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TOPIC THE HOUSING MARKET RENEWAL AREA PATHFINDER PROGRAMME Martin Crookston reviews its origins, objectives and the role of urban design East Lancashire; Merseyside • two in the West Midlands: Birmingham/ Sandwell; North Staffordshire • one in the North East: Newcastle/ Gateshead • two in Yorkshire & Humberside: South Yorkshire, and Hull/East Riding. Notable absentees are, perhaps, Teesside and West Yorkshire. Other declarations may be made, and other variants of the approach are being considered. Even so, this does represent a massive spread of interest, and allocation of resources, across a large swath of urban England. The Housing Market Renewal Area (HMRA) pathfinders have been described as ‘the biggest urban renewal project for a generation’. Certainly, they are on a par with the inner city renewal efforts of the 1970s Labour governments, and different in their scale and focus from the ‘targeted’ regeneration initiatives of the 80s and 90s. Their origins lie in a seminal series of reports prepared by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Birmingham University (CURS), led by Brendan Nevin, which unpicked the ‘low demand’ areas of the North and Midlands – starting with Merseyside and working on through the M62 corridor, Yorkshire, the North East and the Potteries. At the same time Max Steinberg, North West Regional Director for the Housing Corporation, was getting increasingly concerned about the long-term and strategic background to the investments the corporation was being asked to make in his region: and made those concerns clear to – amongst others – the Social Exclusion Unit and the Urban Task Force, in the late 90s. Nevin and Steinberg then (November 2001) put a key paper to the government, on behalf of the National Housing Federation, arguing that the next Comprehensive Spending Review must include a special programme to deal with this unforeseen and rapidly-emerging problem in the northern half of the country: the melting away of demand for housing, and particularly social housing, in many areas, and the social problems that this created or presaged. Government responded extraordinarily rapidly. In mid-2002, a £25 million start-up fund was allocated; in mid-2003 this was expanded to £500 million over the years to 2006; by early 2004, the Manchester-Salford pathfinder had been awarded £150 million, Newcastle-Gateshead £69 million, and further announcements are now coming through. The programme, although not comprehensive (in the sense that it does not explicitly seek to tackle every area where low demand is an issue), is nonetheless much more broadly-targeted and ambitious than the area-based initiatives of the past two decades. There are nine pathfinders: • four in the North West: Manchester/Salford; Oldham/Rochdale; SCALE OF PROBLEM Just to give a flavour of what is being considered: the North Staffordshire (ie Stoke-on-Trent, Newcastle-under-Lyme, the Potteries) pathfinder put in a bid for its first three years for £30 million of HMR money, to be supplemented by £30 million of other public-sector support (EP, Housing Corporation, housing associations); and with a 15-year estimate of £2.3 billion investment in the area, of which £860 million would be HMR, £568 million other public sector, and £879 million private investment. The initial award, from ODPM, is for the full £30 million bid. These are big numbers. But so is the scale of the emerging problem. North Staffs has 67,000 dwellings in the pathfinder area (mainly, the old industrial core of the Potteries, plus some of the peripheral miners’ estates). Up to 14,500 could be cleared; 12,500 new build is envisaged (so a net fall); and 36,000 would be refurbished. Even bigger is South Yorkshire – there, the pathfinder has 150,000 dwellings in its Housing Market Renewal Area – essentially, the areas defined as ‘at risk’ of accelerating low demand in the CURS studies. THE CORE PURPOSES There is no doubt that this government is taking the issue really seriously. As Secretary of State, Stephen Byers said: “we are committed to turning round housing low demand and abandonment by 2016”. The ODPM has stated that “pathfinder strategic plans will entail radical and sustained action to replace obsolete housing with modern sustainable accommodation… [and to] …ensure… all the other essential requirements of sustainable communities”. The ODPM also makes 18 | Urban Design | Autumn 2004 | Issue 92
clear its expectation: the pathfinders will be “…restructuring the housing markets across the sub-regional areas that they cover, to ensure a more sustainable balance between housing supply and demand.” What are the problems that have provoked this scale of response? Four main headings perhaps summarise the main issues, but they do not of themselves give a complete picture of the steepness of the tailspin into which some of these areas have dived: • Vacancy, and even abandonment: the average, in Liverpool’s inner core, is about 10 per cent vacant; some streets are practically abandoned, and this phenomenon is now apparent across the North, from Merseyside to Salford, and on to Newcastle’s West End and the East Durham coalfield in Easington. • House values: in many pathfinder areas, houses average £20- 35,000 per unit, falling to and below £10,000 in places. Even where, here and there, recent speculation has pushed prices up (for buy-to-let, or because of the very presence of a pathfinder programme) real prices compared with 10 years ago are very low indeed. So people’s equity in their homes is worth less and less, and the ability of an area to tow itself out of decline is reducing not increasing. • Unfitness and disrepair: again taking the Liverpool case: one in three of houses in the inner core is regarded as unfit or in serious disrepair. • Social and economic indicators track these patterns: disadvantage follows the house-price graph in many of these areas, and so pathfinders have to be a ‘housing-plus’ agenda. CRITIQUES OF THE PATHFINDER INITIATIVE At the same time, the success in persuading the Government to take low demand seriously, and to adopt the sort of approach evolving in the pathfinder programmes, has led to a lively critique by concerned – and expert – commentators. Suspicion of programmes which imply a lot of demolition rings alarm bells in many quarters. The sense that we have been here before is echoed in a Society Guardian piece: “renewed debate about the future of older neighbourhoods and their meticulously planned Victorian terraces has an eerily familiar ring”. Anne Power and Katherine Mumford, of LSE, are even more explicit: “knocking down and rebuilding sometimes seems like playing Legoland... with poor communities, since it is often the same places and even the same people who are repeatedly having their lives disrupted…” Anne Power makes the ‘social capital’ point that “there is a huge value in these areas even where the market is weak and where properties are being abandoned”; to which English Heritage adds, in terms of the built heritage, that “a pre-1919 house is worth more than an equivalent property from a more recent era… older houses are more often built to better standards and with better quality materials than modern houses.” This is an exceptionally difficult topic: both on the physical side – where for example demolition in Newcastle’s Elswick and Benwell has taken out property that would have fetched half a million two miles away in Jesmond; yet where one also sees streets of mediocre and poorly-built terraces in the Potteries that are on the bottom of everyone’s shopping list; and on the social side, where some communities will resist the bulldozers to the last council meeting, whilst others will sigh with relief and say “about time…”. THE ELEMENTS OF THE EQUATION What are the elements that we are dealing with in the HMRA pathfinders? We can look at six main groupings: the stock itself; the effect of housing tenure; place quality; the nature of demand for housing in the urban areas of the North and Midlands; competing supply of housing; and the issue of people’s aspirations. Housing stock - Council estates are liable to become low demand areas THE STOCK It is important not to see the ‘low demand’ problem as being just about the Victorian terraces. The type of house, and its condition, is undoubtedly a crucial variable – in the Potteries, for example, there is a fairly simple hierarchy from ‘back-of-pavement’ two-bedroom terrace up through bigger dwellings and more frontage space – but even here, a little house in a good location will sell, so the stock per se is not always the issue. The effect of stock type varies with location everywhere. And some of the worst problems are not in the inner core terraces – they are in the outer estates – often where less popular stock types (walk-up blocks, maisonettes, one-bed old people’s units, high rise) interact with weak locations – but including in some areas (Newcastle, Gateshead, Hull) council semis-with-gardens of the sort of ‘Garden City’ estates that would have had Lutyens or Howard at least nodding in recognition. TENURE An underlying fact for many of the lowdemand areas is that renting from the council is no longer a tenure of choice. A generation or more ago, it was: there was no stigma for a skilled working-class family in a tenancy in a good modern house on a leafy outer estate. Now, it is increasingly the default tenure for those who have less choice; and it is liable to be stigmatised too, after 20 years of determined policy towards home ownership. Renting from housing associations (registered social landlords - RSLs) is less so, but still not generally for the aspirant households; and private renting is often at the rock-bottom of local markets, and may be catering from those who cannot even get a council tenancy despite the general ease of access TOPIC Urban Design | Autumn 2004 | Issue 92 | 19
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