Brighton's catastrophic housing shortage
Introduction
Brighton and Hove has a well-deserved reputation as a welcoming, vibrant city. But that reputation is threatened by Brighton’s terrible shortage of housing. The city is thousands of homes short of the number needed to house its current population, and to continue to welcome people to the city.
If you’re a renter in Brighton, someone trying to buy your first home, or a young person living with your parents, you probably know first-hand how bad the state of Brighton’s property shortage is. This article is for anyone who hasn’t experienced the shortage first hand - people who don’t know how bad things are for people looking for housing in Brighton.
In this piece, I look at a number of different measures of the housing shortage, all of which lead to the conclusion that Brighton desperately needs more houses.
All statistics quoted are from the UK Census, Office for National Statistics, and Brighton and Hove City Council’s Strategic Housing Market Assessment.
The housing shortage
There are a number of different areas you could look at to determine the extent of a housing shortage. We’ll look at each of the following in turn to get a different lens on the problem:
Population Growth vs Housing Growth
Changing housing use and available bedrooms
Focusing on non-homeowners
Populations in need of housing
1. Population growth vs housing growth
In 2011, Brighton and Hove had 124,861 homes. The 2021 Census shows that UK population growth from 2011 to 2021 was 5.9%.
Adding housing to Brighton in the same proportion would have produced 7,366 new homes in Brighton. Instead, in that period Brighton and Hove only added 4,904 homes. That’s less than two thirds of the expected delivery - a shortfall of 2,462.
2. Changing housing use and available bedrooms
The problem with the simple estimate above is that housing need doesn’t depend only on the number of people. For example, five single adults need more housing than five people in one family.
The population also changes demographically over time, so the need for housing also evolves:
More people get divorced, meaning they need a home each, rather than one between them.
Family sizes have dropped, meaning the same number of people need more homes.
There are more older people, meaning more “empty nest” homes with lots of spare bedrooms.
We can expand on that last bullet point by looking at the “Room Occupancy” of Brighton homes: The UK Census shows how many bedrooms a household has, compared to the normal amount the people in it need: One bedroom for each couple, one for each single adult, one each for teenagers of different genders, etc.
In 2011, Brighton households had 92,077 spare bedrooms.
Ten years later, the number had risen to 103,493.
That’s an increase of 11,415 bedrooms being used as spare rooms. We can then calculate how many bedrooms were delivered over that period: the number of homes added, multiplied by the average number of bedrooms per home. 4,904 x 2.38 = 11,467.
Almost all of these extra bedrooms are swallowed up by the extra unused bedrooms, leaving none for the growing population.
This is just one adjustment for the changing population, and it shows a housing shortage of 16,589 bedrooms. Dividing that by the average number of bedrooms again, and that gives a shortage of 6,970 homes.
3. Focusing on non-homeowners
The lack of building is felt most acutely by people who don’t already own a home. Homeowners are sheltered - they don’t need to acquire another house, or compete against others for rental properties.
So one of the clearest demonstrations of a shortage can be seen by focusing on a group who could not have owned homes for decades: People who were Under 35 in the 2021 Census. We know that none of those people were homeowners in 2001. We can analyze this age group, and compare them against the Under-35 age group from the 2001 census as a benchmark. (Note for nerds: This uses the “Household Reference Person” field from the census. This is basically the oldest, highest income person or couple in a house.)
In 2001, Brighton had 29,472 households headed by people under 35. The population has increased by 13.3%, so a similar increase in households would have added 3,949 households in 2021.
Instead, in the 2021 Census, under-35s only headed 25,225 homes - a fall of 4,247.
That’s 8,196 households that are simply missing. That’s thousands of young families who are forced out of the city, or forced to live with their parents or live in a house share.
There’s lots of stories people tell about housing to explain why young people don’t have homes. But this is not a case of young people just needing to pull their socks up and work harder. Nor is it a case of young people being priced out by greedy landlords and housebuilders. The houses these people should be living in simply do not exist in Brighton.
Policies that aim to subsidise housing affordability, or move people from renting to owning, or that take private housing into public ownership cannot fix this on their own - there will still be too many people trying to fit into too little housing. Only increasing the number of homes in Brighton can fix this.
4. People without access to housing
We can also look directly at people who need homes, but don’t have them.
As the Guardian reported last year, record numbers of people are stuck living with their parents. The 2021 Census tells us 12,013 “non-dependent” (i.e. adult) children live with their parents in Brighton. This is one in three people in the under 35 age group (excluding students). It’s not just young adults either - there’s a 35% increase in people over 30 living with their parents.
To provide these people with housing would require more than 4,000 more homes (and that’s assuming 3-person flat shares, rather than individual homes).
The Brighton & Hove City Council draft Housing Strategy tells us about two more groups:
Over 7,600 households on the social housing waiting list in December 2023.
More than 1,700 households in temporary and emergency accommodation (February 2024).
If we add these three groups together, we see that they need at least 13,300 homes to be comfortably housed:
Brighton does not have this many houses lying around spare. The homes that these people need to live are yet to be built.
Summary
Here’s a summary of the figures we’ve been through
However you look at it, Brighton desperately needs more homes. It can be hard to understand the human impact just from reading abstract numbers. So, I offer you this thought experiment:
Consider the 1,700 families living in temporary and emergency accommodation. If you visited one family every day - no weekends, no holidays, no breaks - it would take you nearly five years to see them all. Five years of seeing entire families stuck living in one hotel room, or packed in three families to a house, because the houses they need to live in haven’t been built.
How can this be fixed?
So what to do? Sadly, it doesn’t look like the Council’s current draft Housing Strategy is gearing up to fix this. I’ll be back with another piece soon on why this happened, and what can be done about it. Let me know if you have questions, comments or counterarguments!