His prescription is more housing supply to accompany environmental improvements. But we need to think a bit more carefully about this to get the medicine right for places like London.

As he points out, the economic benefits of making an area more desirable will largely go to existing home owners and landlords as the value of the land, and therefore the rent they can charge, increases. Lower income people will be forced to move, presumably (according to Jim’s argument) to less liveable areas. Council and housing association tenants who are secure in their homes gain a nicer environment, but they have no direct stake in the increased value of the land their homes sit on.

Building more homes as Jim suggests could help to keep prices down, meaning less of a windfall gain for land owners and possibly more stable rents. But in practice, due to London’s policy of “mixed and balanced communities”, deprived areas tend to see council housing demolished and replaced overwhelmingly with housing for sale in order to “balance out” the social “mix” of people in the area. There’s no way anyone with an average income and average wealth would be able to buy a new flat in most areas of London on the open market.

The flats will be bought by wealthier-than-average people, and probably many then let on the private market, with a good number of those subsidised by housing benefit. So while more supply might dampen the economic consequences of making an area more liveable, and while it might spread the wealth a little more widely, the economic benefits will still mostly go to wealthier people.

You would need to increase house building across London to 50% higher than Boris Johnson’s aspirational target just to stabilise prices. It would be interesting to know whether there is enough spare land and available development finance to raise supply levels high enough in order to gradually reduce prices so that the benefits of new homes would be principally accrued by ordinary Londoners.

But there are other ways in which we can reduce unequal access to nice local environments while maintaining or reducing levels of economic inequality. Housing supply is undoubtedly part of the picture, but policies need to be a bit more sophisticated to achieve this aim.

One simple policy would be to try to build lots more council housing in wealthier areas that already enjoy high environmental quality. That would require a government to reinstate an adequate housing capital budget; the new budget for London in 2011-15 is two-thirds lower than than the budget for 2008-11!

Another would be to ensure all the new housing is put into the control of a Community Land Trust, which owns the land and so can keep homes permanently affordable. Members of the Trust, usually a co-operative, use any rise in land values to benefit the local community and not private individuals. To date, there is only one example of this in London – Coin Street. Despite valiant efforts and credible plans from various other communities, the HCA, GLA and government have done little to make this concept happen.

A third more radical solution – radical as in dealing with the root of the problem (from radix, Latin for ‘root’) – would be to bring back taxation on land. Winston Churchill and Lloyd George both tried, and failed, to do this at the turn of the 20th century. They were blocked by wealthy landowners in the Lords, whose ancestors got rid of them as the power of the Crown diminished.

We have a tax system that raises income off hard work and consumer goods, and that leaves people to rake in huge gains from increases in land values and capital gains with comparatively little or no tax. If we brought back “schedule A” taxes, land values wouldn’t rise so much, the benefits could be clawed back for investment in affordable housing, all local residents could therefore benefit including council tenants, and people might be encouraged to invest their savings in productive stocks and shares rather than dead bricks and mortar.

These solutions have all been applied in the not-too-distant past. But as with the debate over the National Planning Policy Framework, they seem to get overlooked in simplistic debates over false choices like “housing supply vs. conservation”.

Jim’s post is much more sophisticated, looking at the relationship between environmental improvements and the housing market. But his prescription – more supply – needs to be equally sophisticated to ensure that we deliver environmental and social justice side by side.

They join in attacks on groups like the National Trust and Friends of the Earth, calling them wealthy NIMBYs who are protecting their own over-inflated house prices. They buy into the suggestion that the planning system has held back house building, harming a growing proportion of the current generation of young people who are now “jilted”, priced out of home ownership.

Is this right?

I don’t think so. In fact, I believe the Government’s proposals are bad for young people, and bad for intergenerational justice.

Is planning the problem?

There can be no doubt that planning regulations are a drag on housing development, adding both the cost of the buildings themselves and the process of putting them up. But that’s like saying that the minimum wage and gender equality laws are a drag on business. They may be, but they’re regulations we value.

The evidence that the planning system is a bottleneck is weak. According to London Councils there are approximately 170,000 homes in London’s planning system with permission that aren’t currently being built – the constraint being scarce mortgage finance caused by the credit crunch and high land values.

In London Ken Livingstone used the planning system to force reluctant councils to build more houses, and increased output by almost 50% in a decade, though it was still about half the level required to stabilise prices through supply. Boris Johnson has continued with this approach, albeit with more of an emphasis on negotiation than force.

Would the private sector build more homes without the planning system? The only time in the past century that the UK has seen house building match demand, and kept housing affordable, was when councils built in huge volumes from the 1950s to 1970s.If you think price bubbles are all about supply, explain the continued volatility of house prices through the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The big home builders have little incentive to build large volumes and deflate the value of land, and never filled the gap when we stopped councils building in the 1980s. Have we given up hope of persuading the public to back large scale public house building?

Figures from the Department of Communities and Local Government.

The Government’s main reform is to radically simplify planning regulations. Are the regulations and guidance the problem, or are we overlooking the understaffed local planning authorities and unduly complex or slow processes?

Actually the biggest obstacle to building more housing is the cost of land. Unless we threw away any protections for the green belt and farm land that take up most of our country, or accept much higher density levels across the board, it will always be too scarce a resource for supply to match demand. There can be no doubt that we need policies that reduce the value of land, or at least contain the rises in land values (which are in fact the underlying reason for rises in the prices of existing houses).

Planning consent for housing transforms the value of farm land and brownfield land, so the argument goes that presumed consent would somehow help. I’m not convinced it would, and anyway we could call for proposals such as councils auctioning off land and using the planning gain to fund affordable housing.

Do we need to reduce planning costs as well as tackle land values, pushing for every tool in the box to be used? Is it simply that the current Government is serious about reducing planning costs, but that no minister since Lloyd George has shown a serious interest in reintroducing land value taxation?

Isn’t planning a solution?

My greater worry is that young people are forgetting the benefits of a detailed planning system.

If they are concerned with intergenerational equity, what greater disaster for the current youngest and future generations can there be than climate change? Successive governments may have failed to keep housing costs in check, but that failure pales into insignificance when we consider that decades of hot air on climate change policy have failed to even slow the global rise in greenhouse gase emissions.

The planning system is central to mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Without tough and highly prescriptive planning rules on car parking, road layouts, renewable energy and a long list of other policy areas, councils will continue to allow development that is incompatible with reducing emissions to a sustainable level. Labour failed to go far enough with the planning system, and just as excellent new rules on renewables were ready to be introduced, this Government has decided to scrap the lot and introduce some vague aspirations through which anti-green councils (being the majority in England) will drive a polluting coach and horses.

Can you see every council in England and Wales deciding that “sustainable development” requires a reduction in car traffic, fewer car parking spaces and proper provision of cycle routes?

Allowing people to convert offices into homes without planning permission could damage jobs and lead to the worst type of housing being built, without any regard to considerations of size or quality.

Protecting the green belt and farm land is important for climate change adaptation, not only in terms of protecting habitats (if only all farms were managed well) but more importantly for food security. It’s a long time since the UK was self-sufficient in food, but there are a number of pressures on food prices that will only get worse in the years to come: global population growth and an increase in per-capita demand for meat from grain-intensive cattle; oil prices that will only go in one direction long term, which not only fuels machinery but is also the basis for fertilisers and pesticides; and longer term the potential loss of many of the world’s bread baskets due to climate change taking hold.

We need to keep all the land we can for food production, so that future generations have a chance of keeping a high level of domestic food production using systems such as permaculture and aquaponics. This isn’t science fiction, the new London Plan even begins to discuss this concern.

The planning system can also help redress longstanding integenerational iniquities, such as requiring councils to plan for extra social housing (council and housing association housing) in wealthier areas, and ensuring that homes are always built with decent sized rooms (something this Government has reversed to simplify regulations).

These and other provisions could still be enshrined by more enlightened councils in the new slimmed down system, but they could be challenged if they stood in the way of building lots of houses and promoting economic growth. The benefits of will largely go to property developers and income rich people who can buy houses.

My suggestion to fellow jilted youth

By all means call for planning regulations to be streamlined where they are excessive, and to force NIMBY councils to permit more house building. Challenge conservation groups where they block the development of decent housing in areas that desperately need it, and where the justification is weak or self-serving.

But please don’t support this regressive Government in its efforts to tear up the planning system in the name of misdirected growth. The critics aren’t hysterical, hypocritical or self-serving; the concern is genuine and justified.

A photo of the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, London

One of the best features of the Heygate Estate is the urban forest that has grown there in the past thirty or forty years. But the few remaining residents and local campaigners fear the “regeneration” will see many or even most of them cut down.

Through a friend who is involved with the campaign, I came along to help them map the trees that are there now. Knowing what you have seems like a good first step to saving it.

So I helped them enter the trees into OpenStreetMap using the OpenEcoMaps install of the Potlatch 2 editor, set-up a simple map that shows them as clickable objects on a map, and provided them with a spreadsheet of all the data at the end of the process.

Some other clever bods in the campaign then used a system called CAVAT (Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees) that puts a financial value on the trees. They estimate the value to be well in excess of £7.6m! Here is the CAVAT valuation laid on top of OpenStreetMap:

I’m glad to say this has become a case study in a recent London Assembly report into the state of street trees in London, which makes recommendations about the need for open street tree data and uses this Heygate mapping to show both the demand for this data and how useful it can be.

Since mapping the trees ourselves, I’ve received a file with all the trees in Southwark from the council with permission to use and share it, which is brilliant. I did a test import in East Dulwich/Peckham Rye, but stopped short because of rendering issues. It would be great to be able to import the lot and see if citizens can keep the data more up to date than the council, or perhaps even collaborate with the council and Trees for Cities?

Top of my list was to build a cold frame-come-greenhouse for overwintering my herbs. One salvaged broken chair, a trip to the DIY store and a few hours work later and I had fashioned the rather nice frame pictured opposite. It is sitting on our small balcony, the only space available to most Londoners. I’m not really sure which of the strawberry plants, rosemary, mint, coriander, broad-leafed parsley and the chives will survive the winter but at least they now have a cosy little added help.

In between ironing, cleaning, sit-ups and press-ups, I’ve also caught up on some of the debate following the autumn Green Party conference. No mention online of my motion introducing policy on Community Land Trusts being passed, but there is plenty of chatter on the Bright Green Scotland group blog and a very nice roundup from top blogger Jim Jepps.

Thanks to Jim I stumbled across Molly Scott-Cato’s defence of her motion on living within our means; I spoke against this, and have left a comment outlining my reasons. What is interesting is that she ascribes all opposition to “an influx of socialists who are understandably disillusioned with the Labour Party”. Now that certainly does not include me though I have noticed a growing number of self-described socialists, particularly in the Young Greens.

No, what I enjoyed about this conference was the growing number of people interested in policy relevant to our MP, MEPs, London Assembly members and councillors, not just to those who like to think in terms of broad political theory. After weeks of theory and politics crammed into my working day, evenings and weekends, some time with a hammer and saw has been very nice indeed.

Oona King hasn’t impressed me much so far. Her candidacy seems very light on detail, her policy pronouncements full of nice language but no specifics. As Martin Hoscik writes, Ken Livingstone is simply rehearsing his 2008 manifesto, with a few innovations (such as borrowing affordable housing money on the bond market) that are basically unfolding behind the scenes in City Hall already.

But on the BBC Politics Show on Sunday, King did get one impressive point in. Livingstone is basically gearing up for a re-run of the 1980s, when he battled with Thatcher from the GLC. He wants to fight, fight, fight every cut (transcript here). But as King pointed out, once the Mayor gets a cut-down grant she/he can’t do very much about it.

In the face of cuts beyond our control we need to innovate (whilst of course speaking out against the cuts and making them very uncomfortable for Lib Dem and Conservative MPs in London). King cited the example of co-operative home ownership, something I have recently worked on with Jenny Jones. I have also written in the past about opportunities for local communities to regenerate their area without waiting, cap in hand, for big chunks of government funding.

Given that Livingstone has jumped on the bond market bandwagon to raise money for affordable homes I hope he will use the next two years to take up other innovations, as King suggested. I also hope Oona King puts some substance behind her slightly vague but insightful suggestions.

A campaign of positive ideas for London’s very varied communities would be much more interesting, and beneficial to London, than two years of simply attacking the coalition Government’s disastrous budget.

It’s something that a growing number of people know, whether you’ve been priced out or you know someone who has by decades of massive house price rises. It is most severe in London and fancy rural communities, but is a growing problem across the country.

I’m pretty proud of the work Jenny and I did on it!

Put aside the fact that at 36% of the UK’s GDP, the current tax level is lower than under Margaret Thatcher (when it dipped to 40%) and much lower than the Swedish level of around 50%.

How does tax affect me? Well my income tax and council tax, which pay for all the basic public services, the roads, waste collection, public transport investment, welfare for people in harder circumstances and much more account for less than my rent, which pays for my half of a flat with my fiancee. My national insurance and pension contributions that are hopefully securing my retirement add up to much less than my rent as well. Since I don’t spend a great deal on clothes, cars, TVs and the like, I’m not too affected by indirect taxes like VAT either.

After all those taxes and basic life expenses, I still have 35% of my gross income left over for fun, holidays, personal savings and the like.

If I were to get pissed off about someone taking all my money, my first target would be the property market. Look how much money I have to spend just to afford a reasonable flat in an area I like! Then there’s my inability to afford to buy a home making my future less secure, low interest rates on my ISA bond and in the short term the likely rises in bus and train fares due to spending cuts.

Yep, all things considered I think tax is the least of my financial worries.

Anyone on similar or higher incomes who crows about tax levels should stop for a moment and think about the majority who earn less and stand to lose a great deal from public spending cuts.

I’ve been doing some work recently on the Green story about the recession, and what the Mayor of London should do in response. A big part of this is the Green story on housing, since the housing bubble is both a structural weakness in our economy and a negative consequence for the majority of people for whom it is far too expensive. Jenny Jones has recently published a great report explaining the downside of the story, and we’re working together on a follow-up describing a range of rather complex solutions.

So how can we tell our positive story on housing in a way that people can connect with, that will win their emotional sympathy without triggering justified intellectual cynicism? The cynicism should be dealt with by our detailed report, but here’s a first and rather long attempt at the story:

We all want a home we can afford, that we can make our own, and if possible to build up a stake in it for our retirement – a fair approach to housing.

The Labour government has tried to solve this by providing subsidies to big business builders, who offer slightly cheaper private housing that just becomes completely unaffordable later on. Everyone who struggles to afford this can get state handouts – housing benefit or social housing – paid for by the profits of big business, making us all dependent on their success.

The Green Party would hand ownership and control of our land and homes to communities. Instead of expensive short-term subsidies, we would support pensions and other long-term investments into housing that is owned and run by local communities. You could build up a financial stake in your home, and you would pass it on to the next generation at a permanently affordable price.

Does that make sense? I’d love to read any comments and thoughts.

This is the increasing cost of housing adjusted for increases in income; or adjusting for inflation to state rises in real terms, for economists. Imagine if food or heating bills rose that quickly compared to incomes!

Whilst the property-owning journalists hail this rise in house prices, more and more people are squeezed out of the market, or forced to sacrifice huge chunks of their salary to repay mortgages.

Jenny Jones published a report on the housing crisis in London recently. She shows that over the past decade the cost of buying a home doubled in London, well above the national rise of 63%. This makes the misleading boasts of our Tory Mayor – as he fails to even meet his own modest housing targets – all the more sickening.

Unless we double the number of homes we build, which is pretty unlikely, or we make a radical shift away from home ownership, this trend is set to continue for another decade. But our Labour government and this Tory Mayor are both  committed to mostly building homes we have to buy, with a very small minority available for affordable rent, almost no land being held by communities to keep it affordable, and pretty much no support for alternative models like co-operatives.