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Pete Apps

@peteapps.bsky.social

3.1K followers 22 following 150 posts

Inside Housing + freelance elsewhere. Author of Orwell Prize winning Show Me The Bodies - How We Let Grenfell Happen. https://peteapps.substack.com

peteapps.substack.com

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · May 29

I was born into a city where housing was affordable. But I've grown up into one where it was not. What has gone wrong in London over the last 35 years? And where is it going in the future?

My new book, Homesick, tells that story. Out Sept 25

www.amazon.co.uk/Homesick-How...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 2h

New Substack: Why the housing secretary's Alan Partridge populism is not the answer we need - especially with regard to affordable and social housing in London:

peteapps.substack.com/p/build-baby...

Build, baby, build (with lower rates of affordable housing in London)

The housing secretary's Alan Partridge populism is not the answer we need

peteapps.substack.com

Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 5d

Build baby build is not a housing strategy

Bit by me for the Spectator:

www.spectator.co.uk/article/buil...

Text extract reading:

Working out the way forward isn’t easy, but it is the job of serious politicians to at least try. That requires strategy, trade-offs, imperfect answers, compromise and a willingness to at least hear dissenting voices – not branding everyone who questions you a ‘blocker’ or NIMBY, and hiding behind a slogan that is as childish as it is facile.

For Reed, the buzz of his cosplay populism will soon fade. He has had his fun being cheered by delegates and surrounded by sycophantic think tank wonks who share his taste for silly hats. But the reality of the state of the economy and the size of the mess he has inherited will soon dawn on him.

In the coming weeks, he is likely to meet with leaseholders whose lives have been turned upside down by the building crisis, as well as survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire. When he attends these meetings, he would be well advised to leave his new baseball cap at home

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 7d

Manchester's building boom is sometimes called a miracle. Instead, it's created a city of renters and a huge building safety crisis.

The last instalment of my high rise trilogy looks at one block emptied two years ago where residents are yet to return:

peteapps.substack.com/p/a-modern-h...

A modern high-rise trilogy part three: Skyline Chambers

Our journey through three buildings impacted by the building safety crisis in different ways concludes in central Manchester

peteapps.substack.com

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 9d

In other words: maybe if we'd not cut the funding to build new social housing, we wouldn't now be handing billions to some of the country's worst private landlords to house the homeless families who can't get a social home

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 9d

Can't think of many better illustrations of how badly we have botched housing policy than the fact that our bill for housing homeless families (£2.8bn pa) is now higher than the money we spend each year on new affordable housing (£2.3bn)

www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/english...

English councils’ temporary accommodation bill rises to £2.8bn

Councils in England spent a record £2.8bn on temporary accommodation last year, with the annual bill rising by 25% as the homelessness crisis deepens.

www.insidehousing.co.uk

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 9d

Since the Grenfell Tower, 419 purpose-built blocks of flats have been emptied of residents after a prohibition notice from the fire service.

Often this process is traumatic (and expensive) for those involved.

Could we do it better?

www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/deca...

‘Decanting’: how to deal with blocks that are too unsafe to occupy

Since Grenfell, emergency relocations of residents are becoming more common. Peter Apps investigates how landlords could be handling decanting more sensitively.

www.insidehousing.co.uk

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

Jess and I will be sharing a platform to discuss both books on October 23 at Pages of Hackney, if anyone can make it along!

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

Lovely to see @rowanmoore.bsky.social giving space and thought to the ideas in Homesick, alongside the excellent Eviction by Jess Field:

observer.co.uk/culture/book...

How Britain’s housing was broken | The Observer

Jessica Field’s Eviction and Peter Apps’ Homesick chart the rise and ruin of social housing in the UK

observer.co.uk

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

Also, since you've gotten to the bottom of this thread, you might like to know that I had a book on housing out last week, which contains a lot of This Sort of Thing! You can get it here:

uk.bookshop.org/p/books/home...

Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It

How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It

uk.bookshop.org

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

Many of the flats we get from this will be sold off to landlord investors and rented out, because that's what the housing market does in big cities! This is not a new policy position, and certainly not a return to the transformative post-war years. Those days are gone (ends)

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

It will produce the same results: in some places, probably a good boost to the local economy that brings about some positive change - albeit as a side effect to private sector profit. In others, the opportunity for developers to use the state balance sheet to finance private profit

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

So what this really represents is the same sort of public sector support for private development that pops up in every other fiscal event. Some degree of state support for existing areas of private sector development, to help them overcome blockages and get building. We've been doing this for years

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... a boost. Thamesmead, south London - already a housing zone. Inner city densification in Manchester, hardly a new idea. Milton Keynes city centre, which was a new town originally but can't be again!

A list of developments which will likely become 'new towns', but in fact represent a series of existing areas of private sector development which will now receive enhanced government support

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... planned out over time to maximise return. Really, what we're doing here is using the state balance sheet to crack open the opportunity for private profit. The areas under consideration aren't 'new towns' at all. They are sites often where development is underway, that need...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

The trouble is that while the builders get the help, it's very hard to extract concrete guarantees that they will be built out any differently from other schemes. Mostly, they aren't. The properties carefully released onto the market to maintain demand, elements which cause a drag on profits...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

This is a pretty common use of the state in housing post-Thatcher - she did it with LLDC which plunged millions into preparing the old Docklands for development and then handed it over. Or Boris Johnson's housing zone programme as London Mayor

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... bringing in the private sector to finish the job. Then, as now, you had a government which had targets to hit and there were lots of vague promises about sustainable development and high percentages of affordable housing numbers.

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... and granting them planning permission outside of the normal process. This looks to me to be a pretty close replica of the Blair-era 'Growth Area' programme. This basically involved 'pump-priming' housing development in target areas with govt cash before...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

The press announcement, in fact, says its plans are "modelled on the regeneration of Stratford [east London] during and after the Olympic Games". This means is the creation of a special body which assembles and prepares the land, before handing it over to private developers...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... better social democratic future. It also worked. The land value uplifts over time meant the corporations paid their loans back early. So it put the state in debt at first, but it was an investment that paid off over time.

This is not what Labour is planning.

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... need to rely on a private house builder model, the new towns could just be built, and the houses filled with families, many of whom were homeless or escaping the post-war destruction of the major cities. It was a positive project - part of the post-war vision of a...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... we built 32 towns, in what has since been branded ‘the greatest single creation of planned urbanism ever undertaken anywhere’.

But this was state-owned, state-led development. There were extraordinarily high levels of social rented housing, especially early on. We didn't...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

... buy up land at low value, plan out designs for modern towns and build them rapidly. These corporations would continue to own the land - collecting social rents, business rates and lease payments - which would then be reinvested in the towns. Over a relatively short period...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

The New Towns programme of the 1950s was an extraordinary feat of direct state intervention, which would seem totally unrecognisable in today's world. The government created corporations by statute, capitalised them with huge loans from the Treasury and gave them powers to...

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Pete Apps @peteapps.bsky.social · 10d

Labour is pitching the New Towns announcement today as a return to the "transformative post-war housing boom under Clement Attlee".

Actually it looks much more like housing policy under Blair, or even Thatcher and Boris Johnson (thread)

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