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Hello everyone --- I've not talked about one of my favourite #opendata sets for a while --- it's this one, the Leeds Housing Supply spreadsheet on @DataMillNorth. It's a list of about 50,000 homes completed in Leeds since 2000! Lots of details, lots of timelines, ownership etc...
Let's look at one row in the spreadsheets to see how powerful it is. Hunslet Mill, site 2100341, First planning permission in November 2003, permission for 699 1 and 2 bedroom flats, they got started in,... July 2008,... and promptly stopped,...
It's a really tough site. It's downstream on the Aire, a site at very high flood risk, it's on industrial land not really close enough to the city centre to walk and the tram that was meant to go nearby has been cancelled more times than Toby Young -- which makes land value hard.
You can zoom around the area yourself if you like. Here it is in Jun 2008, no-one else living nearby, though the nearest pub is an Old Leeds beauty The Garden Gate, one of very few remaining old buildings on an estate that I guess was cleared of its slums before I was born.
Zoom forward to today (the Streetview's from a year ago) and you can see what a beautiful job they've done of it. There's still no tram, but Leeds has since been badly flooded, and then had at least two flood defence schemes completed. The site is preserved. The flats are built.
So what happened in the planning flow? I don't know the full story, I just know what's in the data, but here's what it looks like. 699 flats in the original application in 2003 have been pushed up to 769. Maybe those extra two floors they put on the top of one of the buildings?
The area around the mill has been developed too. Safer from flooding, new riverside walk put in, ongoing improvements in water quality, it took time and effort and money and developer contributions, but it's a pretty good job I reckon.
I've written before about the housing market in central Leeds (which this is part of). The site got planning permission at the absolute peak of central Leeds' flat price boom. £215k for a flat. By the time construction was due to start prices were falling. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/flatsandmarkets/
And prices kept falling and kept falling and kept falling. And the tram got cancelled more, and the site was still a flood risk, and now the flats are worth much less, so how is the developer going to pay for all the expensive remedial work to fix the buildings and the site?
You can explore the spreadsheet yourself if you like and look at how much more quickly easier sites, smaller sites, suburban sites, etc... get built once there's planning permission. It's pretty quick. Developers seem to try and hold a year or two of land supply to work with.
A point I'm trying to make is that adding up a few hundred sites like that one in Leeds and saying "look, hundreds of thousands of homes with planning permission that aren't getting built --- planning permission isn't a constraint on building!!" is quite likely to be wrong.
