Clarification

The comment I referred to earlier showed up in my email, so I assumed that it had also appeared under the original post. The commenter has now left another comment to point out that it didn't appear (which didn't appear under the post either etc). Blogger had helpfully put both comments straight into Spam, so I have now unspammed them, and for posterity and in the interests of fair play, I will reproduce his two comments in full here:

Comment 1

You put a lot of effort in so I will dignify your work with a response.

Firstly, I am not a NIMBY but a NIABY. That stands for Not in Anyone’s Back Yard. I tend to speak out against what I see as daft ideas based on top down authoritarian thinking that fail to take into account human nature or happiness. In this context, I oppose the idea that the continuous expansion of housing stock and for that matter local population is either necessary or desirable for happiness.

That does not mean that I oppose houses or builders per se or that I fail to see the problems faced by young people in today’s market. I simply think that we should question how we go about things on the basis that we haven’t been terribly smart over the last 6 decades and I don’t see how a “license to build” awarded to the same people who have been making a mess of it for years is going to help. The basis for my argument is eloquently summed up by John Stuart Mill.

"If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compel them to it."

Like Mill, I am no Malthusian. I accept that we are an ingenious species and that we could expand our population and the boxes we build to house them way beyond where we are now, but like Mill, I question whether or not we would ultimately like what we could create and whether or not we should think about it long before the self-evident truth that an infinite number of people cannot fit into a finite amount of space forces us to act.

In response to some of the personal comments you make in your response:

I don’t live in a fashionable suburb and the housing market had virtually no impact on the profit I made from my first property. I bought a 2 up two down ex farm labourer’s cottage for a princely 30K in 1990. I replaced the floors, re-wired and centrally heated the place myself. 3 Years later we decided to start a family and I moved into a 3 bedroom semi which is over 250 years old as a structure and one of the oldest buildings in the small town where I live. I used the whopping 10k profit from my sweat and on our first house to pay a deposit on the 70K asking price for my new house.

I have lived there ever since. I have never sought to make a profit from the housing market, I do not view my home as a commodity and I have no time or tolerance for those who do. I do make extensive use of maps and travel a lot both within the UK and Europe. I may well emigrate eventually because my travelling has taught me that there are many places less crowded, less pressurised and more pleasant to live than England.

The reason that I have not left so far is that it is a question of balancing my desires with those of others close to me. I said I would sooner emigrate than live in an even more crowded Britain. That does not mean that I will or that I have strong views on emigration versus immigration. It is merely stating a preference.

Space limitations prevent me from addressing all your comments so I will summarise as follows:

I agree with you on the ageing population but question why developers have spent decades building 3 and 4 bedroom family homes on suburban estates nowhere near local amenities to accommodate single pensioners and elderly couples.

I am not advocating demolishing the soulless estates and suburbs but perhaps thinking a bit before we build more of them. We might also want to take a look at what to do with the 900,000 empty properties currently in the UK before we start building on Hyde Park.

I commented anonymously simply because I don’t blog yet and don’t have an URL. My name is Chris Oakley and I am not even slightly ashamed or embarrassed about my views.

Comment 2

Although it is apparently futile to argue with people who disagree with you and it is clearly much easier to call them names, cherry pick their correspondence and attack them I thought that Mark and Adam might appreciate some numbers:
Population densities for the busiest parts of Europe (per km2) and selected others:

Bangladesh 1,002
England 395
Netherlands 393
Belgium 340
India 329
Japan 337
UK 252
Germany 229
Italy 193
Switzerland 181
Luxembourg 181
Denmark 126
Portugal 114
France 111
Austria 98
Greece 81
Spain 80

So it isn’t really about housing density is it? We do fortunately still have lakes and even the odd wood but it really is quite crowded in England. My comments on their being less pressurised and less crowded places to live are purely observations based on spending a lot of time in places that are not England. Why this should be interpreted as a refusal to engage in statistical arguments I am not sure.I can do so if you really want to risk it. Also I have to point out that my personal observations cannot be "obviously incorrect" as you assert.

If you did publish my response to "A NIMBY speaks" then I would expect to see it in the comments below that article. I really can't but if this is just a system glitch then I apologise for that specific criticism. If you can clear that bit up for me I will answer your question.

Chris.
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Apol's for any confusion. I now look forward to getting the answer to my question!

As to these statistics, I am perfectly aware of all that, but I have observed that most of Europe looks pretty much the same; there are towns and villages dotted about, which occupy a small percentage of the surface area, and the rest is open countryside. England tends to have more towns and villages, so instead of being 95% or 90% countryside it is 'only' 85% countryside - to refer to 85% of the surface area as "lakes and even the odd wood" really doesn't further the debate.

But:

a) By definition, everybody except tramps lives in a house and most people live in towns or villages, so what really matters is the quality of our housing stock, and how 'crowded' we are in towns and villages. Spain has only 80 people/km2, but large parts of it are semi-desert and Barcelona is even more densely populated than any British town. The Netherlands have exactly the same population density as England, but their homes are larger, cheaper and they still manage to export food - to us!

b) Chris helpfully quoted the pop. density figures for both England and the UK. Let's go a bit further, and look at the pop. densities of various bits of the British Isles (taking these to be culturally, economically and physically fairly homogeneous):

London 4,778
England excl. London 342
Wales 144
Northern Ireland 128
Scotland 66
Republic of Ireland 63

Is there any correlation between 'how nice these places are to live in' and 'how densely populated they are'? If it were true that a denser population makes a country less nice to live in, wouldn't these densities equalise over time (like gas released into a sealed container)? The point is that [most] people want to be near other people, even without the NIMBYs herding them in, referred to in the jargon as 'agglomeration' (like gas molecules clumping together in space to form stars).

Sticking with the physics theme, we could refer to these as 'centrifugal' and 'centripetal' forces, and observe that the latter tends to outweigh the former (but there is an inherent balance), so there isn't really a need for people to meddle with it. The Invisible Hand does the work far better.