Editor: I believe that it is time for the property industry to accept that we can only build 200,000 homes a year and leave behind the fantasy that we can build 300,000.
This point came across clearly in a recent Savills presentation on residential property forecasts, which showed that building even 200,000 homes annually is a struggle in most years.
Building 300,000 was always going to be a challenge, with the construction industry facing a difficult future, as outlined by Mark Farmer in the Cast report ‘Modernise or Die’ in 2016. Even one of the proposed ways out of this, pre-manufactured housing, has proved a far greater challenge than expected.
The 300,000 target is also a challenge to democracy; recent proposed changes to the planning system had to be dropped, as they were deeply unpopular with voters and lethal to our democratically elected representatives who wanted to keep their posts.
Like healthcare, there may be an almost infinite demand for housing as the population continues to grow, household size continues to shrink and demand for homes shifts towards the biggest cities.
I suggest that the industry accepts its constraints and asks itself: if we can only build 200,000 homes a year, what should we do to achieve a better outcome?
One improvement would be to stop building micro-flats, with a significant amount of space lost to a pod bathroom that is used for just 20 minutes a day, in large anonymous schemes. Rather than a solution to the housing shortage, these flats may be part of the problem, as emphasised throughout Covid-19.
Perhaps a better route would be using the HMO regime within high-rise resi schemes to deliver genuine solutions, giving occupiers larger rooms by providing communal kitchens and bathrooms, grouping them within clusters of six to eight occupiers, a far more humane solution.
Are humane HMOs rather than mass BTR the way forward?
Jonathan Monnickendam, The Development Debt Consultancy
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