I may just have become respectable, at least in this Great Southern Land we call Australia, my current home. I’m not sure I ever achieved full respectability when working as a special advisor in the Blair and Brown governments in the UK or when running the once great and now fallen Thames Gateway London Partnership, an amazing grouping of councils in East and Southeast London. Even writing for planning journals in the UK and esteemed outlets like The Fifth Estate here hadn’t really get me invited to the right soirees. I’ve always had a slight ‘below the salt’ air about me. Until now!
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I exaggerate slightly, of course. Nothing I could say could transform my social standing in the eyes of some holdouts – my wife for example, who frequently describes me as a “barbarian who’s read books” – but I’m hoping some positive feedback from my adopted country will help me turn the corner, brand-wise, in the views of my peers across the Anglosphere.
Cut the crap Tim; get to the point. OK, so I am delighted to report that at the invitation of Catherine King, Minister at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, I am to be a member of the new Australian government backed National Urban Policy Network.
The main remit is to provide advice and feedback to the department on specific urban policy issues, including on the development of the National Urban Policy.
I am more than a little proud to be invited, given that I am essentially a migrant to these shores, albeit one now with deep family roots here. My journey in Australia has been amazingly lucky, given that I arrived at the overripe age of 54 – and it’s not over yet. I’d like to thank all those with the perspicacity to agree with me that I might be useful in this and other things I’ve done since my arrival – from chief executive of the Committee for Sydney through being head of Cities: Australasia for Arup and to now being global cities practice lead for Grimshaw. Message to Minister: Hope I can help – there’s a lot to talk about.
Top priorities for the National Urban Policy Network
Two big things come to mind – and the fact that they are also British priorities suggest not only that these are shared international problems but that also there may have to be international solutions; or at least that it would be useful to see what we can learn from one another on the way to answers.
The first is housing. I keep pointing out something that still seems to elude many decision-makers in the public and private sectors in both Australia and the UK, and indeed across the Anglosphere: market trends and problems seem remarkably similar and moving more or less in lockstep, whether it’s New South Wales or Old South Wales in the UK.
Home prices rose dramatically everywhere since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 as governments and reserve banks threw the financial and monetary kitchen sink at refloating the global economy.
Zero level interest rates and loose monetary policy – or quantitative easing as it’s more formally known – did what they inevitably would do: raise asset prices in general and housing in particular.
We then saw, as Covid hit, a shared approach by governments in Australia and the UK to throw public money into the economy to shore it up which had the unintended effect of again pushing up residential values: proving frankly the monetary origins of home price inflation. Because in both countries, during Covid, there was no population growth – just a growth in the supply of cheap money with little else to spend it on other than one’s abode or the abode one desired.
Of course this period was then followed by rapidly increasing interest rates in both countries which then started putting downward pressure on home prices – and thus housing delivery which tends to rise when prices rise (it’s a market) – while actually lifting rents.
Why? Because in both countries when interest rates and prices get so high, first time buyers cannot enter the market to buy so they rent , raising demand for, and the price of, rental property whose owners themselves are seeking higher rents to be able to afford their more expensive mortgages.
Understanding the Housing Market: A Prerequisite for Effective Solutions
This brings me to my punchline as to the need for a shared understanding between Australia and the UK about housing markets – and the interventions that will or will not work.
while in both countries there is an obsession that the housing price problem
is a supply problem, the “demand” side – the impact of cheap money
flooding into residential – is ignored
This is that while in both countries there is an obsession that the housing price problem is a supply problem, the “demand” side – the impact of cheap money flooding into residential – is ignored.
Also overlooked in the joint mania to “reduce planning barriers” to “unlock” more housing is that two very different planning systems have experienced similar home price inflation trends because what they share is not a planning problem but an over-financialisation of residential property problem grounded in cheap money and loose monetary policy.
That’s the shared problem they should really do joint work on.
Understanding the Housing Market: A Prerequisite for Effective Solutions
The other big shared problem is what to do about our under-performing CBDs hit first by Covid and now suffering from the impact of hybrid working and the reluctance of so many knowledge workers to return to anything like a full time week in the office.
Offices in both Sydney and London are underpopulated at least on Mondays and Fridays and the average rate of return of workers to their offices in both cities remains stubbornly at 60 per cent and for public sector workers a lot lower.
I must say in neither do I see much shift back to full occupancy likely and in neither are we seeing anything that looks like a coordinated public-private strategy to get all staff back into their CBD offices.
Public-Private Partnerships for CBD Renewal
Moreover, I don’t see much evidence of any kind of coordinated CBD recovery or perhaps more realistically renewal and reinvention going on.
While many commentators in both the UK and Australia are talking about a new approach to CBDs as CEDs – central experience districts – and everyone is talking about adaptive re-use of offices for other activities and having more housing in our CBDs, I see little sign in my former and adopted country of intentional, concerted strategies to redesign and replan, re-zone even, our city centres.
If it’s happening, it’s piecemeal and uncoordinated. This moment feels like Hamlet without the Prince: that is to say, action of various kinds but without leadership to shape and direct. We used to do this kind of thinking and public-private partnering at the high point of British urban regeneration activity between about the mid 80s to the mid noughties.
And though there was only an echo of this approach in Australian cities – urban renewal was never thought to be needed in a young country with lots of land – I believe that it is now a necessary approach to CBD transformation, both in Australia and the UK.
These are my two main talking points in both countries at this moment: understanding a broken housing market before attempting to fix it ; and public-private partnering and strategizing around CBD renewal. I hope that sounds respectable enough…
