Manuel
October 7th, 2004, 11:23 PM
All together now, the Times, property, 3-10-2004
If we want to hang on to our green spaces, high-density housing is the only way forward, warns HUGH PEARMAN Density: it is the buzz word of the moment when it comes to planning the scary numbers of new homes that nearly everybody assures us we need. Low density means the land-hungry suburban sprawl we are used to — lots of individual houses dotted about, eating up fields with their driveways, triple garages, gardens and broad approach roads. High density simply means packing more homes into the same space. It is happening primarily because of changes in the way we live. More households are splitting up than in the past — divorced parents generally require two homes capable of accommodating children rather than one. Children leave home and set up their own households younger than they used to and stay single longer. There are more old people living longer. People are buying weekend homes, which creates a shortage of affordable rural housing. Finally, we just don’t fill up houses the way we used to. Bedrooms are lost to ever more bathrooms, while downstairs rooms are knocked together. We need more rooms, which means the nation as a whole needs more houses.
Add the desire of people to move from cities to a suburban version of the countryside, and you get the scary forecasts: it is oft quoted that 4m new homes will be needed between 2001 and 2021. In the southeast the pressure on accommodation is intense and in London it is extreme. Ken Livingstone, the city’s mayor, is working on the basis of 30,000 new homes a year, the boroughs are protesting that they cannot find the space for all those and now statisticians at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister say that, actually, the desirable figure for London is 46,400 new households a year. Nobody believes that figure can be achieved — there are just too many constraints on building freely in the capital. But it shows the scale of the problem. The only way to build lots more homes while trying to conserve as much of the countryside as possible is to build dense. To pile people together. But even on a good, low-density development in the rural fringes, you’ll be lucky to find more than 14 dwellings per acre. Go up a notch and you find greenfield developments regarded as exemplary — such as Countryside Properties’ Abode estate in Harlow — at 17 per acre. Check out brownfield sites such as old hospitals and airfields and you’re looking at 20 to 24 per acre. Finally, go to prestige high-density city developments such as Urban Splash’s Timber Wharf in Manchester and that comes in at 149 dwellings per acre. So we tend to build up to 10 times as densely in the city as we do in the country. Clearly, urban is more efficient. But can it be just as attractive? For generations, we have been taught that fewer people to the acre is healthy. The Victorians associated high-density housing with disease and social disorder. It’s what made them demolish the slums they called “rookeries” and what drove the garden city movement in the early 20th century, leading to the creation of satellite towns such as Welwyn.
Now the official doctrine has changed. Industry has quit our city centres, the air in them is cleaner and high-density urban living is officially good again. As Alan Cherry, chairman of Countryside Properties and an advocate of the new thinking, puts it: “The most important issue is to maximise the use of urban land. Higher numbers are appropriate there.” On the outer edges of cities, Countryside and other developers are upping the densities. For Cherry, it is also about mixing up the housing types. “For 40 years we’ve been going down the road of segregation — building rows of four-bed houses with gardens and ignoring smaller homes for smaller households,” he says. “What we are doing now is not only mixing the types of housing, but seamlessly mixing the tenures as well.” That means people on subsidised rents living cheek by jowl with people who are heavily mortgaged, and not noticing. Cherry offers his high-density Greenwich Millennium Village as proof that this can be done. The “seamless mix” approach is also championed by Urban Splash. High density does not necessarily mean the loss of open space. It just means that the type of open space changes. Build a tall, slender residential tower and there is land left over for gardens round the base. Open space can be created up in the air in the form of roof terraces. Or you can build densely stacked courtyard housing, arranged in the Georgian manner in crescents or squares. As at Greenwich Millennium Village, the result is a surprising amount of open space. But it tends not to be your very own, personally fenced bit of England. It tends to be more communal. And we’re a bit suspicious of that.
In 1997, according to figures from the House Builders Federation, 46% of new homes were detached and 15% flats. In 2003, the figures had virtually reversed: 46% flats and 19% detached. High density, it appears, means flats. But why can’t you have high-density family homes? Partly it is to do with Britain’s curious housing market, where people gamble in property futures as a form of investment. The buy-to-let market favours one-and two-bed flats. Most of the huge amount of housebuilding going on in city centres is to satisfy this investor demand. But there is a real demand for single and two-person homes anyway. The danger is that segregation is returning — this time between singles and nuclear families. This is something that appals our most famous architect, Lord Foster. Foster may be 69 but he has a young family and lives with them on the eighth floor of the apartment block inBattersea that contains his vast office. Okay, so his home is one huge penthouse not a poky flat. There is running-around space. But as he points out, the green acres of Battersea Park are right next door. What’s the problem? It’s just a matter of balancing the big buildings with the green space. In the end, you have to consider the alternative. What happens if we continue along the suburban-sprawl route? Foster offers a stark warning: “The end result is that, in a very few generations, you will be saying to your kids, ‘We’re going to the museum for the weekend’. ‘What’s the museum?’ they’ll ask. And you’ll say, ‘It’s the museum of the countryside’. You’ll say, ‘Once upon a time there used to be a lot of this, and it wasn’t a museum’.”
If we want to hang on to our green spaces, high-density housing is the only way forward, warns HUGH PEARMAN Density: it is the buzz word of the moment when it comes to planning the scary numbers of new homes that nearly everybody assures us we need. Low density means the land-hungry suburban sprawl we are used to — lots of individual houses dotted about, eating up fields with their driveways, triple garages, gardens and broad approach roads. High density simply means packing more homes into the same space. It is happening primarily because of changes in the way we live. More households are splitting up than in the past — divorced parents generally require two homes capable of accommodating children rather than one. Children leave home and set up their own households younger than they used to and stay single longer. There are more old people living longer. People are buying weekend homes, which creates a shortage of affordable rural housing. Finally, we just don’t fill up houses the way we used to. Bedrooms are lost to ever more bathrooms, while downstairs rooms are knocked together. We need more rooms, which means the nation as a whole needs more houses.
Add the desire of people to move from cities to a suburban version of the countryside, and you get the scary forecasts: it is oft quoted that 4m new homes will be needed between 2001 and 2021. In the southeast the pressure on accommodation is intense and in London it is extreme. Ken Livingstone, the city’s mayor, is working on the basis of 30,000 new homes a year, the boroughs are protesting that they cannot find the space for all those and now statisticians at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister say that, actually, the desirable figure for London is 46,400 new households a year. Nobody believes that figure can be achieved — there are just too many constraints on building freely in the capital. But it shows the scale of the problem. The only way to build lots more homes while trying to conserve as much of the countryside as possible is to build dense. To pile people together. But even on a good, low-density development in the rural fringes, you’ll be lucky to find more than 14 dwellings per acre. Go up a notch and you find greenfield developments regarded as exemplary — such as Countryside Properties’ Abode estate in Harlow — at 17 per acre. Check out brownfield sites such as old hospitals and airfields and you’re looking at 20 to 24 per acre. Finally, go to prestige high-density city developments such as Urban Splash’s Timber Wharf in Manchester and that comes in at 149 dwellings per acre. So we tend to build up to 10 times as densely in the city as we do in the country. Clearly, urban is more efficient. But can it be just as attractive? For generations, we have been taught that fewer people to the acre is healthy. The Victorians associated high-density housing with disease and social disorder. It’s what made them demolish the slums they called “rookeries” and what drove the garden city movement in the early 20th century, leading to the creation of satellite towns such as Welwyn.
Now the official doctrine has changed. Industry has quit our city centres, the air in them is cleaner and high-density urban living is officially good again. As Alan Cherry, chairman of Countryside Properties and an advocate of the new thinking, puts it: “The most important issue is to maximise the use of urban land. Higher numbers are appropriate there.” On the outer edges of cities, Countryside and other developers are upping the densities. For Cherry, it is also about mixing up the housing types. “For 40 years we’ve been going down the road of segregation — building rows of four-bed houses with gardens and ignoring smaller homes for smaller households,” he says. “What we are doing now is not only mixing the types of housing, but seamlessly mixing the tenures as well.” That means people on subsidised rents living cheek by jowl with people who are heavily mortgaged, and not noticing. Cherry offers his high-density Greenwich Millennium Village as proof that this can be done. The “seamless mix” approach is also championed by Urban Splash. High density does not necessarily mean the loss of open space. It just means that the type of open space changes. Build a tall, slender residential tower and there is land left over for gardens round the base. Open space can be created up in the air in the form of roof terraces. Or you can build densely stacked courtyard housing, arranged in the Georgian manner in crescents or squares. As at Greenwich Millennium Village, the result is a surprising amount of open space. But it tends not to be your very own, personally fenced bit of England. It tends to be more communal. And we’re a bit suspicious of that.
In 1997, according to figures from the House Builders Federation, 46% of new homes were detached and 15% flats. In 2003, the figures had virtually reversed: 46% flats and 19% detached. High density, it appears, means flats. But why can’t you have high-density family homes? Partly it is to do with Britain’s curious housing market, where people gamble in property futures as a form of investment. The buy-to-let market favours one-and two-bed flats. Most of the huge amount of housebuilding going on in city centres is to satisfy this investor demand. But there is a real demand for single and two-person homes anyway. The danger is that segregation is returning — this time between singles and nuclear families. This is something that appals our most famous architect, Lord Foster. Foster may be 69 but he has a young family and lives with them on the eighth floor of the apartment block inBattersea that contains his vast office. Okay, so his home is one huge penthouse not a poky flat. There is running-around space. But as he points out, the green acres of Battersea Park are right next door. What’s the problem? It’s just a matter of balancing the big buildings with the green space. In the end, you have to consider the alternative. What happens if we continue along the suburban-sprawl route? Foster offers a stark warning: “The end result is that, in a very few generations, you will be saying to your kids, ‘We’re going to the museum for the weekend’. ‘What’s the museum?’ they’ll ask. And you’ll say, ‘It’s the museum of the countryside’. You’ll say, ‘Once upon a time there used to be a lot of this, and it wasn’t a museum’.”