- Hi, welcome to the Works in Progress podcast. I'm Sam, I'm here with Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes. Samuel, what was the Great Downzoning? - So historically cities grow in two ways. Like putting it simply, they grow outwards or they grow upwards. Today, most cities around the world still grow outwards. In fact, there's like massive outward expansion of cities in most countries, but in suburban areas, which is most of the surface area of cities, they don't really, really go upwards anymore.
They tend to be regulatory constraints that say once you built a suburb at a low density, it has to stay like that forever. So it's completely novel. Historically, it's all changed since the late 19th century and the present day. So I call this process the Great Downzoning process whereby zoning restrictions have gradually introduced and lowered such that neighbourhoods were frozen in place forever. - And basically this happened what, around the second World War or before the Second World War?
- It's a bit more complex. So it's starts in actually the German Empire and Austria-Hungary in the late 19th century. It spreads in the interwar period to the United States, Canada, then to Australia. And then it comes in in Britain and France, really in the postwar period, quite a kind of a strange way we can discuss later. But it's proceeded by a kind of private sector downzoning, which happens much earlier. That goes back into the 19th and even the 18th centuries.
So the long story begins in the sixteen, seventeen hundreds with the first development of like not really low density suburbia, but at least like medium density elite residential suburbs in Britain. And those have private zoning rules pretty much from the start names that then gradually expands around the world in the 19th century.
So Germany, France, United States, Canada, they all develop low density suburbs and they've all got, like, again, pretty much from the start, they're getting more sophisticated and more detailed over time. They've got private zoning rules, covenants that are restricting density. Public zoning - so the state restricting density that comes in in the late 1800s in central Europe in Germany and Austria, spreads to North America British Empire in mainly the interwar period.
And then finally comes in in kind of Britain and France, mainly in I think probably the forties, fifties in the postwar period. So it's the overall process is pretty long. But the short version is like whenever low density suburbia develops in a country elite low density suburbia develops in a country, private zoning follows pretty quickly after that.
And then public zoning, like after the modern state emerges and norms start shifting about what kind of state intervention is appropriate, it tends to come fairly quickly when private zoning mechanisms start to fail or when low density elite suburbia comes under serious intensification pressure.
So the the key thing I've learned like studying, so the first thing to say about the Great Downzoning, like an amazingly under-discussed underappreciated subject, Americans write a bit about the introduction of zoning in the United States and there's a bit of a kind of classic literature on how it arrived, but Europeans don't really write about it at all.
So most British and French people, even if they work on housing policy, even if they work on suburban densification as a policy area, don't know where's like rules against densification when they started, why they started, how they started. So I've like kind of gone from scratch when I've been reading about this. The first place where public zoning, like the state putting in zoning policy started was probably, I can't quite work out the first one.
The standard people often say it's Frankfurt, but there seem to be some earlier ones like Dresden and Budapest seem to maybe have been earlier in the 1870s and 1880s. And it's very much like German speaking places that do it. First they have maybe a more interventionist tradition of state government may, maybe it goes back to like the Prussian state in the 18th century, more authoritarian approach to government in the 19th century.
The big thing I hadn't appreciated at all is that in pretty much every country, downzoning by the government is proceeded by downzoning by the private sector. So what I mean by this is in the middle ages, cities do have suburbs, but the suburbs are like poverty stricken, mixed use. Like basically they're where like noxious industrial functions are placed and where people who can't pay to get into the city itself have to have to live.
- They're actually outside the walls in mediaeval times, right? - Often it's like - Shanty towns against the wall. - It's the dangerous place which will get burnt by the authorities if the city's besieged to avoid giving cover to the attackers. So you live under constant threats that the authorities might burn your home down if the town becomes is a town is in danger, maybe you don't have like full protection of law in these places, like bad places.
You don't want to be there if you can possibly avoid it. Then in the like basically England, you start getting something like modern suburbs and the west end of London is maybe the first - The west end starts as a suburb. - Well kind of, it's an elite residential area built at much lower densities. It's exclusively, exclusively for wealthy people and exclusively for housing and some kind of retail functions.
So it's like the key tests, it passes and it starts as early as the 17th century, but really gets underway in the 18th century and that right from the beginning. So that's where like one big landowner says, I'm gonna make this whole neighbourhood into a a sanctuary from the things we don't like about urban life and also maybe a sanctuary from like the things that we don't like about mediaeval suburban life. So we're not gonna have any slaughter houses or brick kilns.
We are not gonna have any like through, well little, as little through traffic as possible and the more morally dubious side of it. Basically we've gotta try to avoid having poor people living in this area and they've got this challenge like how do you preserve once I've sold homes here, sold plots here, like I can sell them for house building or I can build houses, but how do I keep them in that use forever?
And in order to attract really like wealthy buyers to spend a lot of money on this neighbourhood, they're gonna want to guarantee that the neighborhood's going to remain as an elite residential suburb into the medium term. So what they do is they impose covenants which are like kind of like a contract where not only the first buyer, but all future buyers have to agree to keep the house in basically like in elite residential use and in single ownership, right? In single ownership often.
So as a slightly technical detail, but often the original landowner doesn't even build the house, they sell it to a house, a developer to build the individual house. So they often put in some restrictions on what kind of house can be built, what it can be used for, often a minimum price.
Sometimes they put in detailed architectural restrictions, sometimes they put in really like minute stuff restrictions on what pets you can have or restrictions on where you can hang the laundry or any of the kind of things that they think is going to help preserve the tone of the neighbourhood.
- One impression I got from reading the novel, The Quincunx, which I gather is by based on very careful historical research of the period, is that everyone at this time who was middle class was terrified of their neighbourhood falling into penry and becoming like a very dangerous, unpleasant place with 20 people cram to a room and they gave the example of the Devil's Acre in Westminster where all the streets are lined with these crumbling grand mansions,
which are now split into 20 people crammed into every room and all kind of criminality is being carried out around.
- So it's extremely common for neighbourhoods to go through social decline in pre-modern times, partly because of course they didn't have like Europeans now think an older house is like prima fai better than a new house and it's like a heritage, heritage property commands a premium, but Europeans in the past didn't think that they thought them like, like cars or computers or something.
Like you've got like a shoddy old house which is gonna have loads of defects and at some point gonna require loads of expensive work. So you had the properties themselves constantly degrading, just physically fashion, you know, it was capricious then as now, and then the tendency just if we they're building new suburbs, the new suburbs will be built to be maximally attractive and try to draw people out. So you have a constant tendency for neighbourhoods to fall into decline.
People are always afraid of this neighbourhoods that aren't covenanted, certainly in London, but I generally around Europe there's like people often pretty comp... like it's going to happen. - Mm. - You've got a time limit on how long you can live here at the, with the same like expectations for the character of the neighbourhood as when you bought it and quite a short time limit, maybe like a 15 year time limit or something.
Neighbourhoods that were covenanted could sometimes survive indefinitely, although even they would decline sometimes and eventually sometimes the like people would stop bothering to enforce the covenants because they think oh it's, it's hopeless at this point. And is and is this happening because so many people are moving into cities?
Why is it that presumably if you have a lot of people considered to be undesirable moving into a particular area, they're moving from somewhere else, are they like moving within the city and does that mean that there are other areas that are becoming kind of less dangerous let's say? Or are they moving into the city from rural areas? - I think it, my sense is it usually accompanies urban growth. I see. So it's normally, there aren't usually urban neighbourhoods becoming more genial.
There are normally, the default is all in urban neighbourhoods are in decline except maybe the business centre of which might retain like an elite character. All in urban neighbourhoods are in decline and the middle classes are slowly moving further and further outwards. That's the pattern in London. It's a bit more complex in other parts of Europe. - And this is what year, what kind of year period are we talking about? Again?
- I mean it, this starts in a big way in the 18th century and runs all the way into the 20th century. Okay. This process and it's, yeah, but Covenanting was successful in preserving some areas of London from this process and Britain, I mean London had the particularly interesting process, the freehold system whereby the original landowner would retain a kind of ownership. Yeah, partial ownership in the properties and the, these so-called great estates.
And these landowners were often really vigorous about enforcing the covenants because they wanted to avoid the neighbourhood declining because they had a long-term financial interest in it. - In a hundred years they would regain ownership and resell the leases. That's what happened. Yeah, they'd sell the leases for about 80 or a hundred years.
And so they, and because they were extreme like church bodies or charities or aristocratic families, they were extremely long termist and actually cared about what happened in 80 or a hundred years. So they were thinking if this neighborhood's become a slum in 80 years, my grandchildren will inherit a worthless asset. Whereas if I retain it as a summit of fashion, then they'll retain, they'll get to inherit this amazingly prestigious and and lucrative asset.
So I'm gonna fight really hard to retain its character. And like Bloombury was a key like neighbourhood on the, on those like edge of genteel London owned by the Bedford family. And they were famously like one of the most conscientious of the great states in enforcing covenants and even supplying public services and this kind of thing because they were really, really keen to keep its character and they didn't completely succeed.
It gradually decayed and became a kind of bedsit territory by the early 20th century, but it didn't completely fall through. And that sheltered the neighbourhoods to the west of there. And the mechanism here is basically units becoming subdivided. Like it's, it's like you start with a kind of ... I guess a nice apartment. Is it apartments or is it houses?
And then the mechanism is, it's kind of always more economical to just cram more and more people into these units than to maintain them as being nice for a single family or whatever. - Yeah. So London, in the classic greater states period, that's, that's all correct. It started as houses and the main form of densification, it's like population densification rather than mainly floor space densification. So it's mostly just the same buildings being subdivided.
That's not quite true because they did fit in the back garden sometimes, but they weren't at this point mainly talking about knocking them down and building flats. That becomes an issue in the 20th century or late 19th, 20th century when flats become in Anglo-American settings, they become a start becoming more common, get lift shafts and steel frames, which enables you to build really tall blocks of flats.
And then you start getting the block of flats appearing in a green and leafy suburban neighbourhood. And that becomes another huge issue and a huge like key battleground around the, around densification.
- Where are we then when the kind of dense city that you're talking about begins to change, like how do we get from what you're talking about this sort of 18th century, 19th century, the, the emergence of the suburb, how do we then get to the kind of dense, I guess upzoned but but seemingly kind of desirable place to live?
That that, you know, we like the, the kind of the Georgian apartments, things like that or you know, in Spain, the kind of nice bits of Madrid or the, the, the or Barcelona, things like that. Like how do we get from the emergence of suburbs to this sort of beautiful, gentle, dense city that - Oh, they started as beautiful gentle density.
- Okay, - So that's one of the, if for like us reading about this now, that's one of the elements which is a bit like surprising or confusing or confounds our expectations a bit because we have this like papier mache villain of low density suburbia where it's like car dependent, extremely low densities, totally single use and you know, it's a, an easy thing for us to be against.
Whereas your early suburbs in the 18th and 19th century were very beautiful, gentle density, like far above the densities that you'd build a suburb out nowadays, normally, and they're all, I mean certainly ones from the 18th century, will all be under heavy heritage protection now. So when we look at these neighbourhoods, virtually everyone feels positive affect towards them and they really don't feel like, oh, this is a villain of the urbanism story.
This is a real hero of the, of the urbanism story. But it's generally, I mean on the whole, the very fact that the private sector brings in these covenant restrictions explodes some of the standard narratives about density restrictions was it shows when these restrictions were introduced, they were actually value maximising for the neighbourhood.
It's kind of seems like a paradox that by losing rights over your property, you actually gained property value overall because even though those rights were valuable to you, it was even more valuable to you that your neighbour had lost the rights to do things that might compromise your property value. - Yeah, I mean it's not, not that it's not that crazy, right?
Like I'm very happy that my neighbour doesn't really have the right to play music after midnight and you know, maybe once in a few years I'd like to play music after midnight, but it's definitely worth it to me. Yeah, that's right. That we both have that, we both have our, our hands constrained on that. - Yeah, it's not crazy at all.
And that's another thing, like researching the history of this has made me a bit more, I mean I come from a background of working on housing reform and specifically on like pro densification reform, but looking at the history has made me have a somewhat more nuanced view about it because you can see like a lot of this stuff was kind of solving a collective action problem. And these were like, in a way this is, these are societies without a housing shortage.
I mean they had housing shortages in the sense that they were extremely poor and often very overcrowded and so on, but they were without a housing shortage in the sense that floor space values were equal to build cost. - What do you mean by that? Just explain, explain why that's significant.
- So if you've got restrictions on house building imposed by the state and they're quite tight restrictions, then gradually floor space that starts being the state starts stopping you from creating floor space - building stuff.
Even when the floor space that you created would be sufficiently valuable, that it would cover the cost of building it and more and the type those restrictions get and the more people who want to build and can't build, the higher prices will creep and you end up with a big difference between sales prices and, and build costs.
And that the huge differences all across western capitals today, often like buildings will sell for three or four times more than it costs to build them, sometimes even bigger differences than that. That's all the artefact of, of regulation. But that wasn't there at the time. At the time they were building at like whatever density was value maximising sales prices were approximately the same as build cost or just enough above build cost to incentivize people to build.
And as soon as sales prices were drifted above build cost at all, you get some more building and they'd push the sales prices down. So there was a market that was basically ine equilibrium and at that point in improving the immunity of these neighbourhoods by putting in covenants was in the eyes of an economist was kind of a good thing.
Now it gets more complex than that, partly because like morally we might have quite mixed feelings about lots of the preferences that they were, that the market was satisfying here. So like in the United States, a big part of Covenanting was racial exclusion. It was white people didn't want to live near to African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, or occasionally Catholic Americans. And so they put covenants in to exclude those people from neighbourhoods in Europe.
That doesn't seem to have, I can't find evidence of that having happened in Europe, but obviously social class exclusion was a huge part of it. Like people want to bask in the reflected glow of living next to high status people. And that was like, of course the 19th century people are much more open about this. It wasn't regarded as a particularly disruptable motive. So, so like the landowners will be totally clear, like we are going to make here a neighbourhood for the best sort of people.
Nobody else will be allowed in except as servants or whatever. So it's morally quite chequered. It's a, the preference is that the market is solving here, you know, the market is the, the reason why your prices go up when you have covenants is partly because people are being protected from noise and traffic and disease and overcrowding and tall buildings cutting out their light and all the trees being cut down and stuff that's like morally neutral.
But it is also partly like various kinds of social exclusion and both of those are part of the story we can't like ... - So I wanna go back to the start of the story here.
So we, it sounds like we're starting off with the first, the first bits being in lots of different places, the first bits of downzoning being in many different countries, but the UK included private downzoning and I'm gonna speak for you and say your, when you said the great estates you're thinking of like Belgravia and, and places like that. What I'm interested in is you then said the state starts doing it in certain places and I think you said Frankfurt was the, was the first place.
What, like what do they downzone it to? So I can see in my mind Belgravia, we've got like four to six story townhouses basically. And instead they have gardens and they're not maximally full up of people and in the city they're presumably filling in like every bit of space. What's happening in Frankfurt, what are they, what are they downzoning it to? - So there's a tendency in all countries for the densities to fall over time.
And that's basically because like the densities of suburbs are falling over time. I think probably the main driver of that is railways developing, which mean like opens up large expanses of spaces for low density housing and you can have your, in Germany they'd call them villa colonies. So they're like a colony of large detached houses in the middle of the countryside built around a railway station.
And then you take your train, you can get into the city centre for work every day those, so by the late 19th century at the top of the market you are usually looking at big detached stories with like big detached houses with two stories or maybe two stories plus a basement or a roof story or something like that.
And that's true probably all around the Britain, France, Germany, British Empire, United States, that's like the elite housing type that they like, so by the end of the 19th century we are talking about densities that aren't so far off what you'd get in a a rich suburb today. But covenants also operate lower points in the market. So middle class suburbs will also generally be covenanted and those will still be at somewhat high densities.
Those are still like two story terraced houses at that point. So what happens next? So the problem with covenants is they don't, I mean people really want what they purport to offer restrictions on density, restrictions on use, but covenants are not very good at providing it. So they've got a bunch of weaknesses. For one thing, they're really expensive, you have to, I mean they're not expensive, they cost nothing to put in place, but to enforce them you have to have a lawsuit.
I asked some lawyers about this and they said in Britain today you'd have a starting price of 25,000 pounds to bring a lawsuit to enforce a covenant and it could go way higher than that. That's to anticipate what we'll talk about later. That's much more money than it cost to local government to enforce zoning restriction - like maybe 10 times more money than it cost to. They are, they're not, courts don't always enforce them.
They're kind of taught, law courts don't always accept that they're reasonable. They also have a very serious collective action problem. So most of them are in London as we discuss the Great Estates sometimes enforce them, but in most countries you are reliant on neighbours to enforce them against each other, the system of reciprocal enforcement.
So for any given neighbour you think, well I don't want to be the one who pays 25,000 pounds to enforce against this guy for like building an extension in its vanguard. Couldn't someone else in the neighbourhood take the, take the hit on this. And even if it's doing more than 25,000 pounds of aggregate damage to the neighbourhood, it's probably not doing 25,000 pounds of damage to any given person in the neighbourhood.
So there's a serious free rider problem and that means you tend to get very little enforcement. The other key weakness that covenants have is they can't be imposed retroactively on neighbourhoods that didn't have them at first. And you also can't fix loopholes with covenants. So if there's something imperfect in the drafting, which there frequently was, or if there were kinds of densification that they hadn't anticipated, which frequently happened, there's nothing you can do about it.
This became a huge problem in the first world war because the, in the 19th century, most European countries, so the one of the totally standard, the most common kinds of zoning, zoning rule, covenant rule was a minimum price threshold. Really simple and would just exclude all the people you don't want and exclude flats being built and exclude holes from being built The price thresholds were always fixed in nominal terms, which worked fine in the 19th century because there was no inflation.
1914 inflation takes off and pretty quickly all these price thresholds become trivially easy to reach to, to meet. So this whole part of the covenanting system just collapses straight away and there's nothing they can do about it because they can't go back and impose a contract on people that they haven't signed up to.
So it's like theoretically the system, the covenanting thing is fascinating for what it shows about how much people wanted some kind of zoning and it was sometimes effective in some places, but basically it was like a rickety weak system which often collapsed under pressure. And we had some great cases of neighbourhoods where once pressures for densification grew really strong, the covenants just collapsed and were unable to stop them from stopping densification from happening.
Friedenau in Berlin is a classic example of this laid out beautiful street network with lots of villas then like the main body of basic electric trams arrive and the main body of Berlin sweeps outwards, reaches freedom now. And the covenants basically do nothing.
The whole neighbourhood is turned into blocks of dense flats pretty quickly and there's only today you can just find like, I dunno maybe like 10 villas left in Friedenau that didn't get demolished by the time and survived long enough for listing protection to come in.
So basically it's a system that doesn't work very well then you get what, so the key thing that happens next is the state starts to provide the kind of protections that the private sector is trying to provide but is not very good at providing. And the country that starts in, as I said earlier, Germany and Austria-Hungary, we don't really have a very good theory for why it's in those countries.
They're not the countries where suburbia is oldest but probably, the standard theory that planners have, the planning historians have is these are countries with the sort of relatively authoritarian tradition of government and so they're more happy to have zoning controls than other places are, so that first gets introduced 1880s, 1890s spreads across the rest of German speaking Europe over the next two decades and then spreads across other countries in the, in the decades after that.
And it's not at the time very controversial. There's like, people tend to regard the introduction of zoning in existing urban areas as like kind of a straightforwardly a good thing to exist, The local people like it, but there's no no sense this is going to cause a housing crisis in the long run or going to like seriously constrained housing supply in the long run. So there's no sort of big pressure in the other direction from economists or, or people worried about housing need.
The, the main determinant of which countries it spreads to tends to be like how much densification is going on in those countries, how threatened people feel by densification and how much pressure they put on the government to do something about it. So there are some places where it takes ages to arrive, but that tends not to be because there are like principled opponents. It tends just to be because densification wasn't a thing and so the state doesn't, get round to doing this.
So where are those places where it comes in late? So you've got countries like Ireland, New Zealand and so on where it doesn't, they didn't even have planning systems really until like the 1960s. The other really interesting case is, well the weird case is Britain and France, which do have, I mean France always builds pretty densely.
Britain has some densification going on in the Victorian period, the Edwardian period and the first World War they introduced rent controls which, and the private, so the market for flat building is completely dependent upon build-to-let. Basically they, in France they don't, I don't think there's even a way in which a building can be owned by multiple owners at the same time.
They do have one now copropriété, which is like condominium ownership, but it doesn't, literally, there is nothing in 1914. So it becomes, once rent controls kick in, it becomes financially kind of impossible to build anything except for single family housing to be sold into owner occupation. Britain does have the leasehold system, but it's unpopular for flats. So basically flat building is killed off in the first world war.
It comes back only very fitfully when bits of the market are decontrolled in the interwar period and the postwar period. And it's not until like quite late in the 20th century that the market, the rental market is de-controlled in both countries and flat building becomes a big deal again. - Is it, is there a reason that building flats to sell wasn't happening at this point? - So France, it's just because they lack a system for people to own flats in a building that's also owned by someone else.
- So for example, in the, in the US when they invent condominiums, they get a massive explosion in building flats to sell them. But they don't have them, they don't, no one does it before then because there's no legal, it's amazing how individual legal tools can, - How did the con how did the condominium get invented? - So they just realised that wait, we've invented homeowner associations and you could actually just apply them to individual buildings as well. So let's do it.
I could be wrong on the exact details of that. Yes, but it's essentially the same legal title as home ... - It was a slightly sort of trial and error process as well, right? They started building cooperatives was an as an early, which is a different legal structure which still exists in like properties from the 1890s. - Yeah. But they barely, they barely ever took off.
Cooperatives basically only exist with subsidy and they, what's the difference between a cooperative and a, so I I can't give you, I can't give you a proper answer roughly. My papier mache understanding I mean I'm not a American and I don't really, I'm not really across the detail, but my, my understanding is condominium is where the underlying fabric of the building is owned by everyone and then each flat is owned by the people who live in that flat.
Whereas cooperative is where like the whole thing is owned by everyone and then in a complicated way you are given use rights to different parts of the building. - I see. - So you get a result which is pretty similar but through a legal structure, which is in some ways quite different. And that is sort of, they're kind of mythic the cooperatives, right? The kind of, they - Still exists in New York in certain places and in other countries as well.
But my understanding is there has never been a mass cooperative build out except for in periods where - that's how they did social housing - So in various periods the main way they've subsidised social housing is through co-ops and then you've seen co-op buildings sprout up. But other than that you just don't see them get built. But the amazing thing is that, like Samuel was saying, the unless you have condominium title, no one builds flats for sale.
And in the UK we did see some built through the leasehold system like that. But my impression is that from the 1890s freeholders basically believe that one day they were gonna beated from their leaseholds, which eventually happened within enfranchisement in the 1960s. Yeah, that's right. And so they were right about that. And so they were were reluctant to build leaseholds because they knew they were gonna be taken off them at some point in the next like five decades.
- They were actually amazingly prescient. They, they standard lease sold leaseholds on an 80 year time span and in about the 1880s they started thinking, yeah, I reckon that the state is going to somehow steal the freehold from me at some point. And it sure enough it was exactly 80 years later. Can you just briefly explain the difference between a freehold and a leasehold? - So freehold is normal ownership that everyone's very familiar with.
In some countries, like primarily the UK we've retained a kind of feudal type of sub ownership and it could go infinite number of times downwards as well. So in the Victorian area you'd often have one guy own something and then he rents out the right to or sells off the right to own it for a given number of years. That's the leasehold to someone else. And then that guy sells the right the sublet to to another person. And it can go very, very far through.
And this has been retained in its full form in places like Hong Kong and Singapore where they took the British legal leasehold system and they've retained the fact that after 99 years or 999 years, you will in fact be kicked out and they can demolish the building and redevelop it or do whatever they like with it, sell it to someone else. In the UK in the 1960s with enfranchisement, you got the right to stay in your leasehold building after a certain period of time.
And then if franchisement was, was strengthened various times, including in the 1990s. And so now if you're a free holder, you don't, you're not really a free holder in the sense we would usually have understood it before 1960s because you can't kick a lease holder out even when the lease comes due and they have the right to extend it at a rate set by a tribunal rather than you accepting it as a a bid. But before that point you could have done leasehold.
I reckon that in the 1930s, one if the, the reason why the flats didn't go that big is because of leaseholders, so free holders didn't expect that they'd be able to resell leaseholds going into the future. - Yeah, people also, like flats were seen as a very transient people. Even today people often prefer to rent flats rather than buy them because they don't expect to stay in flats for that long.
- I guess there's also, I mean the thing that always puts me off buying a flat is the risk and yeah, exactly the fact, fact that you're much more exposed to risk if you've got a bad neighbour as in a flat and owning that is obviously much, much, much riskier than renting it for however many years. So maybe that, maybe that kind of thing is a factor.
- So the English and the Americans have these, the English have this weird feudal leasehold model and they can kind of start carrying that over gradually to flats. But the market's quite reluctant. The Americans have cooperative model which they've developed in for homeowner associations. They can sort of start carrying that over to flats in France. They've got like nothing.
They really, the only way you've ever done flats is through renting and there's just no legal way to divide a building between a bunch of people. So they, when French introduced rent controls, there are, I mean these quite amazing to go out to the, these communion, the Paris region and you can see blocks of flats that were finished in 1914 and then just like little houses built next door because it became impossible to build flats as soon as the war had had broken out.
And the market just like was completely vaporised for decades. And France, I mean the main effect was a massive dead weight loss because the French housing market wasn't really ready for loads of single family houses, but they did also build quite a lot of single family houses. And the French started to fall in love with suburbia in a way that they, like unbeknownst we never talk about French suburbia, it's kind of unbeknownst to English and American people, but like it is actually a huge thing.
And it did all start through this weird story of rent controls in the, in the first world war. - So the sequence is you have what you are calling kind of early suburbia, which is much, much, much denser than what we would imagine today. That then begins to become even denser as apartments become possible. People begin to be, to get quite upset about that. Then the second, sorry, the first World war hits, and rent controls hits, and then that sort of freezes everything.
And then while the, world is frozen via rent controls or at least Britain and France are frozen by rent controls, this state downzoning also kicks in and means that even after the rent controls are removed, you are stuck or, basically you can never go back to the, to the sort of apartments that you had before. - Yeah, that's right. So what happened in Britain and France, the state downzoning, public downzoning comes in very slowly.
They don't really bother with it in the interwar period because there's no pressure for it. But it kind of comes in almost maybe by accident in the post-war period where local officials say like, oh we're putting a local plan in place, I guess we'll ban putting, you know, turning these, these terraced houses into flats and like it's not gonna happen anyway. But we might as well ban it 'cause it's clearly an anti-social thing to do. That's, there's no controversy at the time.
Nothing's ever written about it, but we notice it when the restrictions, the rent controls are finally removed because in 1980 In the eighties, yeah, eighties in Britain and in France a bit more gradually. - Oh, so the so sorry. So the rent, the rent controls are present for most of the 20th century, right? - Oh yeah. In Britain, right? There are rent controls from the what, 1914? I think so sometime in the first World War, right up until the Thatcher government decon controls it in the 1980s.
And it totally destroys the rental market. Like it falls from being a large majority to or minority of the British stock in France, extremely tight rent controls coming in the first world war and then in the, from the late 1940s, the markets very gradually decontrolled.
They you like, I think maybe you are allowed existing stock stays under rent control, but if you heavily refurbish the property, you can get it out from the rent control and there's various sort of get out clauses and slowly they start to take stock out and there's still some of it's still controlled today, like 2% of the French housing stock is still rent controlled and has been since the first world war. - So what's the situation in places that don't bring in rent controls?
- Basically there's much more pressure for densification and government acts fast to block it using public zoning. That's the state in United States, Canada, Australia, and then even before the first World War, that's what happens in Germany and Austria-Hungary. - Okay, so I predict that almost everybody listening is screaming the word car and you haven't mentioned cars at any point yet so far.
And the traditional story that I hear that I, that I kind of take, I think is widely taken to be the, the real story is you get cars are invented, people suddenly can extend themselves out to much, much further a field and they suddenly can afford to live somewhere that they can have a house and a garden and the kind of low density suburbia that is maybe nicer, maybe safer than cities, but they can still have a job in the city.
And so the car kind of opens up all of all of this land to, to low density building and those people simultaneously don't want those places to be exposed to the sort of inner city building that they've just left. Is that true? Is that part of the story? What's, why are you giving the car such a, a small role in your story? So - I started out thinking that something like that would be true. I now think it's mainly not the story.
The the basic reason to mistrust that is that so much of this process has already taken place before cars come into play. So all these private covenants have spread to basically all elite suburbs and many, probably most middle class suburbs before 1900 before there are any cars at all. So we can see there's lots of demand for it and there are some mechanisms in place.
Public zoning has arrived in Germany and Austria before there are any cars and it's already, you know, it's, I suppose cars are starting to come in in the states in the 1910s and twenties, but like most of the neighbourhoods where zoning is introduced were built before cars had arrived. So cars don't seem to have created the kind of suburbia which originally pioneers either private downzoning or public downzoning. People seem to have already wanted it before then.
I think there's the tech, the transport method which is closer. So here's a, here's a story which I think may be like partly true. So railways create, they do have a big role in expanding suburbia in the 19th century because do make it possible to live in green leafy neighbourhoods that are remote from the city centre but still commuting to the city centre for work. They also have a kind of natural exclusionary structure, which is that they're extremely expensive.
I mean even today, if you take a railway from like Seven Oaks into London, I think it's like a 6,000 pound annual ticket if you want to, that's the cheapest way you can do it. So, like commuting by heavy rail is still extremely expensive now. It was totally prohibitively expensive then. So technology creates neighbourhoods which are like impossible you can't get, you can't live there unless you are very wealthy and those, so those are like a natural exclusionary filter.
And then I think probably the, the technology which breaks that is to some extent the car later on. But earlier on it is the electric tram which is far cheaper than railways and means that the like city of ordinary people can start spreading out and reaching these elite villa colonies, these elite islands of rich houses that have previously only been accessible by railway.
I think like that story of railways creating elite suburbia and then the elite suburbia created by railways being threatened by trams and later on by cars which are more like democratic forms of transport. I think there's some truth in that, but it's not even, that's not the whole story because you find in lots of small towns all around Europe you find elite suburbs developing in the 19th century without any railways being involved. Like the west end wasn't developed through railways.
It developed long before railways. - Everyone used to commute to work via walking. So - Yeah, - Everyone walked an hour from, from their west end house into their city job.
- Yeah, Europeans in the 19th century walked a lot, even rich ones every morning from Belgravia, like a huge flock of top hatted, frock coated men would set out and pour through Covent Garden and Soho and like going to their jobs in the city and then every evening they'd all pour back through the streets and that was, and you would see like even little towns like Shrewsbury near where my parents live like that has its own little villa district.
In Shrewsbury there's certainly no commuter rail around Shrewsbury but, and so that the development of that kind of suburbia I think has more to do with basically availability of capital and like the swiftly growing middle class and it makes it financially possible for a developer to, to a landowner to take a big, a big bunch of land, big plot of area of land and say I'm gonna develop this whole thing as an exclusive residential area and it's gonna be totally different to the kind
of impoverished mixed use suburbia which is existed historically.
Instead this is gonna be somebody's like it's big enough and I can raise enough money to design it in one go and it's going to become a kind of exclusive place exclusive in terms of use, exclusive in terms of social and all these kinds of ... actually think the core mechanism behind the development of suburbia is probably not transport types, it's probably just growing wealth, faster urban expansion and the availability of like easy capital for developers
to do unified development of suburban areas. Once those exist, people try to protect them. - So I have a question for you. What about the places that don't seem to have a great downzoning? So I've looked, I spend a lot of time, I, I spend a lot of time on Google Maps satellite view and I spend a good fraction of that time on Google Maps satellite view looking at Spanish cities.
And my weird impression is that they tend to, the city like Valencia just ends with six story, maybe even eight story apartment blocks and then open field and then like maybe an eight story satellite town. And then open field doesn't seem like there's any great downzoning there. So what's going on there? So - That's definitely true. I don't, I don't have a complete explanation of this.
It's definitely true that the cities of Mediterranean Europe are still structured more like cities in the middle ages were so they have a, the whole city is pretty dense, rich people live either right in the middle or in kind of inner suburbs and then suburban areas are poor mixed use and unplanned. They're like ragged haphazard development of stuff which has been like spat out from the city that there are some exceptions to that and there's exceptions of gradually growing more common over time.
But that's still the basic profile of a Mediterranean city and they don't have, and and in many cases you still find as you say this phenomenon like you get to the city limits and it's six story apartment, six story apartment, six story apartment and it just stops and you have open countryside afterwards, which is the thing which is like almost never happened in the whole history of the English speaking world where no English country has ever had six story flats built
in large quantities on the edge of the countryside. The short, I can give short explanation for why the great downzoning hasn't happened in those places and that's just, they didn't have elite suburbs in the first place. If you don't have elite suburbs then there's nothing to ... the basic mechanism for the great downzoning, which is suburban people demanding it doesn't happen. Why did they not develop elite suburbs That's much more puzzling.
The reason why they didn't in the 19th century is maybe just these countries were still too poor and the capital accumulation hadn't happened. But why haven't they done so since then? I think, you know, we might want to do a Works in Progress article about this.
I have a papier mache theory, but like this is completely conjectural, but my wild theory is maybe if you don't develop suburbia during the railway age, cars arrive and then like these areas around the city are completely democratised and opened up and anyone can build a house there.
And at that point the appeal of suburbia as like an elite zone is lost, and if you haven't established elite suburbs already at that point then you are like path dependently stuck on suburbia being ironically stuck on it being like it was in the middle ages. Like a poor area where like people don't want to live unless they have to.
Whereas if you had the railway age, you had the railway towns then those places and you've created, you get this window where technology created the possibility of having these this socially exclusive suburbia, then the people in that socially exclusive suburbia strive to keep it in being forever. And they're generally pretty successful in doing so because they enlist the state to help them. That's, that's a wild theory but I'm not sure it works and I can see some reasons why it might be wrong.
So I'd quite like us to, to get someone to write about that. - I have another question because, so we had, we are talking here about why everyone inevitably wants to downzone their area if possible and it was imposed everywhere is extremely universal and people try and do it through like almost any mechanism or bear gigantic costs for doing it.
Which, and so does this mean that our project that you and I have been working on for the last five years of trying to upzone various parts of suburbia is now over because we've proven it's impossible. - Yeah, - Historical dozoning is just a historical inevitability. - Like or or undesirable. I mean the like it kind of sounds like maybe, maybe we should just take it on the chin maybe maybe downzoning is just a price we have to pay for people getting what they want.
- Yes. It's, so one key thing has changed since the downzoning happened, which is that the down zoning itself has generated massive housing shortages. In Britain it's a bit more complicated because we have green belts. So the downzoning isn't the whole explanation, but in most countries the downzoning is basically, I mean pretty much the whole explanation for why they have housing shortages. And this is why you can see in the United States housing shortages are very concentrated in big cities.
The places where their already vast urban expansion can't really meet further housing need. What they really need is to densify some of their existing areas - Also they're often geographically ringed in, like San Francisco's on a peninsula. A lot of New York is on islands. - Yeah, yeah, yeah that's, and New York's got national parks around some areas so like in some cases they've got physical constraints on further expansion.
But I think there's, I think, I mean I haven't looked into this properly, but I think there's also an effect that like when a city reaches a certain size, where a further physical expansion becomes like quite an unsatisfactory way of meeting its housing need.
Like if you're out deep in new New Jersey on the actual periphery of the New York metropolitan area and you build a new subdivision, someone in that subdivision, even if they get into their car at 5:00 AM in the morning and drive like crazy may not be able to get to Manhattan in time for the start of the working day. So they actually can't meet the housing needs of the Manhattan Employment Centre by further expansion in Long Island or further expansion on the mainland.
- I mean give an example of that. So you have Houston, which obviously has a famous sprawl city where it's relatively low density in Texas and they have an enormous amount of roads. The going out west of the city is like 16 lanes at one point and generally they flow quite well 'cause they're toll roads. But even in Houston where they basically allow unlimited outward expansion, right?
So there's no overall gap between how we're talking about this before house prices and housing sale costs on the edge of town. There's still a strong push to densify the inner suburban neighbourhoods because they're just such, so much more convenient.
And when you get to the point where like Houston is probably bigger than the urban area of London, if you put them together on a map and it has less than half the population of that overall urban area, when you get to that level of spread, it's just worth adding some more housing in the middle if you can. But sorry Samuel, carry on.
- Yeah, so if you remember when the downzoning was introduced, when it was introduced about the private sector, we are pretty certain that it was increasing the value of these neighbourhoods. The reason why we're certain of this is that it was done again and again and again by profit seeking developers all around the world. It was extremely unlikely they were all wrong about this.
So at that point when you didn't have a housing shortage, the immediate value that you preserved through covenanting or like, you know, the racist preferences that you satisfied through covenanting or whatever it may be, was sufficiently great that covenanting maximised the value of the neighbourhood. It's pretty clear that's no longer true in areas with acute housing shortages.
So in these areas with acute housing shortage, like the great downzoning itself has forced up floor space values so that they're now like it's floor space sells for four times more than it costs to build in these places. And when you see, so that's like one reason why we might think why we might not be so pessimistic about the situation.
It's true that in all countries that don't have tight regulatory constraints on house building, when you start introducing zoning restraints, zoning controls, they probably do increase property prices.
But because those zoning envelopes don't increase over time, you get a housing shortage because you've got a housing shortage, you get high floor space values and you reach a point where the value maximising thing would actually be to upzone the neighbourhood and allow more density which is quite unlike the situation when it was first developed. - And, and you're using total value as a sort of proxy for human welfare or human wellbeing. - Yeah, it's an imperfect proxy obviously. I like it.
- I think it's a good - One. Yeah, I don't like, I mean there are problems so clearly like the financial value ... economic value will weight the preferences of rich people more than it would weight the preferences of poor people. Like a rich, a billionaire's view might count for more than the homes of a hundred people because of billionaire's preferences are like have so much more pricing power than, than people who have no money to, to give effect there.
So like economic value is a very imperfect corollary for, for like social bad social welfare, but like it is at least it's the best, probably the best we've got for aggregating vast numbers of preferences, of vast numbers of people.
- Yeah. It's a way of, it's a, it's a way of people demonstrating what they actually want to happen and how much are you willing to give up for this - The other thing is that if there are distortions that result from any inequalities of income, like those, the distortions will tend to be in fa like will bias us in favour of more downzoning.
If it's the case that building all the flats for poor people maximises economic value, even though it disrupts the billionaires view, then like the poor people must really wanted a lot. - Yeah. - Because they can beat the billionaire with his enormous buying power. - And the the other, the other standard flaw in just taking kind of overall output or overall value as the proxy for welfare is externalities, right?
Like we don't just think that, I don't know, you know, a, a country that mines a lot of coal and then burns it all and makes a lot of stuff, we know there is something missing there, right? There's the pollution and the CO2 and that is part of the story because obviously the story of the great downzoning is one of externalities. You know, you're talking about basically people trying to control negative externalities.
But when you talk about a single area or talk about maximising the value of a single area, this is why the Great Estates worked so well. 'cause they internalised all of those externalities much. They had this, they have been, you've written about this a lot, but you, when you have a kind of single owner, the single owner has a really strong incentive to weigh up all of the externalities kind of within that area. And this is obviously one of the reasons that streets differ in quality and so on.
- And also if we go back to the, the Great Estates in their private zoning, the Great Estates in their private zoning do occasionally upzone themselves, right? So the, the Great Estates are a perfect example of what Samuel's saying, because most of the time they're like, keep it low, keep it low. And then occasionally floor space values rise so high that they think, well, this will be busier, this will be slightly less exclusive.
- Mm. - But we can fit double as many people in here and they really want to live here in the centre of this city, which is a really economically valuable city. And so you can go, you could go right now, you could be like me and go and Google's satellite view of around Chelsea or Marburn and look at the edges of places where there are Edwardian blocks of flats next to Georgian or Victorian houses.
And they have, they'll be in greater state land and they literally have upzoned their own Great Estate land. So that private version of zoning is able to balance it when it actually is necessary. - Yeah. Han's place, probably one of the most expensive streets in the world that was that owned by the Cadogan estate I think. So they, in the 1880s, it was all developed originally in the late 18th century as terraced houses, four stories or something reached at the end of the 19th century.
And the estate owners, when the leases were all coming to their end. They say to us, think actually there's loads of demand to live in Knightsbridge Why don't we just demolish the whole thing and rebuild it at like twice or two and a half times the density. Sure we'll lose a bit of ammenity value because the density will be higher, but we've got two and a half times as much floor space and like people really, really want to live here.
And they did it and it worked. They made it/ They can't do that anymore because the planning system now overlays the private zoning controls by the greater states. But if you remove the planning system, I'm sure the greater states would start demolishing bits of their 19th century stock and replacing it with denser development. And we knew like, this isn't just like us speculating.
We've, there are plenty of international examples where if you give blocks or neighbourhoods the right to upzone, they do it because it like increases the total value of the of the block when they do. So Ben's done some work on the case of Houston here? - Yeah, well yeah. We didn't, we did an article on Works in Progress That was very good. I'll credit Anya Martin for doing most of the work on that. But, but yes, there are many examples. I've seen lots of examples.
My favourite example at the moment who, we've got an article coming in. So I've been reading all these drafts of all these details and I'm one of the few people who knows about all of this stuff because no one seems to go into Korean archives in Korean and look through all the details.
There was this policy called the Korean Dream in the eighties where you could take your neighbourhood that was potentially like a, a shanty town slum on the edge of town because Korea had, had a very high birth rate at the time, funnily enough, and also a very high urbanisation rate. So their cities were growing at like 15% per year or something off or faster than that. And they allowed whole neighbourhoods to opt into up zoning to be allowed to build whatever they wanted, if they wanted.
And at that time, the value for them was no, okay, we is actually better despite the there being more people around, it's still gonna be net more valuable because there's the demand for floor space is so high. And so they all opted in to upzoning. So we clearly can see examples of it, - The question, so like how optimistic should we be?
So the case of pessimism as you lay out is everywhere which has elite suburbia or even like middle class suburbia has downzoning, Like it's pretty much without exception and there aren't many cases of that changing yet. So that looks like quite a powerful argument of pessimism.
But the case for optimism to summarise what we've been saying is all that's true, but the very success of the downzoning maybe has created the conditions for the ends of the downzoning in some places by removing this totally key feature that was there was in the beginning, which is that originally downzoning was value maximising. And now downzoning is massively value destroying in in the places with the bad housing shortage, of course there's still lots of places woithout bad housing shortages.
So I, I'd say like I will be very pessimistic about upzoning parts of, well parts of the United States in the United States or in in Europe, which don't have housing shortages. I think there zoning is probably good, it's certainly economically good for people in suburban areas who, and they, they almost certainly improves their property value.
But in the places where we've got terrible housing shortages, which includes nearly all the great capitals of the world, there we are in uncharted territory and the whole thing, the whole reason that brought the downzoning into being is no longer in place. So maybe we can be more optimistic about what might happen in those places.
- What's the relationship or what's the connection between what you often write about and think about, which is beauty and design and architecture and this, other than the fact that they're, they're all about housing. Like does the, does your interest in the built environment Yeah, I hate that expression, but does your interest in beautiful buildings relate to this at all or are You just interested in cities generally?
- They're definitely related, but they're, sometimes they have a, I mean it's a complicated, intense relationship. So like some, when I first started working on this, I thought great, improving the density of suburbia will tend to create more flourishing, more beautiful places because the classic examples that we have of flourishing beautiful places typically are at like medium or high density or often.
So, you know, I've always loved terraced streets and the kind of old corridor streets and the sense enclosure that you get from that. So I thought, well densification is probably likely to generally make urban spaces more beautiful and that's another reason to be in favour of it. And maybe a reason that's particularly close to my own heart.
Like we've all got this right when we, when we work on policy and we've got our own like publicly our own assessment of the, the stuff that's actually important. And then we have the thing that like kind of really motivates us and that we clearly, if you look at the history of zoning, it's more complicated than that. And part of the reason why down zoning was introduced in the first place was to protect aesthetic values of neighbourhoods, at least perceived aesthetic values of neighbourhoods.
So like people in these 19th century villa districts, one of the classic problem with beauty right, is that you bear all the costs of making your property beautiful, but the beauty of your property is a benefit to all the other plots nearby. And to everyone who goes past it's classic, like totally like pure, like one of the best examples of a, of a positive externality. So the free market with fragmented ownership will normally under-deliver beauty.
And there are, there are fun classic studies about this looking at front gardens, like to take out a driveway and put in a front garden. Your, your net property value goes up a little bit under certain circumstances, but, but not very much. But your neighbor's property also takes a big jump, like maybe larger than your jump because they didn't lose their driveway, they just get some nice flowers to look at. So you've got, you know, classic, classic collective action problem and private zoning.
One of its like totally clear, one of its purposes at the start was to overcome that collective action problem. And public zoning has tended to be less like fine grained on aesthetic questions. Like the private zoners would really fuss over what kind of fence you can have and what colour you can paint your house and so forth. But like public zoning in course terms probably motivated by these aesthetic considerations to an extent.
So there I have like emotional dissonance that urban density, which is good for the economy and good for society as a solution to housing shortages is seemingly bad for aesthetic purposes. The case that really interests me here would be actually the one we've been discussing the case with like greater states.
So what they did, because there was still this one unified owner who was coordinating the densification process, they thought, okay, we're going to redevelop this at higher densities, but we are still going to think about aesthetic values. We don't want to densify one property in our estate in a way which is parasitical on the other properties because we also own all the other properties.
So whenever we identify a property, we'll think really carefully about the fa the massing and the facade and all these kinds of features. And it created these neighbourhoods. Like Hanover Place is an extremely beautiful street. You can see why all these incredibly rich people want to live there. So I like what thinking about this for several years has led me to is the conclusion that there are some prima facie tensions between densification and urban beauty.
And those tensions are obvious and like clearly were one of the things which drove the development of zoning in the first place. But there may be ways if we can get the upzoning right and make it not just like an uncoordinated free for all where parasitical building is allowed and where you get like the free rider problem, aesthetic free rider problem goes like totally rampant.
If there are ways we can, we can counter that then we could get much denser neighbourhoods that were nonetheless beautiful. So what are those ways? Well, where you've got a unified owner, like in the greater states in London it's much easier because there you've got an underlying economic agent who can control what the new development looks like and who's also internalised externalities.
So they care about beauty. The problem we have is like in nearly all places you don't have that because the original landowners have sold the plots into fragmented ownership. And so the freeholder the the free rider problem becomes quite serious. Clearly like part of the solution. Like sometimes you can create the solution just through having a good planning system like that is where you've got fragmented ownership.
The state will step in to provide some of the services that a unified owner would've provided if they existed. - Like what, - Like controlling the design of buildings controlling saying that no, you can't build a multi-story car park there out of concrete or whatever, even if it's the most valuable thing to do for your individual plot because it will still destroy the, the ammenity of all the plots around it.
And the planning system does do that to some extent in, in this country as in all countries. So that is definitely part of the answer. We do have problems there. So like famously planning systems can end up suffering from design disconnect where the professionals who run the planning system have like different aesthetic preferences to the wider public.
So it's a standard like planners and architects are much more likely to be in favour of radical modernist designs, which are quite reparative to normal people. - One thing I often see is buildings where they, they have an old building, there's an extension onto it and the the extension seems to be designed to be like maximally different from the original building as though it's like, I really want to show you that this, this is an extension rather than part of this.
- Yeah. Doctrine of legibility. It's widely, so lots of English planning authorities have this as official or semi official - Policy. They, they require it to look different, - They require it to look different. 'cause they don't want the, if the, if it blends into the original building, it could be seen as a fake extension that was trying to pretend to be part of the heritage Jesus, that would be terrible.
- Yeah. So it's now probably if you had a unified owner, they would be, they would have the discipline of the basically the discipline of the profit motive. Yeah. They'd know this doesn't maximise the value of the neighbourhood and I care about value of the neighbourhood. So I care about the preferences of ordinary people because those preferences drive that value.
Whereas if you are a public authority to some extent you get that through democratic feedback mechanisms, but those are often weaker and like people don't really vote on the basis of the, of the conservation area policy of their neighbourhood. Like they don't know the technical detail, they don't follow that. So the democratic feedback mechanisms are probably quite weak. And so you do get this drift, the design disconnect effect.
And I think that I, that doesn't mean I want to get rid of planning controls and densification. I think they're definitely better than nothing. But that is a problem that you'd have. Ben and I have worked a lot, well you've worked a lot as well on the policy street votes where we look at a way in which like low density streets could vote by qualified majority to go up to like medium densities, marvan density or Paris density.
And there we've always said the street would introduce like strict rules on the external appearance of these buildings. And the idea there is that the street is operating like a, like a democratic version of a greater state. So they, their incentive is to maximise the value of the street as a whole. They want to block free riders because they will suffer if there are free riders.
The free riders will destroy the value of, they want to be in the good bit of the, I mean ideally each person would like to be the one who can be a free rider while everyone else is forced to follow the rules, but they can't do that. So failing that they want to be in the, the positive equilibrium where everyone's controlled by rules of value maximised for the street as a whole - Because that means they individually 'cause the the same rules apply to everybody.
Exactly. So they individually, yeah, that's the best way for them to individually maximise their income. I see. - So that is an attempt to, among other things, that's an attempt to like reconcile the tension between densification and beauty, which is important for me emotionally also is value maximising and also I suspect is very important for like the politics of densification. - Mm. - I don't know, like we don't, there's one question of like how much is the effect on prices on the streets?
But there's a second question, which is what's the effect on the public response to a radical policy like this? And if the first photographs start coming out from the first street votes and the post-street vote developments are like hideously ugly and they get plastered all over the tabloids and over social media, that's like potentially a killer for the policy. Whereas if they come out and they look okay, then that's better.
And if they look great, if people say, wow, hang on, that's, you've made that street a lot denser, but you've actually made it nicer, then you are, you are really looking at like, the emotional response is very different. People will think like, well they're actually making this city into a better place. Let's let's, you know, we should keep trying with this policy and see what happens and maybe we should expand it.
So I think it's pretty important to get this right, especially in places like where places where there's a long tradition of of like caring for neighbourhoods and control over places and people are very sensitive to these kinds of features. - Is there anywhere that does, let's say, kind of beauty and density right at the moment in your mind?
The only, the only place that I know of that I've been to that seems to have a really good land use policy is Japan, but it's not a very, it's it's actually quite nice in its own way, but the buildings are individually in, in a lot of Tokyo for example, not particularly pretty, they're, they're made to be torn down as, as most people know, there is something kind of quite wonderful about being there and the the actual urban form Yeah, makes fantastic, makes it feel really, really good.
But the individual buildings are not, I don't think, are often not beautiful. And there are beautiful parts of Japan of course, but do you think there's anywhere that gets these things, these two things, - Right. I don't think there's any like whole country that is the example. I mean there are, there are a bunch of countries where the urbanism of new developments is typically pretty good. Mm. So Spain and the Netherlands are the two most obvious examples of that.
Quite different, but both quite impressive. But neither of them does that much justification of existing neighbourhoods and even in the good new neighbourhoods, again, it's kinda like in Japan, they're not individually beautiful buildings. They're like fairly ugly buildings that nonetheless create good neighbourhoods because the planning is so good and the infrastructure and so on. There are interesting, there are lots of interesting individual examples.
There's like, which is a, a World War was a kind of a decay post-war social housing estate outside Paris built up fairly low densities. And that's gradually being regenerated at much higher densities like very beautifully and has been extremely popular with local people and is starting to create more and more of a splash internationally. So that like clearly shows how it's done.
And we've got, there are similar like densifying estate regeneration schemes in, in Britain where they've clearly improved the neighbourhood. Like post regeneration estate is like obviously better on the eye than the pre regeneration estate, even though it's two or three times denser. So, so there are success stories, but I wouldn't say there's any country where like the success story has become the norm. - Thank you very much Samuel Hughes.
You've been listening to the Works in Progress podcast. For more go to www.worksinprogress.co.