Technology Obsolescence of Housing

Technological obsolescence is nothing new. At one of my 1^st jobs in the 70’s, the Telex machine was the hub of the office and secretaries produced schedules, invoices, cheques for signature and a whole range of other business documentation in response to the orders and other details which came in on the machine. However, back in 1964 Xerox had launched the first fax machine able to use telephone lines and within 15 years they were ubiquitous and the death knell for Telex had been sounded, its life span at the forefront was little more than 20 years. Now 20 more years later, who uses fax? Fax server, voicemail and email have done for fax what fax did for Telex.  We can tell similar stories with vinyl discs, music cassettes, CD’s and now downloads.

It is not different with houses here in the UK. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, housing was revolutionised with the introduction of plate glass and the move from stone and timber buildings with lime mortar and no cavities to the sort of construction we see around us today.  But now, for the 1^st time in nearly 200 years we are seeing something so different in the construction of houses that it will make all existing structures obsolete – it will not happen at the speed of CD’s replacing cassette tapes, but that is due to the lack of supply. With new houses being effectively air-tight and fully insulated, energy costs for a modern dwelling can be as little as 10-15% of those in a comparable ‘old’ house (for example one built at any time in the last 200 years even if all of the available modern techniques for draught proofing, insulating, renewing boiler, adding controls, etc are put in place).

As energy gets more expensive (it is estimated to increase in cost by 20% in real terms in the next 17 years) and as the proportion of peoples salary spent on energy increases (current reports say energy increases outstrip salary increases by 8:1) and as the new technology in new houses improves, the difference between an expensive to live in old house and a cheap, affordable to live in new house will become so large, that those with a choice will opt for a new house and as a result, demand for old houses will drop resulting in large drops in the price of these houses.  At that time, we have to decide whether to allow these cheap old houses to become run down, for their neighbourhoods to go downhill and for the most fuel poor members of our society to be trapped in them or to decide to bulldoze the old and bring in the new.

When will this happen? When there are enough new properties on the market such that most people have a choice – so even if we add 1,000 new houses a year, a typical city like Portsmouth with around 60,000 houses is not likely to reach a tipping point for maybe 25-30 years. But when that point is reached, change will come quickly – how many 17^th & 18^th century houses are left today? How many music cassettes are sold today..

This is very much a UK statement. North America, the Nordics and Germany have continued to develop their house building methods over the years (due largely to their colder winters) and the UK is about to catch up in one big step.

What should we do? Altruistically, we ought to speed the demise of current housing, do everything we can to get as many new houses as possible and to get as many people into them as possible – this will be good for the residents, good for the planet and probably good for the city, but so many people have so much invested in what is there now, the resistance to change may leave us all worse off. Those cities which embrace this change could position themselves ahead of neighbours who resist.