To solve its housing crisis, Britain turns to an old idea: New towns

NORTHSTOWE, England — On a baking hot afternoon in July, Firouz Thompson proudly drove down the freshly paved road that leads into Northstowe, a new town about 6 miles northwest of Cambridge, England.

“This is where the new town center will be,” said Thompson, a Northstowe resident, as she pointed to an empty patch of land that will eventually include a market hall, convenience store, library and health center. Nearby there are already a high school and an all-ages special needs school. Soon, a preschool will open.

By 2040, this former World War II airfield will be transformed into a thriving town with 10,000 homes and about 25,000 residents. Or, at least, the British government, regional officials and residents hope so.

Today, Northstowe has just 1,450 homes in a mixture of low apartment blocks and single-family houses, surrounded by fields, construction sites and newly planted trees that offer no respite from the heat. Nearly a decade after its groundbreaking, Northstowe has become an example of the sluggish pace at which Britain is chipping away at its housing crisis.

“The U.K. has had a worse housing crisis than most of its peer countries, for a longer period than most of its peer countries, whether in Europe or North America,” said Anthony Breach, a researcher at Centre for Cities, an urban policy think tank. Britain went from having one of the best housing stocks in Europe after World War II to falling behind, he added.

To address the growing need for homes, the country’s governing Labour Party has vowed to “unleash” development and build 1.5 million homes over the next five years, a pace of house building last seen in the 1960s.

Part of Labour’s strategy is to build new towns by expanding small communities or establishing settlements, reviving an idea from the 1940s. Within days of gaining office, Rachel Reeves, Britain’s finance minister, announced that the government was stepping in to unblock stalled housing projects, including Northstowe.

“I moved here thinking, wow, a new community, and wow, a new school,” said Thompson, one of the first people to move to Northstowe in 2017 and the town’s representative on the county council. But she acknowledges that the development has been slow, a frustration to many of her fellow residents.

“It’s hard to build a new town on the back of COVID and construction costs,” which have risen sharply, she said.

Across the country, the problems date back further. Over the past few decades, the dwindling supply of new homes has snowballed into a housing crisis that has left Britain with a shortfall of more than 4 million homes, compared with the pace of house building in the average European country, according to the Centre for Cities. As a result, house prices have soared and homelessness has climbed. The shortage has also made it difficult for people to relocate for good jobs and for companies to attract talented workers.

Much of the blame has been laid on the country’s development planning system. In the late 1940s, a system was introduced that required permission to build from a planning authority, which was controlled by local residents. Around the same time, amid concerns about urban sprawl, “greenbelts” were created around cities to restrict development. Over the years, the planning system has led to delays as residents tend to be wary of new developments, while the protection of the greenbelts has forced building away from areas with existing infrastructure.

It was “a historical accident” that Britain’s planning system became so restrictive, Breach said. And it was made worse by the rise of “NIMBYism” — the not-in-my-backyard phenomenon in which people oppose local development.

“Our discretionary system in the U.K. is extremely case by case, unpredictable,” he said. “Even if you follow the rules, you can still be denied planning permission.”

To overcome resistance, the Labour government has reintroduced mandatory building targets for local authorities in England that will cumulatively seek to deliver 370,000 homes a year. Lawmakers said they would be more assertive in intervening on behalf of development, including plans to build power infrastructure, laboratories and data centers. Officials have said they will rely on private developers, not on local councils, which were key contributors in the past.

The government has a bigger ambition to revive the idea of new towns, a policy of the Labour Party that was introduced after World War II and was intended to direct building away from London. The first was Stevenage in 1946, less than 30 miles north of the capital. The best-known is Milton Keynes, which was founded about 60 years ago and now has more than a quarter-million residents.

Last month, the government announced a task force to develop a strategy for new towns — settlements of more than 10,000 homes — and make recommendations for their locations within a year. The government has not set a target for the number of towns and acknowledges that they will take a long time to deliver.

“I don’t think it’s unrealistic to have spades in the ground on several of these large-scale new communities by the final year of the Parliament,” which is in five years, Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, told the BBC recently. “They will be fully up and running, in many instances, only in a second term if we get the privilege to have one.”

But building the settlements can be divisive and hard to get right.

“The risk with new towns is that they are built too far outside of the commuting range of cities, and you try to build self-contained small economies,” Breach said. The towns end up being “too small to really compete in the global economy, but then they’re also too big to simply be charming little villages with high amenities.”

Homes England, the government’s housing and regeneration agency and the main planner in Northstowe, acknowledges that the town got off to a rough start. The first phase, built by a different developer, “had not been fully successful” and had lacked the necessary social infrastructure, said Peter Denton, CEO of the agency.

“The level of investment upfront that was required to make Northstowe a proper success was reasonably substantial,” he said. The agency helped build many of the roads, green spaces and schools, intending to recoup the money for the Treasury by selling plots of land ready for development.

In the past year, the town has gotten a sports center and a temporary community building, but there are still no stores and only limited medical facilities. The Northstowe Tap &Social opened just four months ago, serving coffee and pastries during the day and craft beer and burgers at night.

Early residents had to build the community from scratch. Thompson and one of her neighbors set up a group called Northstowe Foodies, which brings in food trucks to serve the town.

Victoria Fabron, 35, moved to the development two years ago, attracted to the modern design and prospects of a new town center. It felt “promising,” she said, after leaving the community building on a recent afternoon. Fabron, who lives with her partner and two children, said that the community was “super active,” but that people wanted more places to go.

“There’s not tons to do, but I knew that when I moved here,” she said, adding that she expected more amenities would come. “I just hope that they live up to their promises.”

For others, the promises already feel broken. Karys Brown, 24, who moved to Northstowe just over a year ago with her 4-year-old daughter, said little had improved in that time, and she struggles to get around without a car. She has doubts about the town’s future: “There’s nothing certain about what it’s going to be like.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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