Patrik Schumacher, director and principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, has called for the abolishment of social housing, scraping prescriptive planning regulations and the wholesale privatisation of London streets, squares and parks.
These were the main messages he put across in his address to the World Architecture Festival in Berlin last week. He said London’s housing crisis was the result of “intellectually bankrupt” planning departments and said only the free market can provide “housing for everyone”.
He claimed that social housing tenants in gentrifying inner city areas should not expect to be able to carry on living in central London when their council estates are demolished and should be replaced by more “productive” residents, such as his own staff.
He said the real “tragedy” was that social housing tenants have rights to “precious” city centre properties.
Schumacher, who worked alongside Hadid since 1988 and took over the firm following her death last March, said: “The fact that somebody has enjoyed the privilege of a subsidised central location for some time in my view does not and should not establish ownership over this public resource.
“Is it not fair that now it’s somebody else’s turn to enjoy this central location? Especially if it is those who really need it to be be productive and to be better able to produce the support required for those who have been subsidised all along and will continue to be subsidised.”
He added it made more sense for his own employees “who are working very hard and generating value, having to commute and having flat shares” to occupy central London areas that are currently “left to people who are free-riding and backed by the police for decades and supposedly for decades to come”.
The comments sparked an angry response from London Mayor Sadiq Khan who described them as “out of touch” and “just plain wrong”.
However, Schumacher later reiterated his points on his Facebook page, but said the views were his own and did not represent the policies of the practice he leads.
His eight demands are listed as:
- Regulate the Planners: Development rights must be the starting point, then tightly define and circumscribe the planners’ scope and legitimate reasons for constraining development rights: access/traffic constraints, infringements of neighbours’ property utilisation (rights of light), historic heritage preservation, pollution limits. Nothing else can be brought to bear – no social engineering agendas.
- Abolish all land use prescriptions: The market should perhaps also allocate land uses, so that more residences can come in until the right balance with work and entertainment spaces is discovered. Only the market has a chance to calibrate this intricate balance.
- Stop all vain and unproductive attempts at “milieu protection”.
- Abolish all prescriptive housing standards:Planners and politicians should also stay away from housing standards in terms of unit sizes, unit mixes, etc. Here too the market has the best chance to discover the most useful, productive and life/prosperity-enhancing mix. The imposition of housing standards protect nobody, they only eliminate choices and thus make all of us poorer. Stop all interventions and distortions of the (residential) real state market. (All subsidised goods are oversupplied and thus partially wasted.)
- Abolish all forms of social and affordable housing: No more imposition of quota of various types of affordable housing, phase out and privatise all council housing, phase out the housing benefit system (and substitute with monetary support without specific purpose allocation).
- Abolish all government subsidies for home ownership like Help to Buy: This distorts real housing preferences and biases against mobility.
- Abolish all forms of rent control and one-fits-all regulation of tenancies: Instead allow for free contracting on tenancy terms and let a thousand flowers bloom. Here is a recipe for the creation of the dense, urban fabric that delivers the stimulating urbanity many of us desire and know to be a key condition of further productivity gains within our post-fordist network society.
- Privatise all streets, squares, public spaces and parks, possibly whole urban districts.
