Ep. 82: Lessons From the UK Housing Shortage with Anthony Breach

What happens to housing quality and affordability when any proposed development can be vetoed? Can the public sector reliably deliver most of the housing that people need? If it can, should it? Ant Breach shares insights from the Centre for Cities’ report on the United Kingdom’s homebuilding crisis.

Show notes:

• Watling, S., & Breach, A. (2023). The housebuilding crisis: The UK’s 4 million missing homes. Center for Cities.
• Watling, S. (2023). Why Britain doesn’t build. Works In Progress.
• Episode 59 of UCLA Housing Voice with Paavo and Mike M., on the costs of discretionary housing approvals.

Transcript

Shane Phillips  0:05
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week, we're joined by Anthony Breach, or Ant, to talk about the housing crisis in the United Kingdom. More specifically, we talk about the home building crisis that's been brewing there for several generations and has yielded the UK a mix of very low quality homes with some of the highest housing prices on the planet. 

There were a few topics we were particularly interested in speaking with Ant about. One was the UK's approach to planning and approving housing, which is entirely discretionary. We talk about how that system came into being and what the future might hold. As Ant puts it, for all the shortcomings of American-style zoning, adopting it in the UK would actually be a huge improvement over their status quo. 

We also were intrigued by the history of public housing in the UK, where about half of the homes constructed from the 1950s to 1980 were publicly built, what they call council housing. That's a higher share than any other European countries in their study over that period, but unlike those other countries, Britain complemented this surge of public home building with sharp restrictions on private development. It fell behind its peers on a variety of housing outcomes, and in the 1980s and 90s, when support for public housing declined across the Western world, the UK didn't really have a market in place to fill that gap, and affordability kept declining too. 

Our last episode was about the impressive reforms undertaken by New Zealand in recent years, sort of a vision of hope in the English-speaking world. This time, it's more of a vision of despair and a cautionary tale. At the same time, the UK is also now showing signs of hope and necessary urgency, and their experience is definitely one worth learning from. 

The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante and Irene Marie Cruise. As always, send your questions and feedback to shanephillips@ucla.edu. And with that, let's get to our conversation with Ant Breach. 

Anthony Breach is Associate Director on the Research Team at Center for Cities, a think tank dedicated to improving the economies of the UK's largest cities and towns. And he's joining us to talk about the Center's work examining the origins of Britain's housing shortage, some of the policies that both caused and sustained it, and what they should do to fix it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a bunch of parallels between the challenges in the UK and those in North America, and many of the causes and solutions are quite similar as well. Chalk it up to the special relationship between the two countries that we're always hearing about. Ant, thanks for joining us, and welcome to the Housing Voice Podcast.

Anthony Breach  3:05
Thanks, Shane. It's amazing to be on.

Shane Phillips  3:06
And my co-host today is Mike Lens, former Londoner. Hey, Mike.

Michael Lens  3:11
Hey, Shane. Welcome to Ant. Very excited to learn more about the UK housing situation, particularly things that I didn't learn when I was in London.

Shane Phillips  3:21
All right. So Ant, we start by asking our guests to give us a tour of a city that they know well and want to share with our audience. So where are you taking us? 

Anthony Breach  3:28
Yeah, sure thing. So I think I'm going to take you guys today to Manchester. So it's a big city in the north of England. It's the biggest city in the north, and I think nowhere else on earth really signifies either the global urban renaissance better than Manchester, or indeed the failures of British urban policy over the past 100 years. So I think taking you really back in time to the emergence of Manchester as a major city, Manchester is the heart of the British Industrial Revolution. It's the cradle of the modern world that we now all live in. In Victorian times, that's the centre of Britain's century of dominance in the manufacture of textiles, with ships coming up the canal to Salford to bring cotton and then export cheap clothing all over the world. 

However, in the 20th century, Manchester really begins to struggle. There was some adaptation to light engineering before the Second World War, but the collapse of the textiles industry really hits the city hard. Combined with anti-urban policy from the British government, which I think we might get into a little bit in this conversation, unemployment really explodes in the 1970s and 1980s. And from that basis, the city's leadership really realizes they have to get private investments into the city, partly to help the existing residents, but it's also so that the country's second largest city can play the role that it should be playing in the national economy. 

And you can really see this in the city's built form. So if you go to the city centre, you can see this grand legacy of Victorian architecture in the city centre, these grand buildings with all this ornamentation, this very classical red brick. But until the 1960s, most of the suburbs would have been these traditional small terraced townhouses for the working classes, what we call two ups, two downs. So two houses, two rooms on the top floor, and two rooms on the bottom floor. Much of these back in the 60s and 70s would have been slums. So without an indoor toilet, without indoor piping, with a tin bath hanging on the wall. And although there's still some of this building stock that's been left and repaired and fixed up over time, whole neighbourhoods of this were just demolished and swept away in the 1960s and 70s by slum clearances, by our version of urban renewal. And that really just means as the economy is hitting rock bottom, the actual physical landscape of the city is also a wasteland in many respects. 

But since the 1980s and 1990s, there's been a huge change in the built environments of Manchester with a massive shift towards high rises, particularly in the city centre. So back in maybe 1990, there were about 500 people living in the city centre. Today about 30 years later—

Michael Lens  5:49
That's small number. It's a lonely crew.

Anthony Breach  5:54
So 500, that's mostly like pub landlords, a few students, a very, very small number of people. 30 years later, that's now about 70,000 people. So a massive increase in the total in the population that has been brought about by huge urban change, by change in the physical built form. So there has been this huge renaissance in Manchester as it's trying to make up for lost time.

Michael Lens  6:15
Cool. And you know what I think a lot of people are wondering right now is if you are in Manchester on a Saturday, are you heading to the Etihad or are you more likely to go to Old Trafford?

Anthony Breach  6:30
Oh, so I'm from Liverpool. 

Michael Lens  6:32
Oh, so screw them both.

Anthony Breach  6:35
Completely forbidden, right? I'm a different type of red or blue, right? You know, those guys over there, from Liverpool people call people Manchester wolves because they make textiles, right? Yes. So it's a completely different partisan petty divide. Yes.

Michael Lens  6:51
So Everton or Liverpool for you?

Anthony Breach  6:54
Maybe just about Liverpool for me. I mean, I originally grew up in Belfast and I moved to Liverpool as a kid. So you know, everyone else was already miles ahead and deep in these, you know, ancestral grudges.

Michael Lens  7:08
Well, you had your own ancestral grudges, perhaps.

Anthony Breach  7:10
Exactly. You know, I was on a higher level. So you know, the Liverpool kind of football thing is for me as well has always been a bit, you know, not quite severe as it is for some people.

Michael Lens  7:22
Okay, fair.

Shane Phillips  7:24
I do love a very subtle insult like wolves where you would never even know it's an insult if you weren't a local and someone didn't tell you.

Michael Lens  7:31
Like 200,000 people are enraged by that, but nobody else has a clue.

Anthony Breach  7:38
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, that whole part of the world is, you know, people can tell exactly what town you're from depending on very slight changes in your accent and people know, they remember.

Shane Phillips  7:50
All right, so our conversation today is going to focus on a report that Ant worked on with Samuel Watling that was published in early 2023 titled The House Building Crisis, the UK's 4 Million Missing Homes. In that report, Ant and Sam make the case that, you guessed it, the UK has a shortage of 4 million homes. And they show through a bunch of housing data on the UK and by comparing it to data on other Western European countries that this shortage has roots that go back much further than many people believe. 

In the US, the origin of our housing affordability problems is sometimes identified as around Ronald Reagan's presidential administration in the 1980s and particularly the huge budget cuts he made to the Department of Housing and Urban Development at that time. Something similar happens in the UK. Just replace Reagan with Margaret Thatcher and replace HUD's budget cuts with the Right to Buy program, which sold off a lot of the nation's public housing. In both countries, there is some real truth to these arguments, to the blame ascribed to these parties, but it's also an oversimplification that lets a lot of other guilty parties off the hook and it ignores policy and political changes that got their start much, much earlier. 

In Britain, Ant and Sam make the case that the shortage can be traced back to the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which is linked to a strong shift to discretionary rather than plan or zone-based planning, and the decision to increase public sector home building at the expense of private sector home building rather than as a complement to it. We've discussed the Lewis Center's research on discretionary housing approvals on this podcast and Britain arguably has the most discretionary housing approvals process in the world, or at least among the world's wealthier countries. I'm actually curious whether you think it is in the world or just among the wealthier countries, Ant, but this is a topic we've wanted to cover for quite a while. 

So Ant, to start us off, just paint us a picture of the UK's housing conditions relative to other Western European countries right around the time of the Second World War, and then how things looked jumping forward several decades to around 1980, just as the Thatcher administration was getting started. I think you lay out pretty clearly that the UK started out as one of the better performers in the pre-war period and then ended the 70s as one of the worst. Is that correct?

Anthony Breach  10:12
Yeah, that's right. So obviously right at the end of the Second World War was better than quite a few Western European countries due to extensive damage from the Second World War across Europe. The UK does have a little bit of bomb damage as a result of the Blitz in its big urban areas, but on the whole, we leave World War II with some of the best housing outcomes, if not the best housing outcomes in Europe, mostly because we have a really excellent 1920s and 1930s where we build a lot of housing over that period. So it's quite an interesting difference between any kind of cultural memory between the UK and the US in that while the United States has an amazing 1920s and a terrible 1930s with the Great Depression, in the UK it's the opposite. So our 1920s are pretty grim. We have very severe unemployment problems throughout all of that period. We have a much stronger recovery from the Great Depression. We recover faster, more profoundly, and a huge part of that is housing. So the economic historian Nick Crafts calculated that about a third of Britain's recovery from the Great Depression is caused by a massive house building boom, like the biggest double house building that the country has ever seen in the 1930s, that results in the expansion of massive suburbs around our growing big cities, so primarily London and also Birmingham at this time. I think by the end of the 1930s, something like a third of all buildings in Birmingham are less than 20 years old. It's just a massive expansion in the housing stock. This is all the kind of classical English suburbs that you've probably seen on like chocolate boxes and similar over this period, sort of a nice classic, maybe semi-detached or townhouse, big garden, handsome kind of arts and crafts, fake Tudor kind of architecture. We're really seen as a world leader in terms of design and architectural outcomes at that particular point in time. All those things, we've got all those advantages kind of heading into the war and we leave the wartime with those advantages as well, which means that by 1955 or so, so a little bit after the actors passed, we probably have about 5% more homes per person than the average Western European country. There's a load of countries, some of whom are already much poorer than us, but that have less, but also some that have experienced severe bomb damage and war damage that have less in us as well. Right. And I do want to highlight that point that this is not just comparing the UK to West Germany that's actually comparing to other countries that were neutral in World War II and really had very little damage at all, if any. Yes, that's right. So places like Switzerland and Sweden, obviously very affluent societies, they have relatively good housing outcomes by Western European standards. On the other hand, we also have Ireland, which is exceptionally poor by Western European standards throughout this period. Also neutral. They have far fewer houses than we do throughout this period. So if we've got that kind of 5% advantage at the start of the post-war period in 1955, actually by the end of that period, by 1979, that's fallen to a 2% deficit. So even though we're building lots of houses over that period, there is construction happening, there is a house building program, which we'll get into. In relative terms, we're slipping down the rankings. And this kind of mirrors what we see in other parts of the British economy in terms of exports, in terms of productivity, in terms of wages. You're seeing improvements in absolute terms, but actually relative decline compared to other Western European countries.

Michael Lens  13:34
And the contrast with the United States at this time is also fairly clear, at least to me, this is the really big moment of housing expansion in our country in that post-war period that gets a lot of credit for some of our affluence in the middle to late period of the 20th century.

Anthony Breach  13:54
Yeah, exactly. And one way you can think about it is in the 1930s, we have incomes are rising, right? We do have this massive boom in house building in the UK. Incomes rise even faster in the post-war period, absolutely unprecedented level of income growth. But house building is still lower than during the Great Depression. So even though, again, you are seeing that improvement, in the background, there's already this silhouette of a problem that's starting to emerge. A few people back then were starting to sound the alarm, even though it wasn't initially obvious.

Michael Lens  14:25
Yeah. 

Shane Phillips  14:27
So you show that the quantity and quality of home building in these various other countries and the poor performance of the UK in particular played a big role in its relative decline. So give us some of the data on how home building in the UK compared to other European countries in that post-war period between the end of World War II and around 1980.

Anthony Breach  14:48
Yeah. So in terms of the different patterns between countries, there's definitely a difference between those countries that are recovering from war damage and then those countries that are more neutral in places like Switzerland and Sweden. You see by the mid-1960s or so, West Germany is going absolutely gangbusters on building new houses, right? They absolutely have to. They've got a very, very severe housing shortage as a result of the war. But by the middle of the 1960s, it seems to basically be complete. House building growth really slows compared to its early post-war period average. But it's still outpacing the UK, right? They then kind of go from being way behind the UK to significantly overtaking the UK in terms of homes per person over that period. You see places like Denmark and Sweden, again, didn't really have a significant war damage in that period. They have an advantage over the UK initially. They pull further away as a result of that pattern. Then places like the Netherlands and Finland, which are kind of poorer or more damaged, really catch up with the UK over this period. So it's every front, really, you see these big changes.

Shane Phillips  15:50
And just in terms of ranking here, the UK is essentially right near the bottom throughout this period. I'm sure there's ups and downs over that time. But averaging it all out, it really built less than I think there's one or two other countries in the dozen or so you looked at that built a little less than it did, but others that were building 50%, 100% more on average.

Anthony Breach  16:12
No, yeah, absolutely. So the reason why so many countries overtake or catch up with the UK over this period is we just build far less. So although you've got countries like Finland or Sweden really leading the pack at the top, actually across this whole list of Western European countries we compare against, so places like France, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, and similar islands as well, actually the only two countries that build less than us on average over this period are Austria and Belgium. And Austria has very low population growth over this period, there's really not very much demand for new housing at all. Belgium just seems to be a bit different across a variety of dimensions. So there's this quite clear link between very low house building and then quite poor housing outcomes and deterioration in these outcomes, even though this is during the period of what many people in the UK consider to be the golden age of house building in Britain.

Shane Phillips  16:50
And this is not really a focus of this report directly, but I feel like housing costs and affordability are a big motivation for the work you guys did here and an outcome you're obviously very concerned about. It is, of course, one of the biggest interests at the Lewis Center as well and on this show. So how has affordability in the UK been evolving compared to peer countries over this period? And you can even tell us a little bit about where things stand today, I know it is not a pretty picture.

Anthony Breach  17:33
Sure thing. So this is a tremendously difficult question to answer, it's why we don't really talk about prices in the report. You've got to think about exchange rates, incomes, rent controls, floor plate data all make it really difficult. We've made maybe two observations. One is that throughout most of this period, Britain has both very tight rent controls and also very tight mortgage controls. So the actual access for people to buy housing, to use demands, to access better housing is really quite limited. You see in the private rental market, the quality of rental housing is poor generally, but also as a result of these tight controls on finance, the quality of buildings for home ownership also tends to deteriorate over this period. And once these controls on mortgages are lifted in the 1980s or so, it's kind of Bank of England research which shows there's only three advanced economies in the world that have seen faster house price growth since 1980s, which are Australia, Norway and Spain. And that's sometimes taken to in the UK, oh, we've had out of control financialization, that's the real cause of the housing crisis. To me what it indicates is that we had suppressed demand for home ownership before the relaxation of those controls. And actually we've seen kind of a very rapid rise to an equilibrium level, even if that equilibrium is extremely unaffordable.

Shane Phillips  18:44
Right, because you didn't suddenly make mortgages much more favorable, lower interest, longer term than other peer countries. It was just you actually kind of came to their level and made it roughly as easy to acquire mortgage credit as these other places had done for decades.

Anthony Breach  19:00
Exactly. So a big theme of what I say to policymakers here is we don't have to be crazy radical, we don't have to be experimental, we just have to be normal. And that's difficult in British housing policy. But this is one area in which we went from being very restrictive to being normal, and we have this outsized effect because the rest of our system still is not normal. If you ask people who've moved from other developed countries to the UK, they'll typically be shocked at how bad the quality of housing is and how bad value it is compared to what it is in their own country. But it often comes to the thing that most shocked by is how everybody in Britain thinks it's normal to have terrible housing, right? You know, like, oh, you know, what do you mean? Of course, we've got damp, you know, all throughout our walls, you know, yeah, yeah, of course our landlord, you know, we're living in our early 30s sharing an old Victorian family house, five of us, you know, that's just, doesn't everybody do that? And, you know, the idea that that might not be normal anywhere else is very alien to British people.

Shane Phillips  19:54
Interesting. And how about just on the cost metric, however you want to measure that?

Anthony Breach  19:58
Yeah, sure thing. So I did some kind of initial scoping for this recently, so I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but essentially, depending on how you measure it, the average house price in the UK and the US seems to be pretty similar between the UK and the United States. But obviously, wages in the UK are about a third lower than they are in the United States. This is sort of the origin of this kind of idea that, you know, the UK essentially has California house prices, but Mississippi wages, right? Maybe the most easiest way to think about it that we have get very, very bad value for our money and for the amount of labor that we put in to kind of survive day to day, you know, because we have a relatively fixed amount of our income goes on housing, you know, wherever we are, we get very poor quality dwellings for what we get.

Shane Phillips  20:41
Yeah, a common measure of affordability here in the US, which is flawed in some ways because it doesn't take into account interest rate differences and that kind of thing. But it's just the ratio of median home value to median incomes. And you know, I've heard you say that in much of the UK, that ratio is around 15 to one, which is just that is right near the top of the world. There's a few places like Hong Kong that are significantly higher, but not many.

Mike Lens  21:10
Hong Kong has nothing to do with the UK, of course.

Anthony Breach  21:14
Yeah, maybe there's a connection there.

Shane Phillips 21:16 But here in the US, as bad as things are, even in places like LA, I just put together a list of the largest cities in the US and among the top hundred cities in terms of population, the highest ratio actually is 11.5 to one and it's Los Angeles, actually, where we have very high prices and actually quite low incomes relative to those prices. New York is about 10 to one. Chicago and Houston are four, four and a half to one. And so we're talking 50%, 100%, 103 times as bad in some cases in the UK compared to at least the more affordable parts of the US. Of course, I'm sure there are more affordable areas in the UK as well, though.

Anthony Breach  21:59
Well, that was kind of my first thought was that actually, I think the most shocking statistic there is what you just said about Chicago being four times the average incomes. That would be the very, very poorest place in the UK, would maybe be about four. So somewhere like Aberdeen, which has had a massive shock to its oil industry over the past five years or so, very, very severe unemployment problems, is about maybe high free. So very, very poor kind of former mining towns in Lancashire are maybe about four or five or so.

Michael Lens  22:27
Where the demand for housing has cratered. And that's what creates that kind of favorable in a way ratio.

Anthony Breach  22:33
The difference is, you know, this is a big difference in the US and the UK on this, is that the US is a federal country. You've got lots of options, lots of jurisdictions, all making policy, some are better than others. In the UK, even though we've got Scotland and Wales and other land on this, they all have similar regimes. Our system is super centralized, so there's no kind of escape valve for any of these pressures.

Michael Lens  22:52
And the interesting thing there, I don't know if we're going to talk about this later, is, you know, there is a movement in the United States to actually centralize land use decision making and kind of these decisions around housing supply, right, to get it out of the hands of local jurisdictions. And, you know, it's very different, I think, to go to a nationalized system that you see in the UK than what we're talking about, which is more state influenced or state run. But I think the UK does clearly show that, you know, centralizing your land use or pulling away decision making power from local jurisdictions is not a panacea, obviously. It's not like going to perfectly solve these issues.

Anthony Breach  23:35
Yeah, exactly. You put it in the right way. So you know, Japan is a country that's centralized, you know, they've got great outcomes across a bunch of dimensions. What's difficult for us is we are centralized across every dimension, especially with local funding and local finance, very, very important for incentives. The one thing we do give local governments lots of power to decide is discretionary power to accept or deny planning applications, so it's the worst possible model for centralization.

Shane Phillips  24:01
All right, so a real focus of this report, which we haven't really talked about thus far is how different countries approached public versus private sector home building over the past several generations, with some countries really focusing on building a lot of private housing, and that's about it. Others building a lot of private and some or a lot of public housing as well. And Britain really as a kind of outlier for choosing to allow relatively little private housing, but building quite a lot of public housing, about 50-50, which is no other country achieved that ratio of public to private. You trace this back to the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. This coincided with a decline in private home building and a very sharp rise in public sector home building. Public housing in the UK is known as council housing, which is, I think, fairly analogous to how public housing in the US looked and who it served in its early decades, when it tended to be relatively low density and targeted at the working class, somewhere between poor households and solidly middle class households. Like in the US, public housing in the UK also evolved over time, it developed problems with concentrated poverty and the like, but it has fared much better in the UK and still serves a pretty sizable share of the population. I'll have you start by explaining the Town and Country Planning Act, the TCPA, and its effect on private home building first. Then we can talk about how all this relates to public sector home building. So what's the deal with the TCPA?

Anthony Breach  25:35
Sounds good. So I think it's important to understand here that the UK system is so restrictive that we think zoning would be a big improvement, that zoning would be much more flexible than what we've got today. So before 1947, we have a nascent zoning system, the shadow of something like that is starting to emerge. But in 1947, we take a big diversion. You can perhaps, as an ideal type, describe a zoning system as a system in which you have spatially bounded rules that say single family zoning, zoning there, commercial zoning over there. And if you follow the rules by right, you can build. In practice, it's more complicated than that, but that's sort of how their zoning systems work. Our system is quite different in that we don't have zones that decide where development is and is not committed. We have a discretionary system where every decision is taken case by case. And what that means is then you can actually propose something that complies with the local plan. And because it's all judgment-based, it's all interpretation, it's not about what happens on the map, you can propose something that complies with the local plan and it can still be rejected. And that is a feature, not a bug. That is supposed to provide flexibility to planners and the local authority to say, here's where we want development, here's kind of things a bit different, we want that. In practice, it means two really negative things for house building and planning reform. The first is that there's obviously a ratchet. It's very rarely the case that a non-compliant scheme would be granted planning permission as a result. It does happen, but it's very, very rare. It's much more common for a compliance scheme to be rejected by a local authority. But also it makes the process of planning reform much more unpredictable. Because if you have a system in which the rules don't matter or don't matter as much, then changing the rules doesn't really have a big impact on outcomes. Because it's all down to the interpretation of the local authority and how this is filtered through all these hundreds of different councils.

Shane Phillips  27:27
Before we move on, there was a clarification I was interested in. So my naive, very uninformed understanding of the UK planning system, before reading any of your work on this or listening to you elsewhere, was that there was really no plan at all. It was sort of the city, the central government didn't say, here's what we would like to see on this parcel. There's no guidance whatsoever, and it's just completely up to the developer to propose something they think that the council or whomever will approve. Is that not entirely true? And there is sort of plans there. It's just because it's so discretionary and there's so much left up to interpretation that it is functionally might as well not be a plan.

Anthony Breach  28:14
Yeah. I'm afraid it's not true. We've managed to get the worst of both worlds. So we do have local plans.

Shane Phillips  28:22
I'm sensing a theme there. If nothing else, this is a great conversation for making those of us in the US feel a little bit better about our system.

 Anthony Breach  28:28
Bring a bit of sunshine into housing pressured lives. So we do have local plans. If you read one, you will be surprised at how few maps are in it. It's not really about this neighborhood can do this or this development allow here. It's actually much more about a list of policies. These are documents that run to contain things like every development must have bicycle racks or every development must have a green roof. Every development must have insulation, et cetera, et cetera. And these run to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, 500, 600, 800 pages or so that are basically letters to Santa with all these wish lists items on it. And as no development can possibly comply with all of these criteria, an application is made which tries to be as compliant as possible or even actually is compliant. But the criteria are so vague about character or reducing harm to a particular community that it becomes about the interpretation of the authority and how that has manifest. In technical terms, I think it's kind of maybe where it can be a bit different from the US is it will first go to planning officers. So professional planners will look at the application and they will issue a recommendation as to whether it is compliance or not compliant. If it's not compliant, it obviously is bounced back. But if it is compliant, it then goes to a second stage where a committee of local politicians of local councilors then take a vote on whether the development is compliant or not. So it's really like having, if you imagine if San Francisco's planning system was nationwide, that's what we have. Right.

Shane Phillips  29:55
The dream. Yep. You have a quote in the report that sounded very Manvillian. It sounded like a Mike Manville-ism. "The effect is that instead of all land being available for development unless it is prohibited, development is prohibited on all land unless a site is granted a permit or planning permission." I thought that summed it up very nicely.

Anthony Breach  30:27
There you go. So the Town and Country Planning Act was passed in 1947. I guess I'm curious what motivated it and what was the system that it replaced? So we had a kind of nascent zoning system before 1947, a system in which local authorities could set rules and regulations according to density, height, character, design, etc. But any restrictions imposed on landowners would have to be compensated. So if you had a big site and the local planning authority wanted to impose very severe constrictions on what you could do with that land, you would actually get a big payout from the local authority as a result of compensation for your lost land values.

Shane Phillips  30:55
Your version of takings as we have in the US.

Anthony Breach  30:58
Exactly. And this was unpopular with professional planners because they wanted to do loads of planning. They wanted to kind of get stuck in and regulate lots of stuff. Local authorities were thinking, can we really justify increasing our taxes on local residents to implement these schemes when we could actually, by allowing more houses, we could grow our tax base? Probably not. So there was this kind of frustration in the planning profession, parts of the planning profession about this system. However, other countries evolved towards a more zoning based system from that. What's really weird about the UK is we take a particular turn after 1940 with the publication of what's known as the Barlow Report. The Barlow Report was a Royal Commission. There's a very serious official report issued by the British government, a neutral nonpartisan investigation. And the purpose of this report was to look into what are the problems with the over-concentration of the economy in the big cities, and particularly in the Southeast, particularly in London and Birmingham. And it's really got three things that it's particularly worried about. First is that the big cities are a problem, just economically, socially, from a public health perspective, big cities are bad. Second, it's worried about regional inequality. So it's increasingly concerned about, we were talking about Manchester earlier, starting to de-industrialise, this is a real issue that needs attention. And it's worried about this lack of planning power that the planning system as existed then didn't have enough bite into it. We couldn't set up what planners wanted to do, which is set up new towns, new settlements that were planned from the beginning to be perfect. And Barlow sets up three recommendations from this that are kind of unrelated to planning as a practice, or indeed from a technical perspective, but are used to justify the creation of a discretionary system. So to solve the problem of the big cities, it says we should impose urban containment. So we just have policy that explicitly stops the big cities from growing, with the implementation of very large green belts, urban containment zones around the big cities. Actually people should be forced out of the big cities, that they were christened overspill population to be housed in these new towns set up by the planners.

Shane Phillips  32:59
Particularly from the slums and the tenements that were legitimately very overcrowded, but they felt like, you know, we're not going to rehouse them in the city, we're just going to build housing elsewhere and they'll go to another place that needs more population.

Anthony Breach  33:13
Exactly. So rather than building new suburbs on the outskirts of that big city, it's creating a brand new settlement and locating people there. Second to tackle regional inequality, discretionary control over the location of new factories was imposed. So if you were a business owner, if you wanted to set up a new factory, you couldn't set it up in Birmingham or indeed London of the Southeast. You had to apply for a permission and those permissions would only be granted if you located them in declining areas. And that's more like a workforce development policy. Exactly. So the formal title of the Barlow Report is the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population. So it was very concerned with this kind of workforce location and economic aspect to the problem. And third, to deal with this idea that the planning system was too loose, it was allowing too much building. In this 1930s house building boom that we're having, planning controls need to be tightened in some way to allow for planners to deliver housing through new towns. And each of those things together was then the kind of intellectual genesis for a very restrictive land use system that gave local authorities lots of power to compulsorily accept or deny planning applications and actually move away from that kind of zone or base system.

Michael Lens  34:27
Very interesting. So what's all this got to do with council housing, which is the housing built in the UK by the public sector? Can you give us an idea of how council housing first is distinct from privately built housing in the UK and what its boosters would say about why they wanted to prioritize it back then?

Anthony Breach  34:45
Yeah, sure thing. So council housing, simplest form, is housing built by the local council. So you're looking at local municipality built by the council and it's let out. Probably conceived to be for, as you said, either lower middle class or upper working class workers who had the income to occupy a relatively generous, still subsidized high quality space. The idea behind why it becomes much more important after the Second World War is this vision that private sector development would cease to exist, that all development would be taken by local government, by councils, and that the entire community, the entire national community would be housed through the workings of local government in this way. And it would all be financed by these discretionary controls on development, which mean that councils could capture land value uplifts from development and then use that to finance the works of building new council houses. So I think in a way, all this debate is heavily influenced by the ideas of land value capture of Henry George. You might think about this as dark Georgism in a way, right? This is the ideas of land rents inherently being a bad thing of not really telling us about where people want to live or what the density should be, instead of being a purely negative source of society, trying to capture those and deploy them for public ends is what motivates a lot of this, but it doesn't really work even from the beginning.

Michael Lens  36:08
So, Ant, I'm very intrigued by this genesis of a anti-density move that you describe here in the UK. And also, I think this genesis of council housing as maybe a more desirable housing type than purely private, privately produced housing. And I know so little about other countries. I study the United States, and so much of where I go back to in situations like this is how did this play out around similar times in the United States? And as far as the origins of zoning and the origins of anti-urban or low density preferences, we always end up tying these movements to race, probably primarily also class or income biases. So I'm curious, the UK's demographic profile and changes are very different than those changes were in the United States in the mid 20th century. So is there a role of immigration or perceived immigration or race, class differences in the UK that you think explain any of these low density changes or preferences or movements? And if not, what else is going on socioeconomically that might explain some of this?

Shane Phillips  37:37
Yeah, and just to tack onto that, it seems like to have built so much council housing and done it in a way that sort of went alongside suppressing private home building, I'm just curious if there was some specific problem or set of problems people felt that council housing was able to solve or address some needs it was able to meet that private home building had not been up to that point.

Anthony Breach  37:59
Yes. So these are two really great questions. So I think in terms of the racial immigration angle, I don't think that's a cause of the genesis of this system and these patterns. It becomes more salient later on, later in the 20th century when immigration starts to increase substantially. And you do see some tensions in London and around the Birmingham area quite infamously related to this topic. I think class prejudice is certainly part of it. The people who are benefiting from the expansion of the suburbs in the 1930s are primarily upwardly mobile office workers in London and Birmingham. You do see a backlash, the formation of the council to protect rural England. This kind of countryside preservation group is established, you start to see some initial laws against what's known as ribbon development, houses built along the side of main trunk roads in England. And a lot of this is due to kind of aesthetic concerns about the right kind of houses, which then obviously implies the right kind of people and these kind of norms about who is allowed to mix and live and work where. I think a really big part of the impulse as well is, coming back to the Manchester example, so much of Britain's urban form as the first country to industrialise and create these big urban industrial cities, so much of the building stock is just terrible. There is a very, very severe public health crisis in pretty much every urban area in the UK during this period and it is felt. I think justifiably, I can empathise with this position, why they might come to this conclusion that big cities are inherently unhealthy, unsanitary, or kind of a not clean way of living, not suitable for families and for households, and the kind of introduction of motor vehicles and similar provides the opportunity for a kind of new way of living, a kind of modern England in which people have their semi-detached house, their council house with a garden that's clean and has a pleasant building stock. I think, coming on to your question, Jane, I think this is the great tension of the post-war period is that part of the impulse of council housing is a feeling that the private housing boom of the previous interwar period had only delivered for those upwardly mobile people. There was only middle-class households who had benefited from that and actually the large industrial working class hadn't really benefited at all, and part of the idea of council housing is you're going to have the doctor, the butcher, the factory worker all living in the same type of houses in the same street and it's going to be an inherently mixed community as a result of that. However, as we've just kind of maybe got a hint of, the actual impulse behind the planning regime that then created that tenure mix is inherently anti-mixing. It's intentionally kind of segregated on class grounds, and I think eventually part of the reason why it starts to break down is a contradiction to become too great to bear for the amount of building that was going on and what the system was trying to do.

Shane Phillips  40:46
So the UK built a lot of council housing from 1947 to 1979. As I said, about half of all of the housing constructed over that period was council housing, and that is a higher share than any of these other European countries that you looked at. However, even though the UK had the highest share of public sector home building, it had just about the lowest rate of overall home building, and it actually didn't even have the highest rate of public housing development because the overall rate was so low. Other countries like the Netherlands and Sweden built far more private housing during that period, adjusted for the size of their existing housing stock, and they did so while also building public housing at a higher rate than the UK. As you put it, even though the Netherlands and Sweden had a smaller role for the public sector as a share of their tenure mix, both had higher average rates of public sector home building. I think this is something we see pretty often here in the US, implicitly if not explicitly, where the share of affordable units actually becomes more important than the number of households that are served by those units. I guess the questions I want to ask here on behalf of our audience, and me, are why did the UK turn so sharply against private home building and also at the same time so strongly in favor of public housing? I think we've started to get at that, but I'm curious to drill down on it a little more.

Anthony Breach  42:11
Sure thing. I think at the high level, despite what I've just said, I think the term against private house building is something of a historical accident. I don't think it's intentional that we crush total house building by as much. I think there's a real underestimation of just how much private sector house building being reduced would then affect total house building, and that the planning system that we create is much less conducive to developments than we expect. I think it's initially concealed due to the huge efforts that go to increasing public house building, but as those subsidies are withdrawn and the planning system really begins to tighten in the 1960s, problems then fully emerge. Our next paper tries to answer this question in a bit more detail by looking at the geography of where private and public house building are actually located. I can't talk too much about it because you know what researchers are like with stuff that hasn't come out yet. But I guess-

Shane Phillips  43:15
Can't be scooped.

Anthony Breach  43:18
Yeah. Well, I can give you one little scoop. I'd say that the central problem really is that private house building is much, much lower in the big urban areas compared to the rest of the country. Partly that seems to be because it's this Barlow Report idea of deliberately suppressing demand within the big cities. I think it's also the introduction of discretion makes infill particularly difficult. It makes it hard for private sector builders to take existing urban lands, assemble it, and go up. But also it's the introduction of the green belts. We haven't talked about them that much, but they're a very important aspect of British urban planning. You have these enormous urban containment zones that stretch far into the hind limbs of the big cities that prevent pretty much all development, not even on nature grounds, but specifically on the idea that these are areas where development should just not occur because it would make that area more urban. These are very large areas. The London green belt is about three times the size of Greater London itself. The one in the north of England stretches almost from coast to coast, from Sheffield almost all the way up to Blackpool, on the other side of a mountain range. These are enormous areas where private development is essentially banned. The most dynamic third of the country cannot build private sector housing at scale. Even though things are kind of okay elsewhere, those really get worse as time goes on.

Shane Phillips  44:07
Yeah. Well, I think the point about infill being particularly affected by discretionary processes is really interesting. I think it makes some sense when considering that a lot of this is happening, you're having to tear down something that's already there. It's interesting because a lot of the council housing that was built, I just read a book, Municipal Dreams about the council housing system. It's very pro council housing, but it acknowledges it involved a lot of displacement of households because a lot of it was done in this urban renewal spirit and very well meaning, but in some ways it's easier for a government to engage in that kind of action. Whereas if you're just a private developer saying, hey, I want to tear down a bunch of these homes where people live and build, even if it's more of them. When you have a totally discretionary and by nature totally politicized process, who's the elected official who's going to want to vote in favor of that? One more thing I want to get into here or make more plain is this idea that somehow making private home building less desirable, less feasible, more complex advantages, social housing or public housing or affordable housing development. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think that's an idea. One thing we hear in the US, even from affordable housing developers, and I feel like they should know a little better, but there's this sense that if we didn't have these private developers trying to build market rate housing in the city, or we had fewer of them, then it would be easier for them to get land and therefore we would just build a lot more affordable housing or be a lot more affordable. I don't think there are many places that bear that out in reality, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the experience of that in the UK.

Anthony Breach  45:52
Yeah, sure. So I think this may be a way to talk about the transition from that initial very early post-war purely public regime to the more mixed regime we see afterwards. So the Labour government immediately after the war, which introduces the 1947 TCPA, inherits an economy that's obviously on its backside, basically. There's very severe rationing of all kinds of things, not just meat and butter, but even things like bread are rationed for the first time after the war. And that also includes things like iron, steel and building materials as a result of these controls. And basically the public sector house building, you're trying to recover from bomb damage, you're trying to deliver on these new towns, also just generally growing population needs that you need to meet anyway. The public sector house building that is launched after the war is not even able to scratch the surface with these needs. Probably building about 150,000 houses every year, or maybe even less than 100,000 or so immediately after the war, which is vastly insufficient compared to actual need. What happens then is that this becomes a very salient political issue, that you've got a big divide between Labour and the Conservatives on, a, controls within the economy, but also kind of a record for improving living standards. And at Conservative conference in 1950, essentially the membership, like the crowd of Conservative members, revolts against the leadership and starts chanting that they're demanding 300,000 houses every year. And eventually the politicians on the stage, almost in terror, accede to the mob and say, okay, fine, we'll have a target of 300,000 houses every year, we'll release the controls, we'll allow the free markets to get involved, but we're going to do this. And Churchill, who's back in power after the next election, appoints a guy called Harold McMillan to be his housing minister. And he removes a load of these rationing controls on building materials and allows the private sector to get involved in development again, removes a lot of those land value capture mechanisms that were really killing the incentives for development to occur. And there's then kind of a diminished, but still substantial post-war housing boom is then driven by the rapid increase of the private sector alongside a remnant of public sector house building over that period. What's kind of interesting about public sector house building is its nature changes a little bit over this period as well, as you've sort of just hinted at. Initially, public house building is sort of everywhere. You do see it in the suburbs of places and on the outskirts of big cities. However, by the 1960s, that's really changed, and public sector house building becomes much more about slum clearances, about urban renewal, and these kind of mass demolitions that we're just discussing.

Michael Lens  48:23
Ant, at times, I think this narrative about land use regulation in the UK might sound like there was a whole bunch of home building coming right out of the war, and then it was a continuous decline from 1947 onward after the TCPA passed, especially for private housing as we discussed. But in reality, private home building grew pretty dramatically from about 1950 to the mid 1960s. So what happened over that period and then what was responsible for the downward trend it's been on over the last 60 years or so? My impression from the report is that the approvals process only became more restrictive over time, but you're only really able to hint at those details in the report. And if I can add on, something that we've already been discussing is greenbelts. And when I was in the UK, I was in a conversation, I think it was with Professor Paul Cheshire at LSE, London School of Economics, and he was really talking to me a lot about greenbelts and how important this is. So I want to kind of re-emphasize or give you a little space to re-emphasize what you know, and what we know as a field about the role that greenbelts have played in restricting housing availability or affecting housing markets more broadly.

Anthony Breach  49:50
Yeah, great question. So Paul Cheshire is one of those giants whose shoulders we're standing on, right? He's one of those guys. From the beginning, he saw it all. He'd worked it out and he's been banging the drum for so many years. And finally, people are starting to listen. I think the greenbelt was a really important part of the story. So I've just talked a little bit about how Harold McMillan in the Churchill government and later as PM on his track record in housing delivers a big private house building boom during the same time as that government. This is kind of where some of that class segregation stuff comes in a little bit. That same house building government introduces in 1955 a circular, so it's not even a law, it's not even parliament has decreed this. This is basically an opinion written by a government minister that is circulated to councils and says, well, we think it would be a good idea if you imposed greenbelts around your big cities and around your urban areas and those areas in which house building was banned. You immediately get a big response by a lot more affluent areas that don't want to see house building. They adopt this policy, they implement it into their local plans. They sort of sketch out where they don't want developments there to happen. From what I can tell, it seems to be a little bit based around so many intricacies of local finance during that period. In that if you were a small borough council, a little kind of municipality, if you grew enough, you could be promoted to a full-sized city. It's maybe the simplest translation.

Shane Phillips  51:20
You love your promotion systems in the UK. You get it for soccer, you get it for cities. 

Anthony Breach  51:28
Exactly. Relegated or delegated.  It's something that councils get worried about. What that meant, certainly back then, was that you would get to keep all of your local tax income. Whereas previously, that would have gone largely to the big county council, which is bigger than a US county. A share of your local town money would have gone up to the county council. If you're promoted, that then just stays purely within a city and the county council loses some of that money. So the green belts are imposed, I suspect, partly to prevent that from happening. To say that actually if the city grows too big, we'll lose our money. Therefore, we'll impose these barriers and stop that promotion process from ever happening.

Shane Phillips  52:04
It's an interesting another case where sort of a higher level of government being responsible for these things might actually have some downsides, where they're trying to contain the smaller government as a competitor.

Anthony Breach  52:17
Yes, I think that's really quite perverse incentives in the history of local governments, history of the local finance system that don't apply anymore within England. But I think that green belt restrictiveness then really starts to bite as time goes on, as they're expanded. But there's a bunch of other things that are introduced as well. So in 1965, we have the introduction of conservation areas, kind of historical preservation zones in our urban areas. In 1969, we get the Skeffington Report, which is a report that recommends let's have more consultations, let's invite the NIMBYs into the halls of power, surely they'll change their mind and start supporting developments. If we do that, surprise, surprise, they don't. But then also in 1972, we have local government reforms that it's too complicated to get into too much detail. But essentially, they empower rural areas to resist house building with more opportunities and more powers to do that and really kind of fragment urban areas from their hinterland, which makes private sector expansion of the suburbs more difficult, alongside the green belt.

Shane Phillips  53:15
All right, well, we are coming up on our time here. We got a few more questions, though. I want to make sure we talk a little bit about post 1980 housing production. And I think something that really stands out here is just how across all of the countries you're studying, the amount and share, I think, of public housing construction fell. And I guess my question is partly just what you think about the political durability of a public sector led home building program. Having read Municipal Dreams and heard good things about council housing, of course, the program was in many ways decimated by the Right to Buy program. But it seems like a lot of people still really appreciate it and it's beloved by many. And so I don't want this to come across as like, you know, public housing is hopeless, and we shouldn't do it. And I want to be clear, I don't think that's your message either. I don't think it's that we shouldn't have built council housing and this was bad, it was more we shouldn't have done it at the expense of private, it should have been let's get as much of both as we can. But I do think it's really telling that even in the places that were as or similarly pro public housing construction, it has really declined over time across Europe, and really only a few places like the Netherlands and Austria have maintained some semblance of what they had before. So is there anything you can say about the sustainability of these programs?

Anthony Breach  54:40
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the way to think about public house building is it's trying to respond to a very particular problem, which is that you were seeing, especially after the war, very large baby boom, but also this sort of inheritance of Victorian slum conditions in many urban areas and a sense, you know, a worry that the private sector would not respond quickly enough to those challenges. And that was defensible. I think, you know, obviously, much of the council housing that was built, you know, did improve people's housing outcomes. It was a dramatic improvement to their living standards, did improve affordability in many respects. But, you know, you can't subsidize your way to affordability for everyone, right? You've ultimately got to pay for that public element in some form or another. And I think the real mistake we made kind of the original sin of our system was fusing council housing to extensive controls and development. This kind of strange bargain was struck between these opponents of development and these supporters of council housing. But somehow, in the medium long run, this would all work out. And it obviously didn't, right? So, you know, even though there's still this role for state nonprofit housing, a lot of it is delivered by charities in the UK today. I mean, in today's world, those kind of political barriers about funding, about the role of the state to intervene in people's lives and dramatically as public house building did in the post-war period, all of those things are really quite different. And I think trying to say that let's kind of rebuild that model from scratch, I don't think is really feasible. Unfortunately, even if it's still important, we have some social house building.

Shane Phillips  56:05
I wonder too how much this has to do with, and this is probably cherry picking the data a little bit, but just thinking about somewhere like Austria and the Netherlands to some extent where, you know, in the case of the Netherlands built a lot of housing, both public and private. In the case of Austria, didn't build as much housing, but have had a pretty strong social housing sector for quite a while and just didn't have as much demand for many years. So in both cases, you're sort of better able to maintain affordability more broadly. And I wonder if you don't have that kind of market-wide affordability, if the support for publicly subsidized housing declines because you end up in a situation like we are here in California, where the cost of subsidizing each unit is so high and people just feel like, this is not fair. Like, why are some people getting units subsidized at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit and the rest of us are not getting any help at all? And I don't think that's exactly the way to think about these problems, but it's a very understandable and I think common reaction to these kinds of issues.

Anthony Breach  57:07
No, I think it's exactly right. I think the kind of finance element is crucial for explaining this, not just at a national level, but also at a local level as well. So part of the trend that happens over this period is English funding becomes much more centralized. That controls on what councils they want to tax and use their borrowing powers to do stuff is restricted. But also, kind of conversely, the massive growth from the council housing stock actually becomes a big liability for local authorities. They suddenly have to look after, in some cases, 30%, 40%, 50% of their building stock has to be maintained by them. They have to raise monies to look after it. They have to periodically replace kitchens, do up bedrooms, clean the guttering, all of that stuff, and it becomes an enormous monkey on the back of local authorities from a funding perspective.

Shane Phillips  57:53
And people who don't live in that housing are probably sometimes feeling like you're taking money out of the budget for things that could be benefiting me, services, parks, whatever, schools, and instead spending it on these council homes that are for someone else entirely.

Anthony Breach  58:08
Exactly. And even people in the local authority, right? People who are thinking about the budgets of all of this and thinking about how do we manage our finances. Part of the dirty secret of Right to Buy is that local authorities has undoubtedly welcomed a system that took these, what were normally assets, but in practice often liabilities, off their balance sheets and gave them more headroom to spend funding as they wished.

Michael Lens  58:32
So, I think one of the main lessons from this report is that you don't have to sacrifice private home building to prop up public home building. And I think our conversation so far has touched on this in a few different ways. And in the UK, what you describe is not only a housing shortage that is decades in the making, but also you are in a pretty bad position when support for public home building declined as it did across the Western world in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. As in any good report, you conclude with some recommendations on what the UK should do if it doesn't want to keep these problems going on in the future. What are some of those recommendations? Is there any progress happening on any of them, either locally or nationally in the UK?

Anthony Breach  59:20
Yeah, sure thing. So, the core recommendation that comes out of our report is that we need planning reform to solve the housing crisis. We need to have a system that's looser that can allow more private house building if we're serious about actually responding to this problem. I would say when we first started writing about this issue back in 2019, this was published in 2023, this was very much a niche idea. This was kind of outside the realm of acceptable political debate. Like a lot of YIMBY ideas we're seeing in the United States and around the English-speaking world. But it's really moved to the centre of the debate since the report was published, actually. We've got a new Labour government that was elected a few months ago. Their economic strategy really hinges upon planning reform to drive the economy through higher construction, higher disposable incomes, more investment and similar. We've got conversations happening in the Conservative Party, which was previously in government and failed to grapple these issues. One of the big takeaways that a lot of people, especially younger Conservatives, are taking is that they failed to build enough that their planning reforms were not bold enough. But a lot of the conversation currently is about what we call small R reforms to the planning system. It's taking the existing system and trying to make it work a little bit better. Which is fine, we don't necessarily oppose that. But what we're really calling for is what we call big R planning reform, moving from a discretionary system towards a zoning system. In the UK, the Z word, zoning, is seen as a radical de-liberalisation. People think it has completely ripped off all controls, going absolutely hog-wild on development. Obviously, that's not true. Part of what we're doing at the minute is trying to keep this- That's not our experience here. No. Obviously, we want to be better than California. We're not saying let's copy the Californian system. I'm sure you and listeners will be aware of the Auckland experience. We think places like New Zealand offer really compelling models of what a zoning system could look like in the UK. We're trying to communicate that to activists, to members, to journalists, to politicians. Actually, if you're really serious about tackling this problem, it's just hung over our heads for the past almost 80 years now, and you really want to live a permanent legacy, actually we're going to take this big step. It's not quite as scary as you think it might be. So we're optimistic.

Michael Lens  1:01:29
Optimism is good. I've got some optimism here in California based on what we've been doing. But in both locations, I think the road has many challenges.

Shane Phillips  1:01:40
Yeah. I do think one upside, the downside to such a centralized system is if the policies are bad, then everyone suffers. But a single administration could turn the whole ship around all at once in the case of the UK. Here in the US, we really are stuck fighting this battle. It used to be city by city. Now it's hopefully at least state by state, but that's still 50 states. So you've got an even deeper hole to climb out of than we do, but you might be able to start filling it in a little more quickly than us.

Anthony Breach  1:02:09
Yeah. For us, it's one big bang. In our system, parliament is sovereign and it can do what it likes. We don't have a codified constitution that says what you can and can't do. So a particularly enlightened government that really wants to solve this problem could fix it with a stroke of a pen, maybe a few strokes. But I think it is very solvable from a legal or political point of view. I think you are getting politicians now saying that we do one big thing, it should be this.  So yeah, I am optimistic. 

Shane Phillips  1:02:35
Well, after the way this started, I did not think we were going to end on optimism, but I'm glad we did. Ant Breach, thank you for joining us on the Housing Voice Podcast.

Anthony Breach  1:02:45
Thanks, Shane. Thanks, Mike. Great to be on.

Shane Phillips  1:02:55
You can read more about Ant's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there, too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials, I'm on Bluesky at @shanedphillips, and Mike is on Twitter at @mc_lens. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.