NIMBYs of the week

Here's an aerial photo' of Chigwell, on the very outskirts of London, but still with a Tube Station in Zone 4. As you can see, it's surrounded by a thousand acres of fields (the map is about four square miles and there are 660 acres in a square mile), there's not much to the north of that but fields either, to the south it's increasingly densely built up all the way to London and it's on relatively high ground, there's no flood risk or anything. Pretty much the perfect place to build a few houses, you might think, fresh air for the kids but not too far from the city...

Nope. The council have given planning for 69 homes (plus possibly another 21 flats), which at modern densities is about five acres, in other words slightly smaller than one of the yellow labels with the green borders showing the road numbers on that map. And the locals are Up In Arms about it.

Now, unlike the residents of Chigwell or the local council, I don't like trying to impose things on people, so I think, seeing how important The Hallowed Greenbelt is to the locals, they should be given a choice:

a) They can buy up that plot of land, complete with planning permission, for its market value of £20 million so that they can keep it green In All Eternity (because once the land truly belongs to the residents, then they are perfectly entitled to do with it what they want. Except build houses on it, of course, that would be hypocritical). Those who were on the housing waiting list get a share of that money to buy a house somewhere else. (The council can then auction off planning permission for the next five acres of land, and the lucky landowner can then sell that to the local residents as well, and so on until either everybody on the housing waiting list has been paid off or the residents have gone bankrupt), or

b) Enlarge The Hallowed Greenbelt by demolishing the entire village of Chigwell and planting some trees instead.