Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong

Nicole Gurran, Nick Gallent, Rebecca Chiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317385158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In recent years many nations have asked why not enough housing is being built or, when it is built, why it isn't of the highest quality or in the best, most sustainable, locations. Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong examines the politics and planning of new homes in three very different settings, but with shared political traditions: in Australia, in England and in Hong Kong. It investigates the power-relationships and politics that underpin the allocation of land for large-scale residential schemes and the processes and politics that lead to particular development outcomes.

Using a comparative framework, it asks:

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• how different systems of urban governance and planning mediate the supply of land for housing;

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• whether and how these system differences influence the location, quantity and price of residential land and the implications for housing outcomes;

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• what can be learned from these different systems for allocating land, building consensus between different stakeholders, and delivering a steady supply of high quality and well located homes accessible to, and appropriate for, diverse housing needs.

This book frames each case study in a comprehensive examination of national and territorial frameworks before dissecting key local cases. These local cases – urban renewal and greenfield growth centres in Australia, new towns and strategic sites in England, and major development schemes in Hong Kong – explore how broader urban planning and housing policy goals play out at the local level. While the book highlights a number of potential strategies for improving planning and housing delivery processes, the real challenge is to give voice to a broader array of interests, reconstituting the political process surrounding planning and housing development to prioritise homes in well-planned places for the many, rather than simply facilitating investment opportunities for the few.

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Introduction

Politics, Planning, and Housing Supply

Planning is a key and highly politicized element of public policy. Planning decisions have a propensity to radically change urban and rural environments, to create winners and losers in an economic sense, and also to alter people’s lives and the wellbeing of communities. Those decisions, therefore, are often contested and subject to national and local scrutiny. The politics of planning, and of housing development, is a core public policy concern around the world. Periodically, many nations stop and ask why not enough housing is being built or, when it is built, why it is not of the highest quality or in the best, most sustainable, locations. Housing outcomes are determined by a complex national politics, by power play, and by the forces of democracy; they therefore reflect the will of vested interests and of a well-housed majority, which would often prefer to see its amenity protected than opportunity extended to the poorly housed.

This book examines these issues, exploring the politics and planning of new homes in three settings which are very different, but which have shared political traditions: Australia, England, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR). We cast a spotlight on the power relationships and politics that underpin the allocation of land for large-scale residential schemes and thereafter the processes and politics that lead to particular development outcomes. As well as drawing out key conceptual and practical lessons, the book frames each of its case studies in a comprehensive examination of national/territorial frameworks (themselves analyzed in comparative perspective) before dissecting key local cases as a means of answering the book’s central question: Are there optimum approaches to planning for housing development, in terms of setting an appropriate framework for allocating land and regulating development proposals, building consensus across local communities and between different stakeholders, and delivering a steady supply of high-quality and well-located homes accessible to, and appropriate for, diverse housing needs? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to situate the planning process within its wider economic and political context.

In this introductory chapter we provide a basis for this wider contextual framework, outlining how different systems of governance and urban planning can mediate the supply of land for housing, and the roles playedby government, planning authorities, developers, property owners, and the public in this process. We ask whether and how differences in land use planning systems—across the processes of land use planning and development control, structures of power, property rights, and development entitlement—might influence the location, quantity, and price of residential land and the implications for housing outcomes, particularly for the fate of large-scale strategic housing development. This sets the scene for under standing large strategic housing sites as locations of intense political and democratic scrutiny and as potential epicenters of conflict centered on the exercise of power and conflicting rights and needs, and as litmus tests of the efficacy of planning/ political systems to deliver against the needs of growing populations.

Perspectives from Comparative Planning and Housing Studies

Patterns of housing provision and occupation are shaped by distinct, historically evolved relationships between the state, the market, and private property. While the state intervenes through urban planning to manage the impacts of development, the scope and impacts of this intervention are mediated by systems of landownership and associated rights and obligations (Simpson & Chapman, 1999; Buitelaar & Segeren, 2011). Comparative planning and housing studies can shed light on these processes and their outcomes (Kemeny & Lowe, 1998; Chiu, 2008; Stephens, 2011; Stephens & Norris, 2011). Such work helps explain the origin of new policy information and approaches, while calling into question the validity of assumptions and evidence borrowed from elsewhere (Healey, 2013).

A major attraction of comparative research is the opportunity to undertake “thought” experiments, to speculate on how a shift in the balance between one element of a particular system might affect another. For instance, in the context of growing concern over levels of new housing production relative to rates of population growth, household formation, and rising housing prices, many governments worldwide worry that urban land use planning systems impose oppressive constraints on new development. Arguably, such concerns are rarely grounded in an analysis of actual development processes. Further, the risks of dismantling development controls are significant—potentially degrading urban and environmental quality—while the benefits (assumed increases in rates of housing production) are not necessarily straightforward. Thus, comparative research offers a “low-risk” opportunity for testing assumptions about the potential risks or benefits of system change. Nevertheless, for such comparisons to be valid and useful, it is important to recognize the contextual differences arising from historically evolved systems of housing provision and urban governance. Furthermore, Chiu (2010, 2013) points out that questions of policy transfer must be grounded in a thorough understanding of the policy environment of the originating country (e.g. financial and land resources, regulatory and institutional control, and governance structure) and its national, social, and historical roots. Only by recognizing the embeddedness of policy might it be possible to identify interventions that are genuinely transferrable.

Previous comparative studies have sought to identify which balance of government intervention and market freedom in urban and housing development produces economically or socially optimal outcomes (Barlow & Duncan, 1992). Forms of government intervention span the financial settings for housing and infrastructure production (grants, subsidies, taxes, or finance) to the rules and procedures for deciding the location and design of homes, the obligations of developers, and the extent of community involvement in these decisions. Types of urban regulation (for instance, the extent to which a planning system is discretionary or more rigid in character) may also have important implications for the quantity, quality, and volume of housing and other development (Booth, 1996).

Here, the scale of intervention—i.e. centralized control versus locally devolved decision making—may determine the responsiveness of new development to local circumstances (Barlow & Duncan, 1992), and the extent to which decisions reflect “party politics,” producer interests, or those of resident/home owner groups. Such questions are at the heart of any analysis of the role of politics in housing provision. The distance afforded by comparison can illuminate the structural conditions that enable particular interests to prevail.

All of these considerations are relevant to our three-country comparison of urban governance and housing outcomes in Australia, England, and Hong Kong. However, our particular focus in this book is the ways in which the politics of planning and housing provision—the interests of governments and of different producer and consumer groups—are mediated through par ticular urban governance arrangements, and the implications for new housing supply. Housing supply is our focus, since land and dwelling production is the housing output most directly attributable to the planning system. Other outcomes—such as the cost and distribution of homes across different social groups—are directly and indirectly influenced by planning system decisions (particularly decisions affecting the quantity, quality, and location of new homes), but causality is more difficult to attribute. Further, many other domestic, and progressively international, factors affect demand in the increasingly “financialized” housing market (Rolnik, 2013). These include demographic change, economic growth, the cost and availability of housing credit, the relative value of other investments, and so on (Barker, 2014).

To explore questions concerning the role of planning in mediating housing supply across our three different case studies, we focus on two scales of analysis—1) the bird’s eye overarching view, tracing the evolution of the three systems of urban governance in the planning arena; and 2) the level of the strategic development site—where arrangements are played out in practice. Our chief focus is the ways in which politics has shaped planning policy in Australia, England, and Hong Kong, and how, at local levels, political and economic power has been mediated—or unleashed—through the planning system in the production of new homes.

Approach and Methods

One of the limitations of comparative urban and housing research is that it is almost impossible to reduce highly complex phenomena—whole nations and their systems of urban governance and housing provision—into neat units of analysis for comparison. We have not attempted such a task in this book. Rather, our approach has been to develop both a “macro view” and a “micro view” of urban governance, planning, and housing outcomes in each of our three countries, addressing as part of this task basic markers for comparison. These included an attempt to explain the “scope” of urban planning in each case, the key techniques of development control (plan making, zoning, and the permitting process), and questions of landownership and political power in the decision process. We are interested in the balance of influence across the state, civil society, and the private sector (property owners and developers) in each case, as well as the balance of power between central and local governments, or local government and communities, at the plan-making and development control/implementation stages. Ultimately, we are concerned with the ways in which specific aspects of the urban planning system intersect with the wider framework for housing provision.

Thus, the three cases are each examined in two chapters: The first of each pair of chapters provides a national and territorial overview of urban governance, plan ning, and the housing system, before the second chapters explore how broader frameworks and contexts deliver particular local challenges and outcomes on major strategic sites. Our focus on strategic sites for housing delivery is deliberate. While planning and infra structure decisions impact on the trajectory of urban change within a city or region in gradual and incremental ways, newly constructed homes amount to a very small proportion of the entire dwelling stock (about 0.5 percent annually in England, and around 2 percent in Australia). This means that the impacts of urban planning on the wider housing market are somewhat limited. However, at regional and subregional scales, strategic sites where housing is delivered at volume will have an important price-setting impact. Notwith standing the growing importance of “infill” development, it is on large-scale strategic sites—in “greenfield” (undeveloped) and “renewal” (previously developed) contexts—that the planning system intersects with new housing supply at a significant scale. Yet there is surprisingly little analysis of this important context for housing production. Across the “gray” urban policy literature (such as that produced by government and quasi-government agencies, industry sources, and consultants), the focus has tended to be placed on general barriers to new development: perceived problems with the pace of new land release, restrictive development standards, complicated, slow, and uncertain decision processes, and obstructive home owners. But this catalog of complaints—probably familiar to planners nearly everywhere—is rarely substantiated with a deep analysis of where production barriers exist and how precisely they have impacted on housing provision.

Similarly, there is an extensive empirical literature on relationships between the planning system and housing market outcomes, largely rooted in econometric analytical techniques (see Bramley, 2013, and Hincks et al., 2013, for reviews; White & Allmendinger, 2003). However, by necessity this work reduces the planning system to a generalizable series of proxy measures (such as rates of development approval/refusal, or the character and weight of statutory development controls). To draw valid comparisons from this work would require Herculean efforts to develop equivalent measures of planning constraint between, say, Sydney, with its system of piecemeal zoning and codified development standards, and London, with its discretion...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Politics, Planning, and Housing Supply
• 2 Urban Planning, Politics, Land, and Housing Supply in Australia
• 3 Planning and Property Politics in Sydney’s Urban Renewal and Growth Centres
• 4 Power and Democracy in the English Planning System
• 5 Delivering New Homes on Major Development Sites in England
• 6 Power and Decision Making in Hong Kong’s Planning System
• 7 Land Supply and New Housing Provision in Hong Kong
• 8 Conclusion: Planning, Democracy, and Control in the Delivery of New Homes
• Index