# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bidding wars, rent spikes and eviction threats: Inside London’s growing rental crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tenants face spending more than £2,000 a month to live in one-bed flats in the capital – if they’re lucky, Lydia Patrick writes

# data[].attributes.headline
London house prices: 20 years of changes revealed across the capital | Homes and Property

# data[].attributes.subject
London house prices: 20 years of changes revealed across the capital | Homes and Property

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From yuppies to yummy mummies, and scumble glazing to polished concrete, it's not only London's skyline that has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 20 years.

1. HOUSE PRICES
In 1996, London was just coming out of the recession-before-last. The average home cost £79,000. Today prices have jumped 518 per cent to an average £488,908.

Wages have failed to keep pace with this leap. In 1999 the average Londoner earned £22,487, compared to an average £36,302, a 47 per cent increase. Which means property prices have risen more than 11 times as fast as incomes, locking many Londoners off the property ladder ( sources: Office for National Statistics; Savills).

2. RENTING
In 2001 just 15 per cent of Londoners rented - it was what you did for a few years before you bought a flat.

Now, around one in three of the capital's residents belongs to Generation Rent and many believe they will never own a home (source: Valuation Office Agency).

3. FIRST-TIME BUYER AFFORDABILITY
In 1996 an average first-time buyer borrowed £55,575 and earned £21,575. Today's first timers earn an average £51,000 and borrow £174,000.

Their average deposit is £96,000, which is a tenfold increase on 20 years ago (sources: Council of Mortgage Lenders; Halifax).

4. TRANSPORT UPGRADES
The capital's transport network has spread and improved over the past 20 years. In 1996 the Jubilee line was extended through central London to Canada Water, Canary Wharf, and on to Stratford.

Canary Wharf, back in those days, was very much a work in progress: metaphorical tumbleweed blew across Canada Square at evenings and weekends. Charlie Hart, head of City & east residential development at Knight Frank, was working in Canary Wharf in 1996 but believes it was not until the early to mid-Noughties that the area reached a "critical mass".

Both HSBC and Barclays banks built new head offices in the area, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops started to open, and developers started investing in the first residential towers, notably Pan Peninsula.

"It was the first dawn of a strong and viable high-rise market in London," says Hart.

In the mid-Nineties early adopters who bought in Canary Wharf paid in the region of £85,887 for a flat, compared to £478,000 today, according to Hamptons International, representing a 457 per cent leap.

The 2010 extension of the East London line has worked similar magic on local property prices. In Shoreditch, for example, they have grown from £91,678 to £492,398 over the last six years, an increase of 437 per cent.
1996-2016: HOW WE'VE CHANGED
Then: local councils held all the power.
Now: London has had an elected Mayor since 2000.

Then: Routemaster buses.
Now: Boris Bikes.

Then: developers and councils rarely hired outside architects to design homes, hospitals, or schools.
Now: a "starchitect" name or an up-and-coming practice is seen as an essential expense.

Then: One Canada Square was London's only real skyscraper.
Now: the skyline has changed beyond recognition with additions such as the Shard, Heron Tower, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie. With 250 more towers in the pipeline it is hard to imagine how crowded the skyline might look by 2036.

Then: One Hyde Park had just been granted planning permission.
Now: after a million column inches, homes at this most-prestigious address fetch record prices. One buyer spent £136 million on a duplex. The scheme upped the ante for other developers, who now routinely add lavish health and leisure facilities to tempt buyers.

Then: Kelly Hoppen's "taupe on taupe" style was the look to copy; stencilling and scumble glazing were unaccountably hip, as were squishy sofas decorated with giant cabbage roses and heaped with pastel-coloured cushions.
Now: 50 shades of pale grey on the walls, engineered oak or polished concrete floors, and mid-mod furniture rule.

Reuse content

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How London's property market has been transformed in 20 years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From yuppies to yummy mummies, and scumble glazing to polished concrete, it's not only London's skyline that has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 20 years. 1. HOUSE PRICES In 1996, London was just coming out of the recession-before-last. The average home cost £79,000.

# data[].attributes.headline
'Tower for the toffs': UK's tallest skyscraper and playground of the rich | Society | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
'Tower for the toffs': UK's tallest skyscraper and playground of the rich | Society | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The clocks over the concierge desk show the time in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and Moscow - leaving visitors in little doubt about who owns homes in the Tower, Britain's tallest block of flats.

The 50-storey glazed tube of 214 luxury apartments by the Thames at Vauxhall has emerged as a totem of the London property market's allure to Russian, Chinese and Arab millionaires. The names of some of the offshore companies used by anonymous investors to buy flats in the Tower hint at their priorities: Century Rich International, Capital Yield and Huge Success Management.

Since it opened in October 2013, apartments have sold at prices ranging from £580,000 to £51m. The Tower includes no "affordable" housing and flats go on sale for as much as £2,100 per sq ft - almost three times the UK average for apartments.

Despite critics saying it looks like a nasal hair clipper or the tower of Mordor, from the Lord of the Rings, the prophecy of its architects, Broadway Malyan, that it would "satisfy the most discerning of the world's rich list" appears to have come true. But the fact that nearly two-thirds of the homes have been sold abroad and that only 60 people in a building with enough bedrooms to accommodate 10 times more, are registered to vote, looks set to stoke the already raging debate about Britain's housing shortage, what sort of homes the country is building and who they are for.

The controversial decision by the former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott to grant the Tower planning consent set a precedent for a dozen similar apartment towers now emerging in a mini-Manhattan at Nine Elms, a former industrial area soon to be home to the new US embassy and quickly transforming into London's latest millionaires' playground.

On first impression the Tower is more hotel than home. Once you are past the security gate and the bowler-hatted doorman, the lobby is dressed with black velvet sofas, crystal chandeliers, a 60in television piping out global financial news and a concierge desk.

"We provide the residents with the same feeling they have when they travel to top hotels," explained a staff member, asking not to be named. "You have people with five, 10 apartments all around the world and they come and go."

There is a spa with massage and manicure rooms, a swimming pool and gym with a row of treadmills overlooking the Thames and with views of the London Eye and the Palace of Westminster.

Peter Young, a businessman from Singapore, is one of the Tower's transient residents. He lives here for less than two months a year.

foreign ownership total

"There's not much of a community, people come and go," he said as he waited in the lobby for an Uber car to pick him and his wife up. "It is quite impersonal I think. The staff are wonderful, but I never really see any of my neighbours. I hardly bump into anyone on our floor. Most of these types of places, including this one, are owned by people who don't live here."

Residents can only access their own floors using a special key fob; a £15m apartment occupying the whole 45th floor has fingerprint recognition locks.

On the 23rd floor, another Singapore resident is selling up already. Chong Meng Lai, 71, is asking £2.6m for the three-bedroom apartment he bought in January 2014 for just under £2.1m.

"I used it a couple of times a year and a number of my friends have been guests, too," he said by phone from Singapore where he runs a waste management business. "It was used for not more than 60 days a year. It is basically a holiday home for myself and my family."

Chong Meng Lai. Photograph: Facebook

He is one of the international rich who have several homes around the world; despite his limited use of the Tower, last year he bought an apartment in the neighbouring Riverlight development, designed by Richard Rogers, which features a private club house with swimming pool and virtual golf course programmed to recreate Augusta and St Andrews. He also has a holiday home in Western Australia.

Like all the apartments, his features a "sky garden" - a glazed balcony with glass that becomes opaque at certain viewing angles to prevent being overlooked by the adjacent flats. The kitchen is fitted with expensive but little-used Miele appliances. Blinds can be lowered and lighting dimmed from anywhere in the world using a special iPad that comes with each flat. But even this finish is a notch below the "platinum" specification of the apartments above the 32nd floor.

From its floor-to-ceiling windows, there is a birds-eye view of housing estates on the north bank of the Thames, a reminder of a quite different response to an earlier housing crisis. Stacked in neat lines are the modernist blocks of Pimlico Gardens, a 1,600-home flagship of postwar council housebuilding designed by architects Powell and Moya on the site of bomb-damaged terraces from 1946 to 1962.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Inside the Tower at St George Wharf. Photograph: Rob Booth for the Guardian

Some Tower residents are here all the time. Many are said to be students at London universities, there is a dentist and a doctor as well. But one peculiarity about life in the Tower is the lack of children.

"There are not many families here," the employee said. "You won't find many children between the ages of five and 20. There are students in their 20s, many from Asia."

He added: "There are some empty apartments; people who buy them just to resell them. We have them, but it is really very few."

The block also has its own seasons. In summer, it fills up more with the arrival of Middle Eastern residents getting away from the desert heat in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, while at Christmas it empties.

The Tower very nearly remained on the architects' drawing board. In 2005, the London borough of Lambeth said the architecture was not good enough, it was too tall, and the overall St George Wharf complex of which it was part had insufficient affordable housing. The planning inspector agreed that was it too high and harmful to views of the Palace of Westminster and agreed it should not be built. It was left to Prescott to decide. As he deliberated, the former Conservative education secretary Kenneth Baker warned parliament the plans echoed Aldous Huxley's classic dystopian novel Brave New World.

ownership breakdown

"Your lordships will remember that in the Brave New World the rich and the toffs were called alphas, and they were at the top," he told the House of Lords. "The gammas, the deltas and the epsilons - the proles - were down at the bottom. That is how the development is to be done. In that great tower there will be no social affordable housing. It is all for the alphas. It is all for the toffs."

He continued: "So we have a Labour deputy prime minister, a man who I think would describe himself as a good old-fashioned socialist, giving approval for a tower for the toffs. The other irony is that half of those flats, which will sell for upwards of £1m - probably, the higher one goes, more than £5m - will be bought by foreigners."

Prescott approved the scheme, saying it was a "first-class design".

In many ways, Lord Baker was proved right. The apartments have sold for an average of £2.2m. Thirty-eight are registered to companies in the British Virgin Islands, five in Jersey, three in Cyprus, two in the tiny Pacific republic of the Marshall Islands, two in the Seychelles, one in Mauritius and one in the Isle of Man. It is also a highly stratified place with the richest ensconced at the top, on the occasions they use it at least.

Speaking this week, Baker told the Guardian that Prescott's decision was "an appalling mistake".

"I am very sorry it is happening and [it is] worse than I forecast," he said. "Lots of people have been buying with money they got from somewhere around the world that they want to protect the sources of. It is a scandal when you consider the housing problems of London."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Tower for the toffs': UK's tallest skyscraper and playground of the rich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The clocks over the concierge desk show the time in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and Moscow - leaving visitors in little doubt about who owns homes in the Tower, Britain's tallest block of flats. The 50-storey glazed tube of 214 luxury apartments by the Thames at Vauxhall has emerged as a totem of the London property market's allure to Russian, Chinese and Arab millionaires.

# data[].attributes.headline
VIDEO: London's housing crisis - solve with container settlements?

# data[].attributes.subject
VIDEO: London's housing crisis - solve with container settlements?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Panorama Britains Hidden Housing Crisis Part

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
London's population is rising, money is flooding in from politically less stable countries. not many houses being built. a recipe for vast inflation in prices. The market seems slow in responding, leaving many facing difficult living conditions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sadiq Khan has pledged to prioritise key workers for some affordable housing (Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire)

Sadiq Khan has suggested the introduction of rent controls in London could be used as a blueprint for other cities across the country where housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

The Mayor of London, who is gearing up for the local elections in May, has called for the power to implement rent controls in London, which he told "could be a good template for how to do things across the rest of the country".

London is the epicentre of the UK's housing crisis, with the average asking rent now at £2,219 per month in inner London and £1,723 in outer London. While these rents are down on pre-pandemic levels, they are still unaffordable for many people on low and middle incomes.

But the unaffordability crisis has been spreading to other major cities, including Newcastle and Bristol, which saw the greatest rent rises in 2020. In Bristol, research from Zoopla found that rents in the city rose annually to £1,008pcm. During the pandemic rents have also risen in other cities as people have left London, as well as more rural areas.

Serving as London Mayor since 2016, the housing crisis is something that Mr Khan - who is currently running for re-election - has seen up close. He has long been an advocate for the introduction of rent controls in the capital, despite not having the power to introduce them.

"I'm in favour of the Government giving me the powers to bring in rent controls," he explained. "I think we've got to recognise that London is different to the rest of the country in terms of housing need.

"The average cost of a one-bedroom home in London is more than the average cost of a three-bedroom home in the rest of England."

Mr Khan has also pledged to prioritise key workers for affordable housing in London, known as intermediate affordable housing, which is based on local average earnings and aimed at those who struggle to pay private rents but do not qualify for social housing.

The average median cost of a flat in London is £426,000. This can be more than 11 times a firefighter's annual wage, more than 12 times a teacher's salary, and more than 13 times a nurse's income.

Mr Khan ran a consultation on intermediate housing for such workers in the second half of 2020 in his role as Mayor and this policy has come out of that. Homes provided as intermediate housing would be available at the 'London Living Rent'. This is pegged at one-third of median local household incomes in each council ward. The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom London Living Rent home is £1,050, roughly two-thirds the private market rate.

"One of the things I have recognised from speaking to NHS workers, teachers, people working in the transport sector, shop workers and many other keyworkers who have done an amazing job over the last 14 months and been on the frontline, taking risks with personal wellbeing to keep our city going during the worst parts of this pandemic, is that they may not qualify for social housing because they earn too much.

"But, at the same time, because they rent and don't have enough savings they can't afford to buy. So - if I am re-elected - I will put keyworkers at the top of the queue for intermediate London Living Rent homes."

"We need to keep keyworkers in London," Mr Khan added. "What we can't have is them moving away from London because they can't afford to live here or living on the outskirts of the city and travelling an hour and a half each way. We need them in the centre of our city."

London is where some of the country's most expensive homes are. Due to a chronic shortage of social housing, at the end of last year the number of London households who were homeless and living in temporary accommodation reached its highest level in 15 years at 62,670. That figure accounts for two thirds of England's total temporary accommodation numbers.

"Rents may have fallen slightly in London during the pandemic," Mr Khan explained, "because some Londoners have temporarily left the city [...] but this is only a temporary blip. My worry is that in a few months' time hopefully we will have an [economic] recovery but we will be in the situation we had before."

Mr Khan was given £4.82bn in 2016 by central government to build 116,000 affordable homes by 2022. However, figures from the Greater London Authority show City Hall had only begun building 56,239 as of December last year. There have been obstacles including the lockdowns of the pandemic and, prior to that, the looming threat of a no deal Brexit.

In the year to March 2020, 17,256 affordable homes were started. This exceeded the Mayor's own target of 17,000. As City Hall noted this meant more affordable homes were started in 2019/20 than at any time since records began in 2002/3. Mr Khan's campaign has made much of this achievement. If he wins, he has promised to explore the establishment of a new fund to help local authorities buy back homes sold under the Right to Buy scheme.

Of the homes started during this period, City Hall figures say 70 per cent were at social rent levels, with the remainder a mixture of shared ownership, London Living Rent and other affordable homes. London Living Rent is cheaper than private rent, but it is generally not as affordable as social rent.

Mr Khan acknowledges that what is happening to the affordability of housing in London is part of a national story with other cities like Bristol and Manchester struggling to provide affordable housing too. Until there is enough social housing, national rent regulation via "rent pressure zones", he said, like those implemented in Scotland could help.

In Scotland, local authorities have very recently been given to power to introduce 'Rent Pressure Zones' to cap rent increases for tenants if rent rises are causing problems for tenants or putting pressure on the council to provide or subsidise housing.

"In Scotland everyone was predicting that rent caps would lead to disaster, but it hasn't. What rent pressure zones have done is given power to particular areas to limit rent rises - Edinburgh and parts of Glasgow are good examples...it's something for the Shadow Housing Minister to discuss with respective mayors and leaders across the country."

"I don't think civil servants in Whitehall or politicians in 10 Downing Street are best equipped to know what's happening around the country - whether it's London, Bristol, Manchester or elsewhere," he added.

London is one of the few global European cities without rent control in some form. In Paris, rent controls made a comeback in 2019 and in Berlin, backed by Angela Merkel's government, a five-year rent freeze was also approved that year.

Among Mr Khan's other plans for housing in London if he is re-elected is a plan to set up a City Hall-owned developer to build "genuinely affordable" housing. The Conservative candidate, Shaun Bailey, has a not dissimilar plan. He has pledged to set up Housing for London - a new advisory body funded through the Affordable Homes Programme.

As part of their coronavirus economic recovery plan Boris Johnson's government has introduced measures which favour homeowners, investors and ultimately financial services such as new 95 per cent mortgages and a stamp duty cut. Both have inflated house prices.

"The Government has shown time and time again that it views housing as a commodity rather than a necessity," Mr Khan said. "Instead of obsessively focusing on policies which inflate house prices and push the dream of home ownership further out of the reach of ordinary Londoners, the Government needs to massively increase investment in council, social and other genuinely affordable homes."

Mr Khan sees secure housing tenure and a supply of affordable housing as crucial to the economic recovery post-pandemic. He is concerned about the growing number of private renters who find themselves in arrears because coronavirus has impacted their income. The Government currently has no plan to help with this rent debt and the Labour Party have been quiet on the issue since announcing their policy suggestion - giving renters two years to pay back arrears - last May.

Mr Khan said the Government is "paralysed by cronyism and sleaze".

"What the Government should have done - what they still can do - is amend the welfare benefits scheme to help those private tenants," he said.

"Many private landlords need their rent because they have a mortgage to pay so the way to do this is for the Government to step in and support [renters]. Nobody wants to see renters evicted because of rent arrears. That's why Labour lobbied for and welcomed the moratorium on evictions but, what's it's done, is simply kick the can down the road."
Vicky Spratt is i's Housing Correspondent

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sadiq Khan: Rent controls in London could set a precedent for the rest of England

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sadiq Khan has suggested the introduction of rent controls in London could be used as a blueprint for other cities across the country where housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Across London in 2016, 19,845 homes sat idle; totaling £9.4billion worth of property. The city has a problem with housing - a problem that has a plethora of solutions.

The city in second place was Birmingham, with £956million of property unused; over £8billion less. The problem isn't just that London is under-supplied with housing - something that drives up the already high prices - it's that it's over-supplied with homes that are too expensive.

The causes of this are numerous, and all contribute to the current crisis that has many experts suggesting an equally varied number of solutions.

Mayor Sadiq Khan has stated that,

"The only way we will ever be able to fix this crisis is with a major and sustained programme of government investment in new, affordable housing."

Khan also vowed to crack down on rogue landlords and, perhaps most crucially, foreign buyers who purchase London property to act as 'gold bricks '.

There's an argument to be made that limiting foreign ownership could go towards helping the issue, but developers have said that many projects only get off the ground because of injections from overseas capital.

So what can be done?

Metropolitan Green Belt

The first focus should be the capital's green belt - the huge natural landscape on which building is prohibited.

In theory, this is a noble thing; protecting England's countryside is something nobody would argue against. However, 18% of the land in the Metropolitan Green Belt is classed as "neglected" - wasteland with derelict buildings, rubbish, and unsightly landscapes.

In fact, only 45% of the land is green, and much of it is farmland too harsh for most plants to survive.

A recent study revealed that only 3.7% of the green belt would need to be used to build 1,000,000 homes. Considering the UK needs to build at least 250,000 homes a year, this extra space would go towards helping the issue.

Modular Technology

Modular construction technology is already well underway in Japan, with Toyota claiming that they can build a house in 45 days, and guarantee it to last for 60 years.

UK companies such as Berkeley Homes and nHouse have begun dipping their toes into the technology, with claims from nHouse that they can make a house in 20 days, and then transport and construct it in only half a day.

Naked Housing

Another solution proposed for first-time buyers in London's housing market comes from not-for-profit developer Naked House. Recently subsidised by Sadiq Khan, Naked House plans to construct 22 properties in the Enfield area.

These ultra-basic homes will sell for 40% less than the current average, and bear a minimalist design curated for 'Generation Rent'. Fully compliant with the London Housing Design Guide, the properties don't have partitioning walls or extra fixtures beyond what is necessary.

This encourages homeowners to develop the property themselves - perfect for young people joining the housing market who want to make a house a home.

Taller Buildings

A much more out-there, creative approach to the housing crisis has been explored by property consultancy firm, Knight Frank.

According to the company, London has 23,000 buildings within Zones 1 & 2 that have rooftops suitable for development. This equates to 28million square feet, and the potential for 41,000 new homes.

Knight Frank developed a tool called Skyward that cross-references data from the Ordnance Survey with information on listed buildings, and identified that the value of rooftop-property could be in excess of £51billion. These would not disrupt the city skyline, while making property denser towards the centre of London.

The solution to London's housing crisis is not an easy one, and nor will it be a one-fix-all job. This ongoing conversation is important if housing is ever to become affordable to the millions of people who need it.

Build Recruitment are specialists within the Housing industry. For career advice, current vacancies and introductions to others in the industry, give us a call on 020 3176 4790, or visit www.buildrec.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The London Housing Crisis: Four Possible Solutions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Across London in 2016, 19,845 homes sat idle; totaling £9.4billion worth of property. The city has a problem with housing - a problem that has a plethora of solutions. The city in second place was Birmingham, with £956million of property unused; over £8billion less.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to main content

You are here: Home What we do Housing and landTackling London's housing crisis

Need a document on this page in an accessible format?

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of a PDF or other document on this page in a more accessible format, please get in touch via our online form and tell us which format you need.

It will also help us if you tell us which assistive technology you use. We'll consider your request and get back to you in 5 working days.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skip to main content You are here: Home What we do Housing and landTackling London's housing crisis If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of a PDF or other document on this page in a more accessible format, please get in touch via our online form and tell us which format you need.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
T

here are currently around 250,000 Londoners on waiting lists for council homes as London Councils warns that the capital is the “epicentre of the housing crisis”.

New research from the Local Government Association (LGA) has found that council house waiting lists could double in size by next year as the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic continue to be felt.

The research also found that up to one in 10 households in need of housing are stuck on waiting lists for as long as five years due to a “chronic shortage” of affordable homes.

Responding to the LGA’s findings, the cross-party London Councils group, which represents local authorities across the capital, has called for central Government to use the upcoming Spending Review to “help us build the homes Londoners need”.

Darren Rodwell, London Councils’ executive member for housing and planning, said: “London is the epicentre of the housing crisis. The longstanding shortage of social housing in the capital has driven up pressures and is the fundamental factor behind London’s appalling homelessness rates.

“Boroughs are determined to turn this situation around, but for too long we’ve lacked the resources required to build housing at mass scale. Giving boroughs these resources is crucial for tackling homelessness and will be a major boost to the post-pandemic economic recovery. We’re urging ministers to listen to councils and use the Spending Review to help us deliver the homes Londoners need.”

In its submission to the Chancellor’s Spending Review, London Councils has called for more investment in the Affordable Homes Programme and complete flexibility over Right to Buy receipts so that money can be reinvested into building new homes.

In 2016, City Hall was granted £4.8 billion from the Government’s Affordable Homes Programme to start building 116,000 new affordable homes in London by 2023, 43,000 of which are still yet to be started.

The next round of funding from the programme will see around 30,000 new affordable homes started by 2026 from £3.4 billion of funding.

Despite criticism from City Hall Conservatives over the slow pace of delivery for new affordable homes, Sadiq Khan has said he has spearheaded a “renaissance” of council housebuilding in London, with more council homes started in 2019/20 than in any year since 1983.

Around 12,000 of the 30,000 homes to be started under the 2021-2026 Affordable Homes Programme will be built by councils in London.

Earlier this year, Sadiq Khan also announced the launch of the Right to Buy Back scheme, which would allow London councils to bid for funding from the Affordable Homes Programme to purchase back ex-council houses.

Following the findings of its research, the Local Government Association has called on central Government to provide local authorities with the funding and powers to deliver 100,000 new social rent homes a year to tackle the growing crisis.

# data[].attributes.headline
London's housing crisis: Five controversial solutions - BBC News

# data[].attributes.subject
London's housing crisis: Five controversial solutions - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As pressure to tackle London's housing crisis grows, a number of controversial views are being offered on how the problem should be addressed.

'House prices soar'. 'Fears of a housing bubble'. 'First-time buyers priced-out'. These are familiar headlines to Londoners. Each has appeared in the press in the past month, but similar headlines have become all-too recognisable over the past couple of years.

London's house prices are rising by more than 20% annually, according to latest Office for National Statistics figures.

The city needs 63,000 new homes each year, but only a third of these are being built while a "lost generation is being ruled out of ownership" due to "soaring rents, poor conditions and rising homelessness", it has been claimed.

But what alternative solutions are being put forward to tackle the issue?

Move old people to smaller flats

One in four children in London live in overcrowded homes, according to English Housing Survey figures. At the same time, thousands of single elderly people live alone in multi-bedroomed suburban properties.

In 2012, Local Government Association president Lord Richard Best proposed a radical solution: Building 100,000 homes designed especially for the needs of an ageing population.

By downsizing, older people could free up accommodation for families, helping a whole generation of first-time buyers who are priced out of the market.

"We free up lots of family housing, and we look after ourselves when we're older because, sooner or later, those three-bedroom, four-bedroom family houses are going to be too much for us," Lord Best said.

But how easy would it be to convince elderly people to move out of the home they may have lived in for most of their lives?

Peter Girling, chairman of Girlings Retirement Rentals, suggested the government should offer tax breaks to elderly people who give up their property.

"You can't force people to move but you could help them along the way," he said.

Adopt a European attitude

Perhaps we should just face the fact the golden age of home ownership might be over, and learn to rent like the Germans?

According to the 2011 German census, only 16% of Berliners owned their own place, compared with 50% in London.

"People in Germany or Paris live in rented accommodation for their entire lives and there's no stigma attached," said Patricia Brown, who chairs the London Festival of Architecture.

She said following the example of Germany and enabling people to rent better properties for longer could be a solution. For instance, in Germany tenants can only be evicted with a minimum of three months' notice.

London's mayor Boris Johnson launched a voluntary accreditation scheme aimed at improving rental standards in May.

In order to be approved for the London Rental Standard, landlords are required to meet a set of commitments including "transparent fees" and "improved response times for repairs".

But Labour's London Assembly housing spokesman Tom Copley thinks the scheme does not go far enough.

He suggested three-year tenancies "as standard with caps on annual rent increases" would make "renting in London more stable".

Build all over the green belt

There is still plenty of green belt land within the M25 and Sam Bowman, a research director at pro free market think-tank The Adam Smith Institute, thinks maybe the time has come to build on it.

As of 2010, London had 484,173 hectares of green belt - 3.7% of England's total land area, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Mr Bowman said this would mean "bigger homes and cheaper homes for everybody in order to give people that space to live".

But Ann Goddard, of Elstree & Borehamwood Greenbelt Society, said: "Green belt is very important. You only have to look at the English countryside. It's so pretty."

Ms Goddard, who lives in the green belt in Hertsmere, Hertfordshire - 12 miles (19km) north-west of central London and within the M25 - added: "We need green spaces for recreation purposes and to make a demarcation between the settlements."

Mr Bowman suggested a compromise could be reached "if we stopped thinking of the greenbelt as one single unit and differentiate between the areas of beauty and the intensive farmland".

Penalise owners of empty properties

Perhaps there is not a shortage of homes for Londoners after all. More than 80,000 homes in the capital currently stand empty.

Last year, councils were empowered to use the Empty Homes Premium to charge home owners 50% more council tax if they left properties empty for two or more years.

But the results of a Freedom of Information request published by BBC London last week showed that just 4,399 of the 80,489 empty properties in the capital had been subjected to the Empty Homes Premium.

Responding to the revelations, Labour leader Ed Miliband said he was "deeply concerned".

But Daniel Astaire, Westminster Council's Conservative cabinet member for housing, said: "The way to build homes is not to tax existing homes and stop people investing and buying in our city."

Build on brownfield sites

Building on brownfield sites - land previously used for industrial or commercial purposes - is possibly the least controversial solution on this list.

In June, the Treasury announced 50,000 new London homes would be built on 20 such sites.

But Mr Johnson has said the scheme is a "just a fraction of what needs to be done".

The mayor has said 49,000 homes need to be built in the capital each year, while Labour puts this figure at 63,000.

But developers face problems. Brownfield land is often contaminated and expensive to clean, getting planning permission to build can be a lengthy and costly process and putting in new roads and train links can prove tricky.

But Lib Dem London Assembly member Stephen Knight said what was important was the type of homes that were built.

"We need changes to planning laws, so the government can determine certain plots of land should be used for affordable housing," he suggested.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As pressure to tackle London's housing crisis grows, a number of controversial views are being offered on how the problem should be addressed. 'House prices soar'. 'Fears of a housing bubble'. 'First-time buyers priced-out'. These are familiar headlines to Londoners.

# data[].attributes.headline
Shipping Container Homes: 15 Ideas for Life Inside the Box

# data[].attributes.subject
Shipping Container Homes: 15 Ideas for Life Inside the Box

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The hot trend of shipping container homes fulfills many design desires: living simply, lessening clutter, being environmentally conscious, building a home on a budget and the chance to do something totally modern and different that makes your neighbors' jaws drop.

But there are other practical aspects to living in a shipping container home. Your house is fireproof and low maintenance. You can live in a container home almost anywhere, and lock it up when you're away. Even better, smaller container homes can move with you. Shipping container homes can be modular: You can stack two or three or more as needed.

The Previous Life of a Shipping Container Home

Shipping containers are made of steel and built to withstand weather, heavy stacking and ocean travel. While their lifespan can easily be 30 years, most shipping companies use them considerably less before putting them out to pasture. A typical shipping container work lifespan is 10 years or less.

Because of this, there are reportedly 30 million unused shipping containers sitting around. A decent one can be bought for as little as $2,000.

Shipping Container Home Plans

The standard container measure 8 feet wide and 8 feet 6 inches high, and comes in lengths of 20 or 40 feet. A third option, which may be harder to find, offers higher ceilings; it's called the high cube. A high cube container measures 40 feet long and is 9 feet 6 inches high.

While a shipping container home plan of 150 square feet is really small, the beauty of working with storage containers is the ability to group them to create a bigger space. The 8747 House (above), overlooking the James River in Springfield, Mo., uses several cargo containers.

Shipping Container Home Challenges

Before you head out to buy a plot of land and build your dream container home, you'll need to ask yourself the following questions to avoid potential issues.

Do I need a permit?

You will probably need several. Some areas don't allow residential construction using shipping containers, so check with your local planning department first.

What is the weather like where I want to build?

Insulating a shipping container can be tricky. Bigger issues include extreme weather changes that can lead to interior moisture condensation, and windy areas that can create noise problems.

How am I going to get the container onto the property?

An empty 20-foot container can weigh almost 5,000 pounds. You'll probably need to have it delivered. Make sure a large truck can enter your property easily and place it on site,or you'll have to deal with very expensive cranes to lift the container into place.

What was the previous life of the container?

Buyer beware: The contents of many containers are often sprayed with pesticides for ocean travel. Worse, some shipping containers for sale previously transported toxic chemicals that will ruin your chances of creating a green home. Do your research on the previous life of the shipping container you're choosing.

Will I need an architect or engineer?

If you're making cuts and major changes to your container, it's probably a good idea to consult with experts. The long, vertical walls on a container are load bearing and will need reinforcement if cut out for windows or doors. Planning for electrical and plumbing requires professionals, especially to pass permit and planning requirements.

If this all sounds too complicated, go with a prefabricated storage container home. Several companies create prefab storage container homes for all budgets. HyBrid Architecture offers prefab container homes starting at $29,500. The c192 Nomad model above has a base price of $59,500; it's made from a 24-foot container and has 192 square feet of living space.

While the thought of living in a cargo container house sounds great, certain creature comforts are necessary to make it worthwhile. After all, the goal of a container home is not to make the owner feel like a stowaway in a box.

Here are some shipping container homes that are well designed and comfortable enough to feel more like a home and less like - well, a shipping container. Some ignore the concept of simple, small living by going over the top, but they're stunning and innovative enough to be worth a look.

Studio Arte Nomad Living, Portugal

Studio Arte creates small container homes as perfect weekend getaways or guesthouses. The interiors are modern and vibrant. Plenty of windows and sliders are incorporated to expand the space to the outdoors.

Cargo Container House, California

Set in a beautiful forest setting, this project, designed by Modulus, cost about $250,000 and used six stacked cargo containers. The feeling is more treehouse than shipping container.

Modern Shipping Container Cabin, Colorado

This stunning home by Tomecek Studio goes well beyond a cabin. It houses two bedrooms, two baths and separate guest quarters using a total of seven containers.

Weekend Surf Shack, New Zealand

MRTN Architects designed this container house to be a vacation home that takes advantage of the outdoors. Almost entirely off the grid, the roof is designed to be a water-collection system.

Viña del Mar Apartments, Chile

The firm James and Mau is well known for its innovative container homes. This apartment project is built on a terraced hillside overlooking the city and coast of Viña del Mar. Each apartment has its own outdoor living area with integrated cargo containers as part of the floor plan.

Container Guest House, Texas

This backyard guesthouse by Poteet Architects uses a 40-foot-long container offering 320 square feet of groovy interior space, including a wet bar and bathroom.

Casa Incubo, Costa Rica

This 4,300-square-foot home and work space is made from eight containers. Maria Jose Trejos designed the space to maximize natural air ventilation and light, with windows and skylights throughout to reduce the use of electricity.

Maison Conteneur, Canada

What makes this container home by Collections Dubreuil most spectacular are the interiors. The corrugated steel walls remind you that you're in a container, but the house is designed to be as luxurious as a standard home.

Wood panels add a rustic look to the second level of the home. The homeowner can enjoy a soak in the freestanding bathtub with the custom glass garage doors open to bring the outdoors in.

Jaora Shipping Container House, Australia

This ambitious home by Ziegler Build took 31 shipping containers to build and has more than 6,000 square feet of living space. The master bath above is housed in a container of its own.

Home Contained, Missouri

Debbie Glassberg says she sees homes where others see containers. She built this home from five containers; it has 2,600 square feet of retro-modern design, including environmentally conscious options such as geothermal heating, plant foam insulation, solar power and a green rooftop.

Art Studio, New York

Conceived by architect Maziar Behrooz for a client who wanted an art studio for under $60,000, the minimalist space was built from two 40-foot containers that cost $2,500 each, delivered. The split-level studio is bright and spacious at 840 square feet.

Caterpillar House, Chile

It's hard to believe that such an iconic, contemporary house by Sebastian Irarrazaval was built from 12 containers in order to stick to a reasonable budget. The home's interiors and views overlooking the city of Santiago feels like a million bucks.

Containers of Hope, Costa Rica

This shipping container home was built out of two containers for $40,000 with enough room (1,000 square feet) for the family that commissioned Benjamin Garcia Saxe to build it. The architect hopes to expand his affordable container living project to other parts of the world.

Which shipping container house would you live in?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shipping Container Homes: 15 Ideas for Life Inside the Box

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Collect this idea The hot trend of shipping container homes fulfills many design desires: living simply, lessening clutter, being environmentally conscious, building a home on a budget and the chance to do something totally modern and different that makes your neighbors' jaws drop. But there are other practical aspects to living in a shipping container ...

# data[].attributes.headline
The London skyscraper that is a stark symbol of the housing crisis | Society | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
The London skyscraper that is a stark symbol of the housing crisis | Society | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Russian billionaire whose business partner is a close ally of Vladimir Putin, the former chairman of a defunct Nigerian bank and a Kyrgyz vodka tycoon appear to be among more than 130 foreign buyers in Britain's tallest residential skyscraper.

Almost two-thirds of homes in the Tower, a 50-storey apartment complex in London, are in foreign ownership, with a quarter held through secretive offshore companies based in tax havens, a Guardian investigation has revealed.

The first residents of the landmark development arrived in October 2013, but many of the homes are barely occupied, with some residents saying they only use them for a fraction of the year.

The revelations about the Tower are likely to be seized on by campaigners and politicians as the starkest example yet of the housing crisis gripping the capital, in which too many new homes are sold abroad as investments and left largely empty while fewer and fewer young people can afford to buy or even rent in the city.

The five-storey £51m penthouse with views across to the Thames to the Palace of Westminster is ultimately owned by the family of former Russian senator Andrei Guriev, a well-placed source has told the Guardian. His family already owns Witanhurst in Highgate, north London, the biggest mansion in London after Buckingham Palace.

At 23,000sq ft, the Tower penthouse is 24 times larger than the average new three-bedroom home in the UK. It was bought in May 2014 but has yet to be lived in. As part of a lengthy refurbishment, Guriev is understood to be installing a Russian Orthodox chapel that has had to be carried piece by piece up the elevators.

Lower down is a £2.7m flat owned by Ebitimi Banigo, a former Nigerian government minister. In 2012, Banigo was crowned king of Okpoama, in the oil-rich Niger delta, at a ceremony attended by the then president, Goodluck Jonathan. In 2005, he was investigated by Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission following the collapse of the All States Trust Bank he chaired. He was later named in the Nigerian senate for owing the bank 15bn naira (£50m). He was not charged with any offence.

Tower graphic

Other owners named in Land Registry records include a Kurdish oil magnate, an Egyptian snack-food mogul, an Indonesian banker, a Uruguayan football manager and a former Formula 1 racing driver. About 131 of the 210 apartments for which title deeds were available are in foreign ownership, analysis suggests. Owners from Singapore told the Guardian they spend as little as two months a year in the flats, which are empty the rest of the time. Meanwhile, town hall records show that nobody is registered to vote at 184 of the homes.

The Tower does not have any affordable housing, which has been placed mainly at the rear of the larger St George Wharf housing development at Vauxhall facing a dual carriageway rather than the river.

The extent of the international selloff emerged after the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, pledged to crack down on foreign ownership of new homes, saying he would consider a rule that they must be sold to UK residents only for the first six months of marketing.

"There is no point in building homes if they are bought by investors in the Middle East and Asia," he said earlier this month. "I don't want homes being left empty."

The prime minister, David Cameron, has also complained about the sale of high-value properties in London to people overseas through anonymous shell companies and announced that such companies will in future be obliged to declare their true beneficial owners.

At least 31 of the apartments have been sold to buyers in the far east markets of Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and China; 15 were sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and others were sold to buyers in Russia, India, Iraq, Qatar and Switzerland. About 15 more appear to have been sold to foreign buyers from China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Nigeria.

A spokesman for the developer St George said: "Although some homes in the Tower have overseas owners, it is wrong to suggest that foreign owners dominate the London market. Savills estimated that in 2013-14, non-resident overseas investors accounted for just 7% of the London residential market."

foreign ownership

The developer said 30% of the overall St George Wharf development is affordable housing, with 389 units built in neighbouring blocks. He added: "The range of facilities in the Tower, from a concierge to a spa and gym, appeal to all buyers - UK as well as international."

Forbes magazine estimates Guriev is worth more than $4bn (£2.7bn) and he shares ownership of PhosAgro, Europe's largest producer of phosphate fertiliser, with Vladimir Litvinenko, a campaign manager for Russia's president. Guriev appears to have bought the property through a British Virgin Islands company, Arabella Properties. His ownership of the penthouse has been kept such a closely guarded secret that even the building's managers did not know who owned it. The BVI company that formally owns Guriev's penthouse gives as its address the Jersey office of Opus Private, a firm of advisers promising a service that "exploits every legitimate opportunity to protect and preserve family wealth".

The Guardian approached Guriev's London lawyer, his family spokesman and his company spokesman, but all declined to comment or to confirm or deny the family ownership.

Guriev was last year revealed as the owner of Witanhurst in Highgate, where he has built a 40,000sq ft basement with swimming pool, cinema, gym, staff quarters and parking for 25 cars.

The profile of the Tower's owners is set to raise questions over how far UK residents, facing a housing crisis, will benefit from the neighbouring Nine Elms development where 20,000 mostly luxury high-rise apartments are being built in what has been dubbed "Dubai-on-Thames".

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Witanhurst House in Highgate, which has a swimming pool, cinema and underground car park. Photograph: Marcus Cooper Group

Title deeds for the Tower suggest that in 2014, Vitaly Orlov, a Russian fishing tycoon based in Hong Kong, bought the whole of the 39th floor for £13m. Orlov's Ocean Trawlers company is the world's largest supplier of cod and haddock but has this year been accused by Greenpeace of threatening pristine Arctic ecosystems by fishing further north in the Barents Sea as the ice retreats amid global warming.

Orlov declined to comment, saying through a spokesman that he was "not interested in sharing his private sphere with the general public". The Barents Sea fishery "has been independently certified to the MSC standard ... a well-established approach based on the best available science," the spokesman said.

Another named owner is Sharshenbek Abdykerimov, a former MP and powerful businessman in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. Abdykerimov owns the bestselling Ayu vodka brand as well as a conglomerate of other businesses, and he was recently elected as chairman of the country's national Olympic committee. In 2013, he co-founded the pro-government Kyrgyzstan party.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The London skyscraper that is a stark symbol of the housing crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Russian billionaire whose business partner is a close ally of Vladimir Putin, the former chairman of a defunct Nigerian bank and a Kyrgyz vodka tycoon appear to be among more than 130 foreign buyers in Britain's tallest residential skyscraper.

# data[].attributes.body
Too few homes, in the wrong place

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Too few homes, in the wrong place - Quod

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The second map shows how the number of homes is growing, on the same colour scale. What is striking is how much more evenly-spread the growth of housing is - without the extremes of blue and red. There are areas with falling population where housing has still grown a little, and there are areas with surging population where housing has also grown.

# data[].attributes.body
VIDEO: Small space design in Tokyo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://badstudyhabits.blogspot.com click this link 4 more People living in Tokyo, the world's most populated city, are turning to compact living to overcome the problem of expensive and scarce housing. Some plots are barely two metres wide.

# data[].attributes.body
VIDEO: Shipping Container Grand Designs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Shipping Container Home Design and Construction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Best Car Carage Storage Design Organization Ideas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
45 Shipping Container Home Interior Follow us on: http://homeandgardensinfo.blogspot.co.id/ CREDITS: Music: Clear Day Downloaded it from http://bensound.com/ Follow us on GOOGLE PLUS: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/100507545060165441033 Follow us on PINTEREST: https://www.pinterest.com/Dedewaza/ Follow us on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/Dedewaza Check us out on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/Home-And-Garden-832385310207310 See also my latest videos: Living room Dining Room Ideas Paint

# data[].attributes.body
VIDEO: Could you build a container house in 60 seconds?!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Iconic Residential Eco Shipping Container Homes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For more information, please visit www.containerhouseontario.com (There is a free eBook which I would like you to have if you enjoy Container Homes). Creating this ContainerHouse begs a hearty acknowledgement. To friends who have attended the BoxShops & workshops - Thank you so very much.

# data[].attributes.body
Flat-pack Future?!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pre-built, customisable homes are being touted as a way to help get first-time buyers onto the property ladder.

A far cry from the low-quality post-Second World War prefab houses, new technology means that factory-built houses can be at the cutting-edge of architecture - functional, sustainable and ​generally more affordable than traditional brick.

The Modulhus is one such example. Last week, TV property experts Kevin McCloud, Charlie Luxton and George Clarke awarded it the winner of the Starter Home on a Shoestring competition, run by the National Custom & Self Build Association.

The design consists of a series of "modules" pre-built in a factory, transported on a lorry to the site and assembled within days.

Each module is 15 feet wide by 9 feet high and constructed from 12-inch timber I-beam, so is highly insulated. Plus, there is no need for internal structural support so just about any interior layout can be accommodated, say designers Ecomotive and Barton Willmore.

The modules can fit together to create a standalone home, terrace, or low-rise block of flats, with a standard 710sq ft, two-bedroom home costing from just £49,644.

With possible savings of up to 30 per cent on buying an existing property, including buying the land, this could bring the average cost of first-time buyer homes down to £300,000 from £430,000 in London, and £175,000 from £250,000 nationwide.

NaCSBA's chariman Michael Holmes said: "We have always believed it was possible to build a modest new home for much less than this, and the winning design demonstrates that a comfortable two-bedroom starter home can be constructed on a self- or custom-build basis for less than £50,000.

How to get started
New right to build legislation is already making it easier than ever for the UK's aspiring self-builders to find land.

Plus next month, the Government is expected to release a proposal that will encourage banks to lend to small firms pre-building homes in factories, with ministers said to be hopeful that more than 100,000 custom-built homes will be erected within the next four years.

Financing may not be as daunting as it first seems. "Self-build mortgages aren't so different to regular mortgages," says Holmes. "The amount you can borrow is determined by your income - typically three to four times. Significantly, the mortgage amount dependent on the costs of the project rather than the value."

Custom-builds in the spotlight
In June this year, Bill Dunster, founder of award-winning architecture practice Zed Factory, came up with a similar idea - the ZEDpod concept of cheap, space-saving houses and flats raised on supports above car parks.

His prefabricated pod homes, which measure a cosy 242sq ft, would cost about £60,000 each to build.

Huf Haus, meanwhile, has been creating factory-engineered timber and glass homes since the Sixties. The company produces mainly one-off and thus expensive properties, but their fabulous houses are a brilliant showcase for the possibilities of modular design.
Follow Lizzie Rivera on Twitter @LizzieRivs Michael Holmes will be at The Northern Homebuilding & Renovating Show, November 4-6, Harrogate; and The South-West Homebuilding & Renovating Show, November 19-20, The Bath & West Showground, Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Tickets are £8 in advance or £12 on the door. Visit www.homebuildingshow.co.uk/harrogate or call the ticket hotline on 0844 8740 484 (calls cost 6p per minute plus network extras).
Reuse content

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is this £50k house the future of 'affordable' housing in London?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pre-built, customisable homes are being touted as a way to help get first-time buyers onto the property ladder. A far cry from the low-quality post-Second World War prefab houses, new technology means that factory-built houses can be at the cutting-edge of architecture - functional, sustainable and ​generally more affordable than traditional brick.

# data[].attributes.body
Hot off the press: Prefabicated housing can relieve the pressure!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A CAVERNOUS factory just outside Leeds may point to a shake-up of Britain's construction industry. The building, which covers an area equivalent to seven football pitches, has just been kitted out by Legal and General Homes, a wing of the insurance and pensions giant. In the new year it will start producing pre-manufactured, or "modular", houses. Using ten production lanes and 12 assembly stations per lane, the factory will turn out about 3,000 new homes a year, making it the biggest such operation in Europe. "It will be like a car production line," says Nick Frankland, the head of L&G's modular unit.

Britain needs about 250,000 new homes a year, but has consistently built fewer than 150,000. By producing complete houses which are then delivered to building sites, the pre-manufactured process does away with much of the subcontracting that can slow and complicate construction. Labour requirements are at least 25% lower than for traditional on-site construction methods, reducing costs. The houses are said to be more energy-efficient to run, too. L&G's new Leeds factory, and the future it represents, could be a game-changer, believes Adam Challis of JLL, a property consultant.
Get our daily newsletter
Pre-manufactured housing has had a bad reputation in Britain, based on the poor-quality "prefab" huts that were built to deal with the post-war housing crisis. Modular housing is different, insists Mr Frankland: "It's not flat-pack, prefab or cheap. It does not mean inferior quality."

Yet Britons remain sceptical. A recent study by the Queensland University of Technology in Australia found that whereas 80% of detached houses in Sweden use prefabricated timber elements, and in Japan up to 16% of new houses are prefabricated, in Britain (like America and Australia) no more than 5% of permanent housing has any significant prefabrication, never mind being fully pre-made. Contractors such as Laing O'Rourke produce modular components for housing and infrastructure, but not on the scale that L&G hopes to achieve with its complete houses. L&G plans to invest several hundred million pounds more in the idea in future.

A government-commissioned review of the construction industry's labour model, published on October 17th, suggests that L&G has chosen a good time to start disrupting things. The review, by Mark Farmer, head of Cast, a construction consultancy, is ominously entitled "Modernise or Die". It excoriates the industry for its low productivity, unreliable delivery and fragmentation through subcontracting. There exists "a general acceptance of failure and underperformance", it says.

The report argues that the efficiency of pre-manufactured housing will be crucial as the workforce ages and fewer new labourers come into the industry. And all of that is before Britain's exit from the European Union is considered. About 15% of construction workers nationwide, and getting on for half in London, are foreign-born. "Brexit is the very last thing we need in an industry struggling for long-term manpower," says Mr Farmer. Without more builders, Britain will have to find cleverer ways of building.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A CAVERNOUS factory just outside Leeds may point to a shake-up of Britain's construction industry. The building, which covers an area equivalent to seven football pitches, has just been kitted out by Legal and General Homes, a wing of the insurance and pensions giant.

# data[].attributes.body
Growth in jobs & population vs housing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It is the most common residential road name in the UK, but what is it like living in Station Road in Islington, London?

# data[].attributes.headline
Britain’s housing crisis is so serious that it must be tackled now | Business | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
Britain’s housing crisis is so serious that it must be tackled now | Business | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A boost for childcare in the autumn statement would be a profoundly depressing move. And it will be just as dispiriting if there are new programmes to help low-income families. Not because these measures aren't to be warmly welcomed: it is just that it will tell you that the chancellor is focused on tinkering rather than boldly tackling the most pressing crisis of the age: housing.

Last week saw several heavyweight reports into Britain's housing crisis. The Redfern review, detailing the catastrophic slump in home ownership, told us how real house prices have jumped 151% since 1996, while real earnings have risen only about a quarter as much.

The report by the ResPublica thinktank, out the next day, told us how 1.2 million people are languishing on housing waiting lists in England, while more than 6 million face tenure insecurity and no prospect of ever buying their own home.

Meanwhile the Lyons Housing Commission reminded us last week how, after decades of failure to build the homes the country needs, public concern about housing is the highest it has been for 40 years.

Not that today's millennials need researchers to tell them about punishingly high rents, one-bed flats costing seven times income, and deposits on new homes that take nearly a lifetime to save. The difference now is that the grown-ups accept that action is urgent - not least because they're approaching retirement and the kids have still not left home.

The problem with housing is that to make a real impact, the sums of money required are truly colossal. Britain's housing stock is worth £6 trillion. A billion or two, sprinkled here and there on HomeBuy (2005), Open Market HomeBuy (2006), First Buy (2011) and Help to Buy (2013) has been a waste of taxpayers' money. During the lifetime of these schemes, fewer and fewer young adults and families have been able to buy. It takes tens of billions to actually make a difference.

The standard refrain is that we don't have tens of billions. Cranking up building to the 200,000 units a year most experts say we need as a minimum remains a dream; we don't have the money, the land or the workers to build them. Yet in 1951 politicians - from the Conservative party, no less - set out a plan to build 300,000 units a year, at a time of much greater austerity, and when the national debt was 200% of GDP compared with 89% now.

Harold Macmillan, the wartime minister of supply, was charged with hitting the 300,000 target. Among his requests was for "2,000 million bricks".

Oddly, the Redfern review last week suggested that boosting housing supply will do little to help first-time buyers, and that house prices will remain out of reach. This is unduly pessimistic; a history of British house prices tells you how they remained flat through much of the 1950s and early 1960s, precisely when supply was at its most vigorous - around 400,000 units a year at its peak. We knocked out just 140,000 last year.

Finance is cheaper than the 1950s, with even Brexit failing to disrupt the government's ability to borrow at historically low levels of interest. The money markets are awash with investors happy to accept returns of 1% or 2% a year; housing associations and local authorities are desperate to build both private and public housing. We urgently need to break this logjam, and if not now, then when? Never has there been such near-universal acceptance of the need to act.

But while funding is the most important issue, it's far from the only one: what do we do about planning permission, the green belt, new towns, developers' land banks, inefficient building methods, minimum space standards and reviving the small and medium-sized housebuilding sector? And the type of housing we build is as important as the volume.

Crucially, we need a vision. What we'll find out this week is whether Hammond has inherited the one-nation instincts of Macmillan, or the dreary austerity of Osborne.

Central bankers fight the brickbats

Janet Yellen is going nowhere. She will serve out her full term as chair of the US Federal Reserve. At least that is what she said in her first remarks since the upset that handed the US presidency to Donald Trump - a man who was openly critical of the Fed on the campaign trail and said he would replace Yellen when her term expired.

But Yellen made it clear she would not be cowed into an early exit - and she also stood firm on the Fed's intentions to raise US interest rates soon, to reflect an improving jobs market and rising inflation.

This is the latest showing of central banker defiance in the face of political meddling. In the UK, policymakers at the supposedly independent Bank of England have been defending their role after prime minister Theresa May broke with protocol and talked about "bad side-effects" from low interest rates and quantitative easing. The Bank's governor, Mark Carney, seemed unimpressed, commenting days later: "We are not going to take instruction on our policies from the political side."

Downing Street apologised, insisting that May had not intended to attack the governor. But her comments prompted open criticism of Threadneedle Street and Carney from senior Tories and sparked a debate over the Canadian's future at the Bank.

Last week it was deputy governor Ben Broadbent's turn to fight the Bank's corner, as he argued that low rates had not driven up inequality.

It's a similar story in the eurozone. Amid nervousness over the rise of anti-establishment movements, the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, has been forced to fend off accusations that it is partly to blame. Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said rock-bottom interest rates were hurting savers and fuelling rightwing nationalism.

It has been open season on central bankers and experts in general this year. But if and when Yellen is forced to remind President Trump that central bank independence is not a matter for debate, she will be in good company.

Asda needs more than price cuts

Walmart-owned Asda has just revealed its ninth consecutive quarter of declining sales as German discounters Aldi and Lidl eat its breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Asda's new boss, Sean Clarke, insists the grocer's fortunes are on the turn as carefully targeted price cuts and a decision to put more staff in stores begins to bring back shoppers. Year-on-year sales are now down "only" 5.8%, rather than the 7.5% of three months ago.

Tesco has shown it is possible to win back customers by sorting out the basics - like better service and lower prices on everyday items from bread to apples.

But Tesco has always traded on broad appeal. Asda's historical focus on price gives it a much harder job. It is already the cheapest of the major grocers, but is the worst performing by a large margin. It needs to be smarter and more inventive, and put some excitement back in its stores. It needs bigger ideas than just price cuts.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Britain's housing crisis is so serious that it must be tackled now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A boost for childcare in the autumn statement would be a profoundly depressing move. And it will be just as dispiriting if there are new programmes to help low-income families. Not because these measures aren't to be warmly welcomed: it is just that it will tell you that the chancellor is focused on tinkering rather than boldly tackling the most pressing crisis of the age: housing.

# data[].attributes.body
Children play as residents look from their window at the container settlement shelter for refugees and migrants in Zehlendorf district in Berlin, Germany. Locals, many of them retirees, come to the shelter regularly to help the refugees and migrants

# data[].attributes.headline
Floating homes: a solution to flooding, crowded cities and unaffordable housing

# data[].attributes.subject
Floating homes: a solution to flooding, crowded cities and unaffordable housing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a timber-clad house with open-plan living, pale floorboards and large windows giving views across Chichester canal. This building designed by London-based Baca Architects has a unique feature - it floats.

Completed this month, the amphibious house was developed as a prototype by Baca and Floating Homes, a manufacturer specialising in flood-resilient housing, in response to a competition launched last year to find a solution to London's housing crisis.

The house is intended to be practical, affordable (a two-bed unit will sell for £200,000) and equipped to deal with floods, by rising with the water levels. Ultimately the company wants to unlock redundant waterways by building on "bluespace" sites - manmade docks, canals and marinas - across London.

"Collectively, bluespace has the potential to deliver as many as 7,500 floating homes with minimal disruption to existing communities", says Richard Coutts, director at Baca Architects.

Floating architecture has real potential to help ease some of London's housing problems, says Alex De Rijke of dRMM architects, which won a competition to design the UK's first floating villages in London Docklands.

"Architecture can only respond to overpopulation by addressing the questions of density, economy and speed of construction," says de Rijke, "The space of large rivers in urban areas can offer answers to these questions."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Aerial illustration of DRMM's Docklands project. Photograph: Jason Hawkes. 3D visualisation by Persona - id

Architects and city planners across the world are starting to look beyond the traditional confines of the city, towards building on water as one of the answers to reducing inner-city population density and also developing flood-resilient designs. Global damage to cities from flooding could amount to $1tn a year by 2050 if no action is taken, according to a World Bank report.

Floating architecture is nothing new. Traditional floating villages are common in deltas and along the Mekong river in south-east Asia. But integrating age-old designs into a modern city is a different matter entirely.

Some cities are further ahead than others. IJBurg is a collection of floating houses built on six artificial islands on IJ Lake in Amsterdam, designed by Marlies Rohmer. It was conceived to deal with the city's critical housing shortage problem as well as its vulnerability to flooding - more than half of the Netherlands is at or below sea level.

The housing is a mix of expensive waterside condos and social housing, with about 30% of the community's 18,000 houses allocated to low-income residents. When complete, the development will provide homes for 45,000 residents on 10 islands.

In Copenhagen, architecture firm Urban Rigger has unveiled floating student housing made from end of life shipping containers. Each Urban Rigger has 12 studio apartments which share a courtyard complete with a BBQ area, bike racks and a kayak landing, and is powered in part by solar energy.

Tethered to docks in the city, the first students are due to move at the end of the year and will pay around £500-£600 a month. Over the next decade, the company plans to build 1,000-1,500 containers in "harbour, canal and river intensive cities" across Europe, says founder Kim Loudrup.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Urban Rigger floating housing. Photograph: Urban Rigger

It's about "using infrastructure that's not being used for anything apart from looking nice", says Loudrop, who admits floating housing is "only part of the puzzle" when it comes to solving city housing crises. The beauty is, he says, that this kind of housing "can be initialised and utilised immediately; it comes in, stays for a period of time and then can move away again."

Building on water isn't straightforward, however. The recent collapse of the Makoko Floating School in Lagos, one of the most famous examples of floating architecture, shows some of the complexities.

The award-winning lagoon structure designed by Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi of Dutch studio NLÉ Works was built to provide a school and community centre to a floating slum in the city but collapsed in June after heavy rainfall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Local residents work to dismantle the Makoko Floating School after it collapsed. Composite: Reuters

Adeyemi says that the building had been decommissioned for months and was only intended as a prototype. But it led to a row as a local headmaster, Noah Shemede, raised concerns about the viability of the structure.

There are also environmental concerns. The need for foundations of many floating buildings to go deep into the river bed, for example, will have an impact on the environment, says Phillip Mills, director of the Policy Consulting Network, and a specialist in water construction.

"Foundations or structures within the river could also alter the river bed with silt erosion and deposition elsewhere in the river. The same thing already happens around bridge piers," he says.

Building floating structures can also severely alter the flow of a river such as the Thames and disrupt transport, a spokesperson from the Port of London Authority explains. "What might suit property owners or private developers best is not always best for the city. Londoners have said they want to see the Thames used predominantly for transport or leisure. Any structures in the Thames could impact the flow of the river and create obstacles for watercraft."

However, Lucy Bullivant, adjunct professor of history and theory of urban design at Syracuse University, thinks there are greater environmental consequences building on land - such as the tendency to be more car focused - than on rivers. "Floating designs will create a good anchor point for plants to help foster biodiversity and create habitats for fish and birds."

Building on bluefield sights can be environmentally friendly, according to Mark Junak, director of Floating Homes. He says floating structures such as those at Noorderhaven in the Netherlands have recently been subject to underwater drone surveys to observe whether their construction has negatively affected the ecosystem.

According to the research project, the underwater footage "revealed the existence of a dynamic and diverse aquatic habitat in the vicinity of these structures, showing that floating structures can have a positive effect on the aquatic environment".

For London architect Carl Turner, who has designed a pre-fabricated, open-source amphibious house specifically designed to float on floodwater, called the Floating House, climate change means needing to work with water.

"You either protect the house or protect the land," he says. "Creating large-scale flood protection zones is expensive and in itself potentially harmful to the environment. Once breached, homes are left defenceless, as opposed to floating homes that can simply rise with flood waters."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Floating homes: a solution to flooding, crowded cities and unaffordable housing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a timber-clad house with open-plan living, pale floorboards and large windows giving views across Chichester canal. This building designed by London-based Baca Architects has a unique feature - it floats. Completed this month, the amphibious house was developed as a prototype by Baca and Floating Homes, a manufacturer specialising in flood-resilient housing, in response to a competition launched last year to find a solution to London's housing crisis.