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Comment & Opinion 3
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The Chimera Of Affordable Housing
Aberdeen Western Peripheral Road And Population Trends
Buildings At Risk
Shopping Vs Arts-Led Growth.
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The Western Peripheral Road and Population Trends
The AWPR, as now proposed, should have a significantly improving effect on the fortunes of the satellite towns and villages around Aberdeen, which will become much more accessible than at present; but possibly at the expense of the city itself. It is argued that Aberdeen needs its by-pass, given the present bottlenecks at the river crossings, but we need to be aware of possible unintended consequences. The long-standing trend for young middle-income families to move out of the city, in search of better-value housing, higher-achieving schools and an arguably better quality of life, is likely to be both intensified and accelerated. Recent forecasts by the Registrar-General for Scotland are that the population of Aberdeen City will fall by about 24% over the next two decades, indicating that, by 2024, Aberdeen's population will be back down to what it was in the census year of 1901, i.e., to about 155,000, compared with 203,450 now. The population of working age (16-65) is expected to fall by 28% and the school-age population (under-16) by 43%.
Conversely, the population of Aberdeenshire is expected to rise by about 8%, from the present 232,850 to about 251,300 by 2024. Even this, however, suggests that the combined population of Aberdeen City & Shire will fall by about 30,000, or 8%.
These figures are, of course, only statistical projections, but they are consistent with a trend which has been apparent for years and decades. A continued outward migration from city to shire, combined with easier road access to Aberdeen itself, is likely to result in an increased volume of commuter traffic entering the city in the early mornings and exiting in the late afternoons and early evenings, and in an increased demand for parking space during the working day. This has been London's experience with the M25: easier access leads to worse traffic congestion and increased pressure on parking space in the city itself.
Beyond this, we may expect pressure for new residential and other development along the line of the WPR itself, especially where it intersects the main routes into and out of the city: the A90 southbound at Stonehaven, the A93 North Deeside road between Milltimber and Peterculter, the A944 Alford road between Kingswells and Westhill, the A96 Inverurie road between Bucksburn and Blackburn, the A947 just north of Dyce and the A90 northbound to Ellon at Potterton.
It will not, of course, be to the City of Aberdeen's longer-term economic advantage if too many young middle-income families move out, leaving a shrinking population largely made up of the elderly, the less well-off and the childless. For example: Aberdeenshire has recently had to open a new secondary school at Oldmeldrum, whilst Aberdeen City has had to close one down, at Linksfield. At present, the 12 secondary schools in Aberdeen City, taken together, approximate to the Scottish average in terms of the proportion of students who attain five Standard Grade passes at age 16. The 17 schools in Aberdeenshire, taken together, do much better than the Scottish average; in fact, none of the 17 falls significantly below the Scottish average, whereas four of the 12 Aberdeen City schools achieve half or less than half of the Scottish average. Those people who are parents of school-age children are naturally attracted to those localities and communities where schools are perceived to 'do better', as in, to generalise, those Aberdeenshire towns within commuting distance of the city. The regrettable fact is that the exam performance of schoolchildren is closely related to their parents' economic circumstances. As middle-income families move from the city to the shire, a vicious circle emerges whereby the exam performance of Aberdeenshire schools will continue to improve relative to that of schools in the city, thus further increasing the incentive for families to move out.
As it is, nearly all the new residential development in Aberdeen City takes the form of flats, because the price of building land in the more sought-after parts of the city makes family-sized houses unaffordably expensive. For example: we understand that, back in 2003, SMH paid £26 million for the 21-acre RGU site at Kepplestone, at the corner of Queen's Rd and Anderson Drive. This equates to about £1,238,000 per acre. On the usual developer's rule of thumb of eight family-sized houses per acre, the plot of land required for each house would work out at about £155,000. Hence the pressure on developers to economise on the use of land, to build high and close and to erect blocks of flats, rather than to build detached or even semi-detached houses.
In turn, the high price of building land is what makes low-cost or 'affordable' housing so difficult to achieve in practice, except in those locations where land is cheap, i.e., where demand is low relative to supply, as in places people don't want to live in, or which people are moving out of rather than into. Low prices for land and housing tend to be associated with economic decline and a shortfall of industry, investment and employment. But high land prices may discourage people from starting families. It may be, if the overall population is to be sustained, that we need to improve access to the cheaper land and housing of the rural hinterland, and the WPR is certainly consistent with that. And an influx of middle-income families would benefit otherwise declining towns northwards of Aberdeen, in terms of increased spending in shops, etc, and more children being enrolled in schools.
Population trends matter. Many businesses, services and facilities are viable on the basis of a population of 500,000, or even 250,000, but not of 150,000 or less. IKEA has decided not to locate its second Scottish outlet in Aberdeen, explicitly for this reason. Aberdeen already suffers from the enormous gravitational pull of Edinburgh and Glasgow, which are only 40 miles apart and increasingly function as the eastern and western halves of a single conurbation of over one million people. And the economic and cultural viability of a city is not simply a matter of the size of its population, but also of its demographic composition. Aberdeen needs to retain and expand its educated middle class, people with scarce and transferable skills, managers, professionals, technicians and entrepreneurs, people who are typically both high earners and high spenders, if the local economy is to diversify away from its current over-dependence on the oil industry. The evidence is that the most important factor determining where business chooses to settle and expand is the presence and availability of appropriately-skilled and educated workers. But we cannot force such people to live in Aberdeen. We will have to come up with ways of maximising the attractions, amenity and appeal of our town, such that more people come to see the advantages or up-side of living in the city as more than compensating for the disadvantages or down-side.
The defining characteristic of urban life is proximity, or what David Hume would have described as propinquity and contiguity. Cities ultimately exist in order to reduce transportation costs for goods, people and ideas. In the past, cities succeeded by offering proximity to a seaport, a coal mine, the Court or the government. Nowadays, cities succeed by offering proximity to people and their ideas. Urban success therefore depends on the ability to attract, generate and retain creative, talented, educated and skilled residents. Economic growth will continue to favour human intellect over human muscle, as manufacturing flees to Eastern Europe, India and China. The single most important thing a city has to get right is to be attractive to skilled, creative and enterprising people. This requires, amongst other things, good, high-achieving schools for children, safe, well-maintained streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces such as parks and gardens, and a vibrant cultural and recreational scene. Edinburgh has succeeded on the basis of its combination of professional expertise, scenic and architectural beauty and impressive civic amenities.
Some suburban areas will continue to thrive, as employment increasingly decentralises, creating what are not so much suburbs as 'exburbs', as in free-standing country towns and villages characterised by high levels of income, low levels of housing density and car-based lifestyles. But low-income high-density suburbs and estates may have problems. These localities offer neither the excitement of downtown, which attracts young workers, not the advantages of lower-density outer suburbs, 'exburbs' and country towns and villages. Either the poorer inner suburbs and estates will be demolished and replaced with lower-density housing for better-off people, or they will increasingly sink into social distress. It is significant that we never hear about 'inner-city decay' nowadays. The inner-cities are generally doing OK. Social decay in Scotland tends instead to be concentrated in the white, mono-cultural, predominantly working-class ghettos of the peripheral housing estates.
It is difficult not to be struck by the east-European or former-USSR ambience of so much of urban Scotland, of the Scotland most people actually live in, as against the vast scenic expanses hardly anyone lives in. Even the oil-boom city of Aberdeen, which has enjoyed three decades of relative prosperity and low unemployment, has been surprisingly ineffective at winching up large sections of our community into more aspirational lifestyles. Recent research identifies Aberdeen's Seaton as the 3rd unhealthiest neighbourhood in Britain, with Sheddocksley 6th and Garthdee, Mastrick and Stockethill 9th, 14th and 25th respectively. A specifically Scottish malaise is apparent here. Scotland, population 5 million, contains 22 of the 25 unhealthiest neighbourhoods in Britain, population 60 million.
21st Feb 2006
Aberdeen - Shopping Vs Arts-Led Growth
Within five minutes of the railway station, visitors to Aberdeen can tunnel their way through no fewer than three covered shopping centres, shoehorned into the city centre. Aberdeen's rich oil economy and its position as the regional capital of the north-east have fuelled a greater concentration of retailing activity than in other cities of comparable size. Whilst this has brought economic benefits, there are signs that other aspects of the city's culture now need attention.
The city's arts scene is expanding rapidly, but physical evidence of this is scarce and hard to find. Such arts venues as we have are scattered and dispersed around the city. They would be better-attended if they were clustered around an identifiable focus or epicentre, such as the Belmont St area.
Arts-led regeneration is something of a buzz-word in 21st century town planning circles. Dundee is fast becoming a 'city of culture' and is undergoing a fundamental arts-led renaissance.
Aberdeen, too, is showing signs of an increasingly vibrant arts scene. The recent exhibition of fashion designs by the late Bob Gibb at Aberdeen Art Gallery attracted over 45,000 visitors. In May, the Word 03 International Writers' Festival attracted huge audiences to King's College to meet writers such as Louis de Bernieres, Michel Faber and Janice Galloway. Festival Director Alan Spence has called for a permanent centre of culture to be established in Aberdeen.
Aberdeen City Centre Partnership favours retail-led development to attract tourists and visitors. The proposed Union Square retail and leisure development, around the train and bus stations, indicates that retail-led regeneration is still high on the Council's agenda. But, on the positive side, Union Square may take some of the shop-till-you-drop pressure off the city-centre, and open it up for other uses and purposes.
The down-side of Aberdeen's oil boom has been that low- or zero-profit enterprises and activities cannot afford Aberdeen property prices and rentals, and have been driven out or excluded from the city-centre. This is characteristic of other economically successful and booming cities like Edinburgh and Cambridge.
The immediate problem facing the arts community in Aberdeen is the need to improve the infrastructure of arts facilities. The Council has outlined a commitment to develop a new cultural centre in the Better Cities Project Plan, which proposes a new multi-disciplinary, multi-economy centre that would become a hub of creative activity.
The difficulty is that of finding suitable and affordable venues. Aberdeen, unlike cities such as Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow, does not have a profusion of redundant warehouses, factories and textile mills, readily available at low rentals for new occupants and uses. Residental accomodation is also expensive here - a disincentive to creative artists subsisting on low and irregular incomes.
Plans to create a centre for the visual arts in the Salvation Army's Citadel building were stalled when the Sally-Ann decided to stay put. But it may be that the new visual arts centre would do better in the semi-derelict Triple Kirks building at the corner of Belmont St/Rosemount Viaduct.
A great opportunity will be presented by the proposed demolition of St Nicholas House, which will open up the whole area from Broad St westwards to Flourmill Lane and from Upperkirkgate southwards to Netherkirkgate. I would favour the creation of a (pedestrianised!) post-medieval streetscape, centred on the 16th century Provost Skene's House, such as could accomodate small speciality shops, arts venues, galleries, cafe-bars etc, with residential accomodation on the upper floors. Since ACC would be the landlord, rents could be held at sub-market levels for appropriate enterprises, organisations and tenants.
There are under-used parts of Aberdeen not far from the city-centre; Bridge St, Queen St, Gallowgate, West North St and the town end of King St come to mind. The fast-expanding student population around the old King St Fire Station and in Mealmarket St is well-placed relative to the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen Arts Centre and venues in the Castlegate; so, hopefully, supply will follow demand.
30th Nov 2003
Buildings At Risk 2006
The Buildings At Risk Register maintained by the Scottish Civic Trust now comprises some 1,500 structures, including churches, schools, cottages, mansions, factories and farms. Some are structurally solid, but will decay if they are left empty and uncared for. Others are simply collapsing.
Some Key Facts:
- 82% of Buildings At Risk are Listed Buildings.
- 3% of Category A Listed Buildings are 'At Risk', amounting to 112 buildings of national or international importance.
- Almost 50% of Buildings At Risk are residential properties.
- Over half the properties are at a 'High' level of risk.
- 47 buildings are at the highest 'Critical' level of risk.
- Every fortnight a significant Building At Risk is lost, i.e., demolished.
- 9 out of 10 Buildings At Risk are vacant.
- 883 Buildings At Risk have been saved since 1990.
- almost 40% of the demolished Buildings At Risk were unlisted.
- In Aberdeen City there are 9 Buildings At Risk, of which 7 are Listed. In Aberdeenshire there are 113 Buildings At Risk, of which 103 are Listed. Since 1990, 24 Buildings At Risk in Aberdeen City have been saved and 2 have been demolished. In Aberdeenshire, 62 have been saved and 7 demolished.
Buildings like these fall into disrepair for a variety of reasons:
1. Redundancy. Buildings are made redundant through changes in technology, demography, patterns of economic activity, tastes & lifestyles and government policy. Textile mills, churches, schools, hospitals, farm buildings, railway stations or Ministry of Defence sites are just a few examples. Less obvious problems are faced by traditional High St. shops, many of whose upper floors are unused and poorly maintained, eventually putting the entire property at risk. But redundancy need not be the death knell for a building; new uses can be found in most cases.
Many buildings, however, particularly agricultural or industrial, have been redundant for years. Without regular maintenance, their condition often deteriorates before a new use can be identified, leading in some cases to their demolition. Such buildings can become a target for vandals and, like all empty buildings, will blight their surrounding environment.
2. Ownership. It is often said there are no problem buildings, just problem owners. There are many buildings whose future is jeopardised by owners who, for a variety of reasons ranging from brazen neglect to lack of funds, have allowed their buildings to fall into disrepair. In many cases, when a building no longer has an economic use, owners simply cannot afford the huge costs of conservation. One of the biggest problems is that owners often have an unrealistic idea as to the market value of their property, and set the price at which they would be prepared to sell at an absurdly high level. They are able neither to maintain or improve the property themselves, nor to sell it to new owners with the will and means to do so.
Another problem, which can seriously delay or prevent the re-use of a building, is that of unclear ownership. Disputes about ownership can prevent restoration work from ever getting started. About one-third of Britain's 18 million properties are either still unregistered or the title is unclear. Rural properties will often never have been registered because they have been in the same family for generations, particularly if they are part of a large estate. Multiple ownership, as of large city-centre buildings, complicates decision-taking and leads to arguments over the allocation of costs, as of the repair of a roof, and can delay restoration indefinitely.
And the cycle of decay can set in with alarming speed. Damp gets in through a leaky roof, destroying decorations and weakening the structure. Once a few windows are broken, birds get in and plants grow, their roots attacking the masonry. Thieves arrive and remove anything of value, from door furniture to fireplaces. Vandals ruin what the thieves leave behind.
3. Location. A building might have been cut off by an insensitive road development; it may lie in a now-abandoned industrial area, or in an area characterised by slow decay and neglect.
This does not mean that there is no hope. The restoration of historic buildings is a key factor in the regeneration of an area. A local eyesore can be transformed into a building of which the local community can be once again be proud, enhancing the quality of the environment, the desirability of the area and perhaps providing new possibilities of employment. But the initial investment, the kick-start, may have to come from the public sector, from local or national government, or from charities and trusts.
An interesting local 'Case Study' is that of Wardhouse, near Kennethmont. Wardhouse is an A-Listed mansion in the Palladian (Neo-Classical) style reputedly designed by John Adam for the Gordon family in a spectacular hill-top location in the heart of Aberdeenshire. It has been a gutted, roofless ruin since the 1950s. However, an excellent rescue package is now in place. Acanthus Architects Douglas Forrest have recently obtained planning permission to restore the house as 7 dwellings and for the creation of a further 4 dwellings in other existing buildings on the site. Five new buildings will be erected in the woodland surrounding the house.
Check website: www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk.
20th May 2006
AWPR - Further Reflections
There has been interesting comment recently to the effect that, as the 'preferred route' for the Western Peripheral Road shifts ever-further outwards from Aberdeen, from Pitfodels to Murtle to Milltimber, so it is likely to take less and less traffic off the existing ring road and other streets within the city. Indeed, to the extent that the WPR is likely to encourage families to migrate from the city to the rural hinterland, and to commute in, its effect may well be to increase the volume of traffic in the city.
Aberdeen's real congestion problems are at the bottlenecks of the river crossings and also at the Haudagain roundabout. Past surveys have indicated that about 90% of the traffic coming in across the Bridge of Dee is actually coming into Aberdeen, not heading northwards of the city. The WPR will therefore do little or nothing to relieve congestion problems at the Bridge of Dee and on Anderson Drive, which, given the continuing general increase in traffic volumes, are in fact bound to worsen. Similar logic must apply at the Bridge of Don.
What Aberdeen really needs is a new bridge immediately adjacent to and just up-river of the existing Bridge of Dee. The old and new bridges could operate on a one-way basis; old bridge into the city, new bridge out, or vice-versa. The Boots/Currys buildings would have to go, but I am sure we could all accomodate ourselves to that loss.
Otherwise, we require the long-planned third crossing of the River Don, and a remodelling of the Haudagain roundabout, involving underpasses and flyovers. The adjacent land is under-utilised at present.
24th April 2006
The Chimera Of Affordable Housing
Whether housing is 'affordable' or not depends on the ratio of house prices to earnings. A bank or building society will normally lend about 3-3.5 times gross annual income for purposes of house purchase. This is certainly as much as anyone on average or below-average earnings will be able to repay. It follows that, for a property to be 'affordable', one has to be earning about one-third of its price per annum, unless one has substantial other means, savings, inheritances etc. So if a flat or house costs £100,000, one has to be earning at least £30,000 p.a., about £600 per week, in order to afford it. The average wage in Aberdeen is about £25,000 p.a., but the majority of workers in fact earn less than this - the average is distorted upwards by a small minority of very high earners. For example: Firstbus was recently advertising for bus drivers at £9.50 per hour for a basic 38-hour week. Even with some overtime, this suggests an annual income for these essential workers of around £20,000. The cheapest two-bedroom flats in Aberdeen are now upwards of £80,000. By the usual devices, our bus-driver might just about be able to afford one of these, say in a tenement block in Torry. But there is no way he could afford a family-size house in Aberdeen; which is why such essential workers are forced to choose between indefinite postponement of parenthood or moving out of the city altogether, or quite possibly both. Housing can never be affordable by definition, only in relation to incomes, and higher incomes than many workers earn.
The shortage of affordable housing is the downside of a prosperous and expanding local economy, where more people are moving in than are moving out. The number of new houses which can be built each year is quite small relative to the existing stock. The supply of houses therefore tends to lag behind sudden or large-scale increases in demand; and houses are one of the few items we cannot import from China. Supply is further restricted by shortages of building land, wheher 'brownfield', i.e., former industrial or commercial sites, or 'greenfield'. After 30 years of oil-boom, there are few brownfield sites left undeveloped in Aberdeen City; the former Broadford Works is one of the last such. And as regards the possibilities of greenfield development: ACC's Draft Local Plan of 2004 proposed intruding 'fingers' of residential development into Green Belt land in areas such as Countesswells and Kingswells. These proposals incurred some local resistance. The result is that the Draft Local Plan has never been formally adopted by ACC; the city has effectively been without a Local Plan. And the effect of this shortage of both brownfield and greenfield sites in Aberdeen itself is that new residential development has been pushed outside city limits, into the periphery and the rural hinterland. Hence the exodus of young families from Aberdeen City to Aberdeenshire.
At one time, say in the 1960s, we would have taken it for granted that our bus driver would inhabit a rented 'toon's hoose' or council-owned property. The advent of the Tenants' Right To Buy policy in the 1980s, combined with an enforced cessation of new council house-building, have reduced the number of ACC-owned properties from about 40,000 then to 24,000 now. Inevitably, the properties which were quickest to sell were the nicest houses on the most sought-after estates. Thus not only the quantity, but the quality and image of the public-sector housing stock have declined. Some have proposed that the solution to the shortage of affordable housing would be a return to the large-scale public-sector housebuilding programmes of the 1950s and '60s. The problem here is tha councils, housing associations and trusts have to compete in the same market for land and other resources - capital, labour skills etc - as everyone else, and thus incur much the same level of costs as do private developers. Now that the days of massive central government subsidy are decisively behind us, there is no obvious reason as to why public-sector housing should be any more 'affordable' than is private-sector provison.
So we come back to the underlying issue, the availability and price of land! Until the 1960s, land accounted for about 10% of housebuilding costs; nowadays the plot of land accounts for 40-50% of final cost. Hence the trend towards higher-density developments, the pressure to build high and close. The main benefit arising from the proposed Aberdeen Western Peripheral Road may be that it will render accessible expanses of cheaper land presently too far out of the city, in terms of travelling time as well as distance, to be attractive. We need to be aware, however, that outlying communities like Westhill are fast becoming free-standing townships in their own right, quite apart from those, like Inverurie, which always were. These outlying townships are increasingly able to compete with Aberdeen City, not merely for new residential development and middle-income families, but also for business investment, entrepreneurial talent and jobs.
9th June 2007
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