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Across England, almost 300,000 homes are classed as long-term empty, a number that has seen a rise of 19% year on year. The reasons behind the country’s empty house crisis are numerous and complicated, but a large contributing factor is simply that many new build properties are in areas that nobody actually wants to live. Whether it be in an inaccessible and isolated area or one without any greenery, poor quality of place will deter many from even considering a move there, especially as house prices become more and more extortionate.
Even in a city like London with a fantastic transport network, much of the new development is undertaken in neighbourhoods that don’t possess enough of the qualities that home buyers or renters seek out or need. Many of those that are purchased in these locales are bought without being seen, and remain empty whether as a second home, an investment, an Airbnb property, or just because they can’t find a renter due to the lack of place quality.
Though the highest profile of these deserted homes tend to be as part of a luxury development such as the unsold apartments priced at £50m that top The Shard, many of them are ordinary homes at “affordable” prices, sometimes built as starter homes for the Help to Buy scheme. Research by The Conversation found that half of new build residences in general are empty with little or no transactional data ascribed to them, and the higher the price the more likely it is to have nobody living in it. Many refurbished social housing properties also remain empty after former tenants were not invited to return after building work in the hope developers could find new buyers.
While the emptiness is starker in the luxury areas – dubbed ‘posh ghost towers’ – populations don’t want or cannot afford to live in vast swathes of the country’s newly built properties. London alone has 30,000 empty homes, and it was reported in 2018 that 2,374 newly built houses went unsold that year, the highest on record up to that point, while the number of new starts fell. Despite the fall, new starts are increasingly outpacing sales. To us this highlights a fundamental difference in what the public and development administrators consider a place people would want to reside.
Last summer new legislation was introduced that further deregulated planning laws. This has taken even more emphasis away from the public defining for themselves what place quality means, and additionally reduced the already dwindling impact desperate, cash-strapped local councils can have on influencing developments. The new laws have made development bodies all but the sole authority on the best environment for housing development and what, in their minds, constitutes a good place to live. Unfortunately, in this regard, the ideas of communities and developers do not often go hand in hand.
Speaking about soulless, poor quality new developments, president of RIBA, Alan Jones, lamented the “lack of trust between developers and communities” and in the same article the architect Matthew Carmona concurs: “they don’t always take nearly serious enough the responsibilities they have to the communities they create”. Former housing minister Kit Malthouse even said in 2019 that many of these new developments would have to soon be “ripped down and bulldozed” because of how unsuitable they are. Of Vauxhall Nine Elms, Steven Herd, founder and chief executive of MyLondonHome, said it consisted of “the wrong properties that Londoners don’t need.”
But what is it that Londoners (and indeed everyone else) needs, but that is so often overlooked by developers when it comes to property? Of course, decent quality housing that is fit and comfortable to live in is a necessity. Worryingly though, there has been a great deal of discussion amongst housing experts about how aforementioned legislation change is likely to lead to what some have described as “slums of the future,” with the wider spread of Permitted Development rights allowing developers to convert offices to residential property without the oversight of planning authorities. Past examples of this have resulted in 78% of PD homes being smaller than the suggested space standard of 37 square metres, some of which are as small as 16. The deregulation of building standards may also lead to more cut corners in new building developments too, despite reassurances from ministers.
Once this basic need is met and a property is liveable, what makes people actually want to live there? It’s demonstrably not the chauffeur services, private lifts, cinema rooms, rooftop bars and glass swimming pools of the deserted luxury complexes, nor is it the identikit boxes miles from the nearest shop or transport stop that are popping up on the outskirts of town.
Instead, in a 2014 report by Bloomberg CityLab, researchers found that communities look for neighbourhood amenities. City dwellers want to live somewhere that feels safe – that’s populated with eyes on the street – and have access to high quality parks and recreation spaces – we have spoken in the past about the importance of access to green and blue spaces, particularly while the Covid-19 crisis rages on. People need decent jobs, good air quality, access to arts, culture and nightlife venues, and quality local infrastructure like roads and public transport. Local schools and affordability also get a mention.
More recently the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) published a document that describes the ten characteristics of places where people want to live. These ten features are to aid developers and designers in their ability to provide new homes that are desirable, and evolved thanks to close collaboration with both the public housing sector and the public themselves. They include points such as ensuring those who live there are proud of the area, that there is variety and choice in home style and tenure, that the neighbourhood has a uniqueness and lasting appeal with sustainability and stickability built in.
The key characteristic and the document’s number one point though, is to ensure ‘The right place for the right housing’. That is making sure the area is perfect for supporting a community. For RIBA (and us at Walulel) location is key, and efforts must be made to ensure there is ‘a good school, green open space, shopping and employment opportunities’ and transport hubs nearby, as well as ‘physical connectivity to the surrounding context’, what they describe as the ‘bedrock’ of building new housing. All housing must also have community and health services within walking distance and proximity to accessible leisure space for all.
Many developers overlook these elements in favour of short-term financial gains, which in the long term can prove disastrous, as we have seen with the increasing number of empty homes and dramatically declining sales numbers relative to the number of homes built. To ignore the genuine needs of communities and potential residents is, according to Jones, ‘really damaging in terms of creating a sense of belonging’, one of the main criteria for ensuring people want to occupy an area.
But these conclusions can only be drawn out through collaboration between developers and communities and engaging with both local and potential residents is increasingly important as the housing crisis deepens. If planners fail to effectively consult the people who will be living in an area not only will their valuable needs not be implemented, but oftentimes the development is be opposed by these very communities, delaying or even preventing the process altogether.
While often the highest quality places lack the room to build new homes or the number of people to occupy them. In these cases, as the RIBA report makes clear, it is important that the developers incorporate place quality into their designs, providing the communities they hope to establish with the amenities required to attract occupants. The alternative as we have seen is empty properties, a lack of community, and ultimately for the developer, a vast reduction in profit.
Yet sometimes it is difficult to know what an area already has and what it needs to have introduced to improve its place quality. For buyers and renters too, it can be almost impossible to know whether the neighbourhood you’re looking at actually possesses the qualities the marketing material says it does without having lived there for a while, with many feeling disappointed when it proves to be less than ideal. Our WaInsight platform can instantly solve this problem. Once a potential area is identified, we can help anyone looking to build or move understand nearly every aspect of the postcode and its surrounds with just a few clicks of a button.
Make your life easier and find the perfect location to suit your needs here, and get in touch at sam@walulel.com if you’d like to know more!