Autonomous Geographies: leedshousingcrisis

Leeds Housing Policy and the Affordability Crisis

Britain, like most other rich capitalist countries, is in the grip of an affordable housing crisis. The privatisation of low cost public housing for rent combined with savage cuts in welfare benefits, state-encouraged housing and land speculation, market deregulation, falling real wages, second and third home ownership and restrictions on house building, has pushed access to housing of all tenures beyond the reach of working class people and increasingly middle income earners.

Leeds is no exception to these trends. It is now widely acknowledged that despite major housing regeneration programmes underway, an affordable housing crisis is gripping Leeds. Home ownership is not an option for at least 30% of the population as the lowest house prices in Leeds cost almost 4 times the average manual wage. With between 23,000 and 32,000 on the housing register, the demand for social housing to rent is rising yet supply is falling behind. Leeds needs to build or make available an additional 2000 affordable homes each year. Yet new building of social rented homes averages just 240 per year and with a further 15-20,000 council homes set to be lost by 2016 under the Right to Buy and the mass demolitions planned under regeneration, it will take 83 years at current rates to return social housing stock to 1995 levels (see Jones 2006). It is no surprise that in this content, homelessness is said to be rising.

Only four of the 102 postcode sectors (3.9 per cent) have house prices affordable to those on below average single incomes. More than 31,000 people have been forced onto the housing register waiting for an affordable rented home (see Jones 2006). As house prices rise, those left off the housing ladder are becoming relatively poorer and less able to move. Compounding the problem, they cannot access low cost public housing because this has become a last-resort residual tenure for the most needy; yet they cannot buy their own home because they cannot afford the huge mortgages which are now on average six times that of average incomes.

Housing privatisation in Leeds

Much of the blame for this situation lies with central government’s privatisation programme over the past 25 years. Historically-speaking, Leeds City Council has been one of the country’s largest providers of public housing. At the end of the 1970s, the city had around 100,000 council houses providing low cost affordable rented housing for working class people. Most of this housing was low and medium-rise and was geographically concentrated in the inner and outer wards of the inner city such as Burmantoffs and Seacroft, University, Richmond Hill, Hunslet and Middleton, Bramley and Whinmoor (Moran 1996: 279).

By the mid-1980s, the growing cuts in and constraints on local authority housing budgets imposed by the Thatcher government left three-quarters of inner city housing in need of major repairs across all tenures (Thornton, 2002: 225; Moran 1996). At the same time, central government forced all councils to divert their capital investment away from new build and towards the rehabilitation of existing council housing stock in a targeted, area-based approach (Moran 1996: 283). So as large swathes of public housing fell into disrepair, the best council housing was privatised for individual benefit under the Right to Buy and the private benefit of housing association companies under stock transfer. Between 1979 and 1997, nearly 20,000 council homes were sold off under this policy and hundreds more demolished; they were not replaced.

The election of New Labour has only served to accelerate the privatisation of public housing in Leeds. Since 1997, the city has lost a further 20,000 council homes, meaning that in the past 30 years, a third of Leeds public housing stock has been privatised or demolished leaving less than 60,000. The rate of loss is getting faster: 6,000 have been sold off since 2003, and 900 properties alone were privatised between April and August 2006 (Leeds Housing Partnership, 2005; Jones, 2006). Current predictions by re’new, the strategic housing partnership body for Leeds, suggest that the ‘right to buy’ rate will lead to a further reduction of 10,000 council homes over the next decade, leaving fewer than 50,000.

This constant erosion of low-cost housing supply conflicts with an unchanged percentage of households renting housing in Leeds over the same period. The reduction of council housing in Leeds means that currently 6000 people ‘bid’ for only 500 empty properties per month. 50 people on average bid for every council house available; in some of the more popular areas that number can rise to 500.

The shrinking supply has contributed to rising house prices. According to the City Council, Leeds needs to build 1,930 new homes a year by 2016, 98 per cent of which would have to be affordable homes if it is to meet its own annual target.

Regeneration?

Far from addressing the lack of affordable housing in the city, however, the Council’s regeneration programmes will mean a net loss of affordable properties. Its own figures point to 6,000 demolitions over the next ten years as part of its major regeneration programmes in East and South East Leeds (EASEL), Little London, Beeston Hill and Holbeck, and West Leeds Gateway. In their place they are clearing large sites for developers to build housing for market sale and new roads. By 2016, public housing in Leeds could have fallen by another third to 40,000 homes with little prospect of any being replaced.

The Council responds that its regeneration schemes will include 15-25 per cent of affordable housing through a variety of schemes and tenures (affordability defined as 75% of market levels). But Leeds City Council’s record on forcing developers to meet its own affordable housing requirements is abysmal. In recent years, Leeds has seen an average of 3,288 new homes built each year, yet the average number of affordable homes per year has been just 240 (or 12.4 per cent of what Leeds actually needs per year). Moreover, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that even this is often beyond the reach of low income households This raises the moral issue of why should people be forced out of their low cost social rented home and forced into long-term debt to buy an expensive home?

Much of the recent housing development in Leeds has concentrated on over-priced city centre apartments, a trend set to continue. Building high value flats for the investor-led buy-to-let (and increasingly buy-to-sit) market further deepens the affordability crisis and means little or no family housing is built. Developers eager to avoid their affordable housing contribution have either out-negotiated the Council’s Planning Department, or have readily paid commuted sums to the Council to build the cheaper homes ‘somewhere else’.

The overarching process for these changes is gentrification – a process whereby lower order activities and poorer groups are displaced to make way for higher order ones. This economic model of regeneration has a number of effects. First, land values are encouraged to rise through speculative activity which encourages increased, and national-international controlled, private sector investment. Second, in such a buoyant environment rents are constantly reviewed upwards, creating further entry barriers to local entrepreneurs and local employment generation, focusing instead on non local, big brand, corporate activity. Third, house price increases force the poorer out of their own communities, and can displace them to cheaper parts of the city region. Fourth, the city council is pushed into selling lucrative publicly-owned city centre sites, undermining democratic control of the central area.

References

Moran, Celia (1996), ‘Social inequalities, housing needs and the targeting of housing investment in Leeds’, ch.16 in Haughton & Williams (eds.), Corporate City?, pp. 277-92

Haughton, Graham, & Williams, Colin (1996) (eds.), Corporate City? Partnership, participation and partition in urban development in Leeds. Avebury

Leeds Housing Partnership (2005), ‘Decent Homes in Decent Neighbourhoods: Leeds Housing Strategy’, Leeds City Council

Jones, Huw (2006), The need for affordable rented housing in Leeds

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