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Introduction 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.
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