Understanding Future Uses of Roofspace and Defining An Early Path to Profitable Roof Estate Investing
November 15th, 2017
Via Quartz, an interesting look at London’s potential use of ‘airspace’:
London may have found a radical solution for its housing crisis—building new homes on roofs.
Britain’s capital could benefit from 41,000 new homes if it developed properties on unused rooftops, adding a potential 28 million square feet of real-estate to its two most central zones, according to research from Knight Frank, a global property consultancy firm.
The real-estate firm says there are as many as 23,000 buildings in the heart of the city that are suitable for rooftop development, which would ease the pressure on developers to find unused plots of land in London’s dense center.
The data was produced using Skyward, new geospatial mapping software, developed to investigate the feasibility of the UK government’s suggestion that “buildings can be extended upwards by using the ‘airspace’ above them” in a recent housing white paper (pdf).
In recent years, there has been growing concern that London’s famous skyline is being ruined by new developments, but rooftop developments could offer a solution.
The volume of roof space that could be used for new housing is equal to eight of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world at 830 meters. By spreading volume across thousands of buildings in London’s center, it avoids the need to build new, taller towers to house Londoners. (But of course, this is unlikely to stop developers building more skyscrapers to meet demand for office space.)
Housing volume isn’t just an issue that London is facing alone. Cities across the world are all grappling with the same problem: how to meet rising demand for housing and how to make homes cheaper for those living there. New Zealand is planning to ban foreigners from buying existing homes. Meanwhile, Canada has already tried imposing a steep tax on foreign buyers, with limited success.
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Educated at Yale University (Bachelor of Arts - History) and Harvard (Master in Public Policy - International Development), Monty Simus has held a lifelong interest in environmental and conservation issues, primarily as they relate to freshwater scarcity, renewable energy, and national park policy. Working from a water-scarce base in Las Vegas with his wife and son, he is the founder of Water Politics, an organization dedicated to the identification and analysis of geopolitical water issues arising from the world’s growing and vast water deficits, and is also a co-founder of SmartMarkets, an eco-preneurial venture that applies web 2.0 technology and online social networking innovations to motivate energy & water conservation. He previously worked for an independent power producer in Central Asia; co-authored an article appearing in the Summer 2010 issue of the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, titled: “The Water Ethic: The Inexorable Birth Of A Certain Alienable Right”; and authored an article appearing in the inaugural issue of Johns Hopkins University's Global Water Magazine in July 2010 titled: “H2Own: The Water Ethic and an Equitable Market for the Exchange of Individual Water Efficiency Credits.”