Developing a pilot housing system on Swansea's High Street_Emily Carmichael by Cambridge Design Research Studio

Emily Carmichael

ANOTHER STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK Developing a pilot housing system on Swanseaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High Street

ANOTHER STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK Developing a Pilot Housing System on Swansea’s High Street Emily Carmichael Darwin College An thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil Examination in Architecture and Urban Design 2014-2016 Submitted on 27.05.16 Word Count: 15,439 Supervisor: Kathryn Firth Cover image: Hoarding on the Elysium Cinema, High Street, Swansea. © Emily Carmichael

NOT FOR CIRCULATION MAY CONTAIN SENSITIVE INFORMATION OF ONGOING PROJECTS NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

ABSTRACT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is an investigation of the system of housing provision in the UK. It examines the financial patterns and prevailing ideologies from which our housing system is constructed, and analyses how this affects individual residents and cities. The thesis is also a proposal. Using Swansea as a site of investigation, it analyses predominant regeneration ethos and considers how Swansea’s city centre might revive its role as a domestic context. By suggesting alternative funding and management structures, as well as roles for architects and urban designers, it proposes a specific social rented housing system for sites on Swansea’s High Street. Additionally, it explores how this could act as a pilot housing system for a gradually changing and progressive Welsh policy context.

This thesis has been produced with huge thanks to Kathryn Firth for continued guidance and support as a supervisor, as well as course director Ingrid Schroder, design tutors Alex WarnockSmith and Aram Moordrian, and the 2014 MAUD studio, for the multiple and ongoing conversations which have fed into this work, and to George Weller for proof-reading. Additional thanks to: Coastal Housing; Loans and Savings Abertawe; West Kensington Gibbs Green Community Homes & residents; Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill residents; ASH; Corridors Alliance, Detroit; LLLBA, Chicago; Cambridge City Project; Swansea Print Workshop Also to: Kettle’s Yard Travel Award and the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture Fieldwork Fund Statement of Originality: This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text.

CONTENTS

0.0

Introduction

0.1 0.2 0.3

On housing On Swansea A research site and method

1.0

More homes, more jobs

and a destination waterfront 1.1 1.2 1.3

Amazon Fulfilment Centre Walesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Premier Waterfront Destination Coed Darcy, a place to live, work and relax

2.0

How to make a housing crisis

2.1

Housing as a tool for extraction: UK banks and

2.2 2.3

the affordability crisis Aspiration as a tool for extraction: housing policy and the impact of ideology Housing policy as urban strategy and social engineering

3.0

The potential in proposition: developing a low-cost, long term rental pilot on Swanseaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High Street

3.1 3.2

Supplementing Planning Guidance Restructuring the landlord-tenant power dynamic: negotiating the implications of tenure and ownership Case Study: LASA Credit Union

3.3

Conclusion

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0 Introduction 0.1 On Housing

Housing is complex, emotive, lucrative and political. Everybody is involved: we divide our time between inhabiting our homes and working to pay for them. Were the provision of housing organized differently, it might open up broader questions of how we develop cities and how we spend our time within them. Domestic space is a public issue. The ripples of the subprime crisis and London’s housing shortage have made the issue visible and more public, but the housing system has been structurally flawed since long before 2008. While documenting the housing crisis has become a profession in itself, it seems little closer to being resolved. If anything a ‘crisis’ rhetoric has established a state of emergency used to legitimize any housing-related activity whatsoever, while the need for housing continues to grow. Domestic space is an urban issue. Housing accounts for the majority of any city’s built fabric. It is also an architectural issue. Always, in addressing numbers, units, affordability, we are making a place where someone will live. Our treatment of the topic has implications for the detail of everyday life, from the critical: how much privacy we have, how settled we can be in our homes, to the mundane: if we have to seek permission before hanging a picture, if we can step outside without taking keys, whether there is anywhere to dry a wet coat on coming in from the rain.

0.0 Introduction

Oxford Street, Swansea City Centre

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0.2 On Swansea

Swansea was my first independent experience of anything that called itself a city. A £2.90 journey on a two carriage train, it had bowling, Mk-One, Primark, a bigger New Look than Carmarthen, and an Odeon cinema. Ahead of a primary school trip to the Brangwyn Hall - allegedly not blitzed during World War II as Hitler himself had it earmarked as his UK headquarters - we were instructed by our dinner lady to make sure we dressed up for the occasion. In the 1990s, Swansea was best known for carcrime: my friend’s mother, our dinner lady’s daughter, told my mum that if you wanted rid of any unwanted Christmas presents, you should leave them visible in your car outside Toys R Us on a Saturday, and they would be gone (presumably along with the windscreen) by the time you got back. Fifteen years later, as the train draws in and retraces its steps back out again past remains of 18th century copper plant chimneys, you can draw a mental dot-to-dot of the eastern outline of the city - or town, Swansea has a long-standing identity crisis in this respect - between regulation pebbledashed 1930s houses that mark the abrupt outer limit of the city and the beginning of the purple-green scrub of Kilvey Hill. If you live here, you cannot fail to know the landscape and history. The white morning glare on the docks makes you squint as you walk down to town from the top of the hill. Just after 10am most people passing are walking their dogs. The manicured gardens and semi-detached ‘homes for heroes’ exhibition cottages on the crest of Townhill (F3) neither betray nor comply with the area’s reputation. It reads like an advert for a happy retirement, though older people might choose to live in Sandfields (F9), flatter, and more central, to avoid walking or driving a mobility scooter down a steep, untarmacked hill. September may have been uncharacteristically sunny, but the town centre has been consistently busy throughout the day. It is not a romanticisation

Swansea Bay from Townhill

F2. F3.

to say that Oxford Street (F1), the edges of the 1970s Quadrant shopping centre and the central bus station, serving Swansea’s expansive outlying residential areas, function as highly active social spaces. For a town of 200,000 people, these places are generous in footprint, albeit designed without love. Twenty-five metres of the one kilometre length of Oxford Street is set back from the street by some 6 metres (F10). There are three benches here and three decently-sized acacia trees. The backdrop is typical of Swansea, a four storey ‘poor man’s art deco’ post-war building, elegantly proportioned. Often badly weathered or replaced with cheaper materials, this one has fared reasonably well and is newly painted. The fact that the shop on the ground floor is Poundland does not make it less of a public space than if it was leased by a more ‘reputable’ retailer. Courtesy of Gregg’s next door (one of three in a 200 metre radius), the benches are always full. ‘Low footfall’ is repeatedly cited as an issue for the city centre, but a normal day in town may lead you question whether the concern has less to do with the number of feet and more to do with who they belong to. Those around in the daytime are either working antisocial hours, carers, retired, young children, unemployed, students, disabled or any combination of these. Numbers do not swell noticeably at lunchtime: 1970s zoning legacy means very few offices are based in the town centre. If you find your way across car parks and shop service entrances, over Oystermouth Road to the beach, South Wales hills roll into three sides of the bay, North Devon just visible directly ahead. Turn back towards the city and the whole town can be read in elevation, painted houses backing up the slope towards Townhill. These few paragraphs aim to build a more multi-dimensional picture than a list of statistics which can only cast the city in dire light: life expectancy in East Swansea 13 years lower than in West Swansea; highest rate of homelessness in the UK; GDP 27% lower than the UK average. These are real problems that fundamentally affect the day-to-day lives of people living here, but declared in isolation, they paint the city, physical and people, as a problem. Statistics give us little to play with when designing new parts of the city and offer no insight into the common experience of residents. Designers, politicians and policy makers risk assuming a saviour complex and designs become problem solving exercises. Swansea does not need saving. The city does however provide an interesting context for rethinking an approach to housing: how it is designed, funded and occupied.

Welsh Administrative Boundaries .

F4.

Bae Abertawe | Swansea Bay

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Dinas a Sir Abertawe City and County of Swansea (CCS) Swansea Bay City Region

0.3 Swansea as a research site

Swansea is an unusual yet valuable site for a study on housing. It is one of the cheapest places in the UK to buy a house, yet 1 in 100 people have presented as homeless at some point. Far from the vagaries of the London property market, it permits an analysis of the everyday systems by which we access housing, and how this structures cities. In the 1820s, 90% of the UK’s copper was smelted in the Lower Swansea Valley, exported along a network of canals and down the river Tawe. In the 1900s, the river was diverted to build North dock, one of five docks in the city. These ports made Swansea a strategic German target during WWII: three nights of bombing saw the majority of the city’s substantial historic centre and industrial buildings destroyed (F18-20). A post-war rebuilding program (F22), followed by 1980s retail diversification (F6) shaped the city we see today. Like other peripheral industrial centres of the UK, the departure of heavy industry from Swansea left a legacy of poor health and low educational attainment, creating a void that was filled by lower-quality jobs, insufficient in number and remuneration to support the city’s population. The closure of the steelworks in Port Talbot, Swansea’s neighbouring town, represents the latest and, perhaps, final stage of this process. The expansion of Swansea’s universities, a major tidal energy project, and a potential £500m City Deal are all efforts to break from the shackles of an industrial past. Wales has an opportunity to restructure its approach to housing, jobs and public services. The country’s small size and devolving political structure mean that building an alternative housing system in one of its major cities could have a strong influence on regional (F4) and national and Welsh policy.

Remaining dockyard sheds East of the river tawe

F5.

Parc Tawe, the UKs first â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;retail diversification zoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; built in the 1980s

F6.

This paper is split into three parts. First, it looks at three of Swansea’s recent initiatives: a residential development, a job creation scheme and a city centre redevelopment. In doing so it analyses accepted regeneration ethoses and questions to what extent we can expect this to regenerate Swansea. Second, it examines the political and economic context for regeneration. Drawing on US, UK and German examples, it outlines how a pro-homeownership ideology has been constructed - sustained by bank lending - and the impact this has on the domestic and social life of cities. Third, the paper posits that Welsh policy context offers an opportunity to experiment with how housing is produced in the UK, suggesting a number of ways that local agents in Swansea (architects, local authorities, local organisations and residents) could facilitate a new low-cost rental housing system. This thesis approaches housing as a multi-scalar and multidisciplinary issue. Conversations with architects, residents, housing associations and credit unions, both local and remote, have framed the issues of urban housing from multiple perspectives. It has been developed in conjunction with a design project on Swansea’s High Street. This combined approach has allowed the problem of housing provision to be considered across multiple scales: from national policy to urban planning to individual sites down to the materiality of a building. This is set against fieldwork projects that employed design research approaches in various ways. The Cambridge City Project – while in many ways comprising a set of issues opposite to Swansea’s - proved an invaluable basis for conversations about the development of small cities from an urban planning perspective. It has also been similar in methodology, using a site-by-site basis to expose issues concerning the city as a whole. A feasibility study undertaken with Architects for Social Housing and commissioned by West Kensington Gibbs Green estates in Hammersmith and Fulham employed a consultation-heavy design process and provided an insight into the role of a design process in investigating and consolidating residents’ priorities for an estate infill and self-management program.

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14 08 12 13

11 10 09

Swansea Valley Key Sites

F7. N

KEY 1. Industrial Park 2. Coed Darcy (ongoing 4000 unit market residential development) 3. Liberty Stadium 4. Fforest Fach Retail Park 5. River Tawe 6. Swansea Railway Station 7. University of St Davids Townhill Campus 8. Parc Tawe 9. Swansea University 10. Swansea Beach 11. Waterfront Site 12. Dockland Sites 13. Swansea University Bay Campus 14. Amazon Depot

High Street Oxford Street M4

Mumbles Head from Swansea Beach

F8.

Sandfields, Swansea

F9.

Oxford Street, CIty Centre

F10.

Swansea Covered Market, City Centre

F11.

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Emily Carmichael University of Cambridge

Projection: British National Grid

Swansea 0S map c.1880

F12.

Swansea as a Victorian holiday resort c.1890

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Emily Carmichael University of Cambridge

Projection: British National Grid

Swansea 0S map c.1900

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Cutting King’s Dock c.1904

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Emily Carmichael University of Cambridge

Projection: British National Grid

Swansea 0S map c.1920

F16.

The island between North Dock and the River Tawe, c.1930

F17.

1940

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Emily Carmichael University of Cambridge

Projection: British National Grid

Swansea OS map c.1940

F18.

Bomb damage in the city centre, 1941

F19.

Swansea city centre indicating extent of bomb damage, 1945

F20.

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Emily Carmichael University of Cambridge

Projection: British National Grid

Swansea OS map c.1970

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Post-war Swansea, Kingsway Roundabout c.1970

F22.

1.0 More homes, more jobs and a destination waterfront

Swansea’s recent regeneration activity assumes that the city’s complex socio-economic issues will be addressed by regenerating the city centre, attracting international companies and building new homes. The case studies explored in this chapter show how this approach is highly problematic. It looks at three initiatives: a grant-funded Amazon distribution centre in East Swansea, the Central Area Regeneration Framework and Coed Darcy, a 4,000 home residential development just outside the county. These developments embody broader political and economic currents, embedding them within a city and impacting how people live within it. As a preface, we can consider an historic system of organising people within industrial cities. The factory ‘truck’ system was an economic rather than spatial device designed to extract the highest possible yield from factory workers. Employees of a factory would be housed in purpose-built workers’ housing, belonging to the factory. The first month’s wages would be withheld in order to cover rent. When wages came they were issued partly in food vouchers, which could only be spent in the factory shop, which only sold goods at inflated prices. Today, a combination of high housing costs, low pay, insecure jobs, and more recently, payday loans, have created a similarly extractive system. It is fragmented in provenance, with various parties extracting resources by various methods, but the effects manifest cumulatively on individuals, reproducing a similar structuring mechanism. Precisely because it is fragmented, it is difficult to identify, and therefore goes uncontested. The system is sustained because it is lucrative. In an economic system based on household and personal debt, poor people are highly profitable.

Location of Amazon Depot (orange) East of Swansea

F23.

Inside Amazon’s Swansea ‘fullfillment centre’

F24.

1.1 The Amazon Fulfilment Centre

In 2013, joining a growing compendium of documentaries that cast Swansea life in glorious light - Swansea Love Story, Call Centre Britain, and Poor, British and Broke - the BBC (2013) ran a Panorama which filmed a temporary night shift worker at Amazon’s Swansea distribution centre. The depot, or ‘fulfilment centre’ to use its official name, opened in East Swansea in 2008 (F23+24). It is one of eight UK centres, five of which are located in peripheral, former-industrial cities with low rates of employment3, Doncaster, Dunfermline, Gourick, Rugley and Swansea. These centres were typically government grant-aided. The Welsh Government provided a £8m grant towards build costs in Swansea, as well building a connecting trunk road. These grants were supposed to be an investment in job creation, but the quality of these jobs has meant that the intended economic regeneration has not followed. It is misleading to suggest, as Panorama does, that a decline in local shops can be wholly attributed to the presence of a distribution centre – delivering across the UK - in Swansea. While high street or independent retailers often cannot compete with Amazon on cost, this undercutting is a small part of the picture when looking at the impact on the city: more complex impacts on local businesses are explored in Chapter 2. For now, it is useful to understand the replacement of industrial jobs with lowerskill jobs as part of a process that has kept many post-industrial cities predominantly poor, while others such as Manchester have diversified into knowledge economies. Analysis by Centre for Cities (Swinney & Thomas, 2015) identifies clear trends between economically successful and unsuccessful UK cities: those that struggle have ‘replicated their economies… replac[ing] jobs in declining industries with lower-skilled, more routinized jobs, swapping

cotton mills for call centres, and dockyards for distribution sheds.’ Amazon, the retail diversification policies piloted in Swansea during the 1980s, and the low-tech electronics manufacturing4 that replaced heavy industry can be described as having ‘reinforce[d] the existing industrial structure’ (Simmie et al., 2008). Amazon’s job ‘of last resort’ (Cadwalladr, 2013) has certainly replicated the low-pay, long-hours and legacy of poor health that characterised many industrial jobs in the area. It differs from industrial employment in being highly insecure. Former industrial jobs were often jobs for life, Amazon’s ‘strike and release’ system means employees are sacked after three counts of misconduct. Missing a shift due to illness is one strike. As the Financial Times (O’Connor, 2013) ascertains, the reality of health impacts is distorted by discounting agency worker, technically not employees of Amazon, from workplace statistics. Temporary staff – or ‘seasonal associates’ – account for a high proportion of staff. Along with agency workers, allegedly only used as a stop-gap while a permanent workforce was recruited, they are paid the same minimum wage as permanent staff, but without shares or a pension. In Swansea, Amazon is unusual as a local employer in that its workforce is not unionised. The social dimension of work life has also changed. Industrial work in Wales previously had a strong social component. The Dockworkers Welfare Hall in the Elysium Cinema on Swansea’s High Street, replicated in some form in even the smallest of mining villages, is testament to this. In seeing employment as separate to a broader common social life, governments in Swansea and elsewhere have financed the creation of jobs which potentially erode the social life of a city. This effect begins with those aspects that touch on work itself5, and ultimately extends into the domestic and community spheres. Seasonal work or zero-hours contract shift work make it difficult to take out or sustain rental contracts, impacting people’s ability to live independently. For younger workers this might mean living with family for longer, while the incomes of others must be topped up by the state to ensure a basic standard of living6. Amazon’s infamous tax contribution (0.5%) aside, this makes the Welsh Government’s £8 million grant – £8000 per permanent job at Amazon - seem a very poor investment.

De-industrialisation is far from over in the Swansea area: TATA Steel’s sale or closure of the Port Talbot plant could result in the loss of approximately 4,000 skilled, above average wage jobs. Allegedly, the practice of funding unskilled industrial-based regeneration like Amazon to fill this void belongs to a ‘grant culture that is now over’ (Servini, 2009). The ‘quality jobs indicator’, launched by the Welsh Government represents a readiness to analyse the social impact of the employment practices it is willing to support. However, as the next section shows, the retail and leisure focus of the city centre strategic regeneration strategy displays similar characteristics.

Hoardings in East Swansea project a contrasting view of urban life to St Thomas, a residential district beyond

F25.

Swansea Central Area Regeneration Framework area designations. Major development sites (red line) and retail and leisure core (blue line)

F26.

1.2 Wales’ Premier Waterfront Destination

‘The City and County of Swansea are committed to positioning Swansea as a distinctive, lifestyle city’ (DTZ et al. 2016)

In 2005 the City and County of Swansea (CCS) commissioned a group of retail, real-estate, and built-environment consultants to produce a strategy for regenerating the city. A version of this underwent public consultation in 2015 and the final strategy was published in February 2016 as the Swansea Central Area: Regeneration Framework (Emotional Logic et al. 2016). The report sets out a plan for the large-scale redevelopment and rebranding of Swansea’s city centre as ‘Wales’ Premier Waterfront Destination’. It divides the city centre into nine areas (F26+27), each with a loosely ascribed programme, or ‘vision theme’. While Swansea has many of the ingredients needed to become the ‘European Waterfront City’ that the report describes - its landscape setting, direct rail connections to Cardiff and London, two expanding universities and a growing film and media industry - the quality of its buildings and urban realm are in need of serious attention. The diversity and location of the sites identified in the report would suggest a multi-pronged approach to a wide range of design questions: urban infill on fine grain streets, redevelopment of extensive 1980s retail parks, links to adjacent residential areas, and connections from the city centre to the waterfront – despite its name, it is entirely possible to visit Swansea without realising that it is on the coast. However, the retail-consultant authored report displays a strong bias towards retail-focused regeneration strategies, casting the role of the city as a shopping and leisure destination with little consideration of its domestic and civic functions. Three of the nine areas are identified as a ‘Retail Leisure Mixed Use Centre’, with the other six as ‘complementary areas’

Swansea City Centre Sites

F27.

KEY Park Tawe, a 1980s retail and leisure ‘diversification strategy’ now largely vacant

Retail and leisure core as defined by the Central Area Regeneration Framework

City Centre proposed site for retail and leisure redevelopment by Rivington Land and Acme

Swansea’s Central Area as defined by the Central Area Regeneration Framework

City Waterfront proposed site for retail, leisure and residential redevelopment by Trebor Development Design Study Site - Elysium Site High Street

RESIDENTIAL AREAS MARKED BY APPROX. CENTRE 1. Townhill 2. Mount Pleasant 3. Sandfields 4. St Thomas

Oxford Street

intended to support the retail and leisure core. There is a notable absence of any discussion of Swansea’s existing residential areas. The term ‘City living’ peppers the document, but refers to a very specific urban lifestyle. There is no recognition that Swansea already has 200,000 ‘city lives’ lived within it each day, although perhaps not ones that fit the dominant mantra of successful urban life. It propagates a lifestyle ideal that has to date existed mainly as a marketing tool to attract buyers for executive suites in the Meridian Tower. This idea of the urban is reminiscent of the attitude that saw Towards an Urban Renaissance criticised as a ‘blueprint for gentrification’ (Colomb, 2007). Although the report does propose 3,200 homes in the city centre, the detail of this domestic element is largely unexplored. High Street is proposed as a residential area to ‘support activity in the retail and leisure core’, a view which is highly reductive. These domestic settings are in themselves social settings, work environments. The domestic component of the city deserves more consideration than an allocated location and a set number of units of ‘a variety of tenures’. Additionally, the council’s intention to begin building council homes again in the city centre does not feature in the report, which appears to be more of a development brochure. Swansea’s many housing issues would be better served by affordable city centre housing. The retail focus of the report is mirrored by the regeneration activity that is currently being planned. Despite the size and diversity of the central area, the initiative has been somewhat reframed to prioritise the most saleable portions of land, to the detriment of other, smaller but pivotal sites. The ‘prime development opportunities’ were marketed at property fairs during the report’s consultation period. Developers Rivington Land and Acme were selected in February 2016. The highly valuable and easily saleable Waterfront and St Davids sites (F27-39), have become the focus of the regeneration programme. Besides improving connections to the beach and incorporating a new public square, there is little in the programme or architecture of the Waterfront proposals that is explicitly civic. While much of it will be publicly accessible: ‘a new retail street featuring iconic brands, restaurant and café

Civic Centre looking South from Townhill

F28.

City Centre looking North from Meridian Tower

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Waterfront / Site 1 - Civic Centre site

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City Centre / Site 2 - St Davids site

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quarter, an arena and a state of the art cinema’, crucially, none of it is free. In all cities, there is a need for public indoor space where people are not required to buy anything to legitimize their presence - especially in cities with large, low-income populations, and even more so in Swansea which has the highest rainfall of any UK city. The Chicago Cultural Centre, and London’s Southbank Centre are examples of major institutions with a successful open door policy. Given that the proposals are replacing the Civic Centre library, the provision of free, dry, civic space should be taken seriously. Without this the waterfront will be inaccessible in terms of both distance and expense to large proportions of the population. The availability of large areas of land in Swansea means that the city risks being conceived of as a series of large-scale, homogenous masterplans, with smaller and more complex, but important, sites neglected. There is no doubt that the Waterfront area of Swansea needs major physical improvement, however pursuing a standard commercial development route is to neglect other, potentially better ways to redevelop the sites. A regeneration proposal premised on the unquestioned sale of public assets to create a ‘comprehensive iconic mixed-use development’ that is a ‘destination in its own right’ is not regeneration based on ‘quality, distinctiveness or innovation’ (one of the report’s five stated aims). Although the report provides a necessary overview, Swansea would benefit from more developed, targeted plans on smaller sites, especially those that border more peripheral residential areas. The report neglects to mention that a retail and leisure approach to redevelopment has already been trialed in the form of the Parc Tawe retail park (containing Plantasia, Odeon Cinema, Tenpin Bowling, a shopping centre, and restaurants). Though poorly designed and poorly connected, Parc Tawe does occupy a reasonably central location, and yet it is almost empty. Shoppers from outside the city centre prefer to drive to Swansea’s out of town retail parks, which have been widely blamed for the decline of the city centre over the last 25 years. While most would not deny that Swansea has a ‘poor retail offer’, this is a symptom not a cause - focussing on it directly cannot drive wider

improvements. The report’s strategy is trickle-down regeneration: faced with the ‘low average spend’ of Swansea shoppers, it looks for ways to increase that spend, not by increasing local incomes, but by attracting higher end shops to bring in wealthier shoppers from elsewhere. The benefits for local people of this retail regeneration are limited, and it risks replicating the industrial work structures reinforced by Amazon. Though jobs may be greater in number, House of Fraser and Poundland alike both pay minimum wage for predominantly unskilled positions on low-hours contracts. While shop floor jobs may be more pleasant than working as a picker in Amazon’s warehouse, they occupy a similar position in the story of risky post-industrial diversification that has characterised Swansea, South Wales and other cities across the UK. Generally, profits are not re-invested locally, and companies’ central decisions to close and move elsewhere are all too easy when all that is required is an unskilled workforce. At present, besides the waterfront, there has been no real design input into the framework. Masterplans are in the form of access diagrams and designated zones rather than buildings, and there is little in terms of proposals for specific existing buildings. An official decision has not yet been made on the Civic Centre building, which would make an interesting refurbishment project, but visualisations show it replaced with residential development, and its relocation is described in the framework as a ‘prerequisite for a major new seafront scheme’. The regeneration framework does however outline the need for development briefs to be produced for as a means to delivering the framework. This represents an important role for architects and urban designers, but it is essential that this level of thinking is extended beyond the ‘retail core’ itself. Chapter three sets out how this process could delineate clear intentions for High Street, one of the report’s proposed ‘complementary’ residential areas.

City Centre redevelopment ‘Site 1’ as defined in ‘Development Opportunities’ Brochure

F32.

Quadrant and St Davids indicative concept plan extract from ‘Central Area Regeneration Framework’

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Rivington Land and Acme Site 1 redevelopment proposal overview looking south to beach

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Rivington Land and Acme Site 1 proposed arena, link over Oystermouth Road and new retail street looking north to city centre

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City Centre redevelopment ‘Site 2’ as defined in ‘Development Opportunities’ Brochure

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Civic Centre indicative plan - extract from Central Area Regeneration Framework’

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Trebor Developments Site 2 residential and hospitality redevelopment proposal looking north

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Trebor Developments Site 2 residential and hospitality redevelopment proposal looking south

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Phase I Coed Darcy homes

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1.3 Coed Darcy: ‘A place to live, work, learn and relax’

Coed Darcy is a 4,000 home residential development under construction on the periphery of the city. It sits in the Swansea’s neighbouring Neath Port Talbot, but its impact does not respect administrative boundaries, and since Coed Darcy is considered to be a high quality precedent for building new homes in South Wales by Swansea’s Local Authority in particular, it is an important case study. Within South Wales, it is a typical response to the housing shortage. As with most other new-build, speculative developments plotted, homes at Coed Darcy are valuable because they are located within minutes of the M4 motorway (F41+42). Their proximity and connectivity to South Wales’ towns and cities is of lesser importance. Despite including 40% affordable housing, the design and location of the scheme offers no buffer for financial hardship. This represents a typical compensatory approach to delivering affordable homes: planning decisions are made not with the aim of ensuring economic sustainability for residents but rather as a consequence of developer activities.

Swansea’s 2014 Local Development Plan (Roberts & Holmes 2014), based on Local Housing Market Assessments, aims to provide 9,000 market homes, 5,100 social homes and 2,000 intermediate homes by 2025. There are currently 6,000 households awaiting a council home: building 5,100 social homes by 2025 is too few. Replicating Coed Darcy as planned by the LDP on the M4 at Swansea’s junction 46 (F42) is an attractive option for the council in terms of achieving its own housing target: a quarter of homes required could be built on one site, using a tried and tested, if unimaginative method of volume house-building. It is also a short-term approach to addressing housing need when viewed as part of a broader picture of public spending.

New Build Homes for sale December 2014 by Barrat, Bellway,Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, David Wilson, Redrow, Lewis, Pennant and Llanmor

F41.

Developments by volume housebuilders in the Swansea area are typically located beside the M4 (blue line). Coed Darcy (yellow). Proposed location for Swansea’s ‘largescale sustainable residential development’ at J46

F42.

Developers are well versed in adhering to a loosely defined ‘triple bottom line’ of sustainability (environmental, social, financial) outlined in any development plan. In Coed Darcy, a comparatively high proportion of homes (40%) will be affordable - 80% of market value. But, this takes into account only the question of housing cost itself. Typically, any real consideration of economic sustainability for residents is overshadowed by the developer viability assessments. As profit is essentially the difference between land value, build cost and sale value, building on flat, vacant land is infinitely more viable for a developer than dealing with complex urban infill in the city centre. For residents, the reverse may be true. Long term living costs, rather than housing costs, are not taken into account when delivering supposedly affordable housing. Although the intention is to create new jobs on site, these will be few in number: for most residents, car ownership will be a prerequisite to employment. According to 2011 census data, lack of access to a car affects 50% of those currently living in the Swansea’s city centre, and is cited as the primary barrier to socio-economic mobility. In the event of unemployment, loss of income is likely to entail not just moving house but moving from the area completely. The location and programme of Coed Darcy has further problematic impacts: children living at Coed Darcy will be allocated a school place at the on-site primary school, meaning that parents commuting along the M4 for work must be back at the school gates by 3.30 pm, or pay for childcare. This impacts disproportionately on women: of unemployed, working age adults in Wales, 30% of women and 6% of men could not work due to childcare or other care duties (The Poverty Site, 2015). Work is often made possible through informal childcare arrangements: grandparents, friends and neighbours regularly care for 70% of children in Wales – this requires a community established over time. Through schemes like help-to-buy discussed in chapter two, this type of housing development absorbs a high proportion of available government funding, and does so in a way that exacerbates inequalities between Swansea itself and its new, more affluent peripheral dormitory towns. However, to insinuate a ‘them and us’ division between generally wealthier residents of developments like Coed Darcy, and poorer residents of the city itself is to fall victim to the same, overly simplistic understanding of

Constructon site at Coed Darcy

F43.

‘Traditionally-styled’ homes by Persimmon at Coed Darcy

F44.

income groups that the scheme itself is based upon. To design homes for ‘resilient communities’ (Welsh Govt., 2013), we perhaps need to revisit the idea of absolute distinctions between socioeconomic groups. John Hills’ study Good Times Bad Times (Hills, 2014) found that in the UK, economic hardship is more often cyclical than fixed. As such, the target audience of Coed Darcy, in its entirety, is financially more precarious than we might think. While dense cities have the potential to remedy cyclical financial hardship, the isolation of a dormitory town is likely to deepen the implications of becoming temporarily unemployed. Swansea’s proposed adoption of this model signifies a complete abandonment of the urban, its values and its potential as a social and economic resource. Selling affordable homes outside the city, at 80% of market rates, will in no capacity meet Swansea’s housing need: most people currently renting are not in a position to be buying homes. Thirty-five percent of Swansea’s households rent (private + social). Of these households, (47%) earn less than £10,000 per year, and three-quarters (73%) earn below £20,000 (CCS, 2015). Up to 50% of incomes are spent on rent: like London’s housing crisis, Swansea’s is a crisis of affordability. Wales needs a different way of providing affordable housing that does not work by way of compensation for building market rate homes. Swansea’s LDP Affordable Housing topic paper (Roberts & Holmes 2013b) is testament to the pre-empted influence of developer profit in planning affordable housing. Swansea’s least profitable areas are those with highest need for affordable housing. But, because they are unprofitable, and homes are expected to be delivered via the s106 mechanism, the pragmatic solution is to plan only minimal affordable housing in those areas. However, the profitability of the volume house building sector relies on housing demand being higher than supply: an adequate supply of homes is not their business. Land Registry (2016) figures show Swansea to be one of Wales’ more profitable areas for market housing. In order to develop proposals that work better for more people, it helps to understand how the context for urban and housing development is constructed. The next chapter looks at the ideology of homeownership, how this is promoted by banks and government policy, and how this affects the domestic and social life of cities.

2.0 How to make a housing crisis

While Coed Darcy, the City Centre Strategic Framework and Amazonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fulfilment centre all impact Swansea and peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lives within it, they are themselves symptoms of broader political and economic influences. This chapter identifies two major influences: high levels of domestic mortgage lending among UK banks and pro-homeownership ideology. Drawing on diverse case studies, this chapter explores how these factors manifest in policy and in practice, and where this impacts domestic and social dimensions of cities.

Ratio of Bank Lending to GDP

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 Germany

Non-financial firms

Bank Lending in Germany and the UK in 2014. Graph by author using figures from NEF (2016)

Domestic mortgages

F45.

2.1 Housing as a tool for extraction: UK banks and the affordability crisis

‘If you read any economics textbook, it will say a bank’s main role is the ‘intermediation of household savings for business investment’…This definition is no longer accurate. In advanced economies, banks’ main activity is now domestic mortgage lending’ (Ryan-Collins 2016)

The UK’s pattern of money lending is an important yet little-discussed dimension of the housing crisis. Attributing the crisis in full to the greed of property developers is a somewhat unsatisfactory reading of a deep-rooted and multidimensional issue. The low wages of Amazon, the city centre’s proposed retail core, and the homes at Coed Darcy (with their prices inflated by help-to-buy and the continued high living costs implied by their location), are all products of our pattern of bank lending in the UK. Banks create new money by issuing loans. In the UK, a high proportion of this is issued as debt on land and property (F45). A much lower proportion is issued as business loans. This pattern contributes to a growing affordability gap, since it inflates house prices without a corresponding increase in wages. This speculative pattern of high mortgage lending and escalating house prices is common among advanced economies, but it is not inevitable. Germany’s economy is more focused on production, its banks operate differently and house prices are stable compared to wages. The rate of domestic mortgage lending in the Germany is less than half that in the UK. Conversely, the rate of lending to non-financial businesses in Germany is roughly double the UK rate. Typically, when banks loan money to non-financial firms, these firms have more money to spend on employing people. This increases demand in the labour market, leading to more jobs, higher wages and salaries, and better working conditions. When banks lend in the form of domestic mortgages,

it increases the demand in the housing market. If this demand is not met by an increase in supply, then house prices - and rents - increase. In the UK, where only around £0.36 is lent to non-financial firms for every £1.00 of domestic mortgage lending, there has been a huge increase in average house price relative to income over the last fifteen years. In Germany on the other hand, where about £1.30 is lent to non-financial firms for every £1.00 of domestic mortgage lending, average house price relative to income has changed only slightly over the past few decades and in fact dropped during the 2000s (Ryan-Collins 2016). For businesses in the UK, the difficulty of obtaining a loan makes expansion difficult, which creates an advantage for multinational companies like Amazon. When they set up in places like Swansea, they do so in a context of limited employment, which allows them to offer low wages and low-quality employment. This entrenches the issue of affordability, which is ultimately funded by taxpayers: low wages must be subsidised by welfare payments. Meanwhile, the growing availability of debt (mortgages) has inflated house prices, increasing the cost of housing independently of wages. This means that the welfare bill is increased again, this time by a lack of affordable housing: the UK pays £25bn per year in housing benefit, the majority of which goes to private landlords. In Germany by contrast, any increase in house prices is driven by increases in earnings, rather than by an increase in the availability of debt. House prices have not been inflated by mortgage lending, while businesses are easily able to obtain credit. So, while living costs remain stable, businesses are able to create more jobs. Since this drives competition for staff, work conditions are likely to be better, and wages higher. Germany’s rentcontrolled private rental sector also keeps house prices stable by limiting profits of the buy-to-let market. While easy and incentivised access to debt – such as Barclay’s new 100% mortgage - increases the amount of debt people take on, fewer people can afford to buy at all, so rental prices increase too. This pattern of employment and living costs impacts the social lives of individuals, families and cities, as high numbers of people are required to work longer

hours to cover escalating housing costs. Finding cheaper housing either means sharing with more people and sacrificing social spaces or relocating to areas that are less well served by public infrastructure. Large numbers of Swanseaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s financially excluded credit union members live in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s outlying neighbourhoods, without cars. A growing affordability gap means we can expect these numbers to increase, as people continue to lose any agency over how they live.

2.2 Aspiration as a tool for extraction: housing policy and the impact of ideology

To a great extent, the aspiration towards homeownership upholds the pattern of bank lending in the UK. Our housing system is ideologically geared towards the purchasing of shelter and the subsequent use of that shelter as a source of income. The accepted correct use of the system is to buy a house, raise 2.4 children, pay off a mortgage, and if required, in retirement, borrow against the value of the property before passing the remaining value of the home to your children after your death. The above example is simplified somewhat, but overall, our housing policy is designed for a vastly simplified and increasingly unrepresentative model of how people live.

2.2.1 Britain, a nation of homeowners

It is not for governments to prescribe the tenure mix we ‘ought’ to live in, and it's actually a bit odd that governments support our preference for homeownership: many households will have other economic aspirations too (owning a luxury car, for example) but we don’t expect government policy to subsidise these (Kate Barker, 2014)

Rather than remedy the growing affordability gap, recent UK housing policy has increased house prices. Mainstream politics has reframed the housing crisis as a crisis of homeownership, rather than affordability. As illustrated by the case of bank lending, when faced with the question of affordability, how money is spent is just as critical as the amount of money that is spent. Compared to the annual £25bn spending on housing benefit, the UK govt spends only £1bn on building new homes. ‘Had the last four years’ demand-side subsidy been spent on supply, we could have built 68 million homes’ (Robertson, 2015).

Child’s bedroom in Persimmon’s ‘Teifi’ showhome at Coed Darcy

F46.

Dining Table in Persimmon showroom

F47.

The notion that the market should provide housing underpins the coalition government’s strategy of ‘state support for the private rental and buying sectors as an alternative to building more social housing’ (Dorling, 2014). Specifically, housing policies such as help-to-buy, starter homes and a renewed right-to-buy have been about stimulating a demand for homeownership, rather than addressing a demand for housing. One explanation for a sustained policy focus on homeownership among major parties is that it is designed to get the party elected. Currently, a higher proportion of homeowners than non-homeowners vote. While in some places, e.g. London, renters will soon outnumber homeowners for the first time, we cannot expect an immediate change in policy focus. The ideology of owning one’s home is firmly embedded in British culture, and many vote for the promise of being able to do so in the future. Like developers everywhere, Persimmon uses this aspiration of homeownership to sell homes at Coed Darcy. Persimmon’s ‘Help to Buy Wales’ promotional video is set in the site’s marketing suite. The role of a sales assistant, site manager and aspiring homeowners with a baby are all played by children who chime the catchphrase ‘Help to Buy is Child’s Play!’ in unmistakable South Welsh accents (F48-49). The site’s only showroom is the largest four-bedroom property, carefully staged for an explicitly middle class lifestyle: a recipe book, open on the page of a Thai green curry sits on the countertop in a large kitchen. A second large table is set for dinner in a dedicated dining room. Upstairs two identical summer dresses hang side by side in a twin bedroom (F46-47). As the (adult, real-life) sales manager admits, the other homes are nowhere near as generous, but these are not built yet: what people are buying is the idea of a lifestyle. As described previously (section 1.3), the implications of buying into Coed Darcy are highly limiting: the realities of negotiating employment, childcare and transport impose a rigid structure on residents. It is also prescriptive due to the fact that buyers are locked into paying a mortgage. Homeownership is not always a good proxy for wealth, this is particularly true in Wales where 50% of those in housing poverty in fact own their homes (JRF, 2015). But, homeownership is a highly emotive

Children playing a sales assistant and prospective buyers from Persimmon’s ‘Right to Buy Wales’ promotional video

F48. F49.

issue, especially where it is intrinsically tied to the lives people who feel they should be providing for their families. Braund and Ashcroft (2012) described the American subprime crisis as ‘mortgage mining’, ‘ma[king] unscrupulous use of the manipulative emotional propaganda that underpins the American dream’. We can see this reflected in the UK as being able to own a house ends up taking priority over living somewhere that provides a good quality of life, or allowing a lifestyle that is affordable in the long term. Policies like help-to-buy Wales have been prioritised over funds such as the affordable housing grant, propping up the housing market at the expense of increasing numbers of people who cannot afford to buy homes. In a city where 1 in 100 people has presented to the council as homeless (BBC, 2012), those with £15,000 worth of savings can borrow £60,000 towards the cost of a new-build home, while others have to take out payday loans in order to pay heating bills and council tax. This is a snapshot on a huge disparity in levels of state support for different income groups, an issue that manifests UK-wide. Finally, house building and policies like help-to-buy have not increased the size of the private rented sector faster than it has increased numbers of homeowners . When the issue is cast as a simple shortage of homes, large developments like Coed Darcy are easily justified as a solution. On a national scale, the idea that the UK will build its was out of the housing crisis is too simplistic. Even outside London, UK property is a safe, if not profitable, place to store money. In 2013-14, as a proportion of existing stock, more new homes were completed in Cambridge than in any other UK city. 70% of these were sold to property investors (Savills, 2015), who may or may not let them to tenants. In the year since help-to-buy was introduced, Coed Darcy’s developer, Persimmon saw its shares rise 40% (Birch, 2014). Banks, developers and landowners are the main beneficiaries of policies that promote homeownership.

2.2.2 No place like home: The implications of a growing private rented sector

Paradoxically, focusing government spending on increasing homeownership has meant that more and more people are condemned to poor quality rented accommodation. There has been no parallel effort to raise standards in the private rented sector, in fact a clause to require PRS housing to be ‘fit for human habitation’ was actively removed from the 2015-16 Housing Bill in the House of Commons last year. This reality only serves to reinforce the necessity of buying a home. The poor quality, high costs and insecurity of the private rented sector do as much to uphold the aspiration of homeownership as the benefits of ownership itself. However, our debate around the implications of a growing private rented sector has tended to be narrow in its remit, focusing on the living conditions of people living in unsuitable accommodation. What tends to be ignored is the large scale societal impacts of an increasingly transient population. On a societal level, the real issue with rented accommodation is not that it is damp or that the shower doesn’t work properly. The issue is that it is very difficult to establish a home. At its most benign, this difficulty is present in contract clauses that prohibit interaction with the building itself: ‘no hanging curtains’, ‘no redecorating’, ‘no hanging washing from windows’. Sometimes it extends to limiting who or what we can interact with ‘no guests’, ‘no pets’. But most seriously, it means that people do not become embedded within a community. While growing numbers of people will spend a lifetime as private tenants, each home is only ever temporary. Typical tenancy contracts last for 12 months, and while renewal is possible, the sense of uncertainty is often enough to make people hesitant to put down roots (Garvie, 2012). This impedes the creation of formal and informal relationships within communities: as well as children having to move schools frequently, adults do not see it worthwhile to sit on governing boards or adopt local

leadership roles. Being in constant flux does not lend itself to getting to know neighbours even at the simple, but vital level of developing shared childcare arrangements. Regardless of tenure, housing insecurity is heightened for poorer people. The most common reasons for people needing to move are not specific to those on lower incomes. During the course of a lifetime, loss of income, illness and increased rents will affect most people, but the way housing is distributed in the UK means that poorer people, with no financial buffer, are disproportionately affected by these situations: almost a third of households that found themselves homeless in 2015 became so because a private tenancy ended and they could not find another home that was affordable to them (Shelter, 2016a). It is this in part that accounts for the significant rise in UK homelessness - 42% between 2010-2015. Private rented tenants are an increasingly diverse group. People rent when they are in well-paid stable jobs but cannot save a large enough deposit to buy. Others are families without incomes and on waiting lists for social housing. What they have in common is a lack of representation. Despite their numbers, unorganised, the 600 tenants of one Swansea landlord have no bargaining power. The UK’s PRS housing provision is not fit for purpose. It is always seen as temporary for and by those living in it, and as a stop gap for UK housing in general. Those that end up having families while still renting are regarded as an unfortunate exception rather than the rule. Wales’ Rented Homes Act (Welsh Government 2016) has aimed to regulate rather than subsidise the private rental sector, but again, the focus has been on tackling extremes. It is yet to be seen whether policies such as mandatory landlord registration and training deliver benefits to tenants, or if costs involved are merely transferred to tenants by rising rents. Landlords do not need to be rogue to constitute a problem: being the tenant of a private landlord is inherently precarious. When everyone is individually precarious, then we can no longer expect to equate places with communities. For Swansea, known locally as ‘a collection of villages connected by gossip’, this would be a big shift in the social dynamic of the city.

Continued demolition on the edge of the former Cabrini Green projects in Chicago

F50.

2.3 Housing policy and urban strategy as social engineering: ‘blitzing poverty’ and Chicago’s Plan for Transformation

With housing policy devolved to the Welsh Assembly since 2011, Wales has the chance to formulate an entirely different approach to housing, but if this is to happen it cannot be built on the foundations of cut and pasted UK policies. The beliefs and values that underpin housing policy elsewhere must be critically examined, so that cities like Swansea can avoid the mistakes that have been and are being made in other UK and US cities. Contemporary urban housing policy in the UK and USA is based on a set of assumptions about individuals, communities and families. The first of these assumptions is that people will take better care of their homes if they own them. Chapter three argues that tenure is not the issue at hand - given lifetime tenancies at guaranteed, controlled rents in homes designed to be easily adapted, tenants too could maintain properties over time. The second assumption is that when people live in mixed-income communities, middle class residents function as role models to poorer residents, helping to bring them out of poverty by setting a good example. The third assumption is that the basic social unit is the family, rather than the community or even the extended family. This third assumption was articulated by Thatcher in her infamous negation of society, ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individuals, and there are families’. These beliefs are so widely held among policymakers, and so successfully communicated to the public, that they are not acknowledged as opinions but are instead treated as truisms. Indeed, as Imbroscio (2010) describes, they are so ingrained that policies based upon them seem ‘commonsensical’, a ‘natural policy response to urban problems’.

Seward Park, Cabrini Green. The site occupies a downtown location and borders Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gold Coast

F51.

London skyline from Central Hill, Lambeth. The estate is under consultation for redevelopment

F52.

Analysis of these assumptions reveals not just that they are based on flawed logic, but that they have been proven wrong in practice: repeatedly and across diverse locations, urban housing policy based on these assumptions has been shown to have failed at achieving its aims. Instead, it has resulting in the loss of social housing, the displacement of individuals and families, the breakup of communities, the needless demolition of potentially useful buildings and the waste of public money. In 2000 the Chicago Housing Authority began its Plan For Transformation (PFT), a programme of demolishing the city’s public housing blocks and replacing them with mixed-income residential developments (for a detailed account see Vale (2013)). The assumed social benefit of the plan, widely referred to as the ‘mixed-income experiment’, was not lost on residents. A resident of Chicago’s Cabrini Green speaking in Voices of Cabrini: Remaking Chicago’s Public Housing (Bezalel & Ferrera 1999) brings this presumption into sharp critique, ‘They think that by moving in rich folks to live next to us, that we will become better people, and that is very insulting’. In the same documentary, homeowners that have moved in do not question their supposed role, ‘there is an understanding that we are supposed to be setting a good example’. The role of social engineering in Chicago’s Cabrini Green redevelopment is clear. Design was employed both to encourage a change in behaviour and use of space, but also as an outward signifyer that the area had changed. In the new developments, the open spaces of the former projects is replaced with individual backyards. ‘Loitering’ i.e. gathering in groups outside without clear intent, is classed as antisocial behaviour. In other places this form of social interaction would be designed in. Architecture embodies political gesture, and is often commissioned with this express intention. This became apparent in Landon Bone Baker Architects’ work with the Chicago Housing Authority. ‘I think a lot of the bureaucrats they had this idea, I think it’s that big idea that can happen when they want to make a big move and they want to be the hero – “we’ll tear all this down and build it all back up again, and it’ll be great’’ and so there’s nothing specific about it, you know, you can’t say, actually this

Cabrini Green rowhouse management office. The row houses still remain occupied during onoing talks over their future

F53.

building happens to be good. [They]’ve already decided to tear it all down, so we lost a lot of buildings that would have been have been re-habable’. This was despite previous successful refurbishment projects on other CHA projects, an approach which was ‘never acknowledged’ by the city (Landon, 2015). There are striking similarities between the PFT and UK housing policy. In January 2016, fifteen years after the beginning of the PFT, David Cameron made a statement on the Andrew Marr show (BBC1, 2016), promising to ‘blitz poverty’ by demolishing the UK’s ‘worst council estates’. While both scale and context are different, the PFT and Cameron’s ‘sink estates’ programme have much in common. Both are urban strategies with discernable spatial dimensions, involving the replacement of stateowned social housing with mixed-tenure, mixed-income residential developments. Both are explicit in describing themselves as social engineering strategies, involving a manipulation of political, economic and social contexts to develop urban renewal strategies. Both cast the architecture of the estates, or projects (US), themselves as a cause for antisocial behaviour, a lack of motivation, and thus entrenched poverty. Following this logic, each presumes that by demolishing the buildings where poverty manifests, the poverty ‘embedded’ there will cease to exist. That is, they are place- rather than people-based approaches. The underlying assumption that higher income people can teach others to become more affluent simply by existing in close proximity to them should be rejected. Architectural, urban and programmatic design can and should promote interaction, but initiatives should be done with a view to improving the quality of life in a home, not with the misguided intent of ‘socially educating’ people out of poverty. Research into employment among the small numbers of returning residents in Cabrini Green showed that rates of employment had not increased. Having homeowning neighbours did not, it seemed, address decades of structural racial and socio-economic discrimination when it came to applying for jobs. Research by the JRF in the UK (Cheshire, 2007) also questions the creation of mixed-income neighbourhoods to treat ‘symptoms’ of inequality, rather

Former site of Cabrini Green. The construction of the target store in background mirrors the approach taken by the Welsh Government in grant-aiding Amazon in Swansea Rebranding Cabrini - â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;New Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Mall North of the site

F54.

F55.

Street in transition - new townhouses and closed high school Replacement Mixed Income townhouses in Cabrini

F56. F57.

Residents of Central Hill (top) and Cressingham Gardens (bottom) are both in redevelopment disputes with Lambeth Council. Cameronâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;sink estateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; demolition promise will make is likely to make this issue widespread and harder to resist

F58. F59.

than the cause, ‘the problem is poverty, and what makes people poor keeps them poor’. To cast family as positive and community as unimportant is arbitrary. Both can be positive or damaging. Also, the distinction itself is blurry: many communities contain extended families. ‘Family’ roles can be fulfilled by those not related by blood, and people related by blood can have predominantly toxic relationships with one another. This complexity goes unacknowledged by regeneration strategies that treat nuclear families as the primary - or only - social group. Homes are generally designed and sold based on two incomes, rent is obviously more affordable if two paying adults are resident. Problematic family life cannot be improved by having to remain living together due to financial dependence. Given that policies like the PFT and the ‘sink estates’ programme are based on such flawed assumptions, their negative impact is not altogether suprising. Since both strategies tend to massively reduce the number of low-income units on the the sites in question, and do so without any strategy to accommodate it elsewhere, the ‘housing system’ as defined by Martin et.al (2015) becomes a tool for selecting those who stay and those who go. While this type of regeneration will improve the image and amenities of a particular location, and may cause poverty to decrease in that location, it often becomes the vehicle by which established spatial and economic inequalities are deepened. As (Vale 2013) points out, ‘if policy makers conclude that low-income housing should be 30% of a development, then we need three times as many such places to break even’. National Housing Law’s analysis of the PFT could equally well apply in the UK: ‘[we] take issue with the declaration of crisis. [The PFT] plays on public housing’s unfairly negative reputation and an exaggerated sense of crisis about the state of public housing in general to justify a large-scale family displacement and housing redevelopment that increasingly appears to do more harm than good’. Both initiatives can also be interpreted more cynically. The estates and projects in question are often on prime sites in major cities (F51-52) ‘The

way I see it is they’re moving us out, so they can bring in higher class people instead’ This feeling, articulated by a resident of Chicago’s Cabrini Green could just as well be a resident of a London estate, as this is in effect what happens. London’s ‘City Villages’ and ‘Completing London’s Streets’ (IPPR, 2015) sound like positive urban interventions, and for new residents, and the very few that return, they can be. But without the finances or legal structure in place to protect the rights of return of existing residents, or accommodate them elsewhere, then these initiatives end up as as social engineering projects of a wholly different kind. What Cameron’s strategy – and Labour’s initiatives before it - fail to acknowledge is that generally, UK council estates are in fact already mixedincome: one of the side effects of right-to-buy is that estates are usually made up of council tenants, private tenants and homeowners. Policies like pay to stay, if they go through, will make them less diverse in terms of income, and introduce a new risk to the security of low income households – earning too much. Other decisions have more to do with presumptions about the lifestyle of residents. Speaking on design decisions, a housing officer at West Kensington Gibbs Green articulated how ‘people always think that it's ok for people in social housing not to be allowed cars. People here don’t have any less of a need for a car than other people. It’s just a decision that gets made in the briefing and design, that people on council estates don’t need cars’ (Hawkes, 2015). If housing policy in Swansea is based on a similar set of assumptions, we can expect similar issues to arise. While displacement for instance is not a current issue for Swansea, pursuing regeneration strategies that seek to raise the rentable value of city centre property (Emotional Logic et al. 2016) may make it so. Urban design, and housing design in particular, often embodies policy. But, these policies are also designs, each assembled from a set of subjective judgements. This is not to say that they are always wrong - policies, like design will always be based on values - but, we should be consider them challengeable. The virtue of the family and the merits of mixed income development are two examples that become accepted as ‘real world constraints’ (Allen, 2008), but they are not universal truths. Tonkiss’ Cities by Design (2014) provokes a new reading of the relationships between physical, social and economic aspects of urban form.

‘[P]hysical forms of the city...are the products of social, economic and political designs for the city long before they become products of architects and engineers’. It is these ‘less viable designs’ she argues, ‘that create the conditions under which anything gets built, occupied and inhabited in the city. The nominal “designer” may have least of all to do with the ways in which urban spaces come to be produced.’ However, she also points out that spatial intervention ‘cannot help but have social consequences’. To adopt ideas like these is not necessarily to promote a view of architecture as a method of social engineering, but to see it as a tool for challenging the types of spaces we produce. Large scale strategies routinely falsely problematize issues, and overlook the nuance in situations, be that social relationships or issues with specific sites and individual buildings. Some of the most insightful analyses and portrayals of life on Chicago projects have been those that do not claim to understand the problem in its entirety. ‘I’ve been filming here for 20 years and I still don’t understand it’ (Bezalel, 2015) a sentiment echoed by several residents. This is something to bear in mind with any housing regeneration or any intervention in a city: there isn’t a right answer, but you have to be prepared to find out what a good option might look like. Alluding to the fact that it is not ‘realistic’ (Blakely & Evans, 2013) for urban designers to act outside of the ‘limitations’ imposed by political and economic systems is too convenient an excuse for the failure of urban designers and practitioners to challenge these systems. If we see urban design as capable of offering only symptomatic relief, then as a practice we consider it resultant rather than propositional. Of course, places can still be designed well or badly - but seeing urban design as a method of minimising negative impact sets our expectations too low. This chapter has sought to demonstrate not only that our approach to affordable housing is narrow in its remit, but our primary methods of delivering affordable housing in Swansea and across the UK, are compensatory, rather than proactive. We cannot expect to fix the housing crisis using the same vehicles that created and continue to propagate it: instead we must develop regeneration techniques that do not increase household debt.

High Street

F60.

3.0 The potential in proposition: developing a pilot scheme on Swansea’s High Street

When critiquing regeneration initiatives, there is a risk of simply opposing change. This often leads to non-specific demands. ‘Anti-gentrification’ movements for example are often vague about the issue being protested (is it displacement? change of character? young professionals moving into an area?). Regeneration can indeed have damaging effects, but categorical opposition to redevelopment means that, in a bid to preserve an area, quality of life stagnates. Academic critique of regeneration initiatives risks falling into the same trap unless it proposes alternatives. Swansea’s initiatives discussed in the first chapter may be in operation or in motion, but the development of cities is a never-ending process: it is not too late to influence the course of the city’s regeneration. The Central Area Regeneration Framework provides a necessary, if incomplete, overview and presents an opportunity for developing more specific aims and proposals. Regeneration doesn’t need to be damaging, and Swansea needs redevelopment. The question is what kind, and how. Using design research as an investigative tool allows an examination of physical and spatial issues, as well as a way into social, political and economic contexts. It allows one to make specific proposals demonstrating alternative models of urban regeneration and can ultimately provide a communication tool that can be more effective than the imagery of aspiration inherited from elsewhere. This chapter uses an ongoing design investigation on Swansea’s High Street (F60) to explore aspects of the design, delivery, operation and funding of a potential pilot housing strategy in Swansea. It identifies where there is room within existing policy and planning frameworks to adopt an alternative approach towards rental housing, arguing for the production of a supplementary planning document to define spatial and programmatic

View through Castle Arcade over Castle Gardens site and Parc Tawe to East Swansea

F61.

intentions for key sites, the expansion of local Credit Union services to develop a funding base, and the implementation of organisational structures that disrupt the traditional power dynamic between landlords and tenants. Reflecting on the value of site-specific design in developing wider master planning intentions, it emphasises the importance of detailed development briefs - and the interlocking nature of the diverse disciplines that must collaborate - in urban design. By suggesting a course of action for architects, local councils, housing providers and local financial institutions, the chapter promotes the agency of these groups in driving that change. This is a more direct use of resources, knowledge and skillsets than simply campaigning for policy change on issues such as the classification of affordable housing, and hoping that change will be effected that way. Policy change is slow, and if achieved, sets only a baseline rather than an optimum requirement. Design opens up questions involving overlapping scales and disciplines: from the interior finishes of homes to management and funding structures that allow long-term security for tenants. It is here that urban design can be engaged as a propositional tool, and used to inform and re-think the economic and social practices that are embedded in the physical city. Developing and building alternative models of housing in Swansea is one way to critique the current system, and to do so in a way that, a) produces better homes on the site in question, b) provides a model which can be emulated elsewhere, and c) ultimately has the potential to influence national policy and funding allocation towards housing.

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1:5000 Satelite Image of Swansea’s showing Key Sites for consideration within proposed SPD

KEY 1. The Palace Theatre 2. High Street Multistory Carpark 3. Alexandra Tower 4. The Elysium Cinema 5. The Elysium Site 6. Castle Gardens Site 7. Castle Cinema 8. Sainsbury’s

Strategic Site for Later Phases

High Street Pilot Sites

Dis-used Theatre / Cinema

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Townhill Campus University Buildings

Urban Block for Potential Densification

Coastal Housing Development (under construction)

Key Buildings for Additonal Uses

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Overview of Swanseaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Existing Urban Plan showing Key Sites and Buildings

KEY Under Occupied Retail Park Proposed Demolition Dis-used Theatre / Cinema Strategic Buildings for Additional Uses Inland Water

Sea (High Tide)

High Street Oxford Street

Elysium Site Boundary and Elysium Cinema

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The Elysium Cinema and Elysium Site (camera position indicated on site map)

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3.1 Supplementing Planning Guidance

Swansea’s existing planning frameworks are unable to deliver the type of regeneration that is required and are of insufficient detail to guide spatial, architectural or complex programmatic decisions. The 2014 Swansea Local Development Plan (LDP) (Roberts et. al, 2014), along with numerous topic papers, emphasises the need for Swansea to develop in a way that addresses extreme levels of poor health, low educational attainment, and high unemployment and poverty. Despite intentions to reduce inequality and improve quality of life, the LDP falls short in terms of using local knowledge to develop a specific approach to addressing these issues. It would be naive to imply that they can be ‘solved’ by urban design, but the fact that social issues receive no mention in the Central Area Regeneration Framework (CARF) discussed in chapter one, is a major oversight. With an additional layer of information, the framework could begin to address these issues by developing its own site-specific proposals for sites beyond the retail core. This way, proposals, rather than commercial activity could guide decisions about program, design and ownership structures. Finally, a detailed supplementary planning document (SPD) does not require that guidance is adhered to absolutely. A valuable secondary function is to enable effective scrutiny of future developments, enabling councils and local organisations to guide a development process with a real level of agency and power, rather than relying on the market-driven opinion of developers. Oxford City Council (OCC)’s incorporation of a Jericho Wharf community feasibility study into supplementary planning guidance, later incorporated into a commercial scheme, is a successful example of this (see previous essays and OCC (2013)). Proposed residential spaces such as High Street would benefit significantly from the level of briefing that comes from more detailed design. At present,

Castle Gardens Site Boundary and Castle Cinema

F66.

Castle Cinema from The Strand (camera position indicated on site map)

F67. N

the area is represented by a single diagram, and described in vague terms: ‘High Street has the capacity to build a resident community which supports a thriving community in the Central area and play a significant role in complementing the ‘Retail Leisure Led Mixed Use Core’. More detailed design would help move a briefing conversation to a discussion about specific requirements regarding individual buildings, local organisations and existing and new residents. Without any design on these sites it will be very difficult to guide a conversation about the kind of development that goes there. Coastal’s Urban Village has advanced thinking in Swansea as to promote mixed use residential regeneration, and there are plans to build council housing in the centre of town: this needs to be recognised, and the question of how to best do so addressed. This is a fruitful context within which to experiment with housing provision, but the risk is that, without further in depth and local exploration, the cut and paste architectural strategy of the report’s indicative images risk being built without further consideration of the site and the housing issues of the city. Thus far, consultation has tended to ask the question ‘what should go here when we sell it?’ rather than ‘how shall we go about redeveloping?’, or has simply posed broad questions about whether people are in agreement or disagreement with key themes, on which it is very difficult to have an opinion. The proposed sale of the waterfront already relinquishes the possibility of exploring the ownership of the site beyond a cursory nod to community owned buildings in one stage of the report. Unless these intentions are detailed, they risk being lost once the land of any site goes down a standard development route. High Street’s Elysium site (F64-65), earmarked in the CARF as a potential development site, provides a good springboard for considering High Street’s design issues. A steep and complex site, it would not likely be chosen by any commercial developer. In urban terms however, it is an important site: it borders the high street, the railway station and The Strand, once a street of riverside warehouses, now the service entrance to an emptying retail park which sits on a vast site in the city centre.

Given the Swanseaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s topography, Parc Tawe (red line) is highly visible

F69. F68.

Considering an approach towards residential development on the Elysium site is a way of addressing the broader design issues of the High Street and its surrounding context. Two large High Street sites, Castle Gardens (F62,66-67) and the Elysium Site (F64-65) would benefit from developed design proposals and could be used to help develop an informed strategic masterplan. As well as their potential in terms of their treatment of topography and landscape, proposals for both sites will require a co-ordinated design approach for dealing with major issues such as flood risk (F78), how the Strand is used, and the future of the Parc Tawe site. Recent developments evidence a lack of strategy regarding these issues. For example, to meet flood requirements, Coastalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Urban Village has its car parking along the Strand, which works well for the development itself but badly for the Strand in general (F76). Likewise, Bellway Homesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Llais Tawe occupies the only available area of Parc Tawe not in a flood risk zone, but contributes nothing to the wider area (F77). Used creatively, Parc Tawe could radically improve the character of the city as a whole. The highly visible site (F69), currently a part-used retail park could borrow from Detroitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strategy of greening derelict brownfield land, thereby storing the land productively until it is required for a specific use. Provision for meanwhile uses is making its way into local plans, thereby committing developers to this sort of thing. Meanwhile does not have to refer solely to pop-up shops, but could be extended to provide important civic infrastructure over longer periods of time. Besides concentrating development elsewhere and providing scarce green space in the city centre, not building on the site could help protect adjacent areas from flooding. This type of decision cannot be effected by developers of individual sites. On the Elysium site, the Elysium Cinema is one of three derelict theatre buildings which could be refurbished to provide social spaces on High Street. Without listed status, the Elysium, empty since the mid-90s, risks disintegrating despite its critical cultural history. Originally built as the Dock, Wharf and Riverside General Workers Union in 1914 (F70), with large function rooms as well as a 900 seat cinema, it was converted to a

Interior of the Elysium Cinema

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bingo hall in the 1960s. Alongside Castle Cinema (F72) and Palace Theatre (F73) – a music hall with renowned acoustics - the Elysium is part of Swansea’s shrinking pre-war architectural legacy. This alone does not merit its preservation, but the scale, language and ornament of the civic space that remains could provide large-scale indoor public spaces to sit alongside new domestic buildings, a necessary counterpoint to the minimumallowable footprint residential spaces that cities are so profitably portioned into. Converting these buildings to flats, as has been suggested of Castle Cinema, is to undermine the role they could play in Swansea. The proposed formulation of an SPD identifies important roles for architects, urban designers and engineers from the early stages of briefing. While the Strategic Frameworks have seen input of this kind, there is little actual design, and the emphasis on property and retail consultation has dictated the focus and output of the studies. Rather than recruiting highend retailers to signify prosperity, the SPD should trial multiple direct ways to increase the disposable income of residents at each stage of the project. It should pay attention to the providence of materials, and as demanded of Detroit’s ongoing Redwings Arena by the Corridors Alliance, commit to recruiting and training local construction workers and paying a living wage, essential to Swansea given the impending steel plant closures in Port Talbot, and the prevalence of Amazon-format, low-wage work in the city. There are potential direct roles for Swansea council in terms of delivering low cost housing on High Street, both in the physical preparation of the ground and with concern to the organisational and regulatory challenge of assembling land for development. Both the Elysium Site and Castle Gardens to the south are typical Swansea sites, made up of steep, contaminated, made ground (F71), and bordering The Strand - a road laid beside an in-filled dock, itself dug from the original riverbed. Groundworks proved an expensive component of Coastal’s Urban Village, since conditions were not fully investigated until contractors were on site, and constructing the necessary temporary works significantly delayed the project (Davies, 2016). If CCS were to take on the investigation and preparation of ground as part of a thorough briefing exercise, contractors could better predict build costs, which, without accounting for contingency, would be ultimately lower.

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Typical Swansea Site Conditions: Overgrown made ground on the Elysium Site

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Given the prevalence of similar site conditions in Swansea, CCS could establish a sites preparation department to carry out this work. The Lower Swansea Valley Project of the 1960s documented by Hilton (1967) is an example of an extensive Local Authority initiative to decontaminate industrial wastelands. It made use of the geological and environmental expertise in Swansea University and the South Wales coal industry. Today, the Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s specialism in flooding and hydro-energy could inform the use of sites like Parc Tawe. Similarly, the existing highways department could be adapted, and specialist construction plant, as well as mechanical engineering expertise, could also be brought in-house. For this to happen, the Local Authority needs to acknowledge that it is ultimately cheaper to have in-house expertise, especially when so many sites require development. The typical practice of keeping the transparent payroll low becomes false economy when consultants have to be hired for each job. The council, a major city centre landowner, is also well positioned to assemble sites and to acquire vacant civic buildings from private owners. Assembling land for the Urban Village project involved a 9-year Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) process on the part of Coastal. CCS itself could enact this legislation directly, and could do so more easily supported by a clear plan for the sites in question.

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The Palace Theatre, Upper High Street

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Castle Cinema

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Parc Tawe Retail Park looking East

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Development-by-development tratment of flooding issues by Coastal Housing on the Strand (top) and Bellway Homes at Llais Tawe (bottom)

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F76. F77.

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Scale 1:10000 Template: U:\xgapps\template\ccc_a3l.wor

Flood risk map of central Swansea: Parc Tawe and the Strand fall within an unprotected, high risk area.

00023377 ÂŠ Crown copyright and database rights 2016 Ordnance Survey 100023377

KEY Zone A. Little or no risk of tidal, coastal or fluvial flooding Zone B. Known flooding in the past due to sedimentary deposits Zone C1. Area of floodplain at high risk of flooding with developed and protected flood defences Zone C2. Area of flood plain at high risk of flooding without significant flood defense infrastructure

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8 Heol Spilman Caerfyddrin SA31 1JY

8 Spilman Street Carmarthen SA31 1JY

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Additional information: ÂŹ Carmarthen

West Kensington Gibbs Green, Hammersmith and Fullham

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3.2 Restructuring the landlord-tenant power dynamic: Ownership, management and representation

While the council is well positioned to help deliver housing, there are critical conflicts of interest when it comes to them being the landlords of social housing tenants. However, by setting up specific ownership and management structures as part of site development briefs, the council could move to limit housing costs for themselves and tenants, and ensure the long-term security of tenants, and maintenance of developments. The following ownership structure is currently being tested in design terms: Elysium project homes are let on lifetime tenancies at a maximum of 30% local living wage. The buildings themselves are owned and managed by a Resident Controlled Housing Association (RCHA), and that the land (of which a lot is already owned by the council) should remain in public ownership. Given their local expertise, there is potential value in Coastal acting as an umbrella-organisation for RCHAs relating to individual blocks on High Street. A similar method has been used by Coin-Street Community Builders who established a number of individual co-operatives on Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s South Bank (CSCB, 2015). Experience preparing a feasibility study for West Kensington Gibbs Green Community Homes (WKGGCH) (F79-81), in London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (H&F) has preceded assembling the proposed structure, and provides a useful example with which to illustrate issues of ownership, representation, agency and security. The 760 homes on the Gibbs Green estates are due for demolition under the Earls Court masterplan. Residents have been offered first refusal - â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;an opportunity to buy or rentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; homes in the redevelopment. But since these homes will be unaffordable to the majority, this is not a real substitute for right of return. If they wish to remain in the borough, their only option

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West Kensington Gibbs Green - Resident briefing session and exhibition of draft report. Photos credit ASH.

F80. F81.

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is to resist demolition. A fully redeveloped estate could work better architecturally, buildings could be of better quality, but, current residents are almost certainly not going to be able to afford to live there. WKGGCH, run by experienced housing professionals, sought out an alternative model of estate regeneration. After serving a ‘right-totransfer’ notice on the council in 2015, they assembled a business plan for improvements and self-management of the estates, based on a successful model set up (by some of the same people) at Walterton Elgin Community Homes 20 years ago. WKGGCH, resident-managed through an existing representational system, would control how rents were set and when repairs were carried out, and would allow households to move to larger, smaller, or ground floor homes within the estate when needed. Architects for Social Housing were commissioned to produce a feasibility study (ongoing), based on the premise that the sale of additional proposed homes would fund the refurbishment of existing homes, and new community buildings. The business plan is ongoing, but H&F council did recognise the right to transfer, instead selling the land to developers CapCo for £90 million, £1.5bn below market value (WKGGCH, 2016). There is a clear conflict of interest here. H&F Council, are both the landowners, and the landlord of the majority of the estates’ 2,000 residents, cannot give those tenants fair representation when it is simultaneously under a duty to cut spending and make land available for building more homes (affordability is not a concern). In short, the ownership structure negates the possibility of real representation, and may block any chance of establishing representational management for 2000 residents. Relationships between planners and commercial developers are actively encouraged by ‘presumed planning permission’ a ‘duty to co-operate’, and the privatisation of the planning system set out by the new Housing Bill (UK Government, 2015). Although some councils have been found to have acted unlawfully (as with Lambeth’s Cressingham Gardens consultation (Parkes, 2015)), these estate closures are often enacted lawfully by under-skilled councils, compensating for budget cuts of up to 30% since 2010, in the context of a relinquished duty of care towards homeless people, and an overheated property market.

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While Swansea’s land market may never reach London’s levels, the pressure of a city centre land market still puts lower income residents at risk of displacement. Since cities are constantly changing, there may one day be a legitimate case for demolition of a proposed residential block on the Elysium site. Asking what would happen in the case of this hypothetical demolition is a reasonably good test of how well the proposed management and ownership structures serve tenants. In the case of the proposed Elysium RCHA, the council would own the land, but none of the buildings on it, necessitating a proper dialogue with RCHA. Tenants, having had the chance to foster a community, would be represented by an organisation legally concerned with securing the best outcomes for them, which cannot be provided by councils that are conflicted. If demolition went ahead, tenants would stand a higher chance of exercising a right to return at controlled rents, mitigating the risk of displacement. As well as protecting tenants against the eventuality of losing their homes, there are everyday benefits to this management structure. Where tenants’ needs are well represented and easily articulated, minor adjustments can be done as the need arises. As well as providing an accountable decision making structure, a system of rotational representation can foster community by necessitating contact. There are potential design implications of establishing this management structure. For many residents, despite being low-rent, the apartments built by coastal Housing on an adjacent site are not ‘lifetime’ homes, as they are generally one and two bedroom homes. With lifetime tenancies, we can assume that tenants will need to adapt their homes, and being able to do so could compensate for many of the reasons that people need to move. The layout and construction of much new-build urban housing tends not to allow this, but there are strategies that might make this possible. Both overcrowding and open plan living spaces can be a major compromise on privacy. This type of adaptability allows homes to adapt to a required level of privacy that may change overtime. Constructing double height units with adequate structure to support an additional floor is one option that might allow residents to construct bedrooms for more children or divide a flat to accommodate a grandparent later in life. In a smaller home for an

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elderly person, adequate area (or volume) could permit the construction of a second bedroom for a carer or family member, which opens up the possibility of continuing to live in a familiar home and community, potentially removing the need for expensive (and often lonely) care in a residential home. Low rents, lifetime tenancies and local management lend themselves to residents being able to afford and carry out adaptations themselves. This has material implications too. In many rental properties, each yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tenants must be the careful custodians of blandness so as not to put off next yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tenants. Contrary to most purpose-built social housing blocks, where materials are chosen to minimize the need for maintenance, we might adopt a material palette that is easily adapted and maintained, stairs moved, walls repainted, floor finishes changed as people embed themselves over time.

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3.3 Building a funding base: the buy-to-let market as a source of capital

This section describes two ways that a credit union (CU) could act as a funding mechanism for long-term, low-rent housing, managed using the model described above, in the Elysium project and for other projects in the city. The money currently going into buy-to-let could be redirected to fund social-rented housing. Over the course of 2014, the total value of the UK’s buy-to-let market rose by £109bn (Kent Reliance, 2015). Research by Shelter (2016) indicates that much of this money is already in circulation and does not require creating in the form of debt: 40% of UK buy-tolet landlords are cash buyers. Of 16,560 privately rented properties in Swansea (Roberts & Holmes, 2013a), we can assume that 40% were bought mortgage-free. At an average price of £158,000, this amounts to a potential £1.046bn that could be diverted into social housing. To manipulate the buy-to-let market effectively we must recognise that, primarily, buy-to-let is an investment. Despite the problems caused and often wilfully ignored - by amateur private landlords, most are not driven by an intention to prevent tenants from settling in an area. Small scale property investment is typically used as an additional pension or to supplement income (Monk et al., 2014). By marketing investment in a well-regulated infrastructure of social rented housing as a philanthropic exercise (with competitive financial returns), would-be buy-to-let landlords might be persuaded to fund affordable housing, rather than purchasing one-off rental properties that they are ill-equipped to manage. Loans and Savings Abertawe (LASA), Swansea’s local CU, is both a simplified bank and a social service. Like all CUs, it pools the savings of members, and makes low-interest loans to other members. At the end of

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each year, any profits are shared among members in the form of dividends. LASA was established in 1992 as ‘The Hill Community Credit Union’ in Townhill, one of Swansea’s more deprived areas. 85% of its 7000 members are classed as financially excluded (Greenall, 2015). Day to day, it manages their finances, and helps negotiate and prevent financial consequences of serious personal issues. Swansea Council is currently researching the cost savings of the unofficial social work carried out by LASA which ranges from selling cost-price household white goods to combat store-credit debt to lowering prison reoffending rates (Greenall, 2014). LASA have a working relationship with Coastal and other local HAs. A consequence of focusing on such services is that LASA operates with very limited finances, impacting the services they offer as well as dividends paid to members. CUs are advised to lend at an 80% loan to share ratio, whereas LASA lends at 40%. Doubling loans to current members is not a solution, as a slacker lending process would put people into unmanageable debt, and risk members’ money (LASA, 2016). The social-rented housing funding systems proposed below would be a way of recruiting higher earning savers, which would increase the liquidity of the CU, allow it to make longer term investments and expand its services for low-earning members. The first proposed funding mechanism is for the CU make a loan to the client building the housing project – in this case the Elysium RCHA. This would be for lent for an agreed amount of time at an agreed rate of interest: for instance, a construction loan. To do this, the CU would need predictable access to money. Since most of LASA’s members are financially-excluded and need near-instant access to savings, this can be difficult. Using money invested in fixed-term ISAs is one way to guarantee predictability. As part of their imminent expansion with My Community Bank , LASA will be offering these. Were the interest rate competitive with returns on rental property (taking into account there would be no maintenance, time investment, stamp duty or letting fees to pay) this could be a way of essentially crowdsourcing investment for affordable housing.

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At present, CUs are unable to make commercial loans. Possibly by working in partnership with a Building Society to develop a specialism in affordable housing, LASA could develop a fixed-term ISA that could be used specifically to fund city centre affordable housing as well as broader regeneration projects. The second method would be for the CU to buy shares in the project. The return on these shares, or â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;social housing bondsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; would be capped according to an affordable rent level. Alternative market research by Generation Rent (2014) suggests 7%. However, under a typical shareholder agreement, shareholder profit is a legal priority: this would directly compromise the Elysium RCHAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to provide long-term affordable housing. Both CUs and Community Housing Associations have constitutional structures that can negotiate these conflicts of interest (Davies, 2016), (LASA, 2016). Essentially, the party selling the bonds must have a legal obligation to provide housing at controlled rents and to re-invest profits to continue doing so. Housing bonds could provide a relatively long-term investment in housing projects, again, without the insecurity of being the tenant of an individual landlord. The proposals address the issue of low-cost rental housing in two ways: they level the traditional power dynamic between landlords and tenants found in the private rented sector, and they strategically deflate the private rented market by diverting money away from buy-to-let, and into social housing. If the system was developed nationally, house-prices and rents may become affordable to more people. Both methods could be adapted to refurbish the Palace, Elysium and Castle cinema buildings, and used to incorporate rentable office space and commercial units. Larger cultural spaces could be sustained by a civic building time-share system: The Elysium for instance could host a church / mosque / conference space with each institution responsible for part of the rent. The methods suggested are also a potential funding option for refurbishing civic buildings such as the Elysium Cinema described in Section 3.1.

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Stony Island Arts Bank, Grand Crossing, Chicago

F82.

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Any realistic alternative housing strategy must fit within the context of the existing housing system. One of LASA’s financially excluded members would be a typical tenant: lowering housing costs would be a simple way to increase their disposable income. An older person may downsize somewhere where rent is predictable and care at home is an easy option, which may free up larger homes elsewhere. On the other hand, younger people may take out a tenancy, and since they are able to save quickly, may choose to put a deposit on a home elsewhere and move. As such it may be a reasonably easy idea to sell politically as it does not imply that tenants have to stay there forever, although they may choose to (there is considerable stigma attached to the idea of being ‘stuck’ in social housing for ever). Another benefit to this type of fundraising is that it can generate valuable publicity for future civic institutions on site. The high profile of Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank (FX) is a function of its fundraising process. Token slabs of marble, salvaged from the building were sold to international art investors as ‘bank bonds’, funding the refurbishment of the building in the South Side neighbourhood (Landon, 2015). By encouraging many small local investments, both proposed systems might do more to develop the user base of the Elysium Project in Swansea. With further research, these systems could, in theory, be put into practice without changes to national legislation. This said, there are a number of policies the Welsh Assembly could adopt to increase investment in the schemes. The employer payroll-deduction saving scheme, for example, already used by the council and the NHS could be expanded using tax incentives. The introduction of rent controls, already widespread in Europe, to essentially cap buy-to-let profits - could prove a highly effective way to direct investment into funding schemes of this sort. In the same way that cutting public investment under austerity is a political ideology, resisting austerity should not become an ideological drive to return to former models of state ownership. Effective resistance should must recognise where previous housing systems - including council owned housing - has been problematic and instead find channels for improving models of state investment, and supporting local agents - be that residents or service providers like credit unions to expand their agency to develop better housing models.

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Conclusion

Swansea’s Amazon depot, the retail focus of the Central Area Strategic Framework, and Coed Darcy, together build a picture of a predominant regeneration ethos that follows market trends of employment, urban regeneration and housing provision. Rather than increase the economic resilience of the city, this pattern of regeneration mirrors problematic industrial structures, embedding unjust economic systems. These strategies make poor use of public money, increase personal debt and overlook the capacity of the city to act as an affordable domestic and social resource. The UK’s pattern of bank lending sustains regeneration based on low-wage jobs rising house prices. The resulting affordability gap is exacerbated by ideologically pro-homeownership UK housing policy. This in turn is upheld by both cultural preference and necessity: the promise of homeownership the carrot, the precarity of the private rental sector the stick. In Chicago’s Plan for Transformation and Cameron’s estate regeneration promise, we see a pattern of policy aimed at incentivising people to act in a correct manner, as Vale (2013) describes, ‘housing is offered as a reward for complying to an acceptable lifestyle’. This correct manner is subjective, but it is nonetheless influential on urban housing strategy and becomes embedded in cities in the resulting distribution of people. In this case, the architecture of urban housing is the final step in the pre-decided economic and social design of a housing system. It doesn’t have to work this way. Within Swansea’s Regeneration Framework, there is room to consider the multiple dimensions of affordable urban housing simultaneously. The assembly of detailed development briefs for specific sites, as currently being trialled by the

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High Street design project - allow focused and creative thinking regarding housing as urbanism, as a construction issue, as a long-term home, as a community and as a financial investment designed to support the fair representation of tenants. This type of working is crucial. We should not find ourselves saying in 20 years’ time ‘Swansea is improving but we also need to tackle inequality’(Roberts, 2016). The two are not separate processes. Regeneration and investment are inextricably linked, and for cities like Swansea, it is essential that we are can discern what constitutes genuine investment. Urban-infill housing is about making places and sustaining communities. While Welsh housing policy has begun to look progressive compared with this year’s Housing and Planning Bill, central UK policy should not be able to set the bar. It’s premise of delivering affordable housing as compensation for market activity is fundamentally flawed. It must be proactive. Regulatory legislation is always going to be about minimum standards. Legislation alone cannot produce good living environments - it is up to those working on housing projects to raise the game. By way of conclusion, we might consider how some element of this investigation can be progressed beyond the scope of this thesis and academic course. A possible route is to pursue further research in an academic sense, potentially with the backing of a university and more formal relationships with local organisations, such as housing associations and the credit union and local authority. Certain lines of inquiry, the funding mechanisms for instance, merit further and more specific academic research by those with financial backgrounds. Architects though are well placed to explore these mechanisms through the medium of a built project. Engaging in a building project by acting as a small-scale developer could be a highly productive way of testing a contained aspect of the design or funding strategy by exploring High Street and the issue of lifetime rental housing on the ground and with local people. Building on Swansea’s current self-branding as a ‘city of innovation’,

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establishing a housing lab for the city would be one way to combine local knowledge with a strong design agenda in order to set up design dialogues, develop the agency of local organisations, test progressive policy proposals such as rent controls, and champion alternative housing approaches in the city centre. Swansea is a favourable context for this kind of experimentation. The Local Authority is committed to building city centre council housing over the next five years, its local financial institutions are creative and engaged in practical measures to combat poverty, and the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s housing associations are experienced and innovative developers. In terms of broader influence, the structure of national organisations like CREW and The design commission for Wales specifically set up to share and develop knowledge. Swanseaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s large portfolio of dilapidated, councilowned buildings might provide an opportunity to these ideas in reality, were they part of an informed social-enterprise business plan. Swansea does not need to wait for things to happen to it. No stranger to large-scale physical change, Swansea is reaching a critical point in its development. Cities though, are an ongoing process. Hand-me-down regeneration strategies will take the city in one direction, but will neglect the wealth of possibility embedded in the social, institutional, and physical fabric of the city, and the chance this presents to begin developing exemplary models of dwelling within it.

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