How to think about housing and planning

Author(s):  
Shaun Spiers

This chapter discusses how politicians have been deceived by faith-based, ideologically predetermined anti-planning arguments from free-market think tanks such as Policy Exchange. While ministers were fixating on the planning system as a barrier to house building, they neglected to do the obvious thing: build houses. In time, the ‘war on planning’, a steady stream of reports supported by seminars, newspaper articles, and private lunches and dinners, began to have an impact. Planning came to be widely blamed for the country's failure to build enough homes and, more generally, for holding back economic development. The chapter then looks at four related issues that help explain why a new approach is needed: the rise and fall of council housing; the economic model of the big developers; the rise and fall of the ‘property-owning democracy’; and land values.

Author(s):  
Bob Colenutt

Book Abstract: Despite countless reports and Government policy announcements on the housing crisis over decades, the scale and depth of the crisis continues. Homelessness, shortages of social housing, rents and house prices continue rise year on year. The word affordability has become meaningless. Land landowners and housebuilders and property investors have made huge profits out of this crisis. This book focusing in examples from London and Northamptonshire examines the power of the ‘finance-housebuilding ’ complex arguing that this property lobby is the main blockage for change and reform. It explains why the housing and planning system has become increasingly dysfunctional over the last 40 years accelerating with the impact of the 2008 Crash. The book gives examples of how the property lobby has been highly effective in manipulating Government housing and planning policy for its own benefit, to the detriment of those in housing need. It shows how the housebuilders business model, backed by Government grants and subsidies, has played a central role in perpetuating the crisis. The property lobby has succeeded in diverting attention from themselves onto the town planning system which has been scapegoated for holding back new house building. The result is that the housing crisis and the power behind it is hard baked into the UK economy. It must be addressed by radical reform of the property, planning and finance system. Without these reforms homelessness, poor housing, and lack of affordability will continue indefinitely.


2007 ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
B. Titov ◽  
I. Pilipenko ◽  
A. Danilov-Danilyan

The report considers how the state economic policy contributes to the national economic development in the midterm perspective. It analyzes main current economic problems of the Russian economy, i.e. low effectiveness of the social system, high dependence on export industries and natural resources, high monopolization and underdeveloped free market, as well as barriers that hinder non-recourse-based business development including high tax burden, skilled labor deficit and lack of investment capital. We propose a social-oriented market economy as the Russian economic model to achieve a sustainable economic growth in the long-term perspective. This model is based on people’s prosperity and therefore expanding domestic demand that stimulates the growth of domestic non-resource-based sector which in turn can accelerate annual GDP growth rates to 10-12%. To realize this model "Delovaya Rossiya" proposes a program that consists of a number of directions and key groups of measures covering priority national projects, tax, fiscal, monetary, innovative-industrial, trade and social policies.


Author(s):  
Maidul Islam

Close to the turn of the century and almost 45 years after Independence, India opened its doors to free-market liberalization. Although meant as the promise to a better economic tomorrow, three decades later, many feel betrayed by the economic changes ushered in by this new financial era. Here is a book that probes whether India’s economic reforms have aided the development of Indian Muslims who have historically been denied the fruits of economic development. Maidul Islam points out that in current political discourse, the ‘Muslim question’ in India is not articulated in terms of demands for equity. Instead, the political leadership camouflages real issues of backwardness, prejudice, and social exclusion with the rhetoric of identity and security. Historically informed, empirically grounded, and with robust analytical rigour, the book tries to explore connections between multiple forms of Muslim marginalization, the socio-economic realities facing the community, and the formation of modern Muslim identity in the country. At a time when post-liberalization economic policies have created economic inequality and joblessness for significant sections of the population including Muslims, the book proposes working towards a radical democratic deepening in India.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110282
Author(s):  
Callum Ward

This article offers insight into the role of the state in land financialisation through a reading of urban hegemony. This offers the basis for a conjunctural analysis of the politics of planning within a context in which authoritarian neoliberalism is ascendant across Europe. I explore this through the case of Antwerp as it underwent a hegemonic shift in which the nationalist neoliberal party the New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie; N-VA) ended 70 years of Socialist Party rule and deregulated the city’s technocratic planning system. However, this unbridling of the free market has led to the creation of high-margin investment products rather than suitable housing for the middle classes, raising concerns about the city’s gentrification strategy. The consequent, politicisation of the city’s planning system led to controversy over clientelism which threatened to undermine the N-VA’s wider hegemonic project. In response, the city has sought to roll out a more formalised system of negotiated developer obligations, so embedding transactional, market-oriented informal governance networks at the centre of the planning system. This article highlights how the literature on land financialisation may incorporate conjunctural analysis, in the process situating recent trends towards the use of land value capture mechanisms within the contradictions and statecraft of contemporary neoliberal urbanism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2s) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea De Montis ◽  
Antonio Ledda ◽  
Amedeo Ganciu ◽  
Mario Barra ◽  
Simone Caschili

The late formal tradition of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) European Directive into the Italian planning system has so far induced a variety of behaviour of administrative bodies and planning agencies involved. In Italy and Sardinia, a new approach to landscape planning is characterizing spatial planning practice from the regional to the municipal level. Currently municipalities are adjusting their master plan to the prescriptions of the regional landscape planning instrument (in Italian, Piano Paesaggistico Regionale, PPR), according to processes that have to be integrated with a proper SEA development. With respect to this background, the aim of this paper is to assess the level of SEA implementation on the master plans of Sardinia six years after the approval of the PPR. The first results show that many municipalities are not provided with a master plan (in Italian, Piano Urbanistico Comunale, PUC) and they have in force just an old planning tool. Moreover, just some municipalities have adapted the PUC to the PPR carrying out a SEA process.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Željko Marić

Bosnia and Herzegovina is in a state of long-term recession. Under these conditions, the State would have to apply the Keynesian economic policy instead of the neoclassical free market policy. This means that the State should take on the role of the main driver of economic development by increasing public spending and the fiscal consolidation. In doing so, it is very important to understand and evaluate the fiscal multipliers, as the successful application of the Keynesian policy depends exclusively on them. The aim of this paper is, after conducting an analysis of determinants and limitations of the fiscal multipliers within the conditions present in transition countries, to provide guidance on how to conduct the public spending policy, together with the monetary policy and structural reforms which would reduce the possible limitations regarding the effect of fiscal multipliers, thus increasing their impact on economic development. The analysis will be conducted on the example of Bosnia and Herzegovina.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas A. Akudugu

In recent times, the term ‘local economic development’ has been conceptualised and introduced as a bottom-up participatory development strategy in Ghana. It is intended to be implemented at the district level to facilitate the revitalisation of the local economy and create jobs for local residents. Using in-depth interviews and the analysis of relevant policy documents, this paper evaluates efforts aimed at institutionalising the practice in local institutional frameworks and development planning practice in the country. The paper found out that processes aimed at institutionalising contemporary local economic development practice in Ghana are not making any meaningful impact. Institutional frameworks such as the structuring of development policymaking and planning in the country are still rigid and promote bureaucratic top-down development decision-making processes. Similarly, the promotion of a meaningful bottom-up decentralised planning system is only a well-packaged talk by policymakers in the country. Evidence shows that there is a clear lack of political will to implement reforms, particularly the new decentralisation policy that seeks to make District Assemblies in Ghana responsive to local economic development promotion. There is the need for a conscious effort towards making local economic development practice matter in national and local development endeavour in Ghana.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 385-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Mense ◽  
Claus Michelsen ◽  
Konstantin A. Kholodilin

Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would otherwise not have rented in the market, replacing households with higher willingness to pay for housing. These households bid up prices in the free market segment, giving rise to an opposite-sign spillover from the controlled to the free market (Mense, Michelsen, and Kholodilin 2017). This paper documents a positive effect of “second generation” rent control on the value of vacant, buildable land.


Organization ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amon Barros ◽  
Sergio Wanderley

We advocate for the relevance of taking Brazilian past experience and theorization of populism into account to understand present-day challenges. We depart from Weffort’s conceptualization of populism to discuss the role of businesspeople movements in supporting and taking control of the political agenda through think tanks. According to Weffort, populism is built over precarious alliances that tend to favor policy or politics in different moments. During times of divergence among political elites, a populist leader emerges as a mediator in orchestrating an unstable hegemony among asymmetric classes. At the same time, the classes included in the populist alliance give legitimacy to the populist leader; they hinder his capacity of imposing decisions. However, treason of the weakest within the alliance is certain. We suggest that the political role played by the think tank IPES, in 1960s Brazil, in reframing middle-class demands is akin to contemporary populist events in Brazil—represented by the election of Jair Bolsonaro—and in the Anglo-Saxon world. Trumpism and Brexit are examples of a still-powerful free-market ideology project wrapped up under a populist discourse (re)framed with the support of businessmen and think tanks. A corporate takeover of government and the imposition of a free-market agenda are certain, as it is the treason of the weakest in the populist coalition. CMS academics should engage with the demands that give birth to populist movements as a way to dispute the neoliberal hegemony and anti-democratic populist solutions.


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