No, Minister! We need to widen housing’s role in society
BRIEFING NOTE #11
This is a series of briefing notes to yet another new housing minister. Here are some dangers to avoid, some well-trodden paths to be bypassed, and some barriers to thinking that need to be overcome (if we are serious about bringing about change)….and, oh yes, here are some thoughts on how to deliver this change! Please stick around long enough to make it happen.
The recent pandemic exposed the frailties in our social systems. People cooped up in small apartments in megablocks, experienced the full range of ills that plague our urban society today. Here, isolation, polarisation and addiction contributed to our recent surge in mental health problems that the NHS struggling with. Put this together with the social care crisis, an increase in youth crime and a decrease in educational attainment and we are faced with a tsunami of issues that the provision of a more balanced view of housing’s role in society can seek to resolve. it all starts with community, and best thing pandemic did was to release community genie from the bottle, despite all the factors that work against it.
The problem is that we tend to see housing as a limited range based on peoples projected needs in the beginning. An example of this is found in the planning system which interprets housing demand in a very narrow spectrum of one to 2 bedroom homes for people starting up in life. Another example of this can be found in planners obsession to limit the size of housing to that of other housing around them. This is such a narrow, static view that fails to recognise that housing needs to provide for a much wider spectrum of housing need across the life of the individual and the family. Things change, yet we refuse to allow the natural evolutionary processes to occur across the dweller’s lifetime. A lot of this goes back to the Parker Morris standards of the 1960s which saw the nuclear family as the model for determining space requirements. A lot has changed since then the modern family in its past form is in the minority. The fastest creation of households at the moment lies in single parent households, with children spending time between two homes. The other thing we fail to recognise is the growth of larger multigenerational families who wish to live in more urban conditions. We would find a difficult to identify the model family of today and if we did, it would change before we realised it.
We will only make housing affordable if we embrace a full spectrum of housing solutions – from the big to the small and seriously challenging what we mean by ‘affordable’. This means opening the market to the full range of players, from the individual to the collective and the corporate, all operating under the same rules. Demographics are changing and with this, our needs are more complex than ever. It means recognising housing not in the narrow way we see it today, but something that meets the needs of our aging population, our socially-mobile millennials, our rapidly changing households and our socially-diverse communities. This also means building long-life, loose-fit housing that meets people’s needs at different times in their lives or economic situations. It means exploring the widest range of tenure mixes, from co-owning to co-sharing, from part-owning to full owning, from short-term to long term renting. We would like to see a system where people are not trapped in any of these tenure conditions but are free to move when required. Housing associations must play a much far greater role in whole-life ‘staircasing’ where people can freely make these moves. We would like to see them providing whole-life housing advice to prospective homebuilders, supporting the small developer and taking on a greater role in neighbourhood curating and management
We want people to get on the lowest rung of the housing ladder and benefit from the climb. This includes our homeless, our struggling households and our migrant workers. Everyone should be able to start but at different starting points. Everyone should be able to find their own way but by different routes. Everyone should be able to reach their goals but at different times.