Since the 1990s, governments of all stripes in the UK have sought to resolve the problems facing many of the country's deindustrialised cities, particularly as regards depopulation of once bustling metropolises, large- scale vacancy of plots, sites and old buildings, and plunging land values. The answer that has been provided by policy makers to these issues has been what we now know as ‘urban regeneration’, an attempt to rejuvenate economic growth in formerly industrial urban areas through construction, the transition to service- sector economies and the cultivation of cultural centres and activities.

But these self- same policies for urban regeneration have laid the cornerstones of our current housing crisis today, and given rise to the modern incarnation of ‘gentrification’. We will address two of the clearest case studies around this failed growth model in the UK to illustrate the point.

London

London is the UK's prime example. The situation in respect of housing affordability in London is widely perceived as getting to crisis point. In 2021, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study reported that London's population was set to decline for the first time since 1988 – driven mainly by economic fallout following the COVID- 19 pandemic, but also due to the cost of accommodation. 2019 data from Halifax shows that the average deposit from a first- time buyer in London was £110,656, or 26 per cent of the total value of their new home. This figure had increased three- fold from 2008, where it stood at £38,335.