2018 Manchester Fellow
Let’s Start with Housing: Manchester’s Future Planning & Development
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) on their Planning and Housing Research Team. I have been passionate about all things urban for years: from transportation planning to urban design, to urban inequalities. Most recently, after reading books like “High Risers” by Ben Austen and “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond, I’ve developed a keen interest in affordable housing policy. Working at the GMCA gave me the chance to explore this interest in a global context and develop it further. I learned invaluable work skills while also having amazing opportunities like getting to shadow the Mayor for a day.
“Greater Manchester” is comprised of ten local authorities, each with their own town halls, local plans, and unique characters. The ten local authorities have worked together informally for decades on cross boundary issues such as public transport and waste management. The creation of the GMCA in May of 2017 was a way to formalize these pre-existing collaborative efforts, and exercise newly devolved funds and powers from central government around hot topic issues like education, housing, and carbon neutrality. The GMCA today seeks to encourage cohesion amongst the 10 districts’ local plans through Greater Manchester plans like the Greater Manchester Strategy, and the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF) – the GMSF aiming to provide land for jobs and new homes across the city region.
At my time at the GMCA, I worked on three main projects all to do with planning and housing:
Project 1: What’s in a Housing Lag?
The first project was to support the planning and housing team in understanding recent slow build out rates of homes. Currently, across Greater Manchester, there is tremendous housing pressure, and therefore a need to build new homes faster. A large part of the “stock flow” of homes depends on obtaining a planning permission, or the approval needed by a local housing authority prior to construction. So, using data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Governments (the MHCLG), I created a data pack to summarize key patterns and trends coming from annual planning permission data for the ten districts of Greater Manchester between 2012-2017. This information could then be used to explain to policymakers why build out rates are so slow if the data showed a lag in the time it was taking to grant a permission. Some of the key findings of this project included that, since 2012, all ten districts of Greater Manchester have seen an uptick in planning permission requests for both major and minor residential construction, indicating increased demand to build. Another finding was that, since 2012/13, there has been a steep decline in the timeframes in which planning permissions are processed, which is incongruous with the fact that build out rates have slowed.
Project 2: Metrics for Manchester’s Social Housing Stock
My second (and largest) piece of work was drafting a Manchester-specific social housing Green Paper. Social housing in the UK encompasses a breadth of housing schemes, all intended to provide quality homes in desirable locations for lower income residents. Some of the schemes include affordable rent, renting council owned homes, or the right to buy your council owned home. In September of last year, England’s Secretary of State for Housing and Local government announced that the government would be publishing a paper about the current state of social housing across the UK in response to the Grenfell fires. The GMCA’s research team has previously completed lots of research on Greater Manchester’s social housing stock, however this research was located in many different places. My task was to pull all of this data from its respective locations, update it with the most current figures if necessary, and compile it into a single document to be used by policymakers. At the moment, how best to address the affordable housing crisis in the UK is a national debate, but for Greater Manchester specifically Mayor Burnham has made access to affordable housing one of his top priorities.
Project 3: Development Impact Mitigation from Around the World
The final project I worked on was an international comparison of how municipalities undertake developer abatement. When a new apartment block or housing complex is built, often local governments or community groups will seek to extract additional funds from a developer to mitigate some of the impact of that development, this is called obtaining a community benefit. This is done differently across the world, and to different ends. For example, in some cases community benefit agreements require developers to build affordable units into their complexes, where as other times money can be contributed to a “pool” that is specifically designated for the purpose of building affordable units elsewhere. Sometimes these agreements mandate the developer build something like a park or a health center, in lieu of payment. With lots of new housing development happening around Manchester city center, policymakers are keen to use this powerful tool to achieve as much public benefit as possible. The research team wanted an overview of how the process worked in other cities. Having previously interned for the City of Boston’s Community Development Department, I had an understanding that the process was quite different even between Manchester and Boston, and wanted to highlight some of these critical differences. For example, in England the agreements are called Section 106 agreements and are only ever negotiated between a developer and a government. Whereas in the United States, these agreements are called Community Benefit Agreements (CBAs) and are formal contracts signed by a developer and a community interest group.
One of my main takeaways from this experience was that, across the world, city governments face many common challenges such as homelessness, affordable housing, economic development and climate change. While they may all choose to tackle these problems differently, continued cross-city collaboration is critical for finding innovate solutions to these common challenges. I believe cities are the building blocks of the social fabric of a nation, and I hope to continue to pursue work in the field affordable housing policy in my future.
About Elizabeth: Elizabeth (Class of 2020) is an Economics and International Relations double major. Her past work experience includes internships with the City of Boston Planning and Development Authority and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.