Housing at the Parcel Yard

“A lively group of about 70 development professionals debated “Housing” at the Parcel Yard last week as part of the Love Architecture festival under the title of Quantity, Quality & Cost.
 
Grant Butterworth, Clare Bowman, Peter Brown and myself attempted to resolve a pathway through an almost impossible conundrum of trying to get the amount of housing we need to a quality standard not so far achieved in the main at a cost that is affordable. And in the context of a declining GDP, an energy crisis and a political context that changes seemingly daily.
 
Grant provided the context of both history, current targets - including arbitrary imposed ones on the major cities (plus 35%) – and the possible / likely abolition of Stalinist targets. Well clarity there then! What stood out for me that was that while targets of 300,000 homes plus have been met back in the 50s and 60’s this was only in the context of major public housing build. This I can’t see returning anytime soon. En passant Leicester will publish its new Regulation 19 Local Plan any day.

Clare, from her experience as an architect then demonstrated what she saw as the route to comprehensive sustainable development with both good layout design, but also investment in fabric first and renewables to get to or close to Passive Haus standards. And she demonstrated her comprehensive model in relation to some schemes, recognising again that initial costs were significantly high. Her work, in distilling core sustainability criteria into a checklist has informed and assisted many built schemes. Clare noted that some of the interventions we can do are however relatively cheaper and have long lasting impacts, predominantly in the use of trees for solar shade, air quality and the ability to assist in cooling our buildings
 
Peter Brown illustrated his review of cost and design in relation to his work on two different local schemes of totally different scales. What was interesting as well is the relative cost of land to build cost probably around 70%. If you assume a build cost of say £140 per sq. ft per a standard two storey house with 12/13 houses an acre, you can see what an impact much lower land prices compared with nearing £1m an acre would have on the opportunities to keep house prices down but invest much more in the initial capital cost of fabric first and renewables in a more sustainable house. Peter commented that whilst some enlightened developers are willing to engage in proactive design to improve our built environment, the majority were meeting the targets required of them out of an obligation rather than necessarily forward thinking. At least the debate is very much on the table, and as an industry together we are turning in the right direction.
 
The discussion attempted to draw these different strands together and in fact highlighted the broader conundrum related to quantity, quality and cost. One developer in the audience remarked that since the pandemic his build costs had risen c.40% and however much he tried to do the ‘right thing’ the cost inflation at a time of rising living costs and certainly mortgage rates meant that anything above current Building Regulation standards was optimistic. (It appeared generally accepted by the audience that the only way to drive standards was by national regulations). Local initiatives would never effect substantive national change, but would also make a planning process even more complex with supervision by planning officers with limited or no build technology inappropriate.
 
As Paul Collins pointed out, the elephant in the room is land prices, which are such a substantive part of the whole cost of acquiring property. Reduce that dramatically and you may have a solution, although successive Governments have tried about 5 times since the second World War to capture that value with a singular lack of success. And in the current febrile political world I cannot see much progress being made on this for many years.
 
Overall an enlightening evening so thank you to the speakers and contributors for educating and entertaining us.”