The Empty Homes Delusion

This week: no, there aren’t enough empty homes to solve the housing crisis; and a live map of the London Underground. But first: the sad, man-made decline of the king of the jungle.

This week’s politics-tinged section goes on a bit, so I’m messing with my usual running order. First up, here’s something from the part of my brain that throws up random questions that start with, “Hey, I wonder why-”¹

One of the strangest things about England, and oh my there are a lot of those to choose from, is its choice of national animal. A lion guards a bridge at Hampton Court Palace; there are four surrounding Nelson in Trafalgar Square. At the Somme, there were proverbially thousands of the things, led, famously, by donkeys. Today, London even has a railway line named the Lioness, on the grounds it goes through Wembley where the women’s football team, the Lionesses, once did quite well. England loves a lion.

Which is odd because, so far as one can tell, not a single one of them has ever set foot in this country of its free will. The English lion dates to royal heraldry, specifically Richard I’s motif of three of the things. (This is why there are, as the song says, three lions on the shirt.) The choice to make this a national symbol gets even sillier when you realise that, lionheart or no, Richard I barely set foot in England, absolutely considered himself French, and would have sold his crown to the highest bidder if it got him another three hours crusading. Also, it’s entirely possible that only one of the three lions was meant to be England, with the other two representing Normandy and Aquitaine.² England is about as un-lion-y as a nation could be.

Even if England didn’t have lions though, other parts of Europe did: ancient lion remains have been found right across south eastern Europe, and when they pop up in Ancient Greek sculpture or literature, it was not because Homer spent much time in sub-Saharan Africa. By the point our calendar starts counting up, not down, they were well into their final decline; nonetheless, it’s entirely possible that the lions used at the Colosseum as late as the 4th century may have come from across the Adriatic, not the Mediterranean.

Here’s a map which attempts to compare the animals’ range today with places that seemed to have them historically:

Other versions include Spain, Italy and even southern France – this one from a wildlife charity includes those, plus a few heart wrenching images of lion parents hugging their children, for good measure – but these are more contested. Image: Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

So what happened? Part of the answer is climate change. But much of it, you will be stunned to learn, is “we did”. Lions need fairly wide areas to roam over if they’re to thrive: the growth of human agriculture fragmented their territories, and restricted their movements. That didn’t just reduce the size of a population a given area could support, by reducing prey populations: it also reduced the number of other lions they’d meet, increasing inbreeding, reducing genetic diversity and reducing numbers yet further. It also brought lions into greater contact with people in a “Who’s been eating my cows?” manner, with predictable results.

At any rate, while there’s extensive evidence to suggest significant lion populations in the Balkans throughout prehistory, as the last millennium BCE wore on they gradually disappeared. Those lions in the Colosseum may have been among the last European lions. They’ve lost almost all of their Asian habitat, too: today they occupy just 8% of their historic range. It’s very sad.

Richard the Lionheart was still full of shit, mind.

No, empty homes can’t solve the housing crisis

Some people whoop with delight when a senior politician adopts their policies. I am not one of those people. It isn’t that there’s no pride in seeing that, say, the government’s promise to look again at the “grey belt” felt suspiciously like an idea I’ve been pushing for a decade. It’s just that my automatic assumption is that anyone who backs my ideas is probably going to lose.

So it was with London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s recent announcement that addressing the capital’s housing shortage will require making it easier to build on the green belt. His descriptions of low-quality land near to transport links could have come from an op-ed on the late lamented CityMetric, c2015; so could the promise to use greater provision of affordable homes and increased access to genuinely biodiverse green space to sweeten the pill.

The proposal isn’t perfect. The mayor has relatively limited powers to kickstart property development, although rewriting the London Plan can give cover to boroughs that’ll need more land to meet their housing targets. I’m also not clear where the financing for those affordable homes or new green spaces is coming from. But it’s an admirable attempt to be honest with the electorate about what we’d need to get out of this mess, which is exactly why I’m now concerned it’ll hand the suburbs to Reform.

After all, there are already predictable rumblings of discontent, and bafflement in some quarters that anyone on the left might side with developers (as if there is no one else out there who stands to benefit from an increase in housing supply). The Guardian helpfully illustrated its article on the changes with both a map showing the royal parks and Hackney Marshes, and a picture of a stretch of metropolitan land, Farthing Downs. Not a single inch of any of these would be under threat, even if the green belt were abolished tomorrow.³

There’s another oft-heard criticism of the plans that’s perhaps made in better faith, and thus deserves a longer response. It’s best summed up by recovering Green party mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett.

There is a huge amount to unpack there, not least the fact that she copied in the NIMBYs in chief, the CPRE. “Luxury homes” feels like the same kind of buzz phrase as “executive homes”, which so far as I can tell generally means “four bed”, an entirely reasonable size for a family in any country that wouldn’t try to rent Harry Potter’s cupboard for £800 a month plus bills.

The bit I want to focus on, though, is the last bit: the suggestion that there are “thousands of empty homes across the city”. This is a more localised version of an argument you often hear applied to the country as a whole. Why are we building on a single patch of green space, ask people who’ve apparently never stopped to wonder what their own home was built on, when there are all these empty homes out there? Shouldn’t we bring them back into use first?

Well yes, that might be good. What it would not be is a solution, and for several reasons.