Simon Dudley: ‘Forest City 1’ is a recipe for disaster dressed up as progress, and will end up a migrant city
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
Simon Dudley is Former Chair of Homes England and a Senior Fellow at Onward
Every few years, Britain’s wonk industrial-complex coughs up another grand housing vision that claims to fix everything at once.
A brand-new city. Hundreds of thousands of homes. Permanent affordability. Green growth. High productivity. World-class infrastructure.
Each time, it is sold as hard-headed realism when it is anything but. A wishful stylised fantasy designed to impress policy conferences and think-tank panels, not to survive contact with the harsh realities of local government, land ownership, finance or delivery.
Forest City 1 is the latest and most audacious entry in this tradition.
A million-person settlement on farmland east of Cambridge, permanently affordable by decree, fast-tracked through Parliament, shielded from local consent, and marketed as an innovative model for the future. Yet it is neither innovative, nor a model. It is an all too familiar policy wonk kite-flying exercise dressed up in the language of moral urgency and technocratic inevitability.
I call this sort of thing Progress Slop: a cycle of grand, abstract schemes often designed by people with no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything, all for the approval of their peers who also have no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything.
Like every scheme of this kind, it relies on a simple sleight of hand: that bold CGIs and confident rhetoric can override the constraints that govern cities; incentives, capital, infrastructure, and human behaviour. They never do. I say this as someone who chaired Homes England, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, and spent years turning ambitious housing policy into actual homes as the Leader of Royal Borough and Windsor and Maidenhead Council. At Ebbsfleet, we lost 1,300 homes to imaginary spiders. Natural England designated land as protected based on a species that did not exist. Surveys proved it. It did not matter.
The moral centrepiece of Forest City 1 is permanent affordability. Land value is removed from the market. Homes are sold with land appreciation, in the plan’s own words, “effectively nullified”. Resale values capped. This is presented as ethical clarity. It is a design choice with unavoidable consequences.
Housing markets exist because people believe their homes will hold or increase in value. Mortgage finance exists because lenders believe assets can be realised at market value. Development exists because uplift pays for roads, pipes, schools, and risk. Forest City 1 explicitly removes all of this, effectively leaving the state to pick up the tab.
The plan never confronts what follows. Instead, it performs contradiction in plain sight: claiming land value appreciation is nullified while also promising …
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
Simon Dudley is Former Chair of Homes England and a Senior Fellow at Onward
Every few years, Britain’s wonk industrial-complex coughs up another grand housing vision that claims to fix everything at once.
A brand-new city. Hundreds of thousands of homes. Permanent affordability. Green growth. High productivity. World-class infrastructure.
Each time, it is sold as hard-headed realism when it is anything but. A wishful stylised fantasy designed to impress policy conferences and think-tank panels, not to survive contact with the harsh realities of local government, land ownership, finance or delivery.
Forest City 1 is the latest and most audacious entry in this tradition.
A million-person settlement on farmland east of Cambridge, permanently affordable by decree, fast-tracked through Parliament, shielded from local consent, and marketed as an innovative model for the future. Yet it is neither innovative, nor a model. It is an all too familiar policy wonk kite-flying exercise dressed up in the language of moral urgency and technocratic inevitability.
I call this sort of thing Progress Slop: a cycle of grand, abstract schemes often designed by people with no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything, all for the approval of their peers who also have no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything.
Like every scheme of this kind, it relies on a simple sleight of hand: that bold CGIs and confident rhetoric can override the constraints that govern cities; incentives, capital, infrastructure, and human behaviour. They never do. I say this as someone who chaired Homes England, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, and spent years turning ambitious housing policy into actual homes as the Leader of Royal Borough and Windsor and Maidenhead Council. At Ebbsfleet, we lost 1,300 homes to imaginary spiders. Natural England designated land as protected based on a species that did not exist. Surveys proved it. It did not matter.
The moral centrepiece of Forest City 1 is permanent affordability. Land value is removed from the market. Homes are sold with land appreciation, in the plan’s own words, “effectively nullified”. Resale values capped. This is presented as ethical clarity. It is a design choice with unavoidable consequences.
Housing markets exist because people believe their homes will hold or increase in value. Mortgage finance exists because lenders believe assets can be realised at market value. Development exists because uplift pays for roads, pipes, schools, and risk. Forest City 1 explicitly removes all of this, effectively leaving the state to pick up the tab.
The plan never confronts what follows. Instead, it performs contradiction in plain sight: claiming land value appreciation is nullified while also promising …
Simon Dudley: ‘Forest City 1’ is a recipe for disaster dressed up as progress, and will end up a migrant city
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
Simon Dudley is Former Chair of Homes England and a Senior Fellow at Onward
Every few years, Britain’s wonk industrial-complex coughs up another grand housing vision that claims to fix everything at once.
A brand-new city. Hundreds of thousands of homes. Permanent affordability. Green growth. High productivity. World-class infrastructure.
Each time, it is sold as hard-headed realism when it is anything but. A wishful stylised fantasy designed to impress policy conferences and think-tank panels, not to survive contact with the harsh realities of local government, land ownership, finance or delivery.
Forest City 1 is the latest and most audacious entry in this tradition.
A million-person settlement on farmland east of Cambridge, permanently affordable by decree, fast-tracked through Parliament, shielded from local consent, and marketed as an innovative model for the future. Yet it is neither innovative, nor a model. It is an all too familiar policy wonk kite-flying exercise dressed up in the language of moral urgency and technocratic inevitability.
I call this sort of thing Progress Slop: a cycle of grand, abstract schemes often designed by people with no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything, all for the approval of their peers who also have no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything.
Like every scheme of this kind, it relies on a simple sleight of hand: that bold CGIs and confident rhetoric can override the constraints that govern cities; incentives, capital, infrastructure, and human behaviour. They never do. I say this as someone who chaired Homes England, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, and spent years turning ambitious housing policy into actual homes as the Leader of Royal Borough and Windsor and Maidenhead Council. At Ebbsfleet, we lost 1,300 homes to imaginary spiders. Natural England designated land as protected based on a species that did not exist. Surveys proved it. It did not matter.
The moral centrepiece of Forest City 1 is permanent affordability. Land value is removed from the market. Homes are sold with land appreciation, in the plan’s own words, “effectively nullified”. Resale values capped. This is presented as ethical clarity. It is a design choice with unavoidable consequences.
Housing markets exist because people believe their homes will hold or increase in value. Mortgage finance exists because lenders believe assets can be realised at market value. Development exists because uplift pays for roads, pipes, schools, and risk. Forest City 1 explicitly removes all of this, effectively leaving the state to pick up the tab.
The plan never confronts what follows. Instead, it performs contradiction in plain sight: claiming land value appreciation is nullified while also promising …
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