The Government has made significant progress in its first year of streamlining the planning process and has announced three new towns to be initiated during this Parliament. The goals are simple: build new homes for workers and grow the economy. One effective way to make progress is suburban intensification.
Britain’s towns and cities follow a familiar pattern: a town centre of four- and five-storey buildings largely developed in the Victorian era, after which density quickly drops to two-storey terraced or semi-detached homes.
Yet it is these low-density suburbs that risk being overlooked as an opportunity for new housing supply. Our suburbs are sprawling and low-rise: they contain too few homes and too little local infrastructure. This has real implications for growth and living standards. Such suburban sprawl limits the number of homes within commuting distance of workplaces, increasing commute times and in turn, reducing labour mobility. Ultimately, this worsens affordability because Britain has too few homes where ordinary working people most need them.
Building more homes in our suburbs would help to address this, strengthening high streets and communities through new local infrastructure while helping the Government hit its target of 1.5 million new homes.
The Government is already considering this direction. At Labour Party Conference, Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook explicitly endorsed the ‘principle’ of ‘greater urban, particularly suburban intensification’. If the Government pursues sensitive reforms, it could add homes where they are most needed and revitalise suburban communities.
What is suburban intensification?
Britain has a well-documented gulf between the cost of a new home and the bare construction cost of building that home. An effective way of addressing this gap – by building the homes we need while revitalising local communities – is to intensify our sparse suburbs. The graph below shows just how quickly density drops off in Britain’s cities.
Source: Figure 3, What’s happening to big city density in England in five charts, Centre for Cities.
The typical structure of many suburbs, as well as failing to let them meet the needs of residents, is also out of step with their counterparts in many European countries. London – the UK’s most densely populated city by a wide margin – still has much lower average density than Barcelona, Geneva, Paris, Bucharest, Naples, Milan and Brussels.
Source: Figure 8, Net zero: decarbonising the city, Centre for Cities.
Paris’s high-density core extends far further than London’s. Patches of central London are surprisingly low-rise, and density declines immediately as you move outward. In Paris, by contrast, the built-up core is larger and its suburbs make more efficient use of land, with more homes per hectare.
This demonstrates that there is ample opportunity to build more homes in the suburbs of London and other UK cities.
In addition to better land use, intensifying existing neighbourhoods can improve quality of life. Urban sprawl has several harmful effects:
- Reserving large areas of our cities for low density housing means homes are less affordable in places of high demand as new development must be further from the centre, if it happens at all.
- Sprawl hampers labour mobility, weakening UK growth prospects by restricting labour markets for companies and preventing workers from living in the best areas for work opportunities.
- Low density suburbs cannot support high frequency public transport. This makes for longer commutes and leaves residents isolated and car-dependent.
- Accessing childcare and schooling for working families is more complicated when schools are not within walking distance.
- The decline of the high street intensifies as communities become less walkable and more car-dependent, suppressing demand and local vibrancy.
- The weakening of broader civic life, as sparse suburbs make access to community infrastructure harder.
The current pattern also presents an opportunity. By putting power into the hands of local communities, we can build more homes and infrastructure where they are needed most, with broad consent. Only by building in a popular, place-improving manner will reforms endure and strengthen our suburbs.
Consider Bloomsbury: once a suburb on the edge of central London, its Georgian-era redevelopment transformed it into the townhouses and squares we know today.
More recent experience shows similar benefits. Maida Vale was significantly intensified in the early 20th century and today contains the densest square kilometre in the country. If just 5% of London were to densify in a similar manner, it could provide homes for around 1.2 million people.
Maida Vale serves as an interesting example to demonstrate how intensification need not mean controversial high-rise homes; it can deliver a popular, mid-rise density that improves local communities. But what policy reforms can best enable Britain to strengthen more of its suburbs with popular support?
Renewing our suburbs with popular support
To intensify the suburbs of Britain’s most productive towns and cities, we need to build homes in a way that revitalises communities, wins support from residents and improves places. To this end, there are multiple low-hanging fruit, win-win policy reforms the Government has at its disposal. These popular reforms are as follows:
Make it easier to build granny flats. Learning the lessons from California’s popular support for ADUs in suburban areas, we should empower homeowners to easily build their own granny flats. Strict rules should be set to ensure high quality, green roofs, preservation of a usable space in back gardens and no impact on neighbours. By adopting this policy, Britain could join the increasingly popular international practice of increasing supply where it is needed by giving power to local people.
Let homeowners extend upward. This would give residents the ability to build more space for their families without having to move homes. Britain could expand Haringey Council’s well-received policy of allowing upward extensions in South Tottenham, where over one in five eligible households decided to extend their home. If we are to repeat this nationally, it would transform suburban density with popular support
Allow residents to shape the future of their street. Put power back into the hands of local communities by letting a street decide through street votes. Residents understand the needs of their own street best, so it is right if they are empowered to decide the rules in them too. The efficacy of measures like this has strong international precedent: 37% of all new homes in Tel Aviv have been built through a similar policy, highlighting the local popularity of giving local power to local communities. Street Votes already enjoy wide cross-party support in Britain, and have recently been endorsed in the Good Growth Foundation’s Rapid Reforms report.
Broaden London’s overwhelmingly supported estate renewal ballots. Many estates are ageing, poor quality and low-density. Renewing estates in the suburbs of high-productivity cities with democratic consent would fix this, improving local communities with popular support while adding a vast number of new homes, many of which are council homes.
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