This is a blog about art, but bear with me, I shall come to housing at the end.

Being a part-time painter, I recently did a large painting of Stanley Buildings at King’s Cross. These 5 blocks, housing 104 families, were built in 1864 by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company as tenement flats for local workers. Legend has it that The Pogues lived here in the early eighties, by which time it was a short-life scheme. Now only one block remains, kept company by the adjacent German Gymnasium of 1865, and overshadowed by the new towers that are rapidly emerging from the King’s Cross hinterland.

Stanley Buildings King’s Cross

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Some recent figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on land values reveal an interesting, and shocking, picture of the state of the country’s residential land market.

To begin with, the average value of a hectare of agricultural land in England is £21,000. The average value of a hectare of land with residential planning permission outside London is £1.958m, so 93 times higher than agricultural, but if London is included this soars to £6.017m – 286 times higher than a hectare of agricultural land. Continue reading →

There was a bit of a twitter spat this week between a couple of Inside Housing journalists and a few SHOUT supporters about the use of the word “subsidy”. You can read it here.

In a nutshell the journalists were arguing that £4.5 billion of grant paid to housing providers would be viewed by the wider public as a “subsidy” and that we would face an uphill struggle to persuade them otherwise. Perhaps we will, because the writ of the Daily Mail clearly runs wide and deep, but one of the key ambitions of the SHOUT campaign is to challenge this lazy stereotyping. Continue reading →

When the SHOUT campaign was launched exactly a year ago one of its central arguments was that investment in social rented housing could save the taxpayer money. We knew in our hearts that this must be true but did not have the empirical evidence to support our argument. Well now we do.

A few months ago SHOUT, together with the National Federation of ALMOS, commissioned Capital Economics, one of the most reputable, independent research firms in the business, to test our thesis. Today we are proud to publish that research. “Building New Social Rent Homes” shows that investment in 100,000 social rented homes a year makes sense. In their words: Continue reading →