20.02.2025

Fake plastic bungalows

Government plans to solve the housing crisis by building ‘new towns’ are likely to fail - private ownership of this essential human need is the true problem, argues Paul Demarty

The mood music from the current government, when it comes to housing, is altogether very familiar. Keir Starmer, announcing a new wave of nuclear power investment, trotted out the phrase, “Build, baby, build” - but that has usually been applied to the housing question by neoliberal ‘yimbys’ (‘yes, in my back yard’), and it perfectly well encapsulates the ideas of the government on this point.

There was some controversy when Starmer and Angela Rayner accompanied Charles Windsor on a visit to Nansledan, a new town on the fringes of Newquay in Cornwall. The yellow press accused him of ‘dragging the king into politics’ - always a laughable and hypocritical complaint from any major party, all of whom are perfectly willing to hide behind the constitution’s dignified part when it suits. It is more than usually ridiculous in this case, however, since one matter of policy on which Charles has insisted on inserting himself repeatedly is that of architecture and development.

His description of a proposed extension of the National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” gave the architectural profession the heebie-jeebies, but also an enduring name for its failures. An ironic award, handed out to “the ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months”, is called the ‘Carbuncle Cup’. Charles’s big idea for development is small towns, designed in accordance with ‘traditional’ architectural styles, that are fairly self-contained and crucially not so car-dependent as the average suburb. The most famous example is Poundbury - another initiative out here in the south-west, in this case near Dorchester in Dorset. Nansledan is clearly a chip off the Poundbury block - pastel-coloured terraces, all very chocolate-boxy; amenities all within reach; and a refuge from the carnage of Newquay in the peak of the tourist season. It is wholly an operation of the Duchy of Cornwall (which has long been Charles’s private empire, though now in the hands of William).

Wrong problem

The government’s intention is to create 12 such new towns, though not necessarily to Charles’s aesthetic specifications. Local authorities are scrambling to submit their proposals, in the hope of a golden ticket. There is much government rhetoric about cutting through red tape to get it all done. Optimism is hard to come by - after all, didn’t David Cameron promise us new ‘garden cities’? We shall see.

The basic difficulty with all this is that it is solving the wrong problem. It is important to note, I think, that Charles’s ideas about architecture and planning are not wholly senseless. Given his overall outlook as a remorseless traditionalist, it is easy to forget what his actual target was in his ruminations on the topic - not so much urban “carbuncles” as suburbanisation: the creation of vast swathes of purely residential development that presuppose long car journeys to giant supermarkets and whatever else. His ideal was more or less self-sufficient conurbations, and in this respect he was surely correct - and correct against Thatcher, rather than Labour leaders per se (who, alas, were also rather over-enamoured with the motor-car in the mid-20th century). Even his aesthetic obsessions are shared, to some extent, with radicals like William Morris, who viewed access to beautiful and useful objects, including homes, as a fundamental right of all. Morris would not likely have been any more fond of brutalist tower blocks or mock-Tudor semis than the present king.

Yet, to hear Charles or Starmer talk about it, it is as if we are coming to an end of a long nightmare, where those people called planners spend most of their time refusing to allow any building to happen at all, and the rest of it ensuring that what is built is ugly and slipshod. Soon there will be new planners, like those employed presumably by the Duchy of Cornwall, with a zeal for building, and the talent and common sense to build good places that are nice to live in. It is a matter of expertise, or at least the right kind of expertise, and then of intelligent design of regulations.

Absent from the discussion - and how could it not be? - is the political economy of housing. Most of these new towns are expected to be in the south-east and, however they are planned, will effectively be suburbs of London. Why does London need suburbs? It is already, after all, pretty large. Yet we face the uncomfortable truth that, like many other great or once-great cities, nobody much lives in the middle of it. How could they? To say rents are unaffordable is a preposterous understatement. Residential property in central London is increasingly a matter merely for speculation among international financiers and oligarchs. The various borough councils that govern the city - not to say the central administration of the mayor’s office and the London Assembly - are entirely incapable of dealing with that problem, because that is just what London (and indeed Britain) is: an offshore centre beholden to just such interests.

Suburban

For the same reason, even outside the capital, the results of major developments like new towns are doubtful. Back to the south-west, near where I grew up in suburban Plymouth, they have recently built such a place by the name of Sherford. It is a strange old place; a village-sized conurbation built up of fake Regency town-houses. For all the promises of amenities, the first grocery shop only opened a few weeks ago.

The houses are notoriously built on the cheap. In the main phase of construction, you could keep up with the goings-on every time you needed to get a tradesman in to fix something in your own gaff. They had all been getting work out there, and gossiped guiltily about the corners being cut. Already scaffolding has gone up around many of these places barely a year or two after they were finished. In several of them, it turned out that the layers of insulation had been installed in the wrong order - not something, in the wake of Grenfell Tower, you really want to screw up.

Now, if Sherford had been built by Plymouth city council (or South Hams district council), you would at least have some recourse for this insanity - vote the bastards out, ideally to be replaced with somebody who can procure the work on anything other than a ‘lowest bidder’ basis. However, Sherford was not built by any council, but by a private developer, and the private developer gets paid when the houses get sold - not when the school or the shop opens (there is, at least, a school). At that point, it is all somebody else’s problem. Councils are entirely emasculated anyway, and could not undertake such an endeavour if they wanted to (but no doubt many do, given the problems in our cities)

The whole set-up is, then, hopelessly ridden from top to bottom with bad incentives. And we must now add the final problem: developments of this sort, as noted above, are designed to be sold. That, in the end, is where the developer gets their percentage. It is also a general political objective that has, for decades, been shared by both main parties. Margaret Thatcher is most famous here, seeking to remake Britain as a “property-owning democracy” - of course, the Tories always at bottom considered state housing an outrage, but with Thatcher, something like a new ideology attached itself to the historic class interests of landlords.

Spreading home ownership among the general population, it was thought, was the key to class peace. Once you had a mortgage, you then had a direct interest in ensuring the economy was ‘well-managed’, because your house value would go up, and your mortgage would not suddenly skyrocket because of the emergency action of the central bank during some crisis. The general population would now begin to reason like little capitalists; in reward, they would at length possess an asset that they could liquidate if necessary to pay for care in old age, or pass on to upwardly-mobile children, or whatever.

Over the years, this opened up a contradiction between the use-value and asset price of housing. Buying was increasingly out of range for ordinary Joes, after the initial ‘right to buy’ bonanza. Wealth tended to accrue to landlords; everyone else was subject to a rental market, where rents tended, equally, to increase. The inevitable result is what we see today: mass homelessness, universally precarious letting arrangements that make a joke of the formal duties of landlords to their tenants, and a big divide between them and those fortunate enough to own their own homes. The fact that the only answer the neoliberal consensus can come up with, exemplified by the ‘Yimbys’, is more supply. Build, baby, build! But the fact that these are private, rather than social, properties simply makes the problem worse (and, of course, guarantees the opposition of the Nimbys, who are quite rational in attempting to protect their own asset values by opposing new supply).

Going back

For Marxists, the answer must begin with going back to the use-values. Housing is an elementary human need. A housing policy that does not actually house people is at best merely a government giveaway to developers and landlords. It must, once again, be the prerogative of municipal government to provide housing for people in the locality; achieving this requires a drastic change in the relationship between central and local government, of course, and equally drastic improvements in democratic function in the localities. Private rents must be subject to strict and stringent controls, with a view to the eventual ‘euthanasia of the rentiers’. So far as this forces private landlords out of the market, their properties must be subject to compulsory purchase.

This would, on its own, add up to the abolition of real estate as a form of personal investment. One can hardly weep over the expropriation of landlords or the banishment of parasitic property developers, yet it will be politically wise to ensure a soft landing for run-of-the-mill owner-occupiers, whose equity would now be underwater; that would, in turn, demand the socialisation of the banking sector to wind up all the bad debt in good order.

Social housing

From this short summary, I hope to press home the point that this is one area of policy that really does directly pose the question of power. We only got the mass social housing of the 1950s and 60s because the capitalist class feared a socialist outcome, in the form of the massively enhanced power of the Soviet Union after World War II. We need to think far more radically than is typical on the left, which either demands council houses be built without confronting the question of power, as is typical of Trotskyist groups in this country, or supposes that grassroots organisation of renters can substitute, as is typical of various anarchistic types. (Needless to say, though we will not elaborate here, such sweeping expropriations as I have outlined would be impossible to achieve in one country alone, never mind a country so utterly colonised by finance capital as Britain.)

The homes built under such a regime will not typically be single-family dwellings of the sort found in Nansledan. Some balance will have to be found between quality of life, environmental impact and optimal supply. I expect this will mean spacious apartments in mid-sized blocks, with plenty of room for children’s play areas, green spaces, five-a-side cages, and whatever else you like.

That can all, happily, be left to the desires of the people who will actually live there, and the ingenuity of architects and engineers liberated from the regime of the lowest bidder.