Affordable & Sustainable

 

Passivhaus - image ©Passivhaus Institut

Sonia Sodha, writing in yesterday's Guardian, makes a good case for properly affordable and social housing to turn the tide of property-value inflation and the gradual eroding-to-nothing of the social housing sector. I'm not personally averse to home ownership - we, or at least the bank - own ours; but I am averse to a housing market where value inflation has pushed a very large number of people who would otherwise choose to buy out of the market altogether. And if the kind of widely available decent social housing stock that we in this country used to build was currently available, people would not be forced to rent in a similarly inflated private sector.

Post-Thatcher, the pipe dream of home ownership for all in a free and pretty loosely regulated market has all but evaporated; killed by the rise in inequality, hoarding of wealth and a reluctance on the part of successive governments to interfere in the markets. The mantra of build, build, build bypasses social housing altogether, with construction firms becoming property speculators even at the quite modest end of the business and the recent scandal of usurious leasehold builds plainly indicating that things were running out of control.

If affordability is being sidelined in pursuit of maximised profits, then state intervention is in order, whatever form it takes; if only to protect the market from itself. On the other hand, we could take a leaf out of the books of other countries: not all rely on or fetishise ownership. Germany is the most-cited example, having almost the lowest percentage of owners versus renters in Europe. Most Germans would prefer not to be tied down to one house or have the hassle of selling and re-buying if they just want to move. However, I don't see that mindset taking root in the UK as we're three generations into mass property ownership now and it feels pretty much culturally embedded.

Where we could make changes however, is in the market itself. Regulation and price-capping would go some distance towards positive change, at least at the starter home end; but we need to rethink the type of housing stock we want, both for ownership and for social housing, the need for which is steadily increasing. Sodha posits the idea of guaranteed, affordable five-year tenancies for the 18-25's, to help them save a deposit for a possible house purchase; a sound idea which has echoes of the original modus operandi of the building societies. It also goes some way to taking the heat and urgency out of what often seems to be a cultural obligation to buy. In pricing people out of the market, we have only reinforced the cultural and economic divisions that we should be aiming to close as a fair society; something the current government has no interest in whatsoever, happy to feed inequality in the service of its cohort.

Availability, price and value-inflation aside, the biggest problems with housebuilding are build quality and environmental impact. Plenty of houses are being built all right, but down to the lowest possible price that regulations will allow to maximise margins; leading to shoddy, inefficient and overvalued stock. Built of poor, carbon-intensive materials to standards that have changed little in decades, they represent the very antithesis of what is needed at this critical juncture in human history. This also affects the long-term affordability of running a house in terms of excess energy usage. Put simply, we're just throwing energy and let's not forget, our own money, away in the way we build houses both during construction and subsequently just by living in them.

This applies particularly to mass-market and social new-builds: retrofitting old housing stock with modern secondary insulation and glazing is a small step towards improving what we already have; but that housing stock is coming to the end of it's natural lifespan anyway and a clean start would cost less in the long run. A paradigm-shift will be needed if we are to even take the first steps toward an affordable and sustainable building industry. The standards, techniques and materials for such a thing are already well-established in Europe and particularly in Scandinavia.

Passivhaus as a concept is not complicated and its precepts as easy to implement as 'traditional' building methods are to use. The diagram at the head of this piece explains the fundamentals of a low-carbon dwelling. What's needed is to shift expectations in the market to a point where energy-efficiency becomes not just a desirable feature of a house, but a necessary one; not just enshrined in building regulations, but actually on the tick-list of every prospective buyer/renter; to a point when it would simply be impossible to shift housing not built on environmentally sound principles. Getting the price down to an affordable level would be the second plank of the principle: put such housing within the grasp of everyone and build no new social housing outside of the standard. This might involve subsidies, tax breaks or some other form of state support, but if like me you feel that the state represents the sum of it's citizenship and is not meant to simply be a legitimising organ of autocracy, then there are no real barriers to funding for our future: one lesson we are learning during the current pandemic - some things are just too big to leave to the free markets.

All of this is eminently achievable with only a slight shift in the market mindset and modest, but rigorously enforced legislation. The resulting housing stock would then be taken up rather than being fed into an increasingly voracious private rental sector or simply left, lying around empty as assets to be liquidated in the future as prices inevitably rise. Secondly, as the passivhaus is essentially energy-neutral, not only is its post-construction carbon footprint practically zero, it is virtually free to run in energy terms and in time will pay back most of its construction's cost.

Better conceived, better constructed, cheaper to buy and inexpensive to run; there should be no contest. We just need to want to change the way we think about the houses we build and live in. This needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Further reading: https://passiv.de/en/   https://passivhaustrust.org.uk/