Friday 7 November 2014


6: NOVEMBER 7th 2014 - “COMMUNITIES FAMOUSLY HAVE A REPUTATION FOR ASKING FOR THE EARTH!”

This blogsite is not open for comments, but please contact me on smdhill@gmail.com if you would like to continue the discussion.

So said the chief executive of one of London’s largest housing associations, at a conference yesterday on estate renewal in London. ‘So unlike ‘normal’ people, or me, who are so selfless to want less than the best for themselves,’ is the speaker’s implied message. In forty years of working in housing and estate renewal, I have never met these unrealistic ‘communities’, but I have worked with many wonderful citizens, who give years of their lives to be the voice of their community in regeneration, for free, while all around them are paid handsomely.

I’m sort of speechless…with rage…at the duplicitous condescension and double standards implicit in this statement, that are sadly more common in the world of housing ‘providers’ than they ought to be. ‘There, there, we know what’s good for you. We take the big decisions, but we’ll indulge you in the layout of your homes’, as indeed the speaker then outlined. Different bath fittings? You can have them. Thank you.

I’m doubly upset, of course, as this assertion was a direct challenge to me. The conference chair invited me to make an impromptu contribution to this panel discussion. 'Are there examples of estate renewal being used to achieve good outcomes that benefitted estate residents, the surrounding community, the local authority as well as the development partners: for the common good?' My advocacy for the merits of ‘coproduction’ clearly fell on one pair of deaf ears. I would only say in support of my view that it is based on the experience of working on 127 estate renewal projects in my professional lifetime. (I only know this number as a prospective client once challenged me ‘Well, how many estate renewal projects have you actually worked on?’) In my top ten schemes that achieved this elusive goal of the common good, every single one was the result of coproduction, in which power and responsibility was shared equally amongst citizens, the council and commercial and social housing providers. No exceptions.

The fact that such condescending and damaging ideas still have any currency is due to the fact that they are shared and given house room by some local authorities. As one senior planner once told me: “My housing colleagues would always say how difficult it is to get people from the community to agree what they want. They don’t really know. The best that they [the officers] hope for is that they [the community] end up thinking that it [the council’s proposal] was their own idea.”


Thankfully on the evidence from the floor of the conference, this is an attitude held by a diminishing number of councils. The conference concluded with London’s Deputy Mayor for Housing praising the virtues of the 200+ home Brixton Green community led housing project at Somerleyton Road, and echoing the call throughout the day for ‘The Holy Grail …affordable intermediate market housing’…exactly what Community Land Trusts have been delivering, unsung and sometimes resisted, for over a decade.

Coproduction and affordable intermediate market housing are evidence of what citizens can do, and what they really want. This is their ‘asking for the earth’. This is their response to the obvious question that we all…that is communities and normal people alike…think about every day…and this is where my originally planned blog really begins…
  



THE SCOTTISH QUESTION: HOW SHALL WE LIVE?
CITIZEN LED HOUSING AND THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF POLITICS OF THE COMMON GOOD


To mark the start of the two year Urban CLT Programme, in partnership with the Oak Foundation, I was asked, as a National CLT Network Board Member to share emerging ideas from my forthcoming Churchill Fellowship report ‘Property, Justice and Reason’. This blog examines why citizen action through CLTs should be seen as sign of frustration with the politics of today, and an opportunity to think afresh about the relationship between the citizen and the state. The next blog will look at how this could be operationalised in relation to the affordability of all housing and the use of public and private land for the common good.


A shorter and politer version of this blog on http://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/StephenHillBlogNov2014. The views expressed are my own, and do not represent the views of either the National CLT Network, or the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.


This weekend the country will pause to consider the cost and the legacy of the First World War. Four years of fighting  and the post-war settlement at Versailles shaped the modern world as we now experience it. One of the casualties of that period, now forgotten, deserves fresh attention: the radical pre-war land reform agenda lost in the turmoil of modern warfare, but now reclaimed by citizens 100 years on.

 It’s 1907, April 20th: a large and well-to-do audience is assembled at the Drury Lane Theatre. They wait expectantly to hear what a young celebrity has to say:

“There are only two ways in which people can acquire wealth. There is ‘Production’ and there is ‘Plunder’. I have never used that word before. Production is always beneficial. Plunder is always pernicious, and its proceeds are either monopolised by the few, or consumed in the mere struggle for possession. We are here to range defiantly on the side of Production, and to eliminate Plunder as an element in our social system…

We have to face all the resources of a great monopoly, (land), so ancient that it has become almost venerable. We have against us all the money power. We have to deal with the apathy and levity of all sections of the public.”

Modernise the language, and this could be London and the South East today: extraordinary inflation and speculation in land and housing markets at every price point, driven by the accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy, a public policy definition of ‘affordability’ absurdly and incompetently linked to 80% or indeed any % of market value, and the acquiescent acceptance by existing property owners of their effortless enrichment by a market that has visibly damaging social and economic consequences for those not already on the ‘property ladder’, not to mention for the nation at large.

Our 1907 speaker is not radical Keir Hardie or Ramsay MacDonald, founding members of the Labour Party, but a very junior Liberal Minister, of a rank that today is never seen or heard, and would be of no consequence in the political hierarchy: a minor Under-Secretary of State…for the Colonies… Mr. Winston Churchill.
What would his elegant society audience have made of this broadside against…people like them? More to the point, what would we make of any politician who today delivered such a courageous speech in the national interest against the self-interests of his own property owning kind? Mansion tax is not in the same league as Churchill’s proposition: an economically illiterate and populist soundbite of a policy that will devour political capital and generate paltry revenues.

This speech was certainly not populist, nor an ‘off-message’ aberration, but part of a carefully researched and promoted set of political ideas culminating in the 1909 People’s Budget. The Budget contained proposals for a tax on land development profits, and for annual land value taxation: both considered essential to help eradicate the structural causes of poverty, not just moderate its effects. Later, as President of the Board of Trade, Churchill was to introduce the Minimum Wage and Labour Exchanges, also tackling causes not symptoms.
As Churchill set out in his campaign leaflet for the 1910 general election, ‘The People’s Land’: “It is quite true that unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned and undeserved profit which individuals are able to secure; but it is the principal form of unearned increment which is derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but which are positively detrimental to the general public.” In 1909, the Liberal Government had already passed legislation to give councils powers to make new housing schemes, and to buy the land for them, at existing use value, thus eliminating any speculative uplift in land price.

These economically sound land reform measures were doomed. In the inevitable compromises to get the Budget passed with the land owning members of the House of Lords, they were abandoned. The war intervened and diverted the Liberal government from its extraordinary programme of social and economic reforms. It was an historic lost opportunity to create a long lasting public policy framework for stable housing and land markets. 

We are still living with the consequences. The present extreme structural inequalities in wealth distribution, caused by the absence of effective fiscal policies relating to property ownership of all kinds, are all there in Churchill’s analysis. Nothing has changed, except the development of extraordinary computing power to commodify any kind of property asset, opening the door to the culture of gambling that has turned development land and property into the world’s speculative commodity of choice.
 
But Churchill forgot, as our 21st century politicians continue to forget, that big political ideas are not just their prerogative. Politicians have to govern with the consent of the people; if they are wise, they govern not just with consent but with the citizens’ direct participation in political action.
In his architecture for social justice, Beveridge envisaged a welfare state of ‘private action for social advance’, that was never understood or adopted by politicians or civil servants. Governments of the left and right have never taken the bold leap of letting go of power to liberate the agency of citizens in tackling the wicked problems of modern political life. Governments have lost, because they have become victims of their own self-belief that they alone have the capacity to make policies or to do things for people. And the people have lost, because they can now see that their politicians don’t have the power to do anything that really matters in the modern world, except to fiddle at the margins with tax rates, public service contracts, or parliamentary expenses.

Brighton and Hove CLT looking at the opportunities for a
citywide citizen housing initiative with the City Council on
its urban fringe sites 
And yet, pressed against the hard face of a housing market that cannot offer what they need, citizens are taking action for themselves and reviving the radicalism that infused the Theatre Royal in 1907, and enabled the Liberal government to be re-elected not once but twice in 1910. To do this, they are turning to Community Land Trusts (CLT). In hot market areas, citizens are looking for homes in which the speculative value of land has been extracted and tamed. They want to live in homes that will also be permanently affordable to people like them in the future, at prices determined by what people actually earn. In cool markets, in cities with more homes than people wanting to live in them, citizens are deciding to stay put and are using CLTs to proclaim and reclaim the value of their communities. In both situations, these are the choices of citizens that the state could never make happen on its own,
and does not even dare offer.
 

Granby4Streets CLT reclaiming the streets, Liverpool
For the local or national state, sharing political power with citizens is not a zero sum game. Using the agency of citizens to achieve what politicians cannot, does not diminish their electoral legitimacy. Instead, it enables them to get things done that they had never dreamt were possible.

The London Citizens’
London Living Wage campaign is now regularly endorsed and promoted by local and national politicians, but would have been undeliverable by mainstream political action. Through community organising, ordinary citizens created the space for political action. Generation Rent, also based on the principles of community organising, is mobilising private renters for the general election in over a 100 marginal seats where private renting is now the largest form of tenure to raise the voice of a group not often heard within the political mainstream.

Rural CLTs have already shown what they can do in housing markets that were damaging their communities. Citizens, land owners, councils and housing providers achieved together something that none of them could have done alone.

In urban areas, progress has been hard won. The battle for political airtime, resources and territory is much more contested. Amongst local authorities and housing providers, there can be puzzlement and even resentment that citizens should be trying to plan and deliver their own developments. “Who are you? Why are you trying to do this? We do this…we provide housing for you.”

Then, there is always that crucial question that might seem legitimate, but is often mistaken when used with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of citizens trying to provide for themselves. “What community do you represent?” where the word ‘community’ is being used to define ‘otherness’, and to diminish and marginalise the importance and validity of what is being attempted: those unrealistic and unreasonable communities asking for the earth, again.


So, the right answer to that question is ‘We don’t represent anyone. We elected you to represent us. We are just ourselves: the community, citizens, acting to house ourselves and lead a normal life, here in our part of the city.’ Citizens can unlock the radical changes that politicians may want to achieve, but would never manage alone. The agency of the citizen can empower the state to do the right thing for the common good.

The National CLT Network’s two year Urban CLT Programme, starts today. Eleven urban CLTs in towns and cities, in widely differing housing markets, all over England and Wales, will show how much more is possible when citizens take the initiative, and take back the rights to the city, and the right to live a normal life. Next year, there will be funding for a second cohort of nine more urban CLTs. 

To quote the East London CLT “Buy or rent a CLT home, and live a normal life, in a well-connected place with neighbours you know, free of unnecessary debt, and money left over for energy, food, clothes, transport, school trips and other stuff you can buy in shops, supporting your local economy and community.”

It doesn’t seem much to ask. How did it become so difficult? Think back to 1907…

“Plunder!”




Thursday 15 May 2014

5. MAY 8th 2014: MORE WISDOM FROM THE CAB



The Hat
I’ve just worked out that all these conversations have been prompted by questions about my hat! Champlain Housing Trust very kindly gave me a hard hat after my visit to them, as a ‘present’…which I have grudgingly carted around ever since, with it regularly getting in the way in cramped lifts, crowded buses, restrooms; but then I probably wouldn’t have had these conversations…

“I live in a trailer home about 9 miles out of town, and I’ve been doing this job, since I left the service six years ago. I was in the 82nd Airborne…a volunteer paratrooper. I seen some action in a lot ‘o places you’ll have read about.

But this is the best I can do right now. It’s quite different from when my pa came home after the Korean War. He could get a decent job, with enough pay to buy hi’self a house, pay for things for me and my sister, and such. Not now. I know a lot of normal folks like me, families too, who are just getting by, or, well they need stuff like food stamps, but often they won’t go for them. They’re too ashamed.

This ain’t the country I was brought up in, and I jus’ don’t like what’s happening to my country. This town used to be so busy with the tobacco factories. You’d smell tobacco everywhere in town. But that’s all gone, mostly abroad, like most of our manufacturing industries. They just went and nobody seemed to think there was anything wrong. Now, them factories are condos, artists’ studios, fancy restaurants, offices. They sure look nice, but…

Downtown is getting a lot of money, mostly for the good, but there aren’t jobs for ordinary folks like me. I only stay close as my old folks need someone nearby, but when they’re gone, what’s to keep me here. Being rootless in your own country is a mighty strange feeling.

It’s all about capitalism, of course. Now I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t think capitalism is a good thing. It is. It’s been responsible for some important changes, but…well…there’s a very fine line between capitalism and greed. Isn’t that right?

Those executives of big companies have a fine opinion of themselves, and what they are worth, and the politicians seem to share that fine opinion. But they don’t seem much interested in investing in their own country. They looking after themselves OK, but the rest of us don’t matter much. When ordinary Americans start to think that, that’s a sad business.

As I said, I don’t like what’s happening to my country…to my life.”

Stephen Hill May 8th on the airport shuttle at 4.30am from Durham to Raleigh Airport, North Carolina

Monday 5 May 2014

4. MAY 4th 2014: THE WISDOM OF CAB DRIVERS

(In this conversation, I’m getting out of the way, and let the cab driver speak…as he did, for nearly 20 minutes after I told him about why I was in the USA…this is just what he had to say on the subject of banks and mortgage lenders.)


Banner at the offices of City Life Vide Urbana, Jamaica Plain, Boston
“B-A-N-K is a four letter word. They got you every which way, every aspect of your life. Mortgage companies, they’re a law unto themselves. They ain’t interested in you. They’re just in business for the stockholders, to squeeze the last drop of youse, and if you go bust, and lose your home, that’s just a bonus for them.

They was the first in the queue with the beggin’ bowl for the $700m bailout, to mend the crash that they had created! Obama, he didn’t really have a choice. It had to be done, ‘cos the banks they’re into everything. We just couldn’t do without ‘em.

People in my family lost their home. Notice came on January 1st, be out by the 31st. Ain’t nothing they could do. You think owning your home is a good thing, brings security and ease o’ mind. But it often just brings trouble, and you ain’t really any more in control of things than if you renting.

I own my home, and I’m lucky. I gotta bank that behaves itself, heh, heh. If I could afford it, I’d like a beach house to take the family, but when you see…who was that Enron guy…he had 12 homes. I mean what can you do with 12 homes? You can only be in one at a time. OK, allow the man a beach house, that’s fair; but that’s still 10 homes sittin’ empty. There are plenty o’ folks like him.

The mortgage companies, they’re so powerful, no one can touch them. They’re like the big pharmaceuticals, and the NRA!”

Stephen Hill, taxi ride from downtown Richmond Virginia, to Staple Mills Railroad Station May 4th  


Post Script from Sir Josiah Stamp, Civil Servant, Industrialist, and Director and President of the Bank of England during the 1920's:
"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with the flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. Take this great power away from the bankers and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and to control credit."


 

3. MAY 1st 2014 - CHANGING LIVES FOR REAL

Just under 40 years ago, I met an academic from Nottingham University, who to my young eyes already looked a bit over the hill and with all the delightful eccentricities of someone who lived in another world. He had come to the north London council of Haringey in the summer of 1976 to try out ‘The Game’ on a unique experiment for then and now: council housing tenants were invited to volunteer to form a tenant management cooperative, and commission their own new build scheme to their own design for their own self-management. The then Housing Minister was Reg Freeson, for the Cooperative Party. It seemed an obvious thing to do.

‘The Game’ was based on a large scale map of an area, and small cards with hand written words or pictures describing all the ingredients of the everyday life experience of your home neighbourhood… dog mess, litter, local shop, park, beautiful tree, kids hanging around, nice neighbours, noisy neighbours, traffic noise and so on…and plenty of blanks for people to fill in other things that they liked or disliked about where they lived, and then what they would like to see.

As the room was set up, you could see the puzzlement of both residents and the professionals. A game? With childlike picture cards? What has this to do with ‘design’? But it hardly took a moment for one of the residents to speak up and tell a story about something that had happened to her, and then another story followed. ‘Now put your card on the map, and see if anyone else has had a similar experience in that place’, instructed the academic. In about five minutes, the room was full of noise and laughter, with cards piling up in hotspots where many had had a similar experiences, and odd outliers with a unique story that quickly built a comprehensive picture of all the ordinary and extraordinary things that happened in this place.

And that, of course, was the trick, the neatest simplest trick about ‘The Game’; everyone can tell stories. Lay people and professionals both tell stories in pretty well the same way. Telling stories about your life and where you live provides rich material that both binds future neighbours together with a shared story of place, and gives designers insightful information about the context for their design, as well a foundation for understanding their many clients.

At this time, Oscar Newman’s theories about ‘defensible space’ were gaining widespread currency amongst architects and planners. You might even see a design drawing with areas shaded as ‘defensible’ or not, as the designer perceived it. As part of the architect’s briefing, residents asked to go around other council projects to see what they did and didn’t like. Accompanied by the host tenants’ association, they delivered the most comprehensive critique of the designs as lived experience, describing not the theory of defensible space but what each part of an estate actually felt like in terms of security, safety, pleasure, danger and exposure.

Residents did not need design training or to learn the long words. Designers didn’t need to go into complex technical explanations. The telling of and listening to stories is the most effective form of communication; everyone is speaking and hearing the same language. Which is not to say that this language cannot also be challenging. ‘We don’t want this place to look like council housing’ was a priority requirement of the brief. But, working out what council houses did or didn’t look like proved a challenge too far: so we all agreed to leave it and see what happened.   
Part of the output of 15 simultaneous mini-neighbourhood
Planning for Real events as part of the East Brighton
New Deal for Communities programme October 2000
 

Since this time, many similar games have been invented with more elaborate and ambitious scenarios, more beautiful cards and clever design ideas. They are OK, in their way, but they all miss the point of 'Planning for real', as ‘The Game’ soon became known. The point is not to provide a platform for the professionals to produce a ‘better’ more informed design, it is the way into a quite different way of working: the co-production of place. By making it together, the clients and the architect could see that design was not about achieving a finite realisation of all the clients’ expectations and wants; satisfying the ‘perfect moment’. Design became the starting point for possibilities, for adaptation to how the residents might want or have to live in the future. The physical and psychological occupation of space is the ongoing activity of ‘design for living’, in which most professional designers will only exceptionally play any part. That is a great loss for professional learning and the accumulation of greater understanding of what design is about.
 
The morning after the night before: trying to put the East Brighton map together again after community party, October 2000 











As the coop residents themselves said, when questioned again, as the scheme was ready to go for planning, ‘Why don’t these look like council houses?’:  “Oh, haven’t you worked that out yet? It’s not what they look like; it’s the fact that we made them.”


This eccentric academic was, of course, the wonderful Tony Gibson, who died just recently at the age of 94. His long life was filled with the games that he invented to help people navigate and make more sense of our complicated and sometimes difficult lives.

Back in 1976, I could not have been more wrong in every part of my initial assessment of him. He was forever young, and it was us who lived in another world, and him who enabled us to find a way to connect to each other in the real world of lived experience, and to experience our common humanity. His whole life was dedicated to the process of changing lives for real, and for the better. That experience changed my own ideas about what the real professional task was; not just about design or high technical standards. These are important, but the real question is 'how do we create more democratic places in which to live?'. There are plenty of economic and social consequences that fall out of trying to answer that question, and that is at the heart of this Churchill Fellowship research. I’ve thanked you before, Tony, but it won’t hurt to say it again. Thank you for a life changed.

Now he has gone, it feels quite scary. Maybe I’ll have to join the grown-ups?

Stephen Hill, May 1st in Liberty Gardens, a community park created by the residents of the North Liberties neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

 

Monday 21 April 2014

2. APRIL 20th 2014: THE MAN ON THE #23 BUS



…from Ruggles to Ashmount, South Boston


The old man stumbled awkwardly in the centre of the bus, as it jerked forward from the last stop. He was waiting for a young guy on the aisle seat to make a way through to the empty window seat. Sitting with legs wide apart, knees jammed against the seat in front and plugged in to an alternative world of music behind his shades, he wasn’t moving. I picked up my bag from the seat next to me and the old man flopped down.

“All black people are so rude,”
he said, fixing me in the eye. He was black.

Not all black people, surely, no more than white people?

“We’ll 99% of them. So that’s pretty much all, ha! And the bus drivers are the worst. If you ain’t got your money or your ticket absolutely ready for them, they shout ‘What you doing trying to get on this bus? Homeless folks don’t belong here.’ ”


Are you homeless?

“I lost my home about a year ago. Landlord evicted me. A No Fault eviction, but what can you do? Have to stay with my daughters now, but they don’t like it much. Me neither. You need a place of your own, ‘specially when you are on your own.” Silence. “You ain’t from round here. Where you from and what you doing here?”

I’m from London and I’m going to Burke High School for a conference this morning.

“I’m gettin' off before Burke. Goin' to rob a bank,” he laughed.

What I’ve heard about US banks, that sounds like a good plan. But how could you be sure it was their money you were stealing and not your neighbour’s? 

 “Hmmm, good question." Silence. "Do you think I’m older than you?”

 I’d say we are about the same. I was born in 1948. What about you?

 “November 11th 1947. Hmmm. I'd guess you must be a Scorpio like me.”

Right. October 31st.

“Who’s your President?”

We don’t have a President. We have a Queen…


“Oh yeah. That Mrs. Thatcher?”


No, she was the Prime Minister, like Tony Blair and David Cameron.
 “I ain’t never heard of them. Now who was that short fat guy, with the black hat and cigar?”

Oh, Winston Churchill?

“Yeah, that’s the one.  ‘We shall fight them from door to door. We shall fight them on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets; we shall never surrender”. Silence. “That was a tough guy.” Silence. “They sure don’t make ‘em like him no more.”

 
Stephen Hill, Brooklyn NY. April 20th 2014

 
 

Wednesday 9 April 2014

1. APRIL 9TH 2014: POTHOLE POLITICS - CHURCHILL WOULD NOT HAVE APPROVED

Stephen Hill, author of this new blog, challenges today’s politicians to find Churchillian courage to deal with the root causes of a broken economy and an unjust society.


All will be well. Mr. Osborne (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer) has reached into his purse and brought out a little pocket money for local authorities for the Spring Offensive to fix the potholes. Pocket money because the Local Government Association reckon they need £10.5bn to fix the backlog of repairs and Mr. Osborne’s generosity stretches to £200m…that’s £200m back of £442m recently cut from their budgets in last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review.

This is about as useful as rubbing anti-itch cream onto a malignant melanoma. I only know this, because 30 years ago, a practice nurse took a different view from the expert doctor about that spot on my forearm. For melanoma, the treatment is immediate, radical and systemic. Excision, concentrated chemotherapy, lymph gland removal, no sun-bathing, and reduced work and stress…well, I didn’t do so well with the last two. Without going into the technicalities of road surfacing materials, it does not take much imagination or daily observation to see how patching up patches, treating symptoms not causes, will only serve till the next prolonged period of heavy rain scours out another hole.

In an age of austerity, we could perhaps make do with more potholed roads, but it’s not just policies for potholes that’s the problem. Everything to do with land, planning, housing, transport and infrastructure is about short term random fixes, with not a sign that anyone in politics understands how whole systems work or has the courage to do what needs to be done to fix them. It’s all pothole politics.

Contrast this approach with Winston Churchill rising from the Liberal Front Bench, just over a hundred years ago, to deliver his (in)famous “Land and Poverty” speech.  He proposed an annual tax on the locational value of land, to reduce land hoarding and speculation, and to make more efficient use of land. He was supporting ‘The People’s Budget’: the first ever budget to involve the redistribution of wealth, and the direct cause of the Parliament Act of 1911 to limit the power of the House of Lords.

In his 1909 pamphlet “The People’s Land”, Churchill argued that the strength of the economy and the welfare of all citizens depended on stable and fair land markets. “The best way to make private property secure and respected is to bring the processes by which it is gained into harmony with the general interests of the public”. In his view, the inequitable accumulation of wealth ‘created’ through land value inflation and land price speculation was one of the most powerful forces then undermining citizens’ basic freedoms. Sound familiar?

Henry George, advocate of land value taxation, had impressed Churchill (and Joseph Rowntree); but it was Ricardo’s Law of Economic Rent that had provided the original inspiration. Ricardo’s classic treatise “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” published in 1817, explained economic rent as the surplus profit from investment. Excess capital exploits new investment opportunities wherever it can find them. Towards the end of every business cycle, therefore, economic rent seeks out and pushes up the price of assets in limited or fixed supply, notably land.

Freed from the tight prudential discipline of the local building society manager, by financial deregulation in the mid-1980s, high demand local housing markets became prey to speculative global capital. The latest boom-bust cycle, ending in 2007/8 was turbo-charged by computer power and global capital’s indiscriminate appetite for securitized property assets of any quality. It led inexorably to a devastating and climactic explosion: the wholesale destruction of livelihoods, savings, pensions, the collapse of housing markets and production, and now damaging cuts in health, education, and transport investment, and the prospect of mass youth unemployment.

Unless we can control the unregulated accumulation of inflationary and speculative property wealth, these cycles will recur roughly every 18 years, as they have done since Ricardo’s time. It was not just Gordon Brown who believed he could beat boom and bust, or George Osborne thinking “hopefully we will have a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up”. It's more than just frustrating that they and now

the economist Thomas Piketty in his new book ‘Capitalism in the 21st Century' still don't recognise this. Piketty suggests that 200 years of evidence shows that capitalism hasn't been working. Tell that to the now unfashionable Ricardo who devised his theory, er, almost exactly 200 years ago. Apart from Churchill and a handful of others, they just never understood “It’s the land economy, stupid!"

Churchill’s analysis is truer now than it ever was. We are where we are because we ignored his message. For politicians, the systemic imperatives of land policy reform have always been ‘too difficult’. But now, a wasted century later, frustrated citizens are taking action to adopt their own home-grown reforms.
Take a young man with a small family, a modestly paid job, and a surfboard, standing outside the houses that he and twelve other families have built for themselves. Five years ago now, his three-bed house, in the Cornish coastal village of St Minver, had cost him just under £100,000: one third of its market value, and one sixth of average house prices in the village. “I had given up any idea of living here where I grew up. I have had over thirty homes; off-season holiday lets, caravans, friends’ spare rooms, all over Cornwall. Now I have a life, close to my family, a job I can walk to…and the beach.”

In Cornwall, a unique collaboration between village communities, landowners, councils, and a rural housing association has established the Cornwall Community Land Trust, with a programme of over 120 community land trust homes built since its start in 2006, with a further 11 projects under construction and over 150 new homes in the pipeline across Cornwall. This has grown at twice the pace of previous rural housing production. It is unique because it is grounded in the genuine trust and mutual respect between the partners; and this seems to hold good in many rural situations.

This new life comes through the decade long investment of independent foundations, the Building and Social Housing Foundation, Tudor, Nationwide, Esmee Fairbairn, Carnegie UK and now Oak from the USA, all promoting action research and transformational social change in the interest of democracy, civil society and social justice.

In East London, Citizens UK and their partners, the East London CLT may be on the brink of achieving a 13 year campaign to see a CLT on the Queen Elizabeth Park, promised but not yet delivered by successive Mayors as part of the Olympic Legacy. But they haven’t been sitting on their hands in the meantime, and have fought their way into the redevelopment of the Greater London Authority’s St Clement’s Hospital in Mile End (by extraordinary and unplanned coincidence the site of a former home of David Ricardo) with a pioneering way of selling and reselling homes linked rigidly to local median incomes: a still small voice of sanity in a London housing market that everyone now calls ‘mad’. “People come to us looking for a secure home, with costs that they can genuinely afford. Most are now privately renting and don’t know from one six months to the next where they’ll be living or what they’ll have to pay. Thinking of their home as a speculative ‘investment’ is simply not a priority. The need for security and certainty is a more basic and natural need”, says Paul Regan, chair of the CLT.

But here and elsewhere in urban areas, citizens have been and still are frequently met with condescension, suspicion and irritation at their presumption; conveniently depersonalised and disempowered with the label of ‘communities’. What business do they have meddling in the production of their own homes? This is the proper job of mainstream politicians and housing providers. Who are these ‘communities’? Whom do they represent?

We should admire these disruptive citizens for their courageous disrespect of the status quo, and the people who seek to protect it, or know no better. In many parts of the country, the mainstream provides housing many times more expensive than most people can afford, and has been losing more social rented homes than have been built each year for a generation, until 2008. Even with the prospect of 165000 new ‘affordable’ homes by 2018, there will still be one million less affordable homes then than there were in 1980, but with 7 million more people to house. That was a huge effort, with enormous transaction costs, and still the poorest are being made to move home if they have a surplus bedroom. No one has been looking single-mindedly enough, as Churchill, Bevan and Beveridge would have done, at the “Why is there a queue?” question, rather than “How do we manage the queue?” question. As it is, many homeowners now gain more in untaxed house price increases than they pay in tax, leaving disadvantaged renters and the unhoused to carry the whole burden of their own welfare, or what’s left of it. This is not an achievement for any politician to be proud of.

The new CLT homeowners in north Cornwall, East London and elsewhere are Ricardian economists, choosing to forgo any increase in the land value of their homes, giving up the surplus profit on land.  When politicians fall back on ‘the politics of choice’, for want of anything better, promoters of CLTs and CLT homeowners have made the one choice that politicians dare not offer. They are the true agents of Beveridge’s vision for a Welfare State in which its citizens take “private action for social advance”.

Community land trusts can only be a small part of the answer. All citizens must act. The home ownership ‘revolution’ has made hoarders and speculators of us all. Churchill would despair at the structural inequalities and poverty that we have created through the absence of policy and lack of political courage.

Unless politicians and citizens direct our collective will to reforming land policy and housing markets, we will fail utterly in the task of rebuilding our broken economy and building the just cities and society of the future.

Postscript
Reading more about the Piketty book and its reviewers, it feels like they are all completely missing the point…seemingly almost wilfully…about land. They look as though they are about to name the problem...land price and debt...and then, as neo-classical economists cannot bear to actually say the words. For a good old-fashioned academic catfight, read this interview for Naked Capitalism with Prof. Michael Hudson, a died-in-the-wool classical economist, and spot on about the dimension that’s missing in Piketty and Krugman et al. 
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This is my first blog under this title. If Churchill seems an unusual reference point for ‘Building just cities’, try reading his
Land and Poverty Speech and election pamphlet The People's Land . They seem curiously modern.

Today is also the start of a two month Churchill Memorial Trust Traveling Fellowship, to the USA, to meet citizens’ groups, community organisers and the politicians with whom they work. The title is ‘Strengthening civil society institutions through new forms of land ownership’, and its purpose is to construct better narratives for politicians and citizens about their relationship and shared responsibilities, based around these headline questions for the research:


  • How can participative democracy be recognised by politicians, public bodies and professionals as having as important a role to play in civic life, policy making and practice, as representative democracy? Can politicians learn to be more generous and respectful in their dealings with citizens?
  • How can citizens become more effective agents of the changes needed to improve their quality of life, and rehumanise the process of development, especially in urban areas?
  • Are Community Land Trusts (and similar citizen led housing organisations), merely a small and interesting way of meeting very local needs, or could they be a phenomenon with global significance? How can citizens (re)claim their ‘right to the city’, and the right to a genuinely affordable home related to income, as the foundation of a normal healthy life? Are they powerful witnesses to the failures of economic and fiscal policy, and of land markets to meet both social and economic need?
I’ll be writing about my experiences over the next eight weeks and then ‘what happens next’.

Stephen Hill, Cambridge MA. April 9th 2014