Saving the dear, grey place
Robin McAlpine
I'm in Glasgow less than I used to be, mainly because of how much work is done online these days. When I see the city in short bursts it clearly doesn't look in peak condition just now, but you do read some pretty apocalyptic stuff about the state of the city. 'Surely it's not that bad?' I recently asked a friend who lives there. 'It's worse than that' she replied. So how do we fix it?
The debate about the future of Glasgow has actually been quite good by Scottish standards. Across the political spectrum there does seem to be an awareness that much better reuse of existing buildings is crucial, as is economic diversification, increasing the liveability of the city centre, improving infrastructure and sanitation, collective planning and public intervention, protecting its built heritage and more.
Great. From a Common Weal perspective these are all policy approaches we've been been pushing for a decade now and while that seemed at odds with where mainstream thinking was when we got going ten years ago (profitability-not-liveability, demolish-don't-repair, retail-is-all-you-need...), debate has certainly moved in our direction.
But there is something fairly substantial missing from the debate as best as I can see – an answer to the question of why this has happened. Glasgow in 2014 didn't feel like this, or at least people weren't talking about this level of decline then. What has happened? Can the city afford to try and patch things up or is there something more fundamental?
I think there is something much more fundamental and it has largely been absent from the discussion. It's the sheer economics of Glasgow's land and what is on it. If that sounds obscure, bare with me for a minute.
A city is a space-limited thing. It can sprawl, but every bit as much as the volume and nature of land available to a nation will shape that nation decisively, the same is true of a city. If that land is developed to high density, you get one kind of city. If that land is developed to low density, you get another.
Paris, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Geneva – these are high-density cities yet they don't really feel cramped and they always feel alive. London, Melbourne, Hamburg, Chicago, Oslo – these are low-density cities but they don't feel deserted and they definitely also feel alive. It's not about high or low density being 'right' or 'wrong', it's about how you plan round the realities of your space.
Glasgow is a low-density city. In theory this is perfect for a 'Dear Green Place' because it offers the kind of scope that ought to give you easy walkability sprinkled with social spaces and parks and greenery and easy ability to put infrastructure in place. Glasgow is pretty walkable, but I'd contest the rest of that.
For a 'Dear Green Place', Glasgow isn't really very green at all. It only comes 17th in Britain for green space and there is barely a park or a lawn in the city centre. In the space between Kelvingrove way out in the west and Glasgow Green over to the east, greenery is hard to come by.
Let me give you comparators; Olso (the world's greenest city) is 68 per cent green space. Vienna comes next at 50 per cent, Singapore 46 per cent. Glasgow? Nineteen per cent. As for other social space, Glasgow does have them, but I'd defy anyone to persuade me that they are designed for sociability these days.
Think about St Enoch's Square, or Buchannan Street. Do these spaces entice you to linger, to spend time, to just relax? I'd argue pretty strongly not. They seem quite clearly to drive you towards retail. Even George Square is not the place to stop and while away some time that it was when I was younger. It really does feel like how it is treated – an events space left empty between events. Where you are encouraged to linger it is in commercial properties (think Royal Exchange Square).
As for the liveability of the city centre – well, people are slowly returning to live there, but it is still a sparsely-populated retail-dominated zone. So we've create a large central space in a city which is designed for you to pass through as quickly as you can from one spending opportunity to another. You really do have to try and find the love for this space from somewhere other than your experience of it (i.e., 'people make Glasgow').
What I'm trying to draw you towards here is that the physical space in Glasgow or its density or broad planning approaches or even its economy do not seem to be either fundamental barriers to a better city or obvious reasons for its seemingly rapid decline. But it's still about land, because it's always about land.
The feature I want to argue that has screwed Glasgow is the invisible bit on top of the land; price. I learned this from hard experience. When Common Weal first set up we had a plan to create a physical base that could pay for itself by being office, events space and cafe bar. We wanted to replicated the Coffee Houses where radical politics got much of their impetus.
We had a full business plan and we put formal offers in for two prominent spaces. It is what happened next that was revealing. With one venue we made an offer based on the rental value they were asking for. They didn't have any other interest in the place so we had been hopeful. We were rejected. The landlords weren't landlords at all, they were property speculators.
We were useless for them. All that they wanted was to take a property they bought without a commercial franchise attached and to sell it on with a commercial franchise attached. Had we been Nandos, we could probably have bargained them down on rent. As Common Weal we could almost certainly have offered more and still been rejected.
The second venue was unused and unlikely to be used for a fair while (despite being in a prominent location). But the deal would have been a cohabitation which created a tax issue. To make this happen we just needed the City Council to give some dispensation on Council Tax eligibility to reflect the reality of the arrangement we were proposing.
But Glasgow was in its property-boom pomp at the time. It was disinterested in the fiddly process of even thinking about our offer given the comparative measly tax revenue we'd have brought in anyway. Both of these properties are still sitting empty. I passed one recently and it has substantially deteriorated physically in the eight years since we made an offer.
The point is that Glasgow is a city that was driven by the idea that it was primarily a premium retail destination where all that mattered for a business was the prominence of the location they chose to set up. Get a marquee property in the right place and it was viewed as guaranteed money.
It isn't the buildings themselves that got more expensive (pre-Covid, building costs were not rising substantially) but land costs. Glasgow's economy wasn't based on real enterprise or productivity but on franchising space. Property prices just rose and rose.
The implications of this are enormous. One of the reasons the city centre is not a place people live is that what should have been homes in all the spaces above the ground-floor retail just weren't worth the hassle of actually making into homes. Anything other than businesses that needed prime location were second-class because it was all about those prime locations.
Glasgow became a space of that prime retail, corporate offices and the cafes and sandwich shops that fed off them. When its all about prime space, land costs are going to reflect that.
I could explain this in an awful lot more detail; lots of property is owned by equity funds who hold them as speculative investments rather than revenue-generators. They have a notional value for these properties which they are waiting to rise, and if they have to rent out the space at a price lower than suggested by their notional value, they have to mark down the price of the whole building on their books.
So it is in their interest to keep the whole place empty so they can retain the pretence and hopefully sell on in a subsequent property boom. Likewise what is built on available land is not what the city needs but what unlocks the highest return on the land value. For a while it was luxury housing, then it was retail and office space, then it was student flats. These aren't infrastructure, they're the means of releasing the maximum profit from land.
Likewise a historic two-story building is much more valuable as charred rubble than as a building. You immediately have land to speculate on, even if it is a weed-strewn mess for years and years. You don't want social space; if there is space, you make it private, you build on it, you make peope pay to use that space. And all of the above – all of it – is the economic model that Glasgow's Council Tax revenue is based on.
And it's gone. In-person retail is declining rapidly and is unlikely to return. City centre office spaces make less and less sense in eras of home working. The sandwich shops and cafes don't survive without the other two. The logical thing at this point is for property prices to decline which then makes conversion to housing sensible, and so community replaces commerce and the city is alive in a different way.
But the rule about UK property prices is that public policy never, ever lets them decline. It underpins the whole Ponzi scheme that is the UK economy. They can rise but must never fall. Fundamentally, Glasgow still has property prices that are appropriate to a booming retail and office space economy, but it doesn't have that economy any more.
You could bring Glasgow back to life by accepting all of this and managing (indeed encouraging) a gentle but continual fall in property prices. It would let the city transition its economy and become the thing it needs to be next. But they won't, because breaking orthodoxy is really hard.
Everything everyone says about how to revitalise Glasgow is broadly correct. I just wish they'd focus more on why those things don't happen. The city is living in its recent past – and that is a large part of why it can't become what it needs to be next.