For British Homeowners, No Newts Is Good Newts
Endangered amphibian endangers new construction for pop stars and politicians; Boris Johnson promises to build a ‘newtopia’ to compensate for a swimming pool
Endangered amphibian endangers new construction for pop stars and politicians; Boris Johnson promises to build a ‘newtopia’ to compensate for a swimming pool
EASTCOURT, England—The bane of Britain’s great and powerful is a couple of inches long, has warty skin and a bright orange underbelly—and the power to disrupt some of their most heartfelt ambitions.
Singer Ed Sheeran, King Charles and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson are among the many homeowners in Britain who have, at one time or another, been warned they might have to alter their building plans to accommodate the great crested newt.
Britain is a country where the public proudly regard themselves as animal lovers. There are no wolves, lynxes or bears left in the wild here. But it turns out parts of the island nation have one of the greatest concentrations of great crested newts in Europe.
The tiny amphibian has a protected status here because its population is shrinking. Purposely killing a crested newt or destroying its habitat can result in a six-month jail sentence and unlimited fine. So before anything is built, Britons must be sure the area is newt-free and no newt home is harmed, a process that can take months and cost thousands of pounds.
Johnson once railed against “newt counting” as a symbol of excessive red tape hampering Britain’s notoriously slow housing developers. But when his plan to build a swimming pool at his Oxfordshire manor was recently delayed because it might disturb newts that might be in his nearby moat, Johnson offered to roll out the red carpet. He pledged to build a special pond, or, as he called it, “a newtopia,” to house them. He declined to comment further.
If a newt is found in a pond near a construction site, mitigation measures must be taken before the first brick is laid. That can range from building a special “newt fence” to protect it from wandering into harm’s way to hand collecting newts to move them to an artificial wetland, a la Johnson’s planned pond.
The regulations have spawned numerous newt consultants, who charge a fee that starts at around £200 ($253) to make sure homeowners don’t run afoul of the law. Teams of trained sniffer dogs can be employed to comb ponds near construction sites to give the all-clear. There are specially constructed “newt tunnels” dug under several major British roads—often costing millions of pounds—that allow the animals to crawl around freely. They have to be over 6 feet wide; otherwise they get too chilly and the newts refuse to use them.
On a recent day, Freya, a lively 8-year-old springer spaniel, charged around a field here in southwestern England, lying prone whenever she sniffed a crested newt. Her handler, Nikki Glover, is an ecologist who works for Wessex Water, a utility that wants to install water pipes in the area in September. It needs a newt count before it embarks on plans to move them to a suitable habitat.
Soon after starting to sniff around, Freya tugs at her leash and dives into a thick bush of brambles. “There’s interest there,” Glover says, before yanking on a blue plastic glove, crouching into the undergrowth, and reaching into a small muddy crevice. Her hand emerges cradling a newt.
The British government champions kits that detect DNA in pond water that it says can cut the red tape and find crested newts when they congregate during their breeding season. Annoyingly it means the tests must be completed between March and July as that is the only time the newts get it on, an elaborate ceremony which can include the small male newt tail-whipping his larger partner. “There are seasonal constraints,” says John Wenman, who runs an ecological consulting firm in Berkshire.
The little amphibian plays an outsize role in British culture. “Eye of newt” is a key ingredient in the witches brew in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (although even those witches wouldn’t actually hurt a newt—the expression is a pseudonym for mustard seed). When British people get very drunk they say they are “pissed as a newt” (origins unclear but perhaps linked to young sailors who were called “newts”). Former London mayor Ken Livingstone made political hay by owning pet newts.
Recently, newts have suffered a public-relations setback, becoming a symbol for unnecessary bureaucracy in a country where getting permission to build anything is lengthy and expensive. Britain faces an acute housing shortage, and homes remain unaffordable for many families. “For many years now, the great crested newt has had to live with a bad name,” Natural England, a government agency tasked with protecting the environment, warned on a blog a few years back.
In 2018, a council in Nottingham tendered for a contract worth up to £40,000 to relocate some 40 newts from a construction zone. When developing the stadium for the 2012 London Olympics, newts on the site in east London were hand collected in special plastic bottles and moved elsewhere. In 2017 the U.K. government reported that a house builder once paid an average of £2,261.55, or more than $2,800, per relocated newt. “No newts is good newts,” said one headline in Building Magazine.
Actress Cate Blanchett had to acquire a special license after newt consultants concluded there was “average to excellent habitat suitability” for crested newts in nearby water. She is trying to install several solar panels at her house in Sussex. King Charles was warned about disturbing newts by a British amphibian lobby group when he recently proposed to build a gift shop at his residence at Highgrove. Crested newts briefly threatened a plan by Ed Sheeran to build a chapel on his property until he built an amphibian-proof fence to protect them.
Many newt consultants rely on low-tech methods such as “torching,” or shining flashlights at ponds during the night to count crested newts. Glover, the ecologist, swears by dogs.
To teach Freya to find newts, Glover turned to Louise Wilson, a veteran dog trainer in north Wales who cut her teeth using canines to search for improvised explosive devices and drugs.
When a sewage pipe cracked near Bristol recently, before Wessex Water could stop the effluent from flowing out it had to first make sure no crested newts would be harmed by the diggers turning up to do the repair. Glover and Freya appeared and within days had evacuated 86 newts. She estimates more traditional methods would have required a month of newt hunting.
“There is no other tool that would show you there is a newt in the burrow,” she says.
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
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