Table Of ContentPROPERTY, PLANNING AND
PROTEST
The struggle for the right to housing is a battle over property rights and land use.
For housing to be provided as a human need, land must be recog-
nised as a common right.
Property, Planning and Protest is a compelling new investigation into public
opposition to housing and real estate development. Its innovative materialist
approach is grounded in the political economy of land value, and it recognises
the conflict between communities and real estate capital as a struggle over land
and property rights. Property, Planning and Protest is about a social movement
struggling for democratic representation in land-use decisions. The amenity
groups it describes champion a democratic plan-led system that allocates land
for social and environmental goals. Situating this movement in a history of land
reform and common rights, this book sets out a persuasive new vision of demo-
cratic planning and affordable housing for all.
Quintin Bradley is a Senior Lecturer in Planning and Housing at Leeds Beckett
University and leads research into community planning, housing justice, and
social policy. Property, Planning and Protest is the fruit of extensive research with
amenity groups and housing and land campaigners over a ten-year period.
Quintin has published extensively in peer-reviewed international journals and is
the author of Localism and Neighbourhood Planning: Power to the People? published
by Policy Press in January 2017 and The Tenants’ Movement published by
Routledge in 2015. A former investigative journalist and activist in squatting and
housing rights campaigns, Quintin worked for many years to support and advise
tenant-led organisations and federations of residents’ associations engaged in
housing and planning policy.
Explorations in Housing Studies
Series editors:
Janet Smith, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
Keith Jacobs, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
Mark Stephens, University of Glasgow, UK
Explorations in Housing Studies is a series of high quality, research monographs
which aims to extend and deepen both theoretical debate and empirical research
in the housing studies field. The series is being introduced at a time when
housing, in its various dimensions, is particularly closely intertwined with the
impact of demographic change, economic instability, the shaping of life chances
and wealth distributions and with the uncertain impacts of environmental and
technological change. This series aims to engage with these and related issues
from a variety of perspectives and methodologies.
Evictions in the UK
Power, Housing, and Politics
Joe Crawford
Affordable Housing Preservation in Washington, DC
A Framework for Local Funding, Collaborative Governance, and Community
Organizing for Change
Kathryn Howell
Home Beyond the House
Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China
Wei Zhao
Property, Planning and Protest
The Contentious Politics of Housing Supply
Quintin Bradley
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Explorations-in-Housing-Studies/book-series/HOUSING
PROPERTY, PLANNING
AND PROTEST
The Contentious Politics of Housing
Supply
Quintin Bradley
Designed cover image: Amenity groups: protest against urban sprawl by Alastair
Nisbet screen-play.co.uk
First published 2023
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© 2023 Quintin Bradley
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
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ISBN: 978-1-032-20635-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-20636-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26450-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003264507
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vi
1 The Politics of Housing Supply 1
2 Land as a Financial Asset 23
3 Housing Need or Greed 46
4 The Inclusive Rights of Property 68
5 Housing as a Collective Concern 90
6 Down to Earth 112
Bibliography 134
Index 152
FIGURES
1.1 Amenity groups: protest against urban sprawl. 1
1.2 The real estate sector: homeownership as an appreciating asset. 5
1.3 Private property rights: the theft of common land. 11
1.4 Letchworth Garden City: community landownership. 12
2.1 Land ownership: the exercise of monopoly power. 24
2.2 Housing for international investment. 28
2.3 Building new homes – improving land values. 34
2.4 Land speculation: part of the housing development process. 42
3.1 Housing affordability: the role of land value. 47
3.2 The difference between housing need and housing demand. 53
3.3 A brick in the wall: building housing for need. 56
3.4 Homebuyers as beneficiaries of public policy. 61
4.1 Amenity – the guiding principle of the Garden City movement. 70
4.2 Common land: historic rights on Ilkley Moor. 76
4.3 Defence of Green Belt: protestors on the march to Tandle Hill. 80
4.4 Green Belt – access to the natural world. 83
5.1 Hong Kong – betterment capture makes up half of all public
revenues. 94
5.2 Harlow New Town – a Barbara Hepworth sculpture for council
housing. 97
5.3 The Apollo Pavilion at Peterlee New Town. 97
5.4 Neighbourhood planning: resolving the housing question. 105
6.1 Housing: a home not an asset. 113
6.2 Community land buyout on the Island of Eigg. 120
6.3 People in place: neighbourhood planning and the use values of land. 124
6.4 Amenity groups: land prioritised for social and environmental goals. 129
1
THE POLITICS OF HOUSING SUPPLY
FIGURE 1.1 Amenity groups: protest against urban sprawl.
Source: Alastair Nisbet screen-play.co.uk
The global crisis of housing affordability has brought about an extraordinary
mobilisation of social movements concerned with the politics of home and habi-
tation (Roy, 2021: 14). The spread of rent strikes, tenants’ unions, and evic-
tion blockades has been accompanied by an upsurge in community land trusts
and housing cooperatives pioneering alternative models of housing supply and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003264507-1
2 The Politics of Housing Supply
land-use regulation across the Global North and South (Rolnik, 2019). One of
the oldest and most internationally significant housing social movements is also
the most controversial. It is a movement of amenity associations, community
groups, and environmentalists campaigning for land-use planning and the regula-
tion of property rights. As real estate investors acquire land at an unprecedented
scale and financial institutions turn residential development into a new asset class,
what has been called the amenity movement, and was once known as the town
planning movement (Levin, 1971), now finds itself on the frontline in the con-
tentious politics of housing supply.
This amenity movement is “a political force to be reckoned with” in urban and
rural planning (Cherry, 1982: 105). It is organised around networks of voluntary
groups that are actively concerned with land-use matters. Some of these amenity
groups may be short-lived with short-term goals, others are networked by long-
established national organisations (Ravetz, 1986: 116). They seek representation in
plan-making and democratic decisions on land use. They monitor and respond to
planning applications, encourage public engagement in planning and zoning deci-
sions, report breaches of planning conditions. They carry out research, assemble
evidence, enlist support, and aim to take an effective part in the public examination
of local plans. They also deploy more contentious methods, including non-violent
direct action in protests, rallies, and demonstrations. Many local amenity groups have
titles that link their place name with words like “save,” “stop,” “hands off,” or “keep it
green,” and they work to conserve local habitats, heritage, and environmental quality.
The organisations that coordinate and network these local amenity groups go
by names such as the Better Planning Network, a federation of 500 groups in
New South Wales, Australia, founded in 2012; or Planning Democracy, repre-
senting 200 community groups in Scotland, set up in 2009; or the Community
Planning Alliance, linking 500 groups in England and established in 2021. The
titles of these movements signify their concern with land-use planning and indi-
cate their goal in seeking democratic representation in the regulation of prop-
erty development rights. In their Charter for Good Planning in New South
Wales, the Better Planning Network (2014) calls for the planning system to
be guided by the well-being of the community, the environment, and future
generations. The aims of Planning Democracy (2021) in Scotland are to ensure
that real estate development creates just outcomes driven by need rather than
profit. The manifesto of the Community Planning Alliance (2022) appeals for
democratic representation in a planning system that better protects green spaces,
blue spaces, and wildlife. Amenity organisations in contemporary England are
part of a voluntary town planning movement founded in the early 20th cen-
tury (Pendlebury & Hewitt, 2018). The Campaign for the Protection of Rural
England (CPRE) was established in 1926 as the Council for the Preservation of
Rural England and continues to be one of the largest voluntary planning move-
ments with more than 40,000 individual members and a structure of county-
based branches supporting wider networks of affiliated groups (Murdoch and
The Politics of Housing Supply 3
Lowe, 2003). Where the CPRE is focused primarily on environmental plan-
ning matters, a network of over 1,200 local civic societies in Britain affiliated
to national civic trusts in Scotland, England, and Wales also originates from the
1920s and advocates for the conservation and enhancement of heritage and sense
of place in town planning (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014). These movements
once enjoyed the highest level of access to decision-making and included gov-
ernment ministers and planning practitioners in their membership. They helped
inaugurate the contemporary legal architecture of land-use planning in the post-
war United Kingdom. Their decline from this position of influence coincided
with the resurgence of a global property rights lobby and the rapid erosion of
the regulatory functions of land-use planning. The evacuation of these collective
publics from planning governance was hastened by a mass campaign of denigra-
tion that rendered continued democratic debate over the regulation of property
development unthinkable.
The Home Voter Myth
Public opposition to housebuilding is internationally regarded as a policy problem
and particularly a dilemma for land-use planning and the regulation of property
development rights. We are told that the wrong public is participating in land-
use decisions and has too much influence. Amenity groups are characterised as
unrepresentative because of their alleged socio-economic advantage. Their con-
cern for the regulation of real estate development is greeted with derogatory jeers
and venomous acronyms. This injurious name-calling lacks any analytic content,
but prejudicial caricatures continue to circulate as a governing discourse and any
critique of real estate development is rejected out of hand (Wolsink, 2006). The
representation of amenity groups as an exclusive lobby for homeowner property
interests has been the consistent theme in this orchestration of disparagement. A
confabulated narrative of selfish suburban homeowners spread with the global
commodification of housing and its transformation into an asset of international
investment. The story began in the 1980s in North America where homeowner
associations were portrayed as “home voters” pursuing exclusionary ends in their
support for zoning (Fischel, 2004). In the suburbs of Australian cities, opposi-
tion to demolition and densification was similarly depicted as the self-interested
blockade of the delivery of affordable housing. In the United Kingdom, criticism
of development was slated as the defence of privilege by a rural elite obstructing
the housing need of urban populations. All public engagement in land-use plan-
ning is now denounced as the promotion of socio-economic inequality by afflu-
ent homeowners protecting the value of their property (Einstein et al., 2019).
But the curious thing about this pervasive narrative is that there is not one shred
of evidence to support it.
There are no grounds to support the assertion that public engagement in
planning decisions obstructs or delays housebuilding or property development
