What I am getting at in this piece - and I hope this comes through - is that people ought to consider what it is that they are really trying to achieve with their housing policies. Presumably no-one thinks that, say, Mayfair could or should be rendered readily affordable to people on, say, upper-quartile incomes. But some areas in Zone 2? or Zone 3? should be. Why? What's the reason for drawing the line there?
I suspect that many people's ultimate answers to pressing this line of questioning will be a combination of factors: that the capital city of a country ought to be reasonably accessible to a fair number of its own citizens; that London has a history and tradition of the classes living in close proximity that ought to be preserved; that the life and soul and energy of a city relies on a good mix and variety of people from different income brackets and different life stages; that crowding out all kinds of people on low incomes - students, the young, artists, charity workers, nurses - is bad for London in all kinds of ways; that it is good for neither the rich nor the poor to be in protected bubbles, whether in terms of their ideology or life-experiences, and so living cheek-by-jowl benefits them all; that an international trading city - long a port and formerly an imperial capital - should have space for migrants from across the world, both those just passing through and those who come to stay, and that both they and the locals benefit as a result; and so on. No doubt you can think of other things too.
I am strongly inclined to agree with this kind of reasoning. But it adds up to a rather non-free-market set of conclusions. Subsidised social housing surely has to be part of the mix (contra Henry Hill), for example. Gentrification is not purely good: replacing the character and traditions of a deprived area with characterless "luxury flats" above chain restaurants, even if a Good Thing on balance, involves some degree of loss. The charm of any famous big city relies at least to some extent on its inefficient, quirky or decorative features: what would Paris be if the Eiffel Tower were replaced by a housing estate or New York if Central Park were built over? Sure, they would both be excellent cities, but it's hard to imagine that they would be improved. Of course, Manhattan is a better city now than when it was not built at all, but it is a sign of the maturity and success of a city when people - particularly a city's own inhabitants, those who know and love it best - turn to considering how it might be preserved, how its peculiarities and oddnesses protected from further changes. All of this requires something quite different from unrestrained development.
Against all of that is the simple argument that the country could be much richer if London grew and accommodated more people - more productive "knowledge workers". Not only richer in base GDP terms, but in terms of the satisfaction of valuable human desires: there are lots of people who want to live in London but who can't afford to - why condemn them to crushing commutes or second-best jobs? No-one is talking about knocking down St Paul's to build flats or putting a housing estate on Hyde Park - all we want is the chance to replace some proportion of the miles and miles of undistinguished Victorian, Edwardian and twentieth-century development that makes up the bulk of London's housing stock. Forget about cheerful Cockneys and their traditions - all of that has vanished to Essex anyway - we are merely talking about replacing some of the shallow foundation-ed brick terraces prone to subsidence, put up by the speculative cowboy builders of their day, with denser modern developments built to higher safety and environmental standards, and thereby allowing more families the chance to share in the wealth and security of one of the world's great cities.
I don't disagree with that line of argument either! Indeed, the arguments for having a mix of people in London tend to support making room for the middling sort too - people too rich for social housing but too poor for Chelsea - and that surely means tweaking the land use of the outer suburbs (and even the Green Belt) to make room for affordable housing bought with mortgages pay out of normal middle-class incomes.
But my point is that even that argument does not justify a free-for-all. If it's bad for London that there are no cheap and cheerful places for art students and nurses to live, then it's bad whether they are priced out by international capital building unoccupied mega-flats or by middle-class families who want characterful homes in which to raise their children: either way, a thriving city will require a managed mix, not a blanket YIMBY approach.
Or at least, that is how it seems to me now.
No comments:
Post a Comment