Can Britain Change Its Ways on Housing? (Your Radical Questions with Shiv Malik)

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1:15Amol Rajan:Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our magnificent radical guests. It's a chance for you to engage very directly with the people we have on this podcast and really interrogate them. or I'll try and interrogate them on your behalf about their big and radical ideas for the future. Shiv Malik's got a few of those. In fact, one in particular. It's a very big city in East Anglia. Shiv believes that successive governments in this country have not given anyone born after 1979 a fair chance. In fact, they've had a rotten deal. He first started writing about this well over 15 or 20 years ago with a book called The Jilter Generation in 2010.

1:52Amol Rajan:He argued that too many people are paying expensive rents, too few own their homes. and he thinks that's not just costing them, but the country in terms of lost growth and ambition. And he's got a radical idea, a solution you might call it. A brand new city for a million people comprised of around 400 ,000 affordable homes in East Anglia. It's called Forest City. It's certainly divided some opinion, local opinion, maybe again some of it for lots of people more broadly very, very excited about this. He's got some big, big backers. It's fair to say that people locally sometimes question some of the specifics.

2:26Amol Rajan:If you want to hear all about that, please do go and listen to the main podcast. It was out last Thursday. But as always, we're thrilled to say loads of you have been in touch. Shiv, I could tell you enjoyed that conversation, didn't you, in Thursday's episode? Because it's nice to have a bit of time. That's what podcasts give you, right? Yeah, I did. It was, you know, city's a big thing, so it takes a long time to go through it all. Exactly, exactly. And to put all the questions to you. Right, we've had loads of questions for you, Shiv, as you can imagine. And thank you so much, as ever, to every single person who sent in a question It means the world to us.

2:54Amol Rajan:It shows how incredibly engaged you are in this podcast, and that means the world to us. Our first question is from Daryl. The Forest City seems very laudable and an excellent idea, but two points. One, is it replicable? Does it solve a housing crisis? No, it doesn't. It's a very good idea, but it isn't replicable within a British context of renewing urban areas and increasing the supply demand. Secondly, you talk about it being affordable. £350 ,000 houses are not affordable housing in the context of what is needed for housing supply to solve the issue. I hope that makes sense. Thank you. Daryl, thank you very much indeed.

3:35Amol Rajan:So two points, let me put this to you. First of all, it's not replicable and therefore doesn't solve the housing crisis. Second, your definition of affordable at£350 ,000 is, well, it's not affordable. so uh you need to do this and you can only really do it in places where there are a couple of things one is a massive amount of demand so that for example oxford cambridge have price to earnings you know for homes are about 11 in terms of the ratio right the cost of a house is 11 times your annual salary exactly that's a really good signal for demand right and so there are other places but not everywhere right so people say oh why don't you just build a city in northumbria or wales right Where there's loads of space and far fewer people and leave us alone, in a sense.

4:16You couldn't do it there because you just don't have that demand. And you don't want to make a mistake by locating it somewhere random where people then don't want to move. So there is, there are, I think it is replicable, but in only a few other places in the country. So that would be, I guess, my answer on that. And the second part of it is people are also sort of very obsessed with urban renewal. Well, that is very expensive. And often you don't end up with any more homes than before. You just make the homes that are there nicer or replace them with nicer homes. And we've been obsessed with that for 20 years because we don't actually want to kind of, you know, bite down and do the hard thing, which is to say we should build on what is basically 60 percent plus of England, which is agricultural land.

4:57Right. That's two thirds of the country. Only nine percent of England is currently urban land. And that includes the bits that are canals and parks and golf courses, etc.

5:07Amol Rajan:But what about the idea that£350 ,000 is actually not at all easy to afford? If you're a nurse on£35 ,000, you're not going to have 10 times that to afford a house. So that is for a four-bedroom house. I think it is affordable because technically a couple earning£45 ,000 each is about the average wage, especially in that area. Even lower than that, it sits within that historic range of affordability, right? Really? Look, it's not cheap. It's not free. But it isn't subsidised. It's not affordable. I mean, a lot of people hear the word affordable and say they'd hope a single mum with two kids who's working really hard as a nursery assistant on£27 ,000, maybe outside of London, even less, they could afford it.

5:47Amol Rajan:They certainly couldn't afford£350 ,000. So look, affordability means lots of things to people. It's actually got a technical definition, which we bow out of the water, which is 20 % less than the kind of market rate. Yeah, we're already kind of 40 % less. So we're massively affordable on that basis. So that's one yardstick. But people are right. Like, is it really, truly affordable? As in, can anyone just buy this house? Well, can poor people move there? Yeah, they can. They'll be needed to be subsidised in exactly the way that the government currently subsidises people. But the scheme itself, which is, again, run by the government, will wash its own face.

6:19And that's, for me, the important part. Can I deliver something that can actually pay for itself? If you want to make it, if you want to subsidise it, and there, of course, will be dedicated social housing. And obviously, we haven't talked about the rental part, which is 30%. That's really affordable. and it's cooperative rental, then sure, if you want to subsidise it, then it'll be even cheaper. But that's a secondary conversation.

6:40Amol Rajan:The first thing is you've got to build the city. OK, Daryl, thank you very much indeed for your questions. This next one is from Dr Camilla Allen in Sheffield. Here's Camilla. The illustrations for Forest City One look like every other anonymous and placeless CGI utopia we've seen from developers of late. Pristine streets, impossible light, no mess, no context and no history. But Britain has a tradition of genuinely radical new town planning. Places like Harlow, Stevenage and East Kilbride are places where planners, architects and landscape architects wrestled seriously with the question of what makes a place feel human.

7:19Amol Rajan:So what exactly is radical about ignoring all of that history and heritage in favour of a render? Camilla, thank you so much. I've got because of the glory of the amazing production team on this podcast a picture in front of me of that artist's impression so it's called Forest City One because your hope is that to address Daryl's point it is replicable that other cities are inspired by this around this country and indeed elsewhere so this city there's lots of trees I'm looking at a particular I'll show you which picture I'm looking at I'm looking at a particular kind of avenue of sorts which has a cycle coming down it which tells you we might be in the vicinity of Cambridge There's kind of pleasing hedgerows and bushes in front of lovely gentle stairs.

8:02Amol Rajan:And the architecture, I would say, is in sympathy with its surroundings. So you've got nice curved fronts, big glass windows, multi-storey apartments where you can imagine a family living. It looks quite sort of American suburban in some ways. It's supposed to be emulative. So first of all, we're a project that when we started, we have zero cash. And almost all of the work to date has been done pro bono. I have not been paid either. So no one's making any money off of this. And that also means we don't have the resources to... Renders are expensive. What is a render? A render is like, well, you know, you go to an architect or a proper rendering firm and they will take your drawings and actually turn them into a proper image.

8:41But, you know, there's so much detail, like, you know, where the sunlight falls and how the trees actually dapple and where do you use the right... We just used AI for this because that was the cheapest way to communicate. We live in a visual age. So your caller is right. We're not getting rid of the radicalism. Of Harlow, Stevenage and Letchworth. Yeah, or actually I would say of, you know, the early Garden Cities movement, you know, and there are deep and long critiques of all of that stuff by Jane Jacobs, right? Actually, she takes Letchworth Garden City to task in her book and a huge tome sort of following on from the 60s.

9:12So the image isn't what it will be at the end of the day. We're going to create new images, which I think are far more reflective of what's really going on.

9:19Amol Rajan:Do you know what they're going to look like? Do you know what the city is going to look like? Well, we are right now building away at the four bedroom, prototypical sort of four bedroom house. So we're working with an architecture firm, a robotics firm. People will be able to see and visit and touch and feel this thing not very long from now. It might take sort of six months more, but that will be emblematic, I think, of how we want Forest City to look and the aesthetics. What inspiration do you take from places like Harlow, Stevenage and Letchworth? Or what do you want to avoid from there? I think there's, look, there's a lot to avoid in terms of aesthetics.

9:50there's a lot to avoid in terms of economics. They did not work economically.

9:54Amol Rajan:There's one of your arguments for the location for a city is that it's close to Cambridge, which is a new kind of centre of gravity. Exactly. And you talk to major employers there, including, you know... Arm. Exactly. In fact, talking to the SVP of Arm, you know, one of the major things is they've opened up in Manchester because Cambridge is ultimately, it's really hard to expand, for example, and it's also really difficult for their own employees to afford homes. That's true of all companies that employ people in Cambridge, right? And so what do they do, right? Do they just say, well, we'll try and pay you a lot more or give up or move somewhere else, right?

10:29And ultimately, those are the choices that companies kind of make and much of the deficit of kind of Cambridge because it can't solve those issues. But look, the radicalism that I like is the stuff that goes back to kind of political economy, right? Cities that own themselves, neo, if you want, municipalism. um what do you do to take back those basics of you know energy transport and water and housing right how does a city own itself so it's the landlord rather than you know pensioners saying oh well i'll own a house and let some kind of young student pay for my pension well that's a terrible way to run an economy we don't want to rent our economy so that's the stuff that i think is really radical that's actually what ebenezer howard who by the way was a journalist uh who's City.

11:13Yeah, he set up Letchworth at Garden City and the Garden City movement in his book Tomorrow. If you read it, it's actually, by the way, full of accounts. It's a very boring read. It would be more interesting given that he was a journalist. But actually that's the bit that he was radical about and tried to get right, failed, but was like, look, how do you make this housing affordable forever or for many, many generations to come?

11:35Amol Rajan:On Thursday's episode, I stated the probably not very impartial opinion and very, very controversial view that quite often old buildings look nicer than new ones, which has developed a kind of strange political tinge here, partly because a previous or recent Conservative government asked the late Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton to do this work called Build Big, Build Beautiful, or something along those lines. And it's just a very, very, very strange thing to me that it's become a sort of right-wing thing to believe in sort of beautiful buildings built in sympathy with their surroundings.

12:04Amol Rajan:But one of the reasons people might also believe that is because of Poundbury, which is this place in Dorset that Prince Charles kind of envisioned in the 1980s. To what extent do you look at Poundbury as a lesson or inspiration? I think for me, I don't simply want to re-emulate the past in terms of aesthetics. There's a lot there in terms of placemaking and wayfinding, right? Whether they got right, you mean? That they got right. That is wonderful. But can you do it with a different look? I mean, for me, Charles Rennie McIntosh is probably one of the best architects, I think, for us to kind of reconnect with.

12:38Scottish architect, if people aren't familiar, famous for his work in kind of Glasgow, coming off, I guess, the back of the kind of arts deco and arts and craft movement. But he has a very distinctive style. And for me, I've always been attracted to his work. And it's ornament, right? So he didn't dispel with ornament in any way. In fact, he totally embraced it. And his buildings show and reveal all of that. So they're the most prized and most lauded buildings in Scotland for that reason. So I look, there's a lot that we can move forward with, but rather than simply copying the past.

13:19Amol Rajan:So that's one Charles. Have you thought about asking King Charles if he might come on board? I think. Likes Beautiful Cities. Lots of people have suggested that to me. And certainly his I've read his I didn't realise he'd written several books on architecture, but I've read a few of them and he was such a leader in in putting right I think a lot of the problems that had emulated from brutalism and he certainly had incredibly strong opinions which are still kind of resonating today right his famous kind of carbuncle speech is still like you know you can see it bouncing around in kind of architecture discourse 25 years later for me I think Prince William is actually doing something quite radical, right?

14:01Taking land that's owned by his estate, in effect, and turning it into housing, right? It's just been recently announced. That's the sort of radicalism, obviously, I'm clearly in empathy with. So actually, between father and son, king and prince, there's a lot there.

14:17Amol Rajan:There could be an alliance. Thank you very much indeed for that question, Camilla. We've got another question here. It's from Charles, not the king, as far as we're aware, but who knows? He's almost certainly listened to this podcast. Everyone else does. And this Charles asked, who owns the land in Forest City and how is it acquired to make the project even remotely possible? What are Shiv's credentials for delivering, fronting such a huge project? What is the vision beyond Forest City? It's worth saying we kind of addressed some of this in Thursday's episodes. It's worth going back to and listening to Charles.

14:48Amol Rajan:I did ask Shiv slightly intemperately who the hell he is and he answered it, which I respected. So let's do this in order. Who owns the land? How is it acquired? What are your credentials and what's the vision beyond for our city? Who owns the land? How has it acquired? The land in that area is owned by a handful. Most of it's owned by a handful of landowners who, in some cases, have been there for a long while. In some cases, it's their home, etc., etc. We're in conversations with them. We've got landowners who publicly supported us, which is great because they want this to see this happen. They also believe in what we believe the country is kind of on its knees at the moment, economically speaking, and needs to be revivified um how is it quite in the same way that you would acquire any land you buy it uh so we as our own kind of company would option the land and set it up to be bought then at a reasonable price by the development corporation at the end of the day of course there are holdouts and you know a development corporation will come with compulsory purchase powers that's what people usually go are you're just there you're going to steal all this land And yeah, look, I agree that compulsory purchase is a thing.

15:56And the law says it should be a thing which is sparely used, if at all. The Development Corporation will have to apply it in that way. What are your credentials? I'm just annoyed and fed up and optimistic in this weird concoction. Is that enough? Yeah.

16:12Amol Rajan:Never built a city before Shiv Malik. No one's built a city before in Britain. So, you know, in living memory, right? In fact, there are a few people who have. King Charles and Poundbury. Well, that's not a city. It's a town at best. and that's not to deride it it's just not the same thing uh certainly not as ambitious but there are actually the people who built milton keens are still alive very much so um and so there is a living memory and a connection with those because you know the building began what in sort of the late 60s if you want early 70s um but it continued for for many many years so actually that memory is around and all the lessons that go with it and they have an amazing archive um uh which really sets out how to do things properly and then also you know not charles possibly the king but probably not also asks what's the vision beyond forest city again he addresses a little bit in um thursday's episode but you would like this to be a kind of an example that others seek to emulate right forest city yes of course yeah hence forest city one yeah so you want you want forest city two three four five and six before you're done it leaves the door open i'm not gonna you know i'll suddenly end my days both living in this city dying in it probably but also it'll still be you know it'll be on phase whatever two of the kind of building thing you really think this is gonna happen don't you yeah yeah why is that not just an act of faith um i think we've crossed a threshold again it comes back to planning permission again it's all about people's mindset and what's the threshold getting a piece in the ft coming on radical britain's most exciting podcast i wish it was a threshold and and that would be it well you've leapt over it's a sign it's this which is when people think and they also start to realize look strategically yes Of course, you've got trade-offs and they're difficult, but something's got to be done and they see it too You know, I have these weird phone calls but lots of people who object they're very loud and noisy and of course We hear them but you don't hear the people who want this to happen because they're quiet and they're scared and afraid And that's my job is to actually lead people in that sense, right?

18:12That's actually weirdly my job in all of this So they feel comfortable to speak out and say yeah, actually it is but most of the conversations I have a good 30 % of people you know i think oh you know rung up some professor of you know x y and z and and they'll go this is amazing this is the best thing i've ever heard we should absolutely be doing this right now or senior civil servants you know they disagree and they have things and they're not supposed to say stuff but you know you can feel a bit of kind of oh this is very interesting right on that end and politicians will also say stuff like that give us a flavor of what people at the top of government politics or elsewhere are saying of this look they have lots of things to consider and lots on their plate.

18:51They get excited, as anyone would, by the thought that we could be bold, right? But of course, it's also their job to consider the practical issues. So there's a bunch of mixed responses. Look, this is such a big idea. It's going to, in the end, draw quite heightened responses, both on the negative and the positive side. So across government, at first, you know, obviously people were simply bemused, bewildered, and wondered whether this is a kind of exercise in shifting the Overton window and whether we were serious. But now I think they realise that we are serious and then they go, okay, well, hang on, let's consider this properly.

19:26And I think there's enough there that we're winning people over day by day. I know that's the case.

19:32Amol Rajan:And the momentum's on your side. Okay, Charles, thank you very much for that question. This is the final one from Alan Malady in Buckinghamshire. Firstly, congratulations on actually proposing to do something about housing. It's one of the big issues that I think underpins many of the challenges in this country. The housing stock in Britain is quite poor, as you know. Modern estates are cramped and are littered with cars. How will you encourage enough people to shift their mindset and way of living to live in the way that you propose? and it's hard enough getting people to consider electric cars let alone a walking cycling public transport first city thank you very much alan thank you very much indeed that's that you know alan do you know who that is yeah that's someone who's really engaged with your idea isn't it i mean that's someone who this is again we mentioned this in thursday's episode you come on the bbc and uh we believe in fairness and and accuracy in thursday's episode and in this episode i've giving you a hard time.

20:34Amol Rajan:There's also probably a lot of people out there who don't always get a hearing, but who maybe have read a piece in the Financial Times about it, read your report, listened to this podcast, and they think, this is the antidote that we need to the doom and declinism all around. This is a kind of feeling of a big project. This is a country where we can do great things. And it sounds like Alan Malady, and just to be absolutely transparent, I don't know Alan, and Alan, I'm very grateful for your listening to Radical, is someone who's really engaged with your idea. The idea that he's engaged with is that Forest City, this new city you want to build would be a public first city in terms of transport what's the vision of yours that he's talking about there yeah we've already we've got a brilliant transport planner his name's james cleave who's uh again done all his work for free and he created 120 plus pages i had to edit them also i know i know it intimately um but one of the bold things and radical things he said was like look you know he lives in milton keens so he knows the the issues with kind of a car first transport strategy very well he said two things first of all look our goal is 80 percent of um trips uh the modality should be that it's public transport in some way or another sustainable transport right so it's a bicycling or walking or tram or train or metro etc um fine that's quite a bold uh goal so it's not car but the other thing the other insight he has which is shared between all sort of planners of cities and transport planners is look it's really difficult to shift people they already live in a place right but as soon as you arrive in a new place people are open and willing to adapt so that's your that's your answer to alan's question how you encourage enough people to shift their minds way of living if they come to a place where it is the way of living yeah then you don't have to persuade a transformation it's just it's what comes with the territory you're not asking people to go start in their cars for the first five years and then say oh now we built the tram please use the tram well they're not going to do it are they they got comfortable and everyone else has got comfortable with using cars so it has to be there first that infrastructure which is the hard part but that's how you shift people and actually it's how you shift people just generally new environments shift people's brains literally they rewire their brains whether it's looking at nature being in nature or you know living in a home that's either damp or terrible or it's airy and light etc etc you know these have huge effects on how you walk and travel and shift and talk and communicate and sit in pubs or not right and socialize whether you see children it all has an effect on people's brains and how they understand themselves and the rest of the world and how productive or not they are etc so new places are a brilliant place to either get that horribly wrong as we have done in the past or massively right where you've got 50 years of learning of how to build new places and we've got none of that put into practice yet that's what makes it so exciting final thought and it's a selfish one for me you're bloke, born in LA, grew up, I think I'm right in saying in East London.

23:22Grew up in Finchley. Grew up in Finchley. Very boring East Finchley and then Finchley Central.

23:27Amol Rajan:Finchley Central, which is in North London, Margaret, which is constituency, if I'm not mistaken. And then moved to East London. How did building a new city in East Anglia become the great mission of your life? I'm very struck. A lot of people say, oh, he stands to make millions. You're saying that A, you don't stand to make millions. B, you're happy to forego all income. And C, you're doing all this pro bono and you've got a family to feed. I mean why is this the thing that Shiv Malik's life has become dedicated to? Honestly it's this weird mix of being hyper optimistic and Matt Clifford's probably the best exemplar of that right and a belief and a patriotic belief in Britain which weirdly I think sometimes you have to be an immigrant to really appreciate what Britain is about right you see it from the outside in or in new ways and new light and you also because you travel you realise actually other places aren't like Britain it's quite unique in the world and British people should feel that.

24:18But then also mixed with this deep well of sadness and a couple of weeks ago, just friends getting depressed because their friends are now leaving the country, right? Going to France because they can rent a home with a swimming pool for, you know, 1500 euros a month, right? Of course they're going to leave because all this country offers professionals in that sense is maybe a piddly two and a half bedroom house in Walthamstow and that's the height of living. It's not, it's something's got to be better than this. so it's a mixture of those two things that hyper optimism and there's also this well of sense of it's got to be better than this right