Signals of the Future: from Ikea Homes to Overweight Cars
This month’s crop of seeds of the future include flatpack houses, the growing size and weight of cars, why householders don’t value energy efficiency and my predictions for 2023 (which I look forward to revisiting)
Flatpack Homes
Would you buy a home from IKEA? I was passing this site in South Bristol and had a wander around the half-finished scheme built by IKEA subsidiary, BoKlok.
The houses, on an infill-strip by a main road, are modular in construction. There’s flats and affordable housing coming too. IKEA has built 15,000 such homes across Scandinavia, in partnership with Skanska.
The IKEA houses were certainly popular — there was a ballot to buy. The prefab homes are supposed to be much cheaper and twice as quick to build (although this site has been beset by delays and a feeling locally that the homes were plonked in without delivering for the community.)
We can see in this site a number of trends in the future of housing.
These Modern Methods of Construction, with homes built in a factory and assembled more rapidly on site will mean less waste, less disruption, and will drive economies of scale. Although MMC can have a negative impact on local jobs.
This is low-carbon, energy efficient, housing. BoKlok also tackles embodied carbon -a big challenge facing the construction industry — by using wood as the key material.
IKEA is a new entrant in the UK housing market. I blogged last year about John Lewis, one of the UK’s most trusted brands, offering apartments to rent. https://lnkd.in/e9cVa3Yj IKEA can also leverage its brand to buy land, partner with local authorities, and — of course — fit out the kitchens and bathrooms from the existing furniture range.
Expect to see more modular construction, more homes built with wood, and many more IKEA BoKlok homes in the future.
Chunkier Cars
Will car parks start falling down because vehicles are getting too heavy? I saw a suggestion from the British Parking Association that cars are getting so big and so heavy that this threatens the structural integrity of transport infrastructure.
Many of us have faced the annoyance of ever-bigger SUVs, squeezing other pavement and road users. And they’re not just getting bigger, they’re also much heavier: the new Range Rover weighs in at a hefty 2,700kgs. Most of the UK’s multi story carparks were built in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, popular cars like the Ford Cortina and Vauxhall Viva weighed around 770kg.
Electric vehicles are also heavier than petrol and diesel. The best-selling Tesla Model 3 weighs 1,800kgs. As the numbers of EVs and SUVs on the road grows, cars parks and bridges may need to be strengthened.
These big cars have other downsides. In dense urban neighbourhoods they make life more difficult and dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians. US figures suggest that those hit by the biggest and heaviest vehicles are two to three times more likely to die than people hit by smaller cars. The weight and poor aerodynamics of SUVs mean they emit more carbon, overwhelming any gains from the arrival of EVs.
Some Governments and city administrations are responding by taxing vehicles by weight. France introduced an escalating weight tax in 2020 for vehicles over 1,800kgs (with an exemption for EVs). Washington DC is hiking up the registration fee for vehicles weighing over 2,700kgs, citing the need to pay for increased wear and tear on roads.
As the downsides increase — in fatalities, in emissions, and in infrastructure investment — will we see other administrations starting to use tax and regulation to dissuade the purchase of these vehicles? And will people living in cities continue to get in a car called ‘Discovery’, ‘Explorer’, or ‘Highlander’ to drive a mile to their yoga class?
Green Homes Premium?
Is the housing market at last valuing energy efficient homes? This week’s Residential Market Survey from RICS paints a picture of falling buyer demand and declining house prices but suggests that there may be a premium on highly energy efficient homes, with these properties holding their value in the current market.
This has not, historically, been a big concern for UK home-owners or buyers. Research last year from the Home Builders Federation found that three-quarters of Brits don’t know what their home’s energy performance certificate rating is. HBF also found that only a quarter of people — even if they’re currently worried about energy efficiency — say that energy efficiency will be crucial when they buy their next property.
The big barrier seems to be perceived cost. This is a problem we see in many areas of the economy and business: consumers buy cheap then pay much more over the lifetime of the product. And when it comes to homes, the information isn’t great either. EPCs don’t take account of grid decarbonisation, (with electricity getting greener), so there is not enough encouragement of heat decarbonisation. The certificates don’t seem to be communicating clear messages to the home-owner or buyer. And, with some exceptions, the industry — valuers, estate agents, and lenders — are not promoting the benefits.
Attitudes may be changing with high energy prices really biting, (and retailers have certainly reported a rush to buy energy efficiency products), but there is still a way to go when it comes to house-buying.
2023 Predictions
What does the coming year hold for cities and the built environment? Against a backdrop of recession and global instability, here are six things that I think we’ll experience in the UK.
- Electric vehicle adoption will accelerate. In December, one-in-three new cars bought were electric. We’ll see more widespread — and smarter — charging, longer ranges, and cheaper vehicles coming onto the market. This will intensify the need to tackle home charge-points for terraced streets and tower blocks.
- Housing prices will slide not crash. Cost of living and increased interest rates will lead to an estimated 5–10% drop in housing value. This won’t make house-buying affordable and it certainly won’t help those renting — where costs are soaring. Tackling affordability requires not only building more, but also rethinking property taxation which seems unlikely any time soon.
- Digital twins not the metaverse. One day we’ll live part of our lives virtually but the more immediate impact will be the rapid proliferation of digital replicas (‘twins’) that allow the design, planning and management of the real world. (Bet on Epic Games, Autodesk, and NVIDIA rather than Meta).
- The working week will settle. For those who don’t have to be physically present, a mix of home-working, more 4-day-weeking, and improved office environments will see the TWAT week normalising, with policies firmed-up, and rents and the office micro-economy rebalancing.
- Ubiquitous and contested AI. Artificial intelligence, which is already (invisibly) shaping so much of our lives, will come more into the open as tools like Chat-GPT and DALL-E are widely used. AI will challenge intellectual property, ethical norms, and the existing expertise of many professions. The EU will regulate this year; expect a lighter touch from the UK government.
- Even cheaper renewable energy. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, the global average cost of solar PV projects fell by 85% between 2010 and 2020 and the cost of offshore wind halved, Expect to see more renewable generation, more integration in UK developments and a big uptick in energy storage investment.
This is some of what I expect to see unfolding. The more important question is how we now act to shape the future we want.
These articles originally appeared on consecutive Fridays in Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/professor-peter-madden-obe/
