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Relationships Between Planning and the Housing Market

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Urban Planning and the Housing Market

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Abstract

This chapter examines key debates on how planning as a form of market intervention affects the supply and price of residential land and housing. It examines arguments about the potential for planning regulation and intervention to increase demand for housing in certain locations by creating amenity, which may be capitalised into house prices if otherwise equivalent neighbourhoods are subject to lower levels of amenity or accessibility. It also examines the theoretical and empirical evidence relating to the potential impacts of planning regulation in constraining new housing supply, through restrictive land release policies, or development controls, or as a result of complex, lengthy and uncertain decision processes. With reference to both the empirical literature and examples from practice, the chapter distils key policy tactics for ensuring that planners maximise the positive impacts of planning on housing outcomes by creating demand through infrastructure coordination and enhanced amenity and minimising potentially negative or unfair outcomes for housing affordability or supply. As highlighted in some of the case studies presented in Section 2, these approaches might include offsetting growth constraints with adequate housing development opportunities, ensuring that diverse housing is enabled under local planning schemes, managing gentrification processes by addressing potential implications for affordable housing stock and making plan-making and development assessment processes more efficient.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Simple economic models tend to try to explain variations in one particular factor (named in the model as ‘Y’) from variations in one or more ‘independent’ or ‘exogenous’ factors (i.e. factors which are unrelated to the factor ‘Y’). These exogenous factors are typically named in the model as ‘X1’, ‘X2’, and so on. However, if one of these variables is in fact determined within the same system, that is influenced by some of the same variables, or even by factor Y, then it is said to be ‘endogenous’. Untangling the effects of the different variables on each other is more difficult in this case; although there are analytical techniques which can be applied, these are demanding and not fool-proof.

  2. 2.

    In some jurisdictions this is not a costless process—in the UK, requests to renew planning permission attracts a fee and requires a supporting application scheme prepared by consultants. However in other nations—such as Australia—a development is said to ‘commence’ with almost any action (including demolition or clearing of vegetation), and the simple act of commencement preserves the permission, with no capacity to oblige developers to complete.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Architecture Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Darlington, New South Wales, Australia

    Nicole Gurran

  2. School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

    Glen Bramley

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  1. Nicole Gurran
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  2. Glen Bramley
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Gurran, N., Bramley, G. (2017). Relationships Between Planning and the Housing Market. In: Urban Planning and the Housing Market. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46403-3_4

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