There's a great article on the BBC website.
This is easily fixed, of course, we need to liberalise planning laws (the carrot) and impose Land Value Tax on all land (the stick)*.
Surprisingly, the NIMBY point of view is expressed quite clearly (rather than being disguised as 'enviromental concerns'):
I sat and had tea with a group of locals who are dead against the proposed "affordable" development. For them there should be no "right" to live anywhere. They reminded me that their own, mega-expensive, houses were bought at the full market price, and that any development which reduces the value of their property is simply not fair.
Matthew Taylor MP (Lib Dem, Truro & St Austell), you rock!
* Dearieme, if you don't like the sound of this, you would still have the option of clubbing together with your neighbours, buying up the field at the bottom of your gardens and entering into a restrictive covenant never to build on it, so it becomes worthless and at least there's no LVT to pay on the field. You'd be mad to do so, as you'd suffer a huge capital loss on the deal, but hey, that's exactly what you are asking the farmer to do.
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Affordable housing in the British countryside
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3 comments:
I have been hearing good things about Taylor during thr tour the commission did of various development groups and housing events where he spoke. But I think we have a way to go to persuade him of LVT - we did try a submission via ALTER but it didn't seem to make much impact.
Many years ago when we lived elsewhere a neighbour did suggest that we jointly buy the little field behind our houses to stop the farmer "developing" it. We didn't and he did. I didn't really mind; we'd taken our gamble and anyway it wasn't green belt, he built just one bungalow, the work was done well, they proved decent neighbours, and so on. Where we are now though is different - they broke the green belt semi-promise of no development (and across the road they also broke the green belt semi-promise, in that case by telling outright lies about the nature of the proposed development), and it's a small town they want to build, with some imposed quota of troublesome people and no serious effort to solve the traffic problems that will result. Moreover, there's a high risk that they'll fuck up the drainage resulting in our living in a swamp, and God knows how long it might take to resolve any problem like that. At least if it were a market "solution" of a housing problem we wouldn't have the imposition of antisocial housing. And the risk of their fucking up the drainage is consistent with all of us repeatedly warning them about the difficulties and then their expressing astonishment when they sent out an "expert" with an auger and his reporting to them that the soil was all clay and that the slope was minimal. Fucking cretins. I also don't like the smell of political corruption - a previous Labour controlled council wanted to build near us on a fuck-'em-they're-all-Tories policy, and the present Liberal controlled council has exempted one local road from being used as access - even emergency access - to the site for reasons that some suspect is to do with the prominent Libs who live on it.
D, that's the clever bit. If LVT is the local council's only source of income, there'd be no advantage in building social housing in the swamp next door to you - overall land values would go down and hence there'd be less money for gold plated pensions etc.
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