental, it is recognised the destruction it would bring in starting again. In its place tbe current government are encouraging tbe improvement of existing housing stock. At the moment its via landlords and properties that are let out being forced into improvements, it is not possible to let a property with an EPC rating of G for example, previously it was. There is also a massive amount of regeneration that's taking place, in London have a look at Harrow, Paddington Basin and Stratford as a couple of examples of areas that have been totally rebuilt.

Its good to look forward but even though I am in the industry that benefits from new builds I don't believe mass destruction of housing is tbe solution.

And who would pay for it all ?

The only issue is that new builds are shite.
You get a long lost of defects and house builders who are putting up shoddy builds.

John Prescott tried it with Pathfinder

the carbon impact of new build is multiple MULTIPLE times that of retrofitting PERFECTLY GOOD old homes.

I would only live in a new build if I'd built it myself
I do not trust Building companies
or those who support them

Our house is over 400 years old. What are the chances of a house built this year still standing in 2420?

My 140 year old house would disagree it needs tearing down. It's been well maintained and will be here long after I am dead.

That said, the house next door has been poorly maintained and is falling to bits. Rotted sash windows etc.

I'd argue that anything built late 70s onwards would be shite and need tearing down if anything does. We just moved from a 60s house that was rock solid.

anti-landlord art student science-free trollbait, I think. Do not feed.

I agree that a great deal of the U.K. private rented housing stock is in need of urgent attention and landlords being forced to make improvements is long overdue, but I am unconvinced that new homes are an improvement per se.

There's probably a decent balance to be found. Agree that a lot of existing housing stock is shite. New builds are often utterly shite too and without storage, at least old shite has room for stuff. Not sure all the prefab stuff is the answer, but things do need to change. I was reading earlier about people living in homes that flood often and wondering why it doesn't make more sense to rebuild on stilts or similar rather than just gut, repair and redecorate the ground floor over and over.

So you would demolish millions of houses and replace them with new builds? What a waste of existing resources. To use your example: an old car still running is more sustainable than a new one. More than half of a cars carbon footprint is in its manufacture, and if you replace it after three years, that figure is up to four times. So better to keep your car running as long as possible. And for houses too.
Plus add the historical and desirability:.I'd much rather a victorian terrace than a modern cookie cutter on a housing estate.
Where new builds are required, high quality design should be at least equal to sustainability. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case.

Yes i agree, a lot of new construction is poor. Big housebuilders are producing rubbish and banging it out as a premium product. The UK has made big mistakes in the past with system built homes though they were not very refined and times have moved on.
Imagine a factory producing a more mass market version of this and dropping it on a concrete raft.

www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/

Huf haus are great
but they start at £1m
not much use for meeting mass need

Indeed,other manufacturers are available as as i stated, something like haufhaus but scaled for the mass market. House builders and the housing market would hate it and why? because they couldnt keep ripping people off for the new crap they are building and a house would not be the big investible asset it has been made to be now. It would simply be another manufactured product.

After all if i were to take someones detached house and run it over with a digger until it was deconstructed into a pile of bricks,rooftiles,wood and plastic,what intrinsic value would it have? answer, nothing.

www.dan-wood.co.uk/en/

@ListeningQuietly

Huf haus are great but they start at £1m not much use for meeting mass need

Have you had a recent quote for one in the UK? I’m just curious, as I have had a few plans from them for a house in Germany and it was around 600,000 EUR for 220sqm, so quite a way off your million. Perhaps they cost significantly more in the UK?

They should bring back 1960's tower blocks. They were system built & land efficient...!

Nothing wrong with tower blocks
so long as

• they have two stairwells and two lift shafts
• they have proper utility ducts to allow updating
• they allow daylight into EVERY room
• they are surrounded by appropriate outdoor space
• tenants have proper rights

works fine in lots of other countries - even the USA
always been mucked up by UK politicians

I don't think house builder companies would hate it if they made equal or more profit from it. They can just as much rip people off, hire cheaper less qualified labour, use weaker materials and such just as they do with new builds now. There are plenty of horror stories about this out there about kit homes gone wrong. There is nothing in the manufactured factory system that would automatically make it better or more suitable than what's going on most building sites, before getting that most of the examples given are out of reach for most people, whether they're £600k and £1mil, and aren't the companies that would get contracts to mass produce in the UK. To get the support to fund this, that would require much more than social change than any idea of knocking everything down and starting from scratch will cause (which, as someone in a town with too many holes from things being knocked down for shitty plans, it's a major source of frustration even when new homes are built). I don't think the house market 'cares', it's whether people have faith and wider social systems support it. Right now things are wild because that's all up in the air.

The deconstruction method could apply to anything - even ourselves if we wanted to take it far enough. Houses, like people, can be seen in terms of profit value, and some social systems do that too much, but ethically and morally, it's more often emotional, at the very minimum of the practical benefits of caring for the wellbeing of others even with a financial loss. I don't think we can ever make something like homes just like any other manufactured products. They're homes - the social significance of this is played into by companies, but that doesn't make that significance any less real.

The terrace house I'm buying is a concrete house - pre-rendered concrete reinforced with steel. It was the quick-build system-built efficiency model of its day. The type of construction that was going to revolutionize the home building industry - there are reasons they didn't and I had to offer on condition that a repair scheme certificate was produced. I'm not buying for the concrete and glass, I'm buying for how I felt while in the home - even with the repairs and modernization required, and it's already largely been adapted for accessibility which is my top priority. They might not have updated the heating since the '60s, but they put in an amazing gentle ramp to the front door, shower room with built in seat, beautiful wooden solid grab rails in the hall, ramped access through the lean-to into the back garden - it was clearly very loved and had people who adapted it over time with care for the home and the people who lived in it, not with profit in mind.

With those making money from homes who may need more legal push to bring things to standards, having greater tenant security and support for both improving houses and social issues that tend to cause notorious problem tenants has more benefits that turning the country into a building site - do you think no one would profit or vulture off of that? With an aging population and improving health care that still has its limits, I think the future of housing is going to have to consider retrofitting for accessibility as much as environmental and that no matter what we're told, there are more options out there than the latest shiny gadget sold to solve our problems. We can be more adaptable than that (but then I'm someone who kept a phone with a dead microphone for two years because it could still text, so if I drove, your car metaphor would probably be me or at least Pipandmum's version, but I've never had a car so I don't know. Most people can't live well without a home though).

They should bring back 1960's tower blocks. They were system built & land efficient...!

They already have here in Manchester though they market them as swish apartments now. Shoe boxes in the sky.

That reads like a student struggling to write their first dissertation op.

What houses are past their best? Simply because a house is old doesn’t mean it is not good, in fact many older houses are much more sound than their modern day equivalent, it’s all about how it was maintained

Mines four hundred years old and of historical interest. So it’s listed. Should it be knocked down to make way for some new builds? It’s much more solidly built than any new build I’ve ever seen,

A lot of us like older houses. It is part of the British psyche. This will never change in this country.

I would LOVE a brand new house
but only if I'd specced it from the ground up
in the mean time I will join many others in trusting pre WW2

or even better Pre WW1
or even even better Pre Waterloo houses
because they are built back better