the times | Monday July 27 2020 1GM 29Comment
A humane way out of the housing crisis
Piecemeal reform has failed but Covid-19 is a golden opportunity to turn empty shops and offices into decent homes
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826activity and drug abuse, placing huge
pressures on our local police, A&E
and social services” not to mention
schools. In an “unmitigated disaster”
for the town 12 former office blocks
were developed into 1,100 poor-
quality units and cynically marketed
as “temporary accommodation” to
32 local authorities in London. These
councils use them, in Halfon’s words,
to “cleanse their boroughs and place
vulnerable individuals, often with
additional needs”.
PDR enabled the insouciant David
Cameron and George Osborne, with
little reflection, to turn the housing
crisis into a humanitarian disgrace.
Yet a minute ago I was excited at the
idea of city buildings becoming
human dwellings; I still am. It doesn’t
have to be a matter of catchpenny,
austerity-cheat deregulation. Halfon
himself cites how the former Pearson
publishers HQ was converted into
good-quality homes, close to the
station and bus routes.
It can be done, and we have a fine
architectural tradition of reusing
everything from churches and
stables to former mental asylums
and the Arsenal stadium. However,
anything as important as a human
dwelling has to be planned and
safeguarded with vigour, intelligent
regulation and humanity. Not left to
lazy politics and cosy relationships
with developers.deregulation of Permitted
Development Rights (PDR). That
horror was born five years ago as a
promise to create new homes, but
became a licence to profit off human
misery. Under PDR office blocks and
factories can be “converted” into
multiple flatlets for homeless families
without observing local authority
planning constraints on size,
ventilation, light, or the availability of
transport links and local facilities. The
resulting modern slums have been
covered in many despairing local TV
reports, though they rarely hit the
national news until Labour sensibly
called for the abolition of PDR.
We have seen cramped rooms
without windows housing whole
families, balconies sealed off as
unsafe through the long hot spring,
warrens of narrow corridors where
fragile mothers with young children
endure troubled, criminal or
dangerous neighbours. Some of these
hellholes are on outlying industrial
estates with no transport links to
work or school, and nothing green in
reach except blighted scrubland
crumbling the stained concrete.
Hundreds of our citizens spent
lockdown like this. It’s ghastly.
Ask Shelter. Ask the Royal Town
Planning Institute. Read Robert
Halfon, the Harlow MP, in Hansard,
laying out how into his constituency
was dumped “a hive of criminalOther streets — even those glassy
canyons now lined with vainglorious
corporate towers — could become at
all levels a continental mixture of
live-work spaces, small offices, craft
workshops and businesses both
private and chain. Imagine walking or
cycling quickly to work through these
places, with public squares and
properly patrolled parks replacing the
worst old structures. Remember how
even the smallest green space saves
sanity even now, as children from
cramped south London towers lark
on the South Bank’s faux beaches and
gallop through the fountains in that
scrap of garden by Tower Bridge.Think of prices in estate agents’
windows stalling and tumbling
because there are plenty of
affordable, pleasant city homes. Rub
your hands if you will, thinking how
that will upset Russian and other
absentee buyers who thought British
homes were safe piggy-banks.
How can change come about? Not
through Robert Jenrick’s back-of-the-
envelope scheme to let freeholders
slap two new floors on flats. And
certainly not through the carelessHundreds of citizens
spent lockdown in
ghastly modern slums
T
here is nothing new about
our housing crisis.
Government after
government promised to
build its way out and failed,
while doing little to curb prices, end
street sleeping, or prevent new-built
blocks being left empty by dodgy
foreign investors. Nothing fresh
there. What is new is a sense of
national reassessment after Covid-19.
There is a long-overdue revulsion for
overcrowded transport and pointless
commutes, a white-collar enthusiasm
for working remotely and a growing
awareness that the quality of home is
important to wellbeing. These things
hold a door ajar, even if briefly, for
better, kinder, greener thinking.
We can do it. We stormed the
Nightingale programme, reformed
NHS bureaucratic systems at
astonishing speed and proved
inventive in science and engineering.
After years of foot-dragging Britain
even managed to put four decent
walls and a roof around the streetsleepers. There is anecdotal evidence
that weeks of proper beds and food
enabled some to break free from
disastrous habits and temptations.
All this has happened in a flash.
Surely now even the most
conservative can envisage change.
Without hyping up that irritating
“new normal” stuff, practical
revolutions seem likely. Daily
commuting is less taken for granted,
shopping online even more
embedded. So, many retailers and
office businesses will reduce their
footprint. Freeing up urban space
can create homes, and not only for
the desperate. Some people from all
economic classes will opt to carry on
living in city centres for the sake of
work or pleasure; others who work in
the country for half the week may
need tiny urban bolt holes.
Imagine a future for some vast mall
— in London, Manchester or a
smaller city such as Oxford — which
is now occupied by sprawling, failing
department stores and acres of
underused chain shops and
restaurants. Imagine it has reduced
its commercial tenancies, keeping
some useful shops and perhaps the
cinema, but turned the rest into airy
flats, some high with roof terraces.
Imagine a mixture of affordable
family apartments, roomy starter
bedsits and businesslike pads for
part-timers. Plenty would be rentals.Libby
Purves@lib_thinks