City homes for young people
We could make many more affordable flats for young people available in cities, especially London. There are things we could do to boost their availability, one of which is to incentivize build-to-rent projects with purpose-built rental housing, often owned by institutional investors.
Developers could be incentivized through tax breaks or streamlined planning processes to include a higher proportion of affordable units specifically for younger renters. London’s build-to-rent sector has been growing, and there are policies that could steer this growth toward affordability goals.
Planning permission should be simplified and speeded up. In particular, we should cut red tape for developers building dense, low-cost housing near to public transport availability.
We should repurpose underused commercial spaces, turning empty offices and shops into flats. We should promote small site development and encourage building on infill and "micro" sites with pre-approved templates.
We should develop government-owned land for this purpose. Local councils and Transport for London (TfL) own valuable land that could be sold or leased at below-market rates if used for young people’s accommodation.
Modular and prefab construction might have a role to play, provided we keep an eye on quality. Modular homes can be built off-site and assembled quickly. This reduces costs and gets flats online faster. On land awaiting development, young people could live in pop-up affordable homes.
In some cases, affordable young people’s housing quotas in private developments might use Section 106 agreements: These can be negotiated to include more affordable flats for young renters.
Shared living and co-living spaces are not just for students. Purpose-built co-living spaces can offer affordability through shared kitchens/lounges while still offering private rooms.
Equity loan schemes, shared ownership, and savings-match programmes can help some renters into ownership, reducing rental demand and thereby increasing rental availability for others.
We should fast-track conversions of vacant pubs and offices into studio flats and create “affordable housing accelerators” to support developers with pre-approved, cost-effective designs. And we might consider offering council tax discounts to landlords who selectively rent to under-30s.
The elephant not blundering about these proposals smashing the china is rent controls. These cut available housing by making it uneconomic for landlords to continue renting. Because they can make better returns elsewhere, many sell their rental properties, leading to shortages and long waiting lists. The ones that remain find there is not enough money coming in to do adequate maintenance, so properties deteriorate. Rent controls exacerbate the problem rather than solving it.
Overall, there is no magic bullet to make life easier for young people who want to live independently in cities, but there is a series of measures that could be implemented to increase the supply of accommodation for them. What unites all of these suggested measures is a determination to recognize that there is a problem, and to acquire the determination to solve it.
Madsen Pirie
