Outraged by 'poor doors'? See how you like the alternatives
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Version 0 of 1. Like business class air travel or first class train carriages, apartment blocks with backstreet entrances - so-called "poor doors" - and worse facilities for residents of their cheaper flats hit a raw nerve. In London, they set in stone - or, more likely, steel and glass - the very standard class status of some Londoners compared with others, many of whom don't actually live in London at all and are just passing through. But while their symbolism repels, the sobering fact is that "poor doors" at least open onto homes you don't need to be a millionaire to inhabit. They are the least endearing aspect of trade-offs between private developers and London boroughs and mayors, which have long been vital for augmenting the inadequate supply of homes that Londoners on low and even middle incomes can afford. Housing campaigners mock much of this "affordable" housing as not very affordable at all, given that in some cases only households with incomes upwards of 70 grand need apply for it. The heritage lobby deride these products of "planning gain" as bribes developers pay to be allowed to erect skyline-wrecking towers. Both have a point. But where else have sub-market London homes come from lately? In 2007 Tony Travers asked the then Mayor Livingstone to answer critics who said he was too close to developers. His candid response confirmed a characteristic pragmatism: "The brighter developers will come to me with a well-designed scheme, and they will be signed up for a big Section 106 deal....I can get more affordable housing out of property developers than I can out of the government." Of course, housing associations and councils have been supplying social rent and intermediate affordable homes of their own accord, but those "bribes" - or informal forms of taxation, if you prefer - remain a big part of the picture. If "poor doors" are an unacceptable part of it, what should take their place? Negotiations between developers and London's planning authorities - the boroughs and, in schemes of strategic importance, also the GLA - come down to profit margins and percentages. Developers say the high end stuff within a housing scheme is easier to sell if separate from the "affordable". Politicians might dislike this, but it can also give them leverage: saying yes to segregation might also mean yes to a bit more affordable. The service charges for the "affordable" class would be lower too. Which option is best for the less well-off? Then there's the "off-site" alternative. Give us the green light to include nothing affordable at all, the developer suggests, and we'll hand you a lump sum to build whatever you want and in larger quantities somewhere else. Such offers are often accepted. For people trapped in private renting or overcrowded council homes, the "off site" option might well make sense, though Boris Johnson isn't keen on it. "It is not the one we necessarily encourage," he explained during last October's MQT. "In general, I like to see a mixture. I like to see mixed communities." The mayor is not alone in this. A wide consensus favours "mixed communities." He would be joined by many others of different political stripes, all of whom prefer every housing block or tower to contain a spectrum of tenure types. But which is the more divisive? A tower in which demarcations between the wealthy and the rest are built into its very structure - even without the have-lesses being required to use a separate entrance - or a neighbourhood in which the poor have no party walls with the rich but where more of them are comfortably housed? An irony of "poor doors" is that in some cases they are an outcome of projects promoted by politicians as creating social mix in neighbourhoods deemed blighted by spatial separations between rich and poor. My favourite London example is the as yet unbuilt Lillie Square, a piece of the atrocious Earl's Court Project to be assembled on the Earls Court exhibition centre car park. The Conservatives who backed it - and have since been removed from power - insisted that the entire scheme would liberate the area's poor from lives of grim welfare dependency on council estates nearby - estates that would be needlessly demolished as part of the same noble cause. But, of course, inhabitants of Lillie Square's social rented homes - assuming they're ever built - won't have a concierge or be invited to use its private clubroom or swimming pool. And when the market homes went on sale off-plan, none of the sumptuous brochures about "modern garden square living" mentioned the proles who'd be living next door. See how pursuing mix can produce its opposite? This is all pretty revolting, and it's easy to sympathise with people who'd like "poor doors" banned. But doing so would only treat a disagreeably visible symptom of London's housing crisis rather than address its causes; a symptom which illustrates how desperate London's need for homes within the price range of ordinary Londoners has become. What's more, entering the gleaming residential tower through the same portal as richer neighbours won't make its hard-up inhabitants better off, or their homes any more plush. Until the provision of sensibly-priced homes is less dependent on concessions squeezed from property giants, we might have to just get used to them. |