25,000 sites, 60-week planning applications, and no development school
The Urban Forecast
Charlie Caswell and Adam Dainow trained as architects and became developers. Their claim is that they do more pure design now than they ever did in practice.
The reasoning is blunt: development pays for the value you add, not the hours you bill. It is the argument every architect has had in the pub, made by two people who actually went and did it.
The scale is the surprising part. They have mapped roughly 25,000 potential sites across London, averaging four to five homes each. That is something close to 100,000 homes. It was not built with AI. It was built with staff, software and a great deal of running and cycling, spotting plots that do not stack for their owners largely because of tax.
They stay deliberately in the one to 30 unit bracket, and they are clear about what that bracket costs you. Planning applications averaging 60 weeks. CIL landing on two, three and four unit schemes. A consultant list that has grown faster than the schemes themselves. Their phrase for it is death by a thousand cuts.
Developers are seen as the bad guys, so they're easy people to tax.
Their first big deal nearly took them down. Brexit triggered a bank revaluation after they had already committed at auction. As they put it, development gives you the capacity to earn a lot more money, and the capacity to go bankrupt a great deal more quickly.
On education they are harder still. Seven years of architecture school, and not one thing really about business. There is, they point out, no development school. Their deeper charge is that architects do not see themselves as part of the property industry, and that this is the whole problem.
Their ask of government is specific: cut CIL and Section 106 on small sites, bring back a version of Help to Buy with valuation safeguards, and offset land tax for individual owners so the small plots actually come forward.