What Is Affordable Housing And How Are Developments Planned?

One of the biggest pushes forward when it comes to new build project management is in the field of affordable housing.

This is far from surprising given that the average asking price for a house is ten times the median salary, and given that most mortgages only allow a person to borrow up to 4.5 times their annual salary, the dream of owning a house is beyond the reach of a huge number of people.

The solution to this requires a concerted effort across developers, planning authorities and the government in order to create the best circumstances to create high-quality, long-lasting affordable housing, which given the scale of housing required necessitates new builds.

Building huge numbers of houses is not common but it is also not unprecedented; in 1942, the Burt Committee was set up to determine the most cost-effective ways to rebuild Great Britain following the devastating effects of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz bombing campaigns.

In just six years from the unconditional surrender of Germany to 1951, 1.2m new houses were built, around 11 per cent of which were prefabricated.

This was an incredible level of production which amounts to over 173,000 houses being built each year.

Whilst this is half of the roughly 300,000 houses needed per year to meet the government’s housing targets, they do not have the lingering effects of the most devastating war in British history to contend with.

Exactly how this will be tackled is likely to coalesce around the time of the first Budget of the new government, which will determine how much money will go into affordable housing and the establishment of a planning and housing system that goes beyond a local scale.

That will be half of the battle, with planners, architects and developers also playing a huge role in developing effective housing that is not only beautiful but designed around need rather than short-termism.