It's a grey day in London, we've landed under a thick layer of clouds, but at least it's not raining. I have to go to the Prospect Magazine headquarters, where Alan Rusbridgerand the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have invited us to explain housing policies from different countries, and I've landed at Gatwick. Passport control; what a step backwards the United Kingdom has taken. Once I've passed the passport scan, the machine opens the doors to the kingdom. Gatwick is 40 km from London, and the train track runs through a completely urbanized landscape. It's as if Barcelona had houses and neighborhoods all the way to Sitges; as if the metropolis had swallowed up the Llobregat delta and the Garraf massif to turn it into a megacity. Later in the talk, we'll analyze why large cities haven't resolved housing inequalities either, but let's take it step by step.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is an independent foundation in the United Kingdom dedicated to combating poverty and social injustice. Founded over a hundred years ago by businessman Joseph Rowntree, the project began by promoting the garden city of New Earswick, on the outskirts of York, designed by Raymond Unwin. It was the physical translation of a social commitment to adequately house the population living in poverty on the outskirts of industrial cities. Even today, the neighborhood is a practical demonstration of how good architecture, in a beautiful green setting, has allowed several residents over the years to live with a strong sense of belonging, stability, and personal ties. Walking there, one wouldn't realize one was in a social housing estate: it's not too different from the exclusive Hampstead neighborhood in London, a project by the same architects a few years later. The Foundation now manages a portfolio of more than 2,600 social housing units, and has 1,000 in various project phases through 2030.
The session was also attended by Teija Ojankoski of the Finnish Y-Säätio Foundation, which has been producing the project for over 40 years. They understand that homelessness is not just an individual challenge, but a problem for society as a whole. They are based on the conviction that the home is the foundation upon which life is built, and they have an enviable housing stock: 11,000 privately-owned (non-profit) affordable rental homes in a country of 5.6 million inhabitants.
Now the English Labour Party and Prime Minister Keir Starmer have made affordable housing their flagship and have promised to promote the construction of 1.5 million homes during their five-year term. To this end, they have committed a budget of €46 billion to local governments, organizations, and developers to help them finance the purchase of vacant homes and the construction of new ones.
The interesting part of the session was the (difficult) questions from Alan Rusbridger and those from a very participatory audience (mainly developers, investment funds, and construction industry professionals). Why hasn't public housing construction taken off yet, even though the money is there? Why isn't property taxed differently, and especially the accumulation of housing? How can we combat the rise in land prices due to speculative processes? The construction business, in times of housing crisis, is very lucrative because there's a lot of demand (more homes are created than apartments built) and the finished project is sold at significant margins. On the other hand, building social rental housing doesn't generate a margin, and the investment isn't recovered for many years, at least three or four decades.
Another major obstacle is urban planning. Urban planning in the United Kingdom is more flexible than in ours, but every plan generates a clear aversion, and many developers prefer to hold onto land and not build on it until more favorable times arrive. In the case of Spain, the position against transformation is quite legitimized after the bubble years of unbridled growth that allowed large areas of growth in coastal cities to be designated, often to cater to the "product" that real estate developers wanted: second homes and single-family villas. But twenty years later, theoretically, we should have more mechanisms to promote land for alternative tenures (social rentals, cooperatives, surface rights).
The European cities that became large in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did so with a very specific purpose: to make available cheap land for housing outside the market logic, preventing speculation and encouraging non-profit entities (cooperatives and foundations) to build on rental land.Now that 50,000 homes are to be built in Catalonia, Beyond the shape and location of new neighborhoods, it is necessary to create the conditions for homes with innovative tenure systems. Urban planning and housing, as in the times of Fourier, Cerdà, Ebenezer Howard, Geddes, and Soria y Mata, are once again needed.
