Events | 2009.08.20
Rabbit-hutch housing has destroyed our 'joyous shot' at home-making | Lynsey Hanley
Lack of proper regulation in housebuilding is as deranged as in banking. People\'s needs are coming second to a quick buck
For one of the world\'s more mobile populations, Britain has collectively hit something of a brick wall during this recession. Shortly before the economic balloon went pop, in July 2007, you may remember that Gordon Brown announced a plan to ensure that three million new houses would be built by 2020, thereby preventing another unsustainable rise in prices based on lack of supply. Now people who want to move can\'t, and those who don\'t want to move are finding that they must.
Last month, Brown made a similar song and dance about his investment in – get the diggers out – 20,000 affordable new houses over the next two years , and now the estimable Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) has described much of the private housing that was built during the boom as being unfit for purpose, being too small for their occupants and often lacking adequate kitchen and bathroom facilities.
You can see what\'s coming, can\'t you? A slow but sure resuscitation of demand, helped by the banks beginning to lend again, colliding with an almost complete lack of new building – to create, as if by magic, an unsustainable rise in prices based on lack of suitable supply. Buyers won\'t be able to meet their enormous mortgage payments, will be thrown out of their private homes and will be forced to join a social-housing waiting list of 4.5 million for those 20,000 affordable new houses.
The lack of sufficient regulation in planning and housebuilding is as deranged and damaging as in banking, with a direct psychological and emotional cost to those who are forced to move – or, indeed, to stay put – out of necessity rather than choice. Yet mass housebuilders have a way of making their products appear as, in the words of Philip Larkin , "A joyous shot at how things ought to be", when the reality is anything but. For one thing, they tend to use the word "homes" – one of the most loaded words in the language – rather than "properties", in their names.
Take Berkeley Homes , who are threatening to take a group of off-plan buyers to court for being unable to get hold of 2007-sized mortgages for flats valued at 2009 prices. Or Barratt Homes, whose Manhattan pods in Harlow have living rooms of three metres square . These aren\'t homes: these are symbols of bankrupt imaginations, and ought to be highlighted as such. Admittedly, Berkeley Ruthless Property Transactions, or Barratt Hutches, don\'t quite have the same ring, but at least you\'d know what you were getting.
For now, it\'s left to academics and social policy researchers – those who, like Cabe, are often commissioned by government departments to find out something they know already, but can\'t admit to themselves – to reiterate the true social benefit of building high‑quality, high-density housing in places where people have a good chance of living enjoyable and prosperous lives. In particular, two new books, Anna Minton\'s Ground Control and Moving Histories of Class and Community by Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, show how it could and should be done.
Minton\'s book details the folly and the market-pleasing motivation of policies such as the Pathfinder scheme , which earmarked hundreds of thousands of inner-city terraced homes north of Birmingham for demolition in order to shore up house values in surrounding areas. It\'s a programme which, curiously, appears to have ground to a halt now that the recession, and the attendant collapse in housebuilding is doing its work unaided. If these Victorian houses were somehow "unviable" during the boom, yet they are suddenly "viable" now, it\'s tempting to conclude that this viability had rather more to do with preserving the status quo than with improving people\'s chances of health and happiness.
Taking a longer view, Rogaly and Taylor based their research on a series of interviews with residents of three inter-war and postwar council estates to the west of Norwich.
Their theory is that internal migration – that is, between estates, between different parts of the country and sometimes even between streets – has as profound an emotional effect on people\'s lives as migration from one country to another, and that most operate a form of doublethink when relating their own experiences of feeling isolated or left out, failing to empathise with those who are more obviously – that is, visibly – "immigrants".
Both books have new things to say about the effects of placing profit and political expediency over that "joyous shot" at home-making which all of us, at some point, attempt. Those attempts are, more often than not, affected by our predecessors\' own experiences of displacement and upheaval, which led them to hold zealously on to what stability they could muster in later life. Family members who associate all good or bad memories with a single house often find themselves trapped by its hold and feel bereft at any attempt to move on, even if it\'s the thing they want to do most.
Rogaly and Taylor argue that home isn\'t something "one starts from", as TS Eliot wrote , but something you learn to identify with over the course of time, more strongly as time goes on, and not always for the best. The problem we have now is that homes have, to use Minton\'s words, "become, above all, places of investment" – for all the wrong reasons.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/house-building-property-homes
