Competition for land and volume housebuilding has helped create a culture of architectural sameness, so what could add more variety to our new builds?
Competition for land and volume housebuilding has helped create architectural blandness so what could add more variety to our new builds?
For far too long people have felt that although there have been numerous debates, initiatives and publications aimed at improving the quality of house building in the UK, evidence of change has been extremely thin on the ground.
Now for the first time, I am sensing a new optimism. There is public support and evidence for popular development. Communities are realising they have a say over what’s built in their backyards and that they can break the housebuilding mould.
One of the delights of the UK is how quickly the local character changes from place to place, making a small island feel remarkably diverse, interesting and inexhaustible. However, over the last 80 or so years the character of architecture and placemaking has become more and more similar in style, which risks eating away at the beauty and diversity of towns and villages across the country.
The reasons for this are not only to do with the homogeneity of the volume housebuilding industry, and its associated financial model, but a byproduct of the fact that we buy and sell land competitively in this country. At its crudest level we can deduce that the company that builds the cheapest gets to build the most. The sheer buying power and supply chains of volume builders means they can build at a very low cost and therefore offer more money for land up front. In a market where demand far outstrips supply, there is very little incentive to deliver a better product because people are forced to buy what is on the market at any given time. This in turn makes beautiful parts of the country with good local amenities so desirable that prices go through the roof, pricing people out of the market and making those places more socially homogenous.
One way this is being successfully countered is through garden villages. The model aims to target land away from existing communities to capture the uplift in value for land not already consented or in the local plan. At one level this flies in the face of the sustainability logic of urban extensions that optimise existing infrastructure, but it can work if it delivers shops, offices, schools and the community infrastructure that most new housing developments don’t.
For more than 20 years, the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community has been working with volume housebuilders as well as smaller developers and builders to deliver high-quality mixed-use locations, with varying degrees of success. One of the main stumbling blocks we have come across is that volume housebuilders exist on a regional and compartmentalised basis so a success in one area rarely creates a culture shift across the company. The systems and culture are so embedded in the staff and targets set for performance are based on the existing model. The existing systems work extremely well in delivering profits and so there is very little need or desire to change.
The foundation has recently released a new prospectus called Building a Legacy: A Landowner’s Guide to Popular Development to move the debate from developers and builders to landowners and show how important landowners are in changing culture. The report was scrutinised by a network of around 50 landowners, developers, designers and builders all attempting to break the mould, and the idea is to consolidate and grow this network to share best practice and learning from better-quality new development.
What seems clear to me is that the best and most flexible model for new mixed-use development is to use a consortium of two or three smaller developer builders to be able to share supply chains and expertise but allow a healthy degree of competitiveness.
This model also fits nicely with the £3bn Home Building Fund, which encourages and enables SMEs to borrow infrastructure funding at extremely favourable rates. This is a great help but of course works best when combined with landowners who are incentivised to deliver a better product and are more patient in seeing higher returns over a longer period of time.
Ben Bolgar is a senior director for The Prince’s Foundation for Building Community
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