Can Britain Change Its Ways on Housing? (Your Radical Questions with Shiv Malik)

**Amol Rajan** (0:07)
Hello, and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our magnificent Radical guests. It's a chance for you to engage very directly with the people we have on this podcast, and really interrogate them, or I'll try and interrogate them on your behalf, about their big and radical ideas for the future. Shiv Malik's got a few of those. In fact, one in particular, it's a very big city in East Anglia. Shiv believes that successive governments in this country have not given anyone born after 1979 a fair chance. In fact, they've had a rotten deal. He first started writing about this well over 15 or 20 years ago with a book called The Jilta Generation in 2010 He argued that too many people are paying expensive rents, too few own their homes. And he thinks that's not just costing them, but the country in terms of loss growth and ambition. And he's got a radical idea, solution you might call it. A brand new city for a million people comprised of around 400,000 affordable homes in East Anglia. It's called Forest City.
It's certainly divided some opinion, local opinion, maybe again, some of it for lots of people more broadly, very, very excited about this. He's got some big, big backers.
It's fair to say that people locally sometimes question some of the specifics. If you want to hear all about that, please do go and listen to the main podcast. It was out last Thursday. But as always, we're thrilled to say loads of you have been in touch. Shiv, I could tell you enjoyed that conversation, didn't you, in Thursday's episode? Because it's nice to have a bit of time. That's what podcasts give you, right?

**Shiv Malik** (1:33)
Yeah, I did. It was, you know, city is a big thing. So it takes a long time to go through it all.

**Amol Rajan** (1:37)
Exactly, exactly. And to put all the questions to you. Right. We've had loads of questions for you, Shiv, as you can imagine. And thank you so much as ever to every single person who sent in a question. It means the world to us. It shows how incredibly engaged you are in this podcast. And that means the world to us. Our first question is from Daryl.

**Daryl** (1:52)
The Forest City seems very laudable and an excellent idea, but two points. One, is it replicable? Does it solve a housing crisis? No, it doesn't. It's a very good idea, but it isn't replicable within a British context of renewing urban areas and increasing the supply demand.
Secondly, you talk about it being affordable. 350,000 pound houses are not affordable housing in the context of what is needed for housing supply to solve the issue. I hope that makes sense. Thank you.

**Amol Rajan** (2:26)
Daryl, thank you very much indeed. So two points. Let me put this to you. First of all, it's not replicable and therefore doesn't solve the housing crisis. Second, your definition of affordable at 350,000 pounds is, well, it's not affordable.

**Shiv Malik** (2:39)
So you need to do this and you can only really do it in places where there are a couple of things. One is a massive amount of demand. So that, for example, Oxford, Cambridge have price to earnings, you know, for homes are about 11 in terms of the ratio, right?

**Amol Rajan** (2:53)
The cost of a house is 11 times your annual salary.

**Shiv Malik** (2:55)
Exactly. That's a really good signal for demand, right? And there are other places, but not everywhere, right? People say, oh, why don't you just build a city in Northumbria or Wales, right? Where there's loads of space and far fewer people and, you know, leave us alone in a sense. You couldn't do it there because you just don't have that demand and you don't want to make a mistake by locating it somewhere random where people then don't want to move. So there is, there are, I think it is replicable, but in only a few other places in the country. So that would be, I guess, my answer on that. And the second part of it is people are also sort of very obsessed with urban renewal. Well, that is very expensive. And often you don't end up with any more homes than before. You just make the homes that are there nicer or replace them with nicer homes.
And we've been obsessed with that for 20 years because we don't actually want to kind of bite down and do the hard thing, which is to say, we should build on what is basically 60% plus of England, which is agricultural land, right? That's two-thirds of the country. Only 9% of England is currently urban land. And that includes the bits that are canals and parks and golf courses, etc.