ABSTRACT
England is facing an affordable housing challenge. It is centred on London, where the high cost of housing has become the city’s top political issue. Local authorities, the traditional suppliers of low-cost housing, cannot make up the housing-supply gap: their right to build housing at scale was removed in the 1980s. New affordable housing is now mainly supplied by housing associations or by for-profit developers, who are required to build affordable homes as a condition of planning permission (a rough equivalent to inclusionary zoning). Increasingly, public bodies and housing associations are entering into partnerships to produce affordable housing. These partnerships are based on their comparative advantages: the public bodies often supply low-cost land, while the housing associations bring development expertise. This paper examines the elements of the English policy framework that—usually unintentionally—have permitted such partnerships to emerge.
