The bungalow is a building that has represented a more leisurely, gentler way of life since the early 1900’s. Bungalows have been sold as an aspiration for those about to retire, saving them the annoyance of having to climb stairs. With an aging population, one would think they would be building more bungalows, yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this could be one of the main issues that is holding back many mature homeowners moving home thus creating a bottleneck in the Neath property market for the younger families who are being held back and unable to move into the larger homes they so need to grow their families.
So, before I answer that question, let me share this
fascinating fact about bungalows. The word ‘bungalow’ originated in India, not
the UK. The name is derived from the Hindi word ‘baṅglā’ or the Gujarati word ‘baṅglo’, both
of which seem to refer to a home occupied by a Bengali person. The colonial
English started to use it for themselves in the late 1600s to describe the same
sort of basic lodgings that sailors and staff of the invading East India
Company used.
Anyway, back to the here and now in Neath.
There are 1,623 bungalows in Neath.
When you consider there are 21,919 properties in Neath,
that means only 7.41% of property in Neath are bungalows.
To give you an idea of the age demographic of Neath
homeowners, there are 7,275 Neath homeowners aged 65 years old (and over) and 8,122
Neath homeowners aged between 50 and 64 years of age.
You can see demand for bungalows is only expected to grow. Yet new homes builders are having to deal with
soaring land prices, meaning to get a profit from the site they are under
pressure to build more vertically than horizontally as with bungalows (as
bungalows take up so much more land).
The last available data is from 2018 and only 1.6% new
builds in the UK were bungalows, interesting when it was just over 7% in the
middle of the 1990s. As British people are living longer, those existing Neath
bungalow homeowners will be living in them longer, thus creating even more of a
bottleneck in the Neath property market.
So, what is the answer?
Well with building land in Neath at a shortage, maybe new
homes builders should be forced under planning rules to reserve ground floor apartments
to be set aside for older people to encourage them to move out of larger houses.
I would challenge the long-held point of view that building more bungalows in Neath
is the pre-eminent way to urge growing numbers of mature ‘last-time buyers’ to move
out of their under-occupied Neath homes and free up their large homes (where
their children have flown the nest) for younger Neath families to grow.
With the new Planning Regulations due to be in place in a
couple of years, local authorities could require builders to set aside a share
of homes for mature residents, as they are already obligated to subsidise local
community facilities or low-cost social housing in return for obtaining their planning
permission to build in the first place.
Another option would be to convert all those empty shops in
our town and city centres up and down the country into residential use. There
is no need for planning permission to change offices to residential property
and the Government are considering the same for shops (although I have heard
of some horror stories of those office to residential developments making
rabbit hutches look spacious) – so again, it comes down to the planning
laws and making them fit for purpose.
There are no doubt consequences of not designing our housing
stock for the 21st Century and beyond for older people.
The population of Neath is set to grow by 9,521 to 59,634 by 2040.
As the UK population gets older in the coming decades, as life expectancy is set to grow from 81 years 2 months to 83 years 3 months by 2040, I fully appreciate the need for more Neath homes to be built for families, yet one must ask if the planning authorities are focusing too much on new housing for the younger generation, when they, in fact, should be encouraging new homes builders to develop larger, ground floor two-bedroom homes and decent accessible transport links.
These are my thoughts, what are yours the good people of Neath?
