Article from A&B issue 05|2023
Housing policy vs. spatial policy
Housing policy should not be treated as a stand-alone entity, independent of other policies. Just as it cannot ignore social and economic policy, it cannot ignore the fact that the housing desired by society is not built in virtual space, but in physical space, which is very valuable because it is a limited good.
The architectural standard of housing development is important, as well as urban planning, which is an important factor in the quality of the living environment. Therefore, housing policy should be considered as part of an integrated spatial policy. Among the many aspects of the quality of residential environments, it is urbanistic values that have the most characteristics of public goods, which the state must take care of. This is because in the free market model, it is not profitable for anyone to provide public infrastructure, something that has greatly troubled Poles living in new housing developments over the past three decades.
Unfortunately, after 1989 the Polish authorities did not understand or deliberately ignored the aforementioned dependencies. Housing construction and spatial management were left to free market forces, resulting in an explosion of cheap individual construction in random locations, usually devoid of technical and social infrastructure. The authorities apparently wanted to allow the public to solve the housing problem from the bottom up. However, as society becomes richer, we are beginning to see the poor quality of the resulting housing environments. Suburbanization, or more precisely the dispersal of settlements, generates great economic, social and environmental costs. Space is easy to destroy with planless settlement development, but difficult to repair. The negative consequences of the spatial chaos created by our generation will be faced by future generations for many years.
It was supposed to be cheap, after all, without an asphalt road or landscaped greenery it is possible to live. But it turned out that cheap is not. The hidden costs of settlement dispersal, such as increased demand for transportation and infrastructure, fall into the category of external costs, i.e. burdening not only the investor, but society as a whole. Individuals, however, are most affected by the direct high cost of housing itself, resulting from an insufficient supply of housing. Several myths have arisen, which I will try to identify and then dispel.
Low availability of building land is cited as one of the reasons for the poor performance of Polish housing construction. This is the first of the myths—in fact, there is a huge oversupply of construction land in Poland. In the current local development plans alone, so much land has been designated that more than 80 million people could settle on it, plus a much larger amount of land that is difficult to estimate, which could be developed on the basis of development conditions decisions.
The second myth, very widespread in the media space, is that the remedy for the housing deficit and the described urban problems could be a significant increase or even complete coverage of the country with local plans. It is true that there should be more plans. But not allowing development, but protecting against it. Total coverage by plans would either involve underestimating the amount of building land, which would be undesirable from the point of view of housing policy, or overestimating it, which would further exacerbate the problem of settlement dispersal and the formation of chaotic settlement structures. The problem of oversupply of planned building sites was noticed by state authorities in 2015, when the Revitalization Law introduced new specific rules for the preparation of studies of land use conditions and directions. Unfortunately, as practice has shown, most municipalities, and even the Ministry itself, which is substantively responsible for the established regulations, do not always understand their meaning and the need for serious implementation.
In 2018, the government put forward a new idea to increase housing construction. The Law on Facilitation of the Preparation and Implementation of Housing Investments and Associated Investments, which allows the introduction of housing development in contravention of established plans, was criticized by the urban planning community, even earning the pejorative colloquial name „lex developer.” Is it rightly so? On the one hand, yes, as the law is yet another piece of speculation that allows the urban planning system to be ignored. On the other hand, however, it is a commendable attempt to integrate housing policy with spatial policy. It links the possibility of building housing developments to the presence or necessity of developers to provide infrastructure—technical, social and communications. For the first time since the communist era, urban planning standards were introduced in this regard.
Developer requirements (developer obligations) to equip housing developments with infrastructure are based on two principals: internalization of external costs and collection of planning rents. First, the costs of providing roads or schools in suburban areas should not be borne by all townspeople, but by the developer and landowners, i.e. be internalized in this way. Secondly, their payment by the developer is, as it were, the compensation due to the municipality for granting development rights to the land, which, without the provision of this infrastructure, should not be considered a building site. Such developer obligations are widely used around the world.
In Germany, the adiacencka fee, i.e. the fee charged to owners of plots of land that are equipped with infrastructure, can amount to as much as 90 percent of the real costs incurred by the municipality. In our country, an analogous fee can amount to a maximum of 50 percent, and not the actual cost of infrastructure construction, but the associated hypothetical increase in the value of the property, which can be challenged. In Spain, the possibility of developing a site depends on land cessions and the construction of infrastructure—technical and social—at the owners' expense. Such requirements are also in place in some South American countries. Thanks to them, in economically less developed South American countries the quality of infrastructure in newly built housing developments is higher than in our country. Developer requirements also include the provision of a certain percentage of social or affordable housing, which directly affects the availability of low-cost housing.
Paradoxically, the provision of overall urban infrastructure in this model does not necessarily mean an increase in the price of housing. The condition is one: the burdens must be universal, unavoidable and known in advance, so they cannot depend on the will of the municipality. Then they will result in a proportional reduction in the price of land. Meanwhile, landowners earn the most from the current system in Poland. The absence or insignificance of planning and betterment fees means that the conversion of agricultural land into building land is associated with a huge, socially unjustified profit. In America, such profit is called windfall, because it „falls from the sky”, as it were, to landowners, completely without their merit.
The introduction of the described solutions would significantly contribute to solving the problem of poor urban quality of housing estates. And what should be done to make it cheaper? It is necessary to prevent real estate speculation—both housing and land. In Poland we have a lot of developed land, perfectly suitable for development. Other countries use legal instruments to develop this kind of urban wasteland. In Germany, a development order can be issued for plots of land lying fallow. However, if the owner is unable or unwilling to do so, the municipality must put up funds to buy out such property. This therefore entails setting aside funds for public land management. In recent years there has been great money in the state budget for numerous development and social programs, so it could be found for this purpose as well, but such political will is needed. A source of money for spatial management and, at the same time, an incentive to mobilize unused building land could be a tax on the value of real estate (Latin: ad valorem), the amount of which is tied to the use of the land.
In England in the first decade of the 21st century, the concept of reclaiming building set-aside ( Previously Developed Land Policy) was in place, which called for locating a minimum of 60 percent of residential development on unused urban land, particularly on brownfield sites. This approach was integrated with the policy of increasing housing density and the concept of Urban Renaissance, which aimed to provide a high-quality urban living environment as an alternative to the model of living in suburbs and rural areas. The British in the 1930s had the same urban problems we have today—an oversupply of building land, planless suburbanization. They mastered them with a strong spatial policy introduced in the postwar years. This required both the financial efforts of the state and the determination of the public.
Tomasz ZABOROWSKI
Urban planner, doctor of technical sciences in the specialty of spatial management, graduate of the Faculty of Architecture at the Wroclaw University of Technology. Didactic and scientific employee of the Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies at the University of Warsaw in the Department of Urban Geography and Spatial Planning, as well as the Municipal Urban Planning Laboratory in Radom.
