MAKING ROOM: THE HOUSING CRISES IN LONDON AND NEW YORK (Slide 1)

INTRODUCTION

(Slide 2)

Good evening. I’m very honoured to have been invited to speak to the Benjamin Franklin Society, and I hope that I can shed some useful light on my subject tonight . . .

Which is . . .

The Housing Crises in London and New York, and in relation to London, in particular, what might be done about this.

(Slide 3)

As I’m sure you appreciate, this is not a straightforward subject. It’s a maelstrom of facts and figures and often conflicting, politically- charged information. And so, in giving this talk, I will strive NOT to demonstrate one of Ben Franklin’s remarks: “I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.” Mr Franklin looks down on us now, as does Lord Acton – but more from him in a moment.

Let me emphasise, straight away, that I am an architect, not a housing or demographic expert, and I have no political axe to grind. However, this subject is hugely important and I do hope my enquiries will have made some useful connections between housing issues here, and in New York in relation to planning factors, social issues, and architectural quality and offer suggestions on how the affordable housing crisis in London which, of course, is a national issue, might be addressed.

[PAUSE] (Slide 4)

Britain’s housing crisis - will be a hot potato at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton during which Jeremy Corbyn will outline his plans to build 250,000 homes across Britain each year, half of them as council houses.

Good stuff, given nearly 2 million people in the UK are on waiting lists for social housing, but how will his plans be funded in a housing market dominated by market forces?

(Slide 5)

Meanwhile, the government promises to build 200,000 homes by 2020, through its Starter Homes Initiative (not to be confused its Help To Buy Initiative) with homes to be sold at 80 percent of their market price on derelict land to under 40’s. Except that, as critics have pointed out, how will its intended constituency afford to pay 80 percent of the market price in the first place?

[PAUSE] (Slide 6)

Arriving in London via Boston in 1981, as an architect in my mid- 20s and to a country immersed in a royal wedding and new technologies, I admit that I wasn’t particularly interested in housing or demographic situations then.

(Slide 7)

At that time, I was fortunate enough to be employed by Richard Rogers in his Holland Park studio. Richard was not only an inspiring leader, and his atelier a great place to work, but he and his practice were often generous to staff in a practical way: his firm loaned me the funds for the deposit on my first flat - a one- bedder in Kilburn.

(Slide 8)

I recall buying the flat for £18,000 – three times my then-salary. Now, it’s probably worth about £500,000. Today, even Richard’s practice and his generosity would find it impossible to support a young architect like me, in this way, such is the extraordinary and unremitting increase in property prices in London over the last 35 years – and in the last couple of decades, in particular.

(PAUSE)

Two months ago, the global forecasters, Oxford Economics, warned that the average house price in London could rise to £1 million in the next decade. In the boroughs of Hammersmith, Fulham and Camden, for instance, average house prices today are already 20 times average earnings.

(Slide 9)

Half of the UK’s housing wealth is in the southeast of England. In the last 5 years, the increase in value in London’s homes has risen more than the equivalent total worth of all housing in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And if this doesn’t seem extraordinary enough, then, if you can believe it, the combined property markets of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are reported to be a mere one fifteenth of the property markets in the 10 priciest London boroughs - if Britain's shape reflected this it would have a skinny top, a huge bottom and extend to Paris.

[PAUSE]

So how has this remarkable acceleration in property values come about?

(Slide 10)

The primary reason is power and international influence. London and New York are the world’s two greatest City States, and the greatest financial powerbrokers. New York’s GDP is about $1.5 trillion. London’s is about half this.

The recent 12 Cities Report by Savills confirms that London has overtaken Hong Kong as the most expensive world city in which to live, work and, indeed, build. What the report also highlights is the extraordinary social and economic disparities across London itself which help fuel Britain’s unhealthy position as near the bottom of Europe’s equality table.

[PAUSE]

Architects often speak about the architecture of regeneration in terms of placemaking. But what’s happening in London and New York is not so much about placemaking, in a civic and socially inclusive sense, but rather the creation of domestic architecture as a series of investment containers.

This is causing a social and liveability crisis. Where are so-called ordinary Londoners or New Yorkers supposed to live? Where can they afford to live? Can their city leaders mediate the apparently unstoppable gold-plating – if not gold gating – of real estate in the centres of both cities?

In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, the historian and moralist, Lord Acton, said: “The issue which has swept down the centuries, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the people versus the banks.”

And here’s another remark from Ben Franklin from the late 18th century: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Today, Lord Acton might say that the housing crisis is essentially a case of ordinary people versus extraordinary real estate. And Mr Franklin would certainly want to know whether any civic institution had prepared for this situation.

[PAUSE]

I’m going to approach tonight’s subject in three stages:

First, I’ll give you some general background about the growth of London and New York, historically, and some aspects of the housing state of affairs that have produced the current property markets and the lack of housing affordability.

Second, I’ll take a look at some of the major recent housing projects in both cities.

And third, I’ll set out some possible strategies to address the acute lack of affordable housing with a particular London focus.

[PAUSE]

A LITTLE HISTORY (Slide 11)

(Slide 12)

So let’s start by looking at some general aspects of the growth of London and New York.

(Slide 13)

How do you plan to house millions of people in big cities that are growing, or densifying? New York’s growth has always been on an upward trajectory – its population in 179o was 33,000. By 1900 it was 3.4 million . . . 7.9 million in 1960 . . . and today it’s around 8.5 million, roughly the same as London.

(Slide 14)

In 1800, when the first detailed census of London was taken, the population here was 1 million. By 1939 it had risen to 8.6 million, it then dropped to 6.5 million post-war, but since the 1990’s, with a two-decade spike of growth, it is now back at its pre- war level of 8.6m and continues to grow, fuelling the city's prosperity but creating the enormous shortage of affordable homes that we face today.

(Slide 15)

In 19th century London, government authorities and charities became directly involved in housing. The Peabody Trust, set up in 1862, is still involved, and still setting standards for affordable housing. In 1892, the London County Council took a momentous decision: it decided to build council housing – with the first two sites in Limehouse in the East End of London.

London’s early inner city housing included the Millbank estate in Westminster, completed in 1902. It housed 4,500 people on a site that had previously been the Millbank prison. The estate was designed to increase the quantity of affordable rented accommodation in central London. In outer London, the Becontree estate in Dagenham was virtually a new town – 26,000 Homes for Heroes, built between 1921 and 1935.

(Slide 16)

After World War II, London was replanned, notably by Patrick Abercrombie, who tried to balance the development of housing, industry, and open spaces. The first 10-storey postwar council housing block opened in 1949. And, by the 1960s, more than half a million council flats had been built in the city.

(Slide 17)

(Slide 18)

Thirty-five years after Gunner Hector Murdoch’s 1946 homecoming to Tulse Hill, captured in this evocative image, Britain had begun its apparent irreversible housing shift with the introduction in 1979 of Margaret Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme, during which 1.5million council houses were sold cheaply across the country to their tenants, 20% of them in London.

Today, London has around 400,000 council housing units – about half the number in the 1980’s - and they accommodate 1 in 8 of the capital's households, at social rents of between 40% and 60% of private sector market rates, compared with a London average of 65% under the government's affordable rent requirements.

[PAUSE] (Slide 19)

Turning to New York, better organised social housing began with the Tenement House Act in 1867. At that time, at least 500,000 New Yorkers lived in more or less windowless tenement blocks, typically on 25ft by 100ft lots. In a 1894 survey, 8,000 workers’ buildings had 250,000 residents, making New York the most densely populated city in the world. Part of the Lower East Side had 1000 residents per acre – that’s a far greater density than Bombay today.

(Slide 20)

In the late 19th century, many of New York’s middle classes began to move into apartment blocks. So, in due course, did the wealthy.

By the early 20th century, lavish New York apartments were deemed good enough for the great American plutocrats –the Roosevelts, the DuPonts, the Astors, and later, John and Yoko, who moved into much of the upper floors in the famous 1884 Dakota Building – a grand cooperative on the Upper West Side.

In the public sector, the New York City Housing Authority, America's largest public housing manager, was set up in 1934. It still maintains over 400,000 tenants in mostly high-rise projects across the city – particularly in the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is the city’s second biggest landlord, after the Housing Authority, controlling more than 100,000 residential units, and is gradually delivering 85,000 new or rehabilitated, affordable homes.

(Slide 21)

The contemporary situation regarding New York’s property values and rent levels, began to change in the 1980s as gentrification took root in areas such as Brooklyn and Tribeca. Many tenements were modernised or replaced to create fashionable mid-range or even upscale housing. And at that time, New York’s property developers were happy to speak of parts of New York as quote “an urban Vietnam” in which it was necessary to quote “destroy the buildings in order to save the neighbourhood.”

One historian described New York’s gentrifications as creating an atmosphere of quote “residence-based self-identification”. That’s a rather chilling phrase – and it has unquestionably set the aspirational model for market-driven housing that we now see in London, New York, and the world’s wealthiest cities.

And according to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, house prices in New York have risen by 250 percent in the last two decades.

[PAUSE] (Slide 22)

London’s gentrification also began in the 1980s, marking the beginning of the 35-year, year-on-year depletion of London’s affordable housing stock. As in New York, it established the idea of housing redevelopments in central areas specifically for personal gain, rather than as part of the process of planned civic or social inclusivity.

My practice’s work has contributed to regeneration in Hammersmith, Peckham, Deptford and, most recently, around the transport interchange at Dalston. Our project there helped to trigger the perception of that part of London as being nouveau hip, with property values accelerating in Dalston over the last four or five years. A few miles to the northeast, Walthamstow has now become another new property hotspot – a decade ago, that idea would have probably seemed unthinkable.

(Slide 23)

And what about Edmonton Green...10 miles north of Charing Cross Station, and not far from the northern stretch of the M25. Here, the £1.5 billion Meridian Water development, on 200 acres of post-industrial land, is creating 5000 new homes.

These transformations to desirable urban neighbourhoods, can happen almost anywhere – particularly if there’s a transport hub nearby.

In principle, this is a good thing. But it tends to serve the market economy. The social market economy which produced substantial tracts of affordable and local authority housing in London and New York in the 20th century is being lost on the alluring Yellow Brick Road to endless gentrification.

THE ACCELERATION OF PROPERTY VALUES (Slide 24)

What’s fuelling the current unremitting rise in property values in both cities? In a sentence: it’s the increasing number of people who are locking disposable incomes into rapidly appreciating residential assets in the world’s two most powerful, well- organised, historically alluring, and politically stable cities.

(Slide 25)

Average house prices across the Boroughs of New York stand at about $400,000. But, in Manhattan, its wealthiest borough, the average apartment price reached a record $1.7 million in 2014.

In 2006, the average asking price for a two bedroom house in

London was £330,000. By 2013, despite the Recession, it was

£500,000. Today, it’s around £600,000 – that’s a doubling of values within a decade. And let me repeat, that’s the average price, which is more than 20 times the average annual earnings of a Londoner.

But that’s more or less small change for the new regiments of the super-rich – or the merely rather wealthy! – who either live in London or New York and treat its buildings as investment silos that can be sold on at the most advantageous future moment.

Peter Rees, the former planning supremo of the City of London, recently pointed out that residential development can now make four to six times more profit than building offices – which possibly explains the success of the Government’s Permitted Development Rights, or PDR, scheme which has turned empty offices into homes with some success nationally, whilst depleting office stock, particularly, in London.

Peter Rees also says this surge in residential development has produced buildings that are quote: “Piles of safe deposit boxes . . . many of dubious architectural quality, sold off-plan to the world’s uber rich.”

Let me emphasise that I don’t say this in any xenophobic way. The British and Americans colonised much of the rest of the world, imperially and financially, for more than two centuries. The situation has simply been reversed, but in terms of real estate. There’s an extraordinary game of Monopoly going on that’s financially straightforward, but socially very complicated.

[PAUSE]

I’m now going to cite some examples of new high-value and mostly high-rise mixed-use residential developments in London and New York, balancing this with the challenging rental housing market. I’ll then conclude by looking at what might be done to alleviate the deeper rooted problems relating to the lack of affordable housing .

[PAUSE] (Slide 26)

In terms of high-rise, there’s nothing new about the idea of London as a vertical city. Here’s a rather beguiling 1926 painting by Montague Black called This Is All In The Air, a vision of London in 2026:

However, in London today, this vision has become reality with the city’s skyline altering daily and the prospect of future dramatic change, with over 200 schemes for residential and office towers in the planning process which, if built, would radically alter London forever.

(Slide 27)

This has led to sustained criticism of the London’s planning authorities and their inability to ensure that these residential tower projects are, at the very least, architecturally exemplary and incorporate a decent proportion of genuinely affordable units.

Currently, most of these tower designs are mediocre – very much whack-it-up, business as usual high rises. Sadly, our best architects often do their poorest work in the high-value residential sector – perhaps because their clients won’t pay for more thoughtful designs, or because they’re fundamentally indifferent to this kind of project.

Most of these schemes also have little to do with the civic and socially inclusive ideas as championed in the defining Urban Task Force Renaissance strategy, launched by the Labour government in 1999. A proportion of the apartments in developments like these – “safe deposit boxes” as Peter Rees called them – will be left unoccupied. They are hardly civic, or indeed, socially inclusive. They aren’t convivial. They’re not characterful. Their cultural contribution to the city is debatable. And so, many of these these towers are not about placemaking . . . they’re about profitable placefaking.

The bottom line is that there is no doubt whatsoever that most of the apartments in these developments will be way beyond the mortgage or rental reach of most Londoners. According to the Financial Times, only 20 percent of the 23,000 homes currently being built on London’s 60 major residential development sites since March 2014 can be classed as affordable.

Up to 2008, London had a 50 percent affordable housing target, which was rarely met as developers found ways round these targets. Today, there’s no Mayoral affordable housing target. Although 25% affordable is the recommended level, many developers continue to deliver the lowest possible affordable percentage, without redress.

Basic house-building targets in London are also nowhere near being met. The Homes for London Board reports that the Mayor’s promise to build 53,000 affordable homes between April 2011 and March 2015 has not been achieved. The current New London Plan calls for 42,000 new homes per year, despite the fact that the Greater London Authority’s strategic assessments say that up to 62,000 are needed.

In short, 1 million more housing units will be needed in London by 2020 with a likely shortfall of 500,000. More people will be forced to live further from their place of work, stifling London’s economic growth. Nationally, £24 billion a year is currently spent on housing-related benefits. And unless the housing shortfall is reversed, this level of spending will inevitably increase, particularly in outer London Boroughs.

(Slide 28)

It’s not much better for those who rent in London. So-called affordable rents have reached around £12,000 per annum – that’s a third of the £34,000 median pre-tax earnings of Londoners, and effectively half of the after-tax figure. This has generated tens of thousands of severely rent burdened lives particularly for those recent graduates who form 60% of all those renting in Central London. Only in the outer areas of London can a new graduate, earning an average of £22,500 per year, spend less than a third of their pay on rent.

No wonder the Private Rented Sector, or PRS, has become contentious. So has the availability of buy-to-let mortgages, and the abolition of rent controls. Since the financial crash in 2008, PRS has grown by 60 percent in Britain, with rental values doubling in the last three years to £2.5billion.

And with a third of homes privately rented in inner London, agents Knight Frank say there are more profits to be made in PRS housing than in any other rental model, with average monthly rentals for a one-bed flat approaching £1500 per month – that’s 70 percent of an average Londoner’s net salary.

In Germany, incidentally, more than half the housing is privately rented. In Canada and the US, it’s about 30 percent . . . nearly 60 percent in Switzerland . . . about 15 percent in Denmark and Finland . . . and 10 percent in Holland.

Paul Finch, the highly-regarded commentator on architecture and planning, describes PRS as the housing sector’s “cynical silver bullet”. With 55,000 buy-to-let homes planned or under construction in London this year the owner of a £1 million two bed flat will charge the tenant about £35,000 a year with a 3% - 4% return for their buy-to-let investment.

Meanwhile, there’s no government-led national accreditation or effective rent-capping scheme for landlords.

The shift in the age of first-time home buyers is also revealing – as is the shifting ownership and rental market. The average age of a British first time buyer in 1960 was 24. By 1994 it was 28. Today, it’s 32. Britain is now a country of declining home ownership. The new landlord class is in the ascendency.

It’s just as problematic in New York. In Manhattan, the median monthly rent is now $4,000 – that’s a rise of 10 percent in the last year. In New York as a whole, almost 70 percent of residents are renters. One third of tenants pay more than half their income in rent – and are categorised as being severely ‘rent burdened’. Between 2000 and 2012, rents rose by 75 percent, while pay went up 30 percent. A minimum-wage earner in New York would have to work 140 hours per week to be able to afford the average apartment.

New York’s previous Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, created 165,000 low rent apartments during his tenure. And the current Mayor, Bill de Blasio, says he’s on what he calls a “sacred mission” to build or renovate 200,000 affordable housing units in New York’s diverse neighbourhoods for households earning less than $40,000 a year, in a plan that will cost the city $40 billion, in the next decade.

These measures would appear to be born out of desperation. It’s shocking to discover that affordable housing build-starts in New York reached 34,000 in 2009, but have been stagnant at a mere 7,000 a year since then. For a city of that size and wealth, that’s an absurdly low number.

One grim effect of all this, in both cities, is that it creates, and sustains, alarming levels of homelessness, particularly in New York, where 60,000 of its residents, including 22,000 children, are registered homeless.

35 percent of Britain’s homeless are in London. The British government doesn’t keep fully detailed records of the number of homeless families, but in the last four years alone there has been a 25 percent rise in families who are recorded as statutory homeless – that is, families who report to the authorities that they’re homeless. There are obviously many more who don’t.

[PAUSE]

Returning to London’s residential housing sector, one logical strategy is to create new housing in the vicinity of transport hubs. This creates mixed-use concentrations – commercial in the lowest levels of buildings, residential higher up. We can see exactly this happening in big new buildings going up near Victoria station in London, for example. And there’s a £1 billion mini- Manhattan style development rising from the City Road Basin.

(Slide 29)

And here’s one of the forthcoming City Road apartment blocks, the so- called Canaletto Building next to Frank Gehry’s offering at Battersea Power Station - instant high value residential bling.

There are, of course, less glitzy residential developments. For example, Mayor Boris Johnson plans to create five new residential-led Opportunity Areas to trigger regeneration and growth. They include Canada Water, the Old Kent Road corridor in Southwark, Bromley town centre, and Harrow and Wealdstone. Those areas are expected to deliver 11,000 new homes and 8,000 new jobs.

In New York, the residential development situation is even more dramatic. And two words sum up the upscale end of the housing market: skyscrapers and waterfronts.

Norman Foster has a 60-storey stack of residences going up on East 53rd Street. Zaha Hadid’s imposing apartment building on West 28th Street will cover much of a city block.

(Slide 30)

A weirdly skinny, 40 foot wide apartment building 1,400 feet tall is planned for a site at 111 West 57th Street in Manhattan.

And here it is. Who on earth would want to live at the top of something so bizarrely slight?

On New York’s waterfronts, the development that sums up the dominance of gilt-edged real estate is the Hudson Yards project, described as the epicentre of the New West Side. This single scheme will contain 16 skyscrapers delivering almost 13 million square feet of offices, retail space, and 5,000 residences. The first tower going up will be 1000 feet high, and the tallest will rise to more than 1,500 feet.

The high-value core of the Hudson Yards project, covering about 30 acres, was triggered by the creation of the celebrated High Line elevated park in 2009, which immediately branded the area as gentrified, sucked in $2 billion of private investment around it, and created 12,000 new jobs and 30 urban development projects. Which is extremely impressive in statistical terms.

However, neither New York nor London have enough public transport infrastructure to move people efficiently to, or from, these urban development hotspots. Whole sections of New York’s subway system can barely cope with rush-hour movement.

In London, the vast Crossrail system – the biggest single infrastructure project outside China – is nearing completion, some 50 years after it was first mooted. I’m proud that my practice is involved here, because Crossrail will certainly make daily life better for those who live and work in central London, and beyond.

In New York, Mayor de Blasio’s housing plan will be underpinned by what is called Inclusionary Zoning – it was Bloomberg’s idea first, incidentally. This zoning encourages private developers to build high density residential blocks or towers connected to public transport, provided they contain a percentage of affordable housing.

De Blasio’s plan sounds promising, but it will need to deliver many more affordable homes if it is to succeed. Many fear that this plan will simply be a Trojan Horse for further gentrification.

More work and research is needed – Inclusionary Zoning is not yet a magic bullet for affordable urban housing.

[PAUSE]

CLOSING REMARKS (Slide 31)

Are there any other ways to tackle this hugely challenging issue of an affordable housing crisis in a market-driven economy beyond those being exercised today?

I do think there are some actions, or investigations, that might improve the availability and quality of affordable housing. Some of these have already been tried, others need more attention. I’ll set out these possibilities as I see them and they how relate to London and, to varying degrees, elsewhere in Britain, with the following recommendations :

First and foremost . . . the government must recognize Britain’s housing crisis is a suitable case for exceptional measures and come forward with a co-ordinated housing strategy. There must be decisive legislation that defines and delivers house-building targets through joint public and private sector involvement in both market and affordable schemes. And there should be more comprehensive controls over landlords, and rent protection to deliver a properly managed rental sector. And surely, the housing minister deserves a seat and a voice in the Cabinet charged with the delivery of the Government’s housing programme and accountable for its success or failure.

(Slide 32)

Second . . . With space for at least 400,000 new homes by intensification, infill and brown field site development, and with thousands of unimplemented planning permissions for this land, I believe there should be a far greater focus on house-building on empty sites, whilst identifying further ways of bringing more derelict land into the system without threatening the Green Belt, which I believe should be protected at all costs.

Third . . . I believe there should be tougher regulations, administered by more highly skilled planning officials and design champions across London’s 33 boroughs, to obligate developers to build out higher quality permissioned schemes within a specific period. This would stop them building poorly or sitting on permissions until land values – and sales prices – increase.

Having said that, housing developers want the planning approval process speeded up. In principle, that’s fine. But this has often led to the rubber stamping of poorly designed housing projects that are being built by a construction workforce whose skills are in short supply. The CBI’s just-published Building Growth Report notes that a third of construction companies claim serious shortages of skilled labour and increased costs as the greatest threat to their ability to deliver qualitative buildings… Rushed approvals . . . poorly skilled builders . . . rising costs . . . that’s a pretty toxic cocktail.

(Slide 33)

Fourth . . . I support, in principle, the concept of Micro Housing, which is already underway in London, and increasingly being investigated in New York , where 1 million people are searching for affordable homes.

In both cities, Micro Housing formats of between 250 and 450 square feet studio and one-bed units are being designed and built, recalling housing theories first explored in Europe in the 1920’s and developed later in legendary architectural projects such as the 1972 Capsule Tower designed by Kisho Kurakawa, and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, in Montreal.

(Slide 34)

In London, for instance, The Collective and Pocket Living developers are building a range of schemes across the city, with average rents of £200 per week or at purchase costs affordable to those on average London wages, greatly opening up opportunities within this sector.

Some may flinch at this kind of sardine-can scale and density, but micro-living is surely here to stay, and will ultimately provide good quality, affordable living for hundreds of thousands of people in London and New York.

(Slide 35)

Fifth. . . As an alternative to creating vertical residential housing, we need to design and build more medium-rise developments. Could we not revisit the New York mid-rise tenement model, or Berlin’s courtyard housing typologies, or use the principles of the 19th century Peabody housing or as seen in many of London’s traditional neighbourhoods.

The prospect of big medium-rise housing blocks does not have to conger up grim 19th century images. If they are well-designed, these large-scale domestic buildings can be exemplary and pleasant places to live.

There should also be more improvements to existing larger scale housing blocks. I am a great believer in the principles of renovation and adaptive re-use for all sorts of buildings, residential included.

Sixth. . . I think the development of co-housing should be encouraged. This means individuals getting together to buy urban sites to build housing units with communal facilities. There would also be lots of people who would willingly invest in co-housing opportunities. Whilst they would make a modest return for the investment, their contribution would, in a low-risk way, help London’s affordable housing crisis.

A New York version of this kind of communality is appearing in democratically controlled Community Land Trusts. This brings together a piece of land owned by a non-profit organisation, with buildings on it owned by a mutual housing association, which sells or rents the apartments affordably.

(Slide 36)

Seventh . . . I think new use-classes should be created to facilitate the adaption of redundant buildings into housing and live/work units.

In London, for instance, there’s a vast amount of empty space above low-rise shops, which could easily be converted into flats and live/work opportunities. I caution, though, against unregulated office to residential conversions, which deplete office stock and drive up office rentals.

(Slide 37)

Eighth . . . Bearing in mind the increasing numbers of home renters, we surely need more firmly regulated rent differentials using means-tested rental models, such as those being adopted at the New Era Estate in Hoxton by Dolphin Living.

Of course, we have to see how this kind of rent model actually pans out. But, if successful, it could ensure a greater, more culturally civil mixture of different types of people, and different types of housing, in London.

Ninth . . . local authorities should strive to become co-developers of social or affordable housing.

1975 was the peak year for council houses, with 60 percent of homes owned or managed by local authorities. Today, it’s runs at between 10 and 14 percent. But now, some London councils are commiting strategic funds for social housing. Newham and Southwark, for example, plan to build 30,000 council homes in the next 20 years.

(Slide 38)

In Tottenham, where my practice has set up the design-related social involvement project, N17, the local authority is investigating joint-venture housing initiatives with private developers. They have no alternative, as the government has cut council homebuilding subsidies by 50 percent.

Also in Haringey, which has the second highest number of homeless households in temporary accommodation in London, the council is considering joint ventures with private developers – taking an equity stake in regeneration to create new mixes of social, affordable housing within a public/private ownership model. I think this could work well, in combination with the setting up of the Community Land Trust-type projects I mentioned a moment ago.

Tenth, and finally . . . I think the design quality of housing is crucial. This is not a purely aesthetic issue. It’s surely obvious that well-designed homes can contribute greatly to the quality of domestic life.

For decades, planning regulations have made no truly sustained demands for design quality. Whitehall is essentially interested in accelerating the churn of construction activity to increase cashflow, investment and jobs within Great Britain plc. Jeremy Corbyn’s plan for housing doesn’t mention quality.

Meanwhile, most councils struggle to process even the existing volumes of planning applications with any true understanding of architectural quality or urban design. Which means that most housing developers get to do more or less what they want in parts of London that desperately need housing. And what this class of developer wants to do is eliminate design and quality from the agenda.

And yet, there is absolutely no reason for housing to be designed badly, or cynically.

Britain has enough thoughtful creative, contextually intelligent architects to design tens of thousands of housing units in towers, estates, or on small plots of ground. Housebuilders just need to trust them and use them to escape from design mediocrity – even where building costs are extremely limited. Innovations are entirely possible, and would be served by the development of a properly funded modular housing industry which is woefully absent in this country through lack of investment.

And here are just a few examples of well-designed affordable housing in London built economically and to the highest possible quality:

(Slide 39)

…an early affordable scheme in Southwark by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands.

(Slide 40)

Another by AHMM at Adelaide Wharf in Hoxton.

(Slide 41)

Another by Niall McLaughlin in Whitechapel for Peabody.

(Slide 42)

And finally, in New York a major new affordable housing development by the British architects Grimshaw.

[PAUSE]

The key factors in all of these projects? Affordability, intelligent clients, thoughtful architects, and planning authorities who know a good housing design when they see one. But these projects are exceptions – rare Utopian specimens, if you like.

[PAUSE]

In closing, there is, to make a wartime analogy, a property Blitz taking place in London and across Britain. Unless the affordable housing crisis is recognised and addressed in detail by government and grasped as a political priority, the flow of housing evacuees from the city will increase . . . the so-called Generation Rent will become a new kind of property triggered diaspora.

[PAUSE] (Slide 43)

Can the housing situations in London and New York change, or be changed? Should they be left to develop in a purely market-led way? Can the market improve housing affordability? Does it want to? Is there any thorough democracy in the dynamics of housing provision? Are we somehow losing the fundamental idea of having secure homes?

[PAUSE]

I can’t answer these questions categorically. But it’s impossible for anybody interested in cities, and the way people live in them, to ignore them.

How simple it was to aspire to buy a home for myself in the early 1980s. How incredibly fraught it is today, in every sense – human, political, economic, ethical.

The government and local authorities, planners, developers, house-builders and the construction industry can no longer plough on, heedless of the potential social and cultural effects of the national housing crisis that has become so profitable to so many people, and so crippling to vast numbers of others. They can no longer make empty promises to deliver and fail on housing targets. There must be accountability.

London and New York are, indeed, the world’s pre-eminent, world class cities . . . But in terms of their public and private sector affordable housing, we are left with a profoundly challenging question:

Who, exactly, are these two great cities world class for?

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for giving me the opportunity to speak to you here tonight.

(Slide 44)

END