The Housing Debate

The Housing Debate.

Last week our Head of Data, Tom Forth, appeared on Channel 4 News’s programme ‘How do we fix the Housing Crisis?’

Tom was asked to appear as, alongside his work on transport data and income inequality, he’s often used data to evidence problems in housing in the UK. You can read some more about this on his website. As Tom said on Channel 4, he thinks the solution is to build more homes. We agree. You can watch it for yourself in a clip Twitter/X or the full debate on YouTube.

If anyone has tried to rent a property in a busy area recently, you’ll know how difficult it is to get a reasonable rent within a reasonable time. Very simply, you might be able to see how more empty homes might combat this problem. However, many people think having empty homes is something to be avoided at all costs, and that they should be filled before more are built. As Tom outlined in his appearance on Channel 4, the UK built 120,000 less homes than France last year.

However, where we build these homes matters, and they require the infrastructure to go along with them. Bob Seely, Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight said during the debate that more inner city housing was needed, then explained that the population of the Isle of Wight had gone up 50% since 1961 while places like Manchester and Birmingham had stagnated.

Densifying our cities is all well and good, but concurrent infrastructure like transport and education hasn’t received the level of investment and initiative to make this viable. There’s no point more people living in a city if they can’t access it. More people means more buses and more school places. Take a look at Tom’s work for Open Innovations here, detailing how the effective population density of a city shrinks when public transport is not up to scratch.

We’ve done lots of work of our own on housing and the related issues of transport and inequality. You can follow these links to have a look. There’s a tool to see how many houses there are in certain areas, and how many are empty. The accompanying link explains our thoughts behind this tool.

As always, if you’re interested in this work or think you can help, Get in Touch!

https://open-innovations.org/projects/housingengland/

https://open-innovations.org/blog/2019-06-19-open-data-foundations-building-a-housing-tool