We are told there is a housing crisis, and I don’t necessarily disagree. It depends on your perspective and the local context. Housing problems differ across the country and indeed the county, and cannot be seen in isolation from other social, environmental and economic problems. If you read the Daily Mail it all is the fault of immigrants taking away our homes or rich people speculating on asset values going up. Well neither of those 2 are going worry us around here, as there’s little work locally to attract immigrants and you can be guaranteed that your home is worth pretty much the same as it was 10 years ago, as property prices continue to stagnate especially in the old town. Migrants, like me, should have known better and heeded the warnings from friends and family.
The problems locally? On top of demographic factors, land supply and ownership, nimby attitudes, and a continuing exodus of people to idylls of suburbia (or dystopia if you believe Will Self)?
1. Chronic underinvestment in the old town.
In a well kept Conservation Area you could achieve a premium price for your home of 25% over the average, which you could view as a small compensation for the significant additional constraints that such a designation imposes, on top those of a listed building, repair and maintenance of which will cost you your arm and your leg.
But not in Dunbar. Many people that buy into listed buildings here perhaps don’t realise they are going to be making a loss. Admittedly some home owners know that and happy to spend their hard earned cash on a property that has a rich history, a unique character and in the knowledge that they are passing it on to future generations to enjoy, perhaps in a much better state than they inherited.
Speculators definitely don’t. They see their flats as cash cows. They don’t care if their Buy to Let doesn’t make a capital gain on selling. They bought for a song or are just paying off the interest only. And there’s a steady stream of the desperate and the dispossessed ready to take on even leaky freezing garrets. An argument for more decent social housing or affordable housing, if ever there was one.
2. A failure to maintain the public realm in the Conservation Area.
Too much money is channelled into prestige projects (some of these are admittedly very good, but gold plated) and play parks. The basic fabric of the old town feels not just worn out and tired, but is too often decrepit, redolent of its medieval past. There are amazingly wide cycle paths over in Gullane and new trees planted in North Berwick, but here the pavements are sticky with ice cream / fizzy drink discards and chewing gum, the cobble sets loose and the planters half heartedly maintained. Half baked schemes and a tendency to indulge in crowd pleasing gesture politicking hasn’t yielded great improvements in the public realm lately.
Play this game with your kids on a street near you in the Conservation Area. Get in the car. 2 teams. Pick a side Left or Right and count the number of satellite dishes which decorate the buildings on your side. There is no winner, of course, as almost all are illegal. The Council stands by powerless.
3. Chronic poverty.
Many old houses require significant investment over and above that which many are likely to be able to sustain, not just the poor or struggling. Energy efficiency in many tenements is dreadfully poor, and would be punishingly expensive to redress, hitting the poorest hardest. I am not even sure that our politicians are smart enough to make serious inroads into decoupling social class and chronic poverty. The structural difficulties are usually deeply embedded and intergenerational. Poverty seems to be hard wired into sections of the old town, whether you’re a social or private tenant. Its all relative – for sure – we’re not as poor as some towns, and like Naples we have the sea don’t we?
All this despite a healthy influx and vibrant community of left bank migrants, a doubling of the overall Dunbar population through new housing on the Southside and pretty good local schools.
4. Lack of local opportunities for employment.
We are a long way from health and support services, and tertiary education, not to mention a barely adequate transport infrastructure that is too costly for many. Creating employment seems like the priority to me. I am no fan of the current Government, but creating homes where there’s work is actually not a bad idea. It also begs the question why on earth build more homes for the disadvantaged in a town / area classified as a “remote rural” if there is no work.
5. Lack of understanding.
Listed buildings are probably being decimated as I write, because a great many us have a limited understanding of what is valuable about our homes. Too often the building’s listing / status is sketchy to the point that the average owner is likely to be clueless as to what is covered and what isn’t. How many times have I heard that its only the front that is listed, isn’t it? The Government would not get away with this if your home was designated an SSSI, but for bizarre reasons listed buildings area bit of a Cinderella.
Supporting homeowners to manage protected listed buildings could be a good thing, as they (owners) are currently doing it for altruistic reasons rather than private gain. Perhaps some encouragements for works that require co-operation between owners and occupiers (I believe you get support in Edinburgh). An owner occupying community is more likely to take better care of older buildings, which often require traditional and more expensive treatments. A better built environment would have effects beyond the households and leak into the public realm.
6. Insufficient collaboration.
In order to deal with many of the old town problems there is a need for people to get together to solve problems jointly. Some tenements have got together to deal with insurance issues, maintenance and common repairs, which is a good thing. 60 High Street and 18 Church Street come to mind, in mixed tenure I believe, and I am sure there are others.
However, there’s more that seem to be stuck in a mindset that prevents co-operation, perhaps because the economic circumstances make it a non starter, but as often as not it will be the mixed tenure, owner occupiers at loggerheads with a reluctant landlord.
7. A plethora of new housing and the affordable housing formula.
Many new homes are ill served by public transport and place transport pressures on the old town, which has adapted to the demands of the “convenience economy”, which creates demand for (very) transient parking. So where to put the affordable homes? In the old town, a derelict site near you, and as close to the (expensive) convenience stores as possible. It is regrettable that we are reduced to these formulas, as it seems no one likes them. But it is worse to apply them uncritically. I would much prefer mixed solutions, rather than ghettos on the one hand and pseudo gated communities on the other.
Dumping social obligations on the old town just adds to the pressures that make it less likely that other families are willing to invest in old town living, families concerned about traffic, pollution and noise, litter, ASB and other inconveniences like drug taking, rowdy pubs and malodorous takeaways.
8. Backland infilling.
The backlands of Dunbar are an important asset for the town. With limited public greenspace in the old town, a triangle here and a dog shit strip there, the remaining gardens need more explicit protection from insensitive development.
We cannot and should not build here, without creating associated gardens (private) and with signficant compensatory public and civic greenspaces, but no more playparks please.
9. Ghettoisation.
Many of our town centres are effectively ghettoised by local planning policies that are predominantly skewed to favour businesses, who have unbridled access to advice and warm words, but trample over the interests of owner-occupied residents, who just have to put up with bad neighbours. A flourishing of the rental sector aimed at transients – no discrimination round here, DSS welcome, amplifies the effect. This is not a caricature, and you’d get my point if you’ve had teenage neighbours partying all night that really should be still living with Mum and Dad. I am sure that most landlords are fit a proper persons, as required by legislation, but the rental sector is now tarnished and is having disastrous consequences on neighbourhoods all over the country, not just Dunbar. Such policies – even if not explicit – without doubt shape decisions about people’s investment and motivations – or in our case the lack of it.
Let’s be clear. I am not against new housing, nor social housing, nor even renting for that matter. Other countries and economies seem to get on just fine with a strong rental sector and there are economists who will argue that home owning is actually bad for the economy (too much capital is tied up and the workforce immobilised). But it is a fact that the rental sector in Britain is on the one hand inadequately regulated and has skewed where people want to live. And I am not really against shopkeepers plying their trades, only those that do so inconsiderately and ignore the boundaries of good neighbourliness.
Readers may recall my exasperation, hardly politicly inspired, that a car park should NOT take precedence over social housing at Abbeylands. Our far-sighted politicians demanded that football was the game to play and that there were more votes and political points in car parking than in helping “state scroungers” – when old labour invokes toxic tory/Daily Mail striver / shirker rhetoric you know its is the end of the line. A housing development was more in tune with the location, though perhaps a private development would have been more fitting still, nestling as it does between 2 rather fine listed buildings, rather than the pokey flats anticipated by the planning permission originally granted.
In response to the Main Issues Report, I was pretty supportive of new housing locally provided that transport links were improved and upgraded, which on reflection is a massive ask. The logic of my response was that most of the development would necessarily have to take place nearer to Edinburgh, where there is work. Unless of course ELC were to hatch a new plan to attract serious inward investment. I can’t remember whether I suggested that it should be easier for individuals and self builds to create new homes, but that would be highly desirable and create diversity, but also seems unlikely given the hoops that planners make them go through at present. If new homes are to be built on infill and derelict sites, or backlands, I strongly recommend that these are private owner occupier developments, not speculative ones or of the socially engineered variety.
Those of us that brave High Street living may be regarded as an underclass, or just plain daft, but it is substantially down to us that your High Street still has a pulse, doing most of our shopping locally and doing our bit to hold back the decay. Preserve us or your High Street will die along with the Conservation Area.