What Are Suburbs For? Paving Paradise in London
Some years ago, a family in the North London suburb of North Finchley had their door knocked by a man offering them a large sum of free money. The proposal was simple. Many houses on the street had double-length gardens with space for another house but didn’t have planning permission for anything more than a shed. If they gained permission for a second residential building, the value of the land would skyrocket. They needn’t even build on it themselves to realize the gain; they could sell the land to the speculator and pocket an immediate windfall.
This autumn, policy proposals on a similar principle became law in the UK, as part of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act. Under the label of “street votes,” residents in areas set out by the Housing Secretary will be able to vote to permit new infill development with a “street vote development order.” When first proposed by the center-right think tank Policy Exchange, supporters claimed they could enable 110,000 extra homes to be built per year. This would represent increasing housing delivery by almost half in England, mostly by extending houses upwards — the authors propose that this should be done in the style of “traditional” urban forms where possible. Street votes would turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs by giving householders a say over the design of new, denser development alongside making the average homeowner some estimated £900,000.
As readers may have guessed, the family in North Finchley was my own. My parents said no to the proposal, along with every other family on our street. They didn’t want to lose their gardens, didn’t want the disruption of construction, and didn’t trust the people offering them such miraculously easy money.
But densification of low-rise neighborhoods, of which this approach is an example, has become a mainstay of policy proposals for resolving London’s housing crisis. The “intensification” of London’s low-density outskirts has begun, unevenly and not without public outrage. Can it solve the housing shortage?
Figure 1. Rendering of a potential intensification project on a suburban street, by Michael DeMaagd Rodriguez. From Samuel Hughes and Ben Southwood, Strong Suburbs (2021). Courtesy of Michael DeMaagd Rodriguez.
London’s Housing Crisis
London has long been short on space for new homes. Competition for housing has reached fever pitch, with prices at an average of over twelve times median incomes in late 2022 and asking rents soaring over 10% in a single year (surpassing overall inflation). Most agree the supply of homes in the city has failed to keep pace with soaring demand in both the private and social sectors.
This marks an abrupt turnaround in the city’s recent fortunes. By the latter half of the twentieth century, London had entered a decline thought by many at the time to be terminal. As in other cities around the Global North, deindustrialization took a sledgehammer to traditional working-class communities, while the center saw a mass exodus of middle- and high-income households. Poverty rates spiked for the first time since before the Second World War, and street homelessness became a mass, visible phenomenon, inspiring Ken Loach’s well-known social realist television program Cathy Come Home, which told the story of a stable family’s descent into destitution.
A number of middle-class households had begun to renovate abandoned Victorian and Georgian terraces in poor inner-city areas like Islington in the 1950s, and gentrification soon spread to other similar areas. But only after Margaret Thatcher’s government loosened financial regulations in the “Big Bang” of the 1980s did London’s economy boom, and its population begin to grow.
But despite the return of the prodigal middle classes to inner London, homebuilding remained slow. There are competing arguments as to why this was. Some have blamed the increasingly restrictive planning and Green Belt system after 1947 and a growth in NIMBY opposition to development, others an end to the building of New Towns, a dirigiste solution which channeled metropolitan housing demand to new settlements outside of cities. The truth is likely a combination of the two, along with the wider effects of London’s plunging population on the perceived need (and market) for new homes. This was while Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy enabled tenants in public housing to buy their homes at a large discount, but made no effort to replace them. More than 300,000 and counting council homes in London have been lost through this process so far; from 2011 to 2021, for instance, over 40,000 were sold but fewer than 30,000 were built.
London’s economic boom continued into the 1990s and 2000s, with enormous expansions in jobs in management consultancy and technology. But beneath the surface, its housing market had begun to tighten, rents to rise, and sale prices to rocket. The average price of a home rose from under £75,000 in 1995 to more than £535,000 in October.
Making the situation worse, the only government programs to achieve any real impact on housing markets, like the Help to Buy equity loan for new build homes, simply increased demand. That program alone is calculated to have increased the price of new build homes by around 6% without expanding supply. The best estimates, by contrast, predict that London would need to double the number of homes it builds every year to fill the backlog of homes required and address the affordability crisis.
Figure 2. London’s population, 1801-2021. From Centre for London, London’s Homes Today (2023), which analyses Greater London Authority, Historical Census Tables (2019), and Office for National Statistics, First Results From Census 2021 in England and Wales (2022). This informatoin is licensed under the terms of the Open Government License. Courtesy of Centre for London.
Figure 3. Average house prices, 2001-2023, drawing on Greater London Authority, UK House Price Index (2023). This information is licensed under the terms of the Open Government License.
“The case for some degree of densification seems unavoidable.”
The Urban Renaissance
More than six in ten Londoners may claim to support the building of new homes, but determining where exactly to build them has proven contentious. Support for new building is strongly concentrated in inner areas, with their concentrations of younger adults, priced out of homeownership. Among much of the political class, afraid of backlash from homeowners outside the center, “brownfield first” remains the strategy of choice, channeling new homes into previously developed sites, either ex-industrial or those dominated by (often unfairly) maligned council estates.
Richard Rogers — starchitect and New Labour’s urban policy sage — led the Urban Task Force in the late 1990s, which went on to produce an influential paper, “Towards an Urban Renaissance,” in 1998, urging just this. The paper called for high-density, brownfield development where possible, which would harness soaring demand for London’s land to fund affordable housing using profits from developments.
In 2000, Ken Livingstone was elected as the first Mayor of London, after more than ten years in which London had no institutions of self-government, while Tony Blair’s New Labour government embraced a vision of urban regeneration focused on city-center agglomeration and growth in high-value services. Policy reflecting Rogers’ vision directed development towards massive redevelopment sites, from King’s Cross to Elephant and Castle, following the pattern laid out by Canary Wharf under Margaret Thatcher. In many cases, what had been low-income, inner-city neighborhoods were redeveloped wholesale.
There were also less idealistic reasons for this spatial fix. The political power of homeowners in outlying sections, even in a Labour-leaning city like London, made city-center infill and rebuilding projects more viable, requiring less political capital.
Today, however, there are only so many readily redeveloped parcels remaining in central London. Vauxhall-Nine Elms-Battersea, a nettle patch of skyscrapers hugging the southwest bank of the River Thames, was one of the last major industrial sites to be built out.
Meanwhile, outward expansion is impossible without significant reform. London is surrounded by a protected Green Belt three times its size, in which new development has been almost entirely prohibited for nearly a century.
And so, attention is turning, inexorably, to outer London and its suburbs, to John Betjeman’s “Metroland” and its lower-density, often architecturally unremarkable building stock which houses near five and a half million Londoners.
Figure 4. Models of urban capacity, by Andrew Wright Associates. From Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999). Courtesy of Queen’s Printer and Controller of HMSO.
Figure 5. High-rise blocks of flats, both recent and under construction, in the area around Battersea Power Station, London (with new United States embassy at far right). Photograph by Geoff Henson, 2022, via Flickr. CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED.
The Case for Density
Densification would very likely benefit these areas in several ways. London has one of the highest rates of online shopping in the country. Despite hybrid workers spending more time in their local town centers, high streets and shopping districts have suffered a body blow from the rise of online retail. Adding housing could not only ease rents and sale prices, but provide new customers for local shops and restaurants, reinvigorating neighborhoods for existing residents as well as new.
More residents could also support better public transport, offsetting losses from hybrid work and enabling investment in buses and rail links. And by the same token, Londoners living in more densely populated areas would be less likely to own a car or van of their own. Denser suburbs, in this scenario, would mean lower-emissions-living, cutting air pollution and improving the public realm.
The case for some degree of densification seems unavoidable. In fact, it has already begun.
Figure 6. The proportion of households that do not own a car or van by population density (people per square kilometer) for all Lower Layer Super Output Areas in London. From Centre for London, Moving with the Times: Supporting sustainable travel in outer London (2023). Courtesy of Centre for London.
Southern Discomfort
Croydon, in the deep south of Greater London, is the largest borough in the capital, housing nearly 400,000 people. It is so large, indeed, that its council has applied four times to separate from London and be recognized as a city in its own right (unsuccessfully).
In recent decades, the East Croydon inter-city railway station has become a magnet for growth, urbanizing the suburb to a degree. The single most densely populated small area in London, in fact, is now directly surrounding the station, some 15km from Charing Cross.
But in 2019, change began to accelerate. That year, Croydon Council issued a piece of planning guidance titled the “Suburban Design Guide” or SPD2 (for Supplementary Planning Document). Its key argument was that “suburban growth occurs whether it is planned or not.”
SPD2 was a bold attempt to deliver one-third of the borough’s five-year housing target through small-scale development — a full ten thousand homes. Responding to a city-wide requirement to increase the number of homes built on small sites (as opposed to larger brownfield parcels), these new units could come from extensions and alterations to existing houses, redevelopment of houses, granny flats in gardens, or higher-density developments in designated Areas of Focused Intensification. The document admitted that it would require an “evolution of the existing character of suburban streets” and attempted to mitigate any negative impacts through a detailed design guide.
Development exploded. Analysis from the Greater London Authority found that between 2017-18 and 2021-22, nearly two thousand new homes were built on small sites in Croydon — almost three times as many as in Barnet, London’s next most prolific borough.
The policy led to hundreds of single-family houses being redeveloped into mid-size apartment blocks — anecdotally, often with under ten units to avoid requirements to include affordable (below-market rate) units.
The backlash was also swift. By 2022, Croydon rescinded SPD2. Local residents’ groups mobilized against the incumbent Labour council, and the Conservative candidate for Mayor of Croydon strangely attacked it as causing the “destruction of homes.” Combined with Croydon council’s near-bankruptcy, the award-winning Suburban Design Guide led to its authors not only losing the next election but failing to win the new position of elected borough mayor — a post created against the will of the Labour authority by a local referendum.
Figure 7. Net number of new build homes completed in small developments (fewer than ten homes) in London by borough, 2012-13 to 2021-22. From Greater London Authority, Housing in London (2023). Courtesy of Greater London Authority.
Streets Ahead
Intensifying outer London was never going to be the only answer to the capital’s housing crisis. One analysis found that to reach the city’s housing targets by replacing one-family houses with three-family ones, the city would need as many such redevelopments as the number of semi-detached houses sold in outer London every year.
The Labour Party, which is likely to form the next government, has proposed a new generation of New Towns, which, as after World War II, would bypass the political requirements of England’s restrictive planning system. It has also proposed loosening Green Belt restrictions in selected areas of low ecological quality. This is a workable idea, though it will require spending considerable political capital to bulldoze through local objections and is unlikely to deliver the full increase needed to end the crisis.
Suburban densification will be part of the solution as well. One need only look at the changing demographics of London’s outskirts to see why. Renters, young people, and low-income residents priced out of the center make up an increasing portion of the suburbs every year. They are moving out from dense, central neighborhoods and bringing their pro-housing politics with them. Members of Parliament like Chipping Barnet’s Theresa Villiers, who successfully campaigned for national housing targets to be made non-binding, are likely to lose their seats in the next general election.
So, if policymakers are going to take up the challenge of the housing crisis, and of accommodating growth throughout Greater London, they will have to think strategically about what kinds of places they are trying to create. Without careful planning, the panic of resolving London’s housing shortage could open the door to poorly designed, car-dependent, disconnected developments in the outskirts of the city, with high carbon emissions and few local amenities. One need only look at Northstowe, a mostly privately developed new town built five miles from Cambridge, that still has no shops, cafes, or space for doctors six years after residents first moved in.
Ironically, in the comparatively urbanized UK, it’s widely assumed that all that makes our suburbs suburban is low-density housing. In the United States, similar (if arguably less advanced) movements, like June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones’ Retrofitting Suburbia project, have focused on importing the overall form of a city to the suburbs, rather than just its housing density. This means thinking more deeply about road design, commercial space, and anchor institutions than much of the British discourse on suburban intensification has managed so far — like exploring how our redundant shopping centers can be redeveloped into mixed-use havens of green space.
Ensuring new homes are well-connected to public transport will be key. Twice as many trips in outer London use cars than in inner London, but over half of those trips are less than two miles long, meaning they can be feasibly replaced by other modes. New developments should be anchored in new or upgraded public transport — ideally, routes should be committed to before densification areas are designated, to avoid “baking in” unsustainable travel patterns.
Figure 8. Evolution of streets with detached homes. From Croydon Council, Suburban Design Guide (retracted), 2019. Courtesy of Croydon Council.
Design can also make a difference. One study found that making densified buildings look traditionally suburban made outer Londoners more likely to find simulated images of new development acceptable. Substantial green space also helps build support. Future design guides from councils looking to avoid Croydon’s fate will have to learn these lessons. But every tower and block of flats foregone means more pressure to turn single-family houses into triplexes, more planning appeals, and more protests outside the town hall. Every decision has its trade-offs.
Ultimately, as Croydon’s chastened planners once wrote, “suburban growth occurs whether it is planned or not.”
Citation
Jon Tabbush, “What Are Suburbs For? Paving Paradise in London,” PLATFORM, Dec. 11, 2023.
