In 1947, the U.K. Parliament passed the Town & Country Planning Act, which limited urban development to 6 percent of the land area of the country. Housing soon became expensive. Politicians responded by promising to build lots of new housing, mostly high-rise but some mid-rise.
The new housing proved to be a disaster. It created lots of social problems including crime and congestion. Much of the housing was also poorly built. Meanwhile, housing affordability continued to decline. Today, only the upper classes own their own homes while most working-class Brits live in “council housing.”
In 1973, Britain’s leading urban planner, Sir Peter Hall, led a group of planners in writing a massive, two-volume work, The Containment of Urban England, which showed that housing affordability problems were caused by the Town & Country Planning Act and the high-rise houses built in response weren’t fixing the problem. The books were ignored.
In 2006, Dame Katherine Barker, an economist who was on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve Board), led a study commission on housing that reached similar conclusions to Hall’s. Again, Barker’s report was ignored and U.K. housing remains unaffordable.
In the United States, housing remained very affordable through the 1960s. Then several states passed laws similar to the Town & Country Planning Act. These included Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, and Florida. Several New England states passed laws that had similar effects. Now housing affordability has become a big crisis.
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Biden’s proposal has been endorsed by Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser. Glaeser is a smart guy, but I fear his personal experience with housing has blinded him to the problems. He grew up in a Manhattan high rise. He currently lives in Weston, Massachusetts on a 6.5-acre lot next to a 600-acre conservation area. Massachusetts doesn’t have urban-growth boundaries, but it doesn’t have counties either; instead, all rural lands are under city and town land-use controls and the towns have set aside most of the land for conservation purposes.
Somehow I doubt that Glaeser wants the federal government to force Weston to allow mid-rise and high-rise housing developments on the 600-acre conservation area next to his property. Weston probably doesn’t get federal housing funds, in which case Biden’s plan will have no effect on it. Instead, I suspect Glaeser expects the government to force Boston and Brookline and other inner-ring suburbs to allow denser development of their single-family neighborhoods. Density for thee, not for me.
In 1890, less than 20 percent of urban households in the United States owned their own homes. It wasn’t because they couldn’t afford to: homes were cheap. Instead, people rented so they would be free to move if incompatible uses were built nearby. Developers realized that protective covenants that would prevent such incompatible uses would make homeownership more attractive and such covenants became popular in the 1890s and early 1900s. Cities developed zoning in the 1910s to provide the same benefit to single-family neighborhoods that had been built before the use of protective covenants.
This massively increased homeownership rates. In turn, this greatly reduced income inequality. People used the equity in their homes to start small businesses and the United States had record numbers of new business formations. Single-family zoning had actually made homeownership more popular and more affordable.
Income inequality reached its lowest levels in about 1970, which was about when many states were passing and implementing growth-management laws that made housing less affordable. The solution to housing affordability issues is not to get rid of single-family zoning. It is to get rid of growth management. Biden’s plan won’t do that. Instead, as similar plans did in the U.K., it will make cities less affordable than ever.
“Today, only the upper classes own their own homes while most working-class Brits live in “council housing.””
Not true. Much of the council housing was sold off to the occupants, at a major discount. This was then sold off at a profit to private landlords.
I am a working-class Brit. I own my house outright. Or, yet again, have I been promoted to the rank of the elite?
“The new housing proved to be a disaster. It created lots of social problems including crime and congestion. Much of the housing was also poorly built.”
There were two phases to the high-rise housing, which was built to replace WW2-era slum housing. The first phase created quality high-rise housing. However this was taking too long, and so some cheaper and poor quality high-rise housing was built – the corner fell off of one of these.
The big problem was housing density. High-rise building permitted much higher housing density, in theory, together with a lot of precious park land. In practice, the park land was ‘indefensible’ – could not be controlled by the police, and was the haunt of criminals at night – and once you figured out the actual housing density (building and parkland together) it was the same as two-storey houses.
When people were asked what they really wanted, it turned out that they really wanted two-storey houses.
I agree with Francis King. All the middle class people I know in Britain own their own houses. I do agree with the Antiplanner that urban limit lines reduce housing supply and increase housing cost. However, I would argue that in Britain and possibly in the US the reason that urban limit lines are established is because of the perception of the lack of open space due to what in 1947 Britain was called “ribbon development.” I would argue that this perception in the US is because of ribbon development along freeways. Development in the US occurs along freeways, and thus most people living in the area travelling along freeways don’t realize how much open space there is.
In Britain the history of this goes back to WWI or possibly earlier.
During WWI the governments of Britain, France and Germany all discovered that city draftees to the army were much less likely to pass their physical than rural draftees. After WWI in Britain this led to the building of single family mostly two-story homes in more rural areas in part to improve peoples health. Bus transport was just becoming economically viable and buses were running between communities along roads that were just beginning to be paved. The obvious place to build houses was along these roads, fronting them onto the paved road. This saved the builder the cost of the roads and provided transport in the form of a regular bus service. This also resulted in the back garden of the house frequently looking onto countryside, the best of both worlds for many homeowners. This gave the impression when travelling between communities that the countryside was being paved over because all that could be seen was a row of houses along the road, where there had once been countryside. Hence the passage of the 1947 Town and Country act.
What seems to have happened in Britain is that local councils controlled local land use, and on the edges of cities and in rural or semi-rural areas local councils built two story row houses as council houses. As far as I can make out, since local councils also controlled land use and permission for building, they would approve land for building their own council houses. This was a useful safety valve on keeping housing costs down- if there was a housing shortage the council’s approve expansion of the urban limit line and built more houses. These two-story houses suffered from the lack of garages and typically had common walls, but do have defensible space in the form of small front and back gardens. These council houses were rented by the local councils. Since local councils that built cheap housing were mostly Labour party, the Conservative party viewed these renters as tied by their council landlords as loyal voters. Therefor, under the Conservative Thatcher government in the local 1980’s the local councils were forced to sell off their council houses, often to the tenants. However, the Thatcher government wouldn’t let the local councils use the funds from the sale to build new council houses, viewing this as causing tied voters to the Labour councils. Suddenly then local councils were not able to build new housing. They seem to have been much more reluctant to approve new building on open space for private developers. The big increase in housing cost seems to have started in the early 1980’s when local councils were prevented from building council houses.
It seems that in both the San Francisco Bay area, and according to the people I know in Britain, there is a complete disconnect between voters awareness of urban limit lines causing housing price increases. In Britain I have had numerous people complaining that their children cannot afford to buy a house, and that they don’t want anymore of the countryside built on. This also happens in the San Francisco Bay Area where people complain about housing costs, but then don’t want to expand the urban limit line. This seems to be because they don’t realize only 17% of the SF bay area is built on. This seems to be because they only drive along freeways that are built up between cities.
The solution may be to make sure there is open space between cities, but allow development away from the freeway or major roads. This would allow people to continually see open space and not believe that most of the area they live in was developed.
According to the zealots, SFH is racist.
They don’t want to end it, they want to destroy it forever.
Did you know right now Bryan Caplan is writing a book right now about housing affordability in the west. He says its going to be published by CATO. Does not sound like he is going to talk about urban growth boundaries.