Housing for the masses: government have been cocking it up for centuries

Yesterday I suggested that Grant Shapps and others ought to read Herbert Spencer's "The Sins of Legislators" about the folly of overburdensome legislation in regard to his proposal to create an imprisonable offence of subletting your council house.

However there's a more important issue in that great essay (touched on also in his Social Statics) about housing.  No doubt most of my readers will be at least passing familiar with the work of Charles Booth who mapped out the extent of squalor in London's Victorian urban slums.  From the horrors of his report arose, partly at least, the Liberal reformists, shocked by what Booth found, and ultimately too groups like the Fabians arose: all demanding, as they still do today, that "something must be done".

Well, Spencer lays the blame for that squalor firmly at the feet of ill-guided and probably venal legislators setting out rules that drove the price of new housing out of reach of the poorest and so drove them into the hands of lazy slum-landlords.  I post the pertinent section below so you can all read it without having to wade through the entire essay (which is all about how legislation often has unintended but devastating consequences).

Before I do, however, I just want to say that this is still happening.  We add bits and pieces to building regulations all the time.  Often thinking that they will make the occupants' lives better, or merely because they have been lobbied by the likes of the renewable energy industry and so on.  The current stipulation that every home built from whenever it is, 2016 I think, will have to be "Code 6" on the energy efficiency scale at a time when even solar panels have to be subsidised to make them work will just add to the burden.

But never mind - as Mr Spencer shows below, this has been going on for centuries.  No sense in stopping it now eh?

Already I have hinted that interferences with the connexion between supply and demand, given up in certain fields after immense mischiefs had been done during many centuries, are now taking place in other fields. This connexion is supposed to hold only where it has been proved to hold by the evils of disregarding it: so feeble is men’s belief in it. There appears no suspicion that in cases where it seems to fail, natural causation has been traversed by artificial hindrances. And yet in the case to which I now refer—that of the supply of houses for the poor—it needs but to ask what laws have been doing for a long time past, to see that the terrible evils complained of are mostly law-made.

A generation ago discussion was taking place concerning the inadequacy and badness of industrial dwellings, and I had occasion to deal with the question. Here is a passage then written:

An architect and surveyor described it [the Building Act] as having worked after the following manner. In those districts of London consisting of inferior houses built in that unsubstantial fashion which the new Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently remunerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before the New Building Act passed. This existing average rent fixes the rent that must be charged in these districts for new houses of the same accommodation—that is the same number of rooms, for the people they are built for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened with hoop-iron bond. Now it turns out upon trial, that houses built in accordance with the present regulations, and let at this established rate, bring in nothing like a reasonable return. Builders have consequently confined themselves to erecting houses in better districts (where the possibility of a profitable competition with pre-existing houses shows that those pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial), and have ceased to erect dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has resulted an increase of overcrowding—half-a-dozen families in a house, a score lodgers to a room. Nay, more than this has resulted. That state of miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the poor are allowed to fall, is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords do not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. Repairs, being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, are not made. ... In fact for a large percentage of the very horrors which our sanitary agitators are trying to cure by law, we have to thank previous agitators of the same school!

—Social Statics, p. 384 (edition of 1851).

These were not the only law-made causes of such evils. As shown in the following further passage, sundry others were recognized:

Writing before the repeal of the brick duty, the Builder says: “It is supposed that one-fourth of the cost of a dwelling which lets for 2S. 6d. or 3s. a week is caused by the expense of the title-deeds and the tax on wood and bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property must be remunerated, and he therefore charges 7½d. or 9d. a week to cover these burdens.” Mr. C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Classes, describing the effect of the window-tax, says: “They are now paying upon their institution in St. Pancras the sum of £162 16s. in window-duties, or 1 per cent per annum upon the original outlay. The average rental paid by the Society’s tenants is 5s. 6d. per week, and the window-duty deducts from this 7¼d. per week.” —The Times, 31 January 1850.

—Social Statics, p. 385 (edition of 1851).

Neither is this all the evidence which the press of those days afforded. There was published in The Times of 7 December 1850 (too late to be used in the above-named work, which I issued in the last week of 1850), a letter dated from the Reform Club, and signed “Architect,” which contained the following passages:

Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construction of model lodging-houses by throwing two or three houses into one.

Allow me to suggest to his Lordship, and to his friend Lord Ashley to whom he refers, that if,—

1. The window tax were repealed,

2. The building Act repealed (excepting the clauses enacting that party and external walls shall be fireproof),

3. The timber duties either equalized or repealed, and,

4. An Act passed to facilitate the transfer of property.

There would be no more necessity for model lodging-houses than there is for model ships, model cotton-mills, or model steam-engines.

The first limits the poor man’s house to seven windows,

The second limits the size of the poor man’s house to 25 feet by 18 (about the size of a gentleman’s dining-room), into which space the builder has to cram a staircase, an entrance passage, a parlour, and a kitchen (walls and partitions included).

The third induces the builder to erect the poor man’s house of timber unfit for building purposes, the duty on the good material (Baltic) being fifteen times more than the duty on the bad or injurious article (Canadian). The Government, even, exclude the latter from all their contracts.

The fourth would have considerable influence upon the present miserable state of the dwellings of the poor. Small freeholds might then be transferred as easily as leaseholds. The effect of building leases has been a direct inducement to bad building.

To guard against mis-statements or over-statements, I have taken the precaution to consult a large East-end builder and contractor of forty years’ experience, Mr. C. Forrest, Museum Works, 17 Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, who, being churchwarden, member of the vestry, and of the board of guardians, adds extensive knowledge of local public affairs to his extensive knowledge of the building business. Mr. Forrest, who authorizes me to give his name, verifies the foregoing statements, with the exception of one which he strengthens. He says that “Architect” understates the evil entailed by the definition of “a fourth-rate house” ; since the dimensions are much less than those he gives (perhaps in conformity with the provisions of a more recent Building Act). Mr. Forrest has done more than this. Besides illustrating the bad effects of great increase in ground-rents (in sixty years from £1 to £8 10s. for a fourth-rate house) which, joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans for industrial dwellings he had intended to build—besides agreeing with “Architect” that this evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land transfer due to the law-established system of trusts and entails; he pointed out that a further penalty on the building of small houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens (” prohibitory imposts” he called them): one of the instances he named being that to the cost of each new house has to be added the cost of pavement, roadway, and sewerage, which is charged according to length of frontage, and which, consequently, bears a far larger ratio to the value of a small house than to the value of a large one.

From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a generation ago, and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent law-produced mischiefs. The misery, the disease, the mortality, in “rookeries,” made continually worse by artificial impediments to the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding of those which existed, having become a scandal, Government was invoked to remove the evil. It responded by Artisans’ Dwellings Acts; giving to local authorities powers to pull down bad houses and provide for the building of good ones. What have been the results? A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated 21 December 1883, shows that up to last September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to ratepayers, unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000—the remaining 9,000 to be hereafter provided for, being, meanwhile, left houseless. This is not all. Another local lieutenant of the Government, the Commission of Sewers for the City, working on the same lines, has, under legislative compulsion, pulled down in Golden Lane and Petticoat Square, masses of condemned small houses, which, together, accommodated 1,734 poor people; and of the spaces thus cleared five years ago, one has, by State authority, been sold for a railway station, and the other is only now being covered with industrial dwellings which will eventually accommodate one-half of the expelled population: the result up to the present time being that, added to those displaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works, these 1,734 displaced five years ago, form a total of nearly 11,000 artificially made homeless, who have had to find corners for themselves in miserable places that were already overflowing!

See then what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxes, raising the prices of bricks and timber, it added to the costs of houses; and promoted, for economy’s sake, the use of bad materials in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwellings, it established regulations which, in mediaeval fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced: there being no perception that by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price, it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply. By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building of small houses. Finally, having, by successive measures, produced first bad houses and then a deficiency of better ones, it has at length provided for the artificially-increased overflow of poor people by diminishing the house-capacity which already could not contain them!

Where then lies the blame for the miseries of the East-end? Against whom should be raised “The bitter cry of outcast London” ?

[Spencer, H. 1884. The Sins of Legislators, in "The Man versus the State, with Six Essays on Government, Society and Freedom".  Edition used ed. Eric Mack, introduction by Albert Jay Nock.  Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1981.  Available online at the Online Library of Liberty and in audio format by me.]