Roundtable: How to find more homes without building anew

In an effort to tackle the housing crisis, the government has firmly nailed its colours to the mast of building 1.5 million houses during the course of this parliament. Few expect this ambitious figure to be hit. But as well as that concern, many in the sector want much more retrofitting of existing housing stock, repurposing existing buildings and creating incentives for downsizers to free up the housing market. So what is the best way to achieve both aims? And how can architects best influence this debate and get progress on delivery? Can the country summon up the skill and the will that produced the London 2012 Olympics, matched with good people, funding and a deadline?

Eleanor Young, editor of the RIBA Journal, led a roundtable discussion of designers, planners and housing experts at the RIBA in October. The session was supported by the Family Building Society.

Below we look at the key themes to emerge.

Make it easier to downsize

Tony Crook, professor emeritus of town and regional planning at the School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield, pointed out that even if the government target was reached, which was unlikely, it would add less than 1% to the housing stock each year.

‘But there's a great opportunity to take the existing stock, both housing and commercial, and use retrofit techniques to re-purpose and modernise that for modern housing. And an important part of that is enabling retirees to downsize from the properties they are occupying.’

Professor Crook pointed out that most retirees own properties outright but often they were energy inefficient and no longer suitable, particularly for the 40% of these who had some disability. Retrofitting blocks in city centres in a way that is sustainable, affordable and planned well could suit their needs better. It was suggested that reducing stamp duty for older people could provide an incentive to downsize. Mark Bogard, CEO, of the Family Building Society, said his organisation had commissioned research from Crooks and Christine Whitehead, emeritus professor of housing economics at the Department of Economics, London School of Economics (LSE), on creating a coherent housing policy. This had found that paying stamp duty was a key deterrent to moving.

Though it was acknowledged that giving older people such a financial break might not ‘look good politically’, Whitehead said ‘If your goal is to ‘ungum” the housing market, then do it because it's better for the greater good, and you generate more money when people move because of  the additional economic activity associated with moving.’

The general consensus was that older people were more likely to downsize if housing was available either in town centres or with easy bus links into town centres – rather than ‘in the middle of nowhere’. It was also pointed out that retirement villages, with lots of onsite facilities, were only affordable at the high end of the private market.

There were also calls for greater diversity of tenure and housing to suit all ages in developments, including for multi-generational families. Where there was innovation this tended to come from local authorities, observed Sowmya Parthasrathy, fellow of urban design and masterplanning at Arup. 

One issue flagged up during the discussion was that there was little provision in the National Planning Policy Framework for housing for older people. However, Amy Waite, associate director at Mikhail Riches, thought that it was not necessarily a good thing to think of older persons’ housing as a completely separate identity. She pointed to the success of the second phase of the Park Hill flats redevelopment in Sheffield where Mikhail Riches had been the architect. ‘The demographic at Park Hill is lots of young professionals and downsizers, and what has been amazing is the sense of community that comes from young and old people living there together.’

Create new housing opportunities in the original new towns

There was a degree of scepticism expressed during the discussion about government’s appetite to build new towns, despite Parthasrathy being on the New Towns Taskforce. Instead, there was a feeling that more ‘love’ and investment should be being directed to some of those built 65-70 years ago along with other towns and cities.

Paul Karakusevic, co-founder of Karakusevic Carson Architects, pointed to better use of existing space found within the first generation of the UK’s new towns - including one where his practice had recently been commissioned to do a feasibility study for the council – where there is extensive under-utilised land and overly generous road layouts. Speaking of this scenario, he said: 'You could close some roads and re-allocate empty low-rise retail space and car parks and build new housing and mixed-use districts within town centres. There are schools, stations, bus stations, empty shops and acres of publicly owned land. It seems to me illogical to be building on remote airfields that lack any infrastructure when you have perfectly good functioning towns already well established with embedded communities and developed economies, fabulous local infrastructure and ready to go transport connections.'

It was observed that demand for offices had reduced across towns and cities leaving a glut with little chance of being let. Jonny Buckland, architect and creative director at Studio SAAR, explained how the practice had become involved in a bid by a community group in Taunton, Somerset, to take over a Debenhams department store that had been empty for some time, which will be under new legislation on High Street Rental Auctions intended to unlock regeneration.

However, while some of these schemes could be converted to residential, it was noted that others and brownfield development more widely could not. Existing sites may lack the necessary infrastructure for housing, and with huge up-front costs, affordability becomes a barrier, unless government was willing to pick up these costs.

Repurpose existing buildings as homes

As well as making the numbers stack up, another major challenge flagged up during the discussion was technical complexity. As Amy Waite, associate director, Mikhail Riches, pointed out: ‘There’s a lot of work on retrofit processes and systems and standards. But they will take us just so far, but there's never going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to all the different building stock.’

Her practice was working on a scheme to turn a 1980s supermarket in the West Midlands into flats, which like other retrofit schemes necessitated flexibility and being able to design in ways that would suit the building, rather than shoehorning the design to fit policy. Waite said that although they had won the competition for this scheme by proposing the retention of the building, maintaining the existing fabric may not always be the best approach and any scheme needed to be considered from a holistic perspective including the energy performance, the embodied carbon and the existing community.

There was another plea for retrofit to be considered more widely than simply as part of the decarbonisation drive. Richard Partington, director of Studio Partington, expressed his frustration that funding for retrofit was normally for single measure improvement, yet there was often a great opportunity to improve homes and neighbourhoods. ‘The kind of things that local authorities are doing with the Public Sector Decarbonisation Fund, for instance, are just the simplest, least intrusive things they can get to the government standards, rather than looking at the housing stock and saying, “all the roofs on these homes are going to need replacing within the next four or five years, or all the kitchens are going to need replacing. So why don't we combine the capital repair with the energy improvement, and assess whether the homes are suitable”.’

That said, scaling-up of retrofitting in all its guises is hampered by the lack of skilled people – from those who could fit heat pumps, to installing insulation correctly. ‘I think it would be amazing if we took that on as a real mission, right from architectural education to engineering to all the building trades, because there's so much work to do,’ Parthasrathy concluded.

The expert view: What can architects and others do to ensure we have the right homes in the right places?

Sowmya Parthasrathy, Arup 

As architects we come up with amazing individual projects, but we talk quite a lot to our own discipline.  We need to have very many more substantive conversations with related disciplines, be they funders or economists or government policy makers, because all our good ideas will only remain smaller projects unless we can influence people who can actually unlock things further up the food chain.

Jonny Buckland, Studio SAAR

Co-design and increasing our skills to communicate with the people that we're working with is vital. It's about how we can facilitate design conversation and not dictate design conversation.

Richard Partington, Studio Partington 

As architects we have to provide the overview and the ambition and sustain that all the way through a project. It's not about design, it's about the way that architects can interact with all the different participants.

Amy Waite, Mikhail Riches

We have to stop talking about retrofit as being different to architecture. I think that will stop cowboys doing things and causing so much damage. The things that make projects successful are the things that foster community, because in retrofit projects you're not dealing with an empty site or empty building. You've got people and lives and histories there. We need to ensure more meaningful consultation, rather than talking about just numbers, otherwise we're going nowhere.

Tony Crook, University of Sheffield 

Planning needs to be more visual and architects need to be more place-based. It's important for designers to do work on the wider geographies, beyond the site, and work with other professions, because we do know that the place, as well as good buildings, produces value.

Mark Bogard, Family Building Society 

There are a lot of different initiatives, but until departments, be they government departments or in councils, join up, they're just pulling in completely different directions at the same time. Someone needs to have an overarching vision for planning and delivery.

Paul Karakusevic, Karakusevic Carson Architects 

On city architects and the role of architects in strategic decision making on national infrastructure, transport, housing investment, education and health projects: there should be strategic architects across central and local government. Every metro region needs one, as does every local council and every city. Architects bring incredible common sense to these conversations. There has to be spatial design, strategy and commonsense in the room. Only then will we get the investment and development in the right places. Big decisions will be improved and will save money in the long term, for example on HS2.

Christine Whitehead, London School of Economics  

Architects can help ensure that the right homes are in the right places by talking clearly about cost – and when they put forward different options for schemes that cost different amounts of money, explaining what those differences are in words which make sense to the local authority or to the economist or funder.

This RIBAJ roundtable was produced in association with the Family Building Society