AFFORDABLE
HOUSING HAS A BAD IMAGE......
The
Royal Institution of
Chartered Surveyors has said this week that we are experiencing the
lowest level of housebuilding in England
since the 1920's and that today's children face a lifetime of renting cramped
accommodation in an increasingly unaffordable market.
Around 2.5
million children live in homes that are damp.
Around 1.5
million children live in households that cannot afford to heat their home.
Housing is
not one of our most successful services compared with our European neighbours.
16th out of 34 in OECD analysis, it nevertheless ranks way above education,
skills, work-life balance and wellbeing - all of them in many ways affected by
quality and quantity of housing.
100 years
ago many millions of people who would have died early in their lives from
infectious diseases due to, or exacerbated by poor housing, sanitation, lack of
food and limited access to medical care survived and flourished due to a
partnership between health and planning for housing and communities. Housing
was a function of the Ministry of Health.
Post 2nd
world war house building was a numbers game – successfully allowing MacMillan
to build over 300,000 homes in 1955.
Housing
completions these days neither reach the heady numbers of the 1950s, nor
do they respond to the health and well
being imperatives as they did in the 1920's.
There is currently no effective mechanism to
engage affordable housing providers in the planning and delivery of homes that
are not just a roof – but afford positive benefits. There is concern in the
public health realm that it is not possible to get the right houses built in
the right place for the right families.
In recent
decades the health priorities have become cardiovascular disease, stroke,
respiratory disease and mental and physical health. November 2014 Town and
Country Planning journal in a joint issue with Public Health England focuses on
the need for better understanding of
both the influence of the built environment on health and the role of spatial
planning in shaping places that maintain good health.
Across a
range of societal factors the home environment has a massive influence on child
and young adult development. As MIND, the Mental Health Charity suggest, well
designed home environments need to respond to the needs of occupiers –
delivering positive assistive, uplifting home environments can often be as easy
as building the wrong house.
Not a cost
issue but a DESIGN issue.
Research
from Finland confirms the improved
development of children that can be afforded by communal space that is well
designed, engaging and safe.
Affordable
Housing was always intended for the most vulnerable – by enhancing life and
earning chances through positive design of supportive environments the future
opportunities for the less advantaged can be improved.
We
are uniquely placed to influence the lives of millions of people who live in
our affordable homes...
- affording
children’s perceptive capability through good environmental design,
- affording
cheap warmth by high grade insulation,
- affording
old age community engagement through interactive technology.
43%
of adults over state pension age are disabled. Based on responses
from 222 English and Wales housing authorities, the charity found that a third
of councils (32%) either did not mention disability at all in their housing
plan, or mentioned it only in passing.
How
many homes are capable of receiving a disabled person for short term remedial
care?? The Lifetime Homes standard promotes a 1 in 10 policy for new homes –
but there is a massive gulf between actual accessibility and the need. The cost
of bed blocking from older patients unable to return to their own home because
they cannot care for themselves, but also unable to be discharged to their
family's home due to lack of facilities is significant.
It is considered axiomatic by
many that health and housing are linked in that poor housing results in
negative health issues. But evidence suggests that housing built to address
health concerns could dramatically improve health outcomes, reduce burdens of
the health services and social care and not cost much, if anything, extra to build
if the homes are designed right in the first place.
The space
standards for UK dwellings is significantly less than that for our European
neighbours. Housing Associations either have to buy land at commercial prices,
or buy ready built houses also at commercial prices. 1/3 of the price of a
property is taken up in profit for the land owner or developer while huge
tracts of public land are classed as developable brownfield but are not being
released.
Housing
Associations are facing both an identity and a structural crisis. The are not
delivering for the least well off, they are not working with health agencies to
provide sympathetic environments in which to grow develop and retire in
supportive communities, and they are now being threatened by the double threat
of profit making private businesses accessing government grants and loan
guarantees to build one bedroom starter homes for sale or private rent on the
one hand and a promised 'right to buy' for Housing Association tenants promoted
as part of a successful Conservative
Party if they win the May 7th General Election.
The
strong desire of the health and wellbeing community is for lifetime homes with
low energy use and cost, high
utility, permanent low cost to access
and low maintenance and service charges
A
focus on affordance – what the home can do for its occupants - together with a
restructuring of tenure models so that low land cost can allow lower density
with higher utility could transform both the lives of social tenants but also
release higher residual income to be spent in the community to support economic
growth without resort to payday loans just to buy food at the end of the week.
Community Land Trusts offer one route to this uprated provision.
My
research will be extending and integrating the many situational aspects of
affordance, drawing from human computer interaction, social psychology, design,
child development and ageing amongst others to develop a framework of
affordances that might allow a translation or a correspondence between required
outcomes and specific characteristics of the environment. This framework will
be piloted in a Health and Wellbeing context.
We
need is a mechanism to relate health issues that might stem from housing
deficiencies and the solutions that are possible in the housing world.
A
specific case might be the need to retrofit houses with electrical sockets
higher on the wall so that wheelchair users can access them – this was a
solution, and it cost money to retrofit. Now with wireless technology plugs that
use existing sockets that can be controlled by mobile phone or tablet, allow
disabled people to live in their own home but also (given other physical
factors) during a period of recuperation
in their family's home without restrictions on their use of electrical devices.
No cost to the built environment, huge savings in the hospital and care sector due to reduced bed blocking (estimated
to impact 61% of days lost due to wait for discharge to nursing home or care
home).
Just
this month government has begun to work in this cross cutting way, recognising
the value of warmth on prescription piloted in Sunderland: joint funding from
health and housing leading to a reduction in unplanned admissions. This
initiative builds on the Decent Homes and Affordable Warmth initiatives that
have seen a major improvement in air tightness and levels of warmth at lower
cost that have made significant improvements in family health.
However, increasing air tightness creates its own
problems; In a 2014 study the high prevalence of asthma in UK compared with the
rest of the world was considered in relation to improved energy efficiency
measures in houses. The study authors concluded that energy efficiency may
increase the risk of asthma in adults residing in social housing and that a
multidisciplinary approach is needed to understand the interaction between
energy efficiency and fuel poverty. The risk of asthma was doubled in houses
where mould was present. Tightly sealed houses with double glazing have been
reported to increase the incidence of damp and mould when their SAP rating
rises above 71.
Tobacco
is itself a significant housing issue not only degrading the housing stock of tenants
who smoke but causing a third of all household fires and resulting in a third
of all domestic fire deaths resulting from cigarette smoking. Yet increasing
constraints on smoking in public places and the workplace result in the
domestic house becoming the last – and as we’ve seen above sadly for some the
final –refuge of the smoker.
Housing
designed to address health concerns can dramatically improve health outcomes
and reduce burdens on health, social care and housing budgets. The annual cost
of falls of people over 60 in the UK is £2billion, and at one year follow up
20% of frequent fallers are in hospital, full time care or dead. Homes designed
to minimise the likelihood of falls could make a significant inroads in to this
major public health focus area.
But
where is the conversation being had between health and housing at this level of
design solutions that impact health and housing – there is little evidence that
these conversations are happening at all. One reason is that there is no common
language.
And
thats what my research is about …... creating a mechanism – an algebra of
affordances and appropriations - that allows health professionals to describe
their hopes in their language, for housing providers to express their design
options in their own language and for there to be a coming together of the two that results in the design of houses and neighbourhoods that
contribute to greatly improved well being and health with little or no direct
cost.
March
27th 2015
uk.linkedin.com/in/paullrobathan/
