A commenter left the following comment on Intellectual Titans Of The 21st Century: Grant Shapps:
Finite amount of land (1) ÷ Infinite number of people (2) = cultural disaster (3). You can vote to turn the whole of the UK into South London if you like (4) but I would sooner emigrate (5).
Like my parents, I bought small, worked hard on my house, sold at a profit (6) when I needed to and moved up a bit in size. I didn't expect a 3 bed semi on some crappy soulless Wimpey estate to land in my lap (7). This is perhaps the worst planning idea ever to come out of government. A charter for vandalism unless you believe building on every bit of green (8) and huge dormer towns (9) are the way to go. I pity my grandchildren growing up in England's grey and unpleasant cesspit (10).
1) Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, we have built on or developed barely ten per cent of the UK by area. Trying looking at a map or out of a car window every now and then? Mathematically, there's about one acre per person. In practice, an average household of 2.5 people uses less than one-tenth of an acre.
2) Where does this idea come from? I'm all in favour of sensible immigration controls, restricting by 'quality' ultimately means restricting by 'quantity', doesn't it? We have had a very stable number of births in the UK for decades (around three quarters of a million babies every year) and what has really driven population growth is increasing life spans, which alone would require the construction of 100,000 new homes per year.
3) Densely populated areas like The Vatican, Holland, Hong Kong etc are all automatically 'cultural disasters'?
4) That would be physically impossible. If the whole of the UK were built to the same density as Greater London (of which one third is still green or open spaces) that would equate to a population of over one trillion billion, or nearly twenty times what it is now.
5) So it's OK for British citizens to emigrate but not for others to immigrate? Bit of a mismatch there, eh?
6) And how much of that 'profit' is down to general house price growth? How much profit would he have made even if he hadn't 'worked hard' on his house?
7) Sure. A lot of new houses are a bit flimsy - but this is a circular argument; the NIMBYs restrict the amount of land that can be used for development, so Wimpey et al have to cram ever more houses into an ever smaller area. Anyway, here's a plan - let's draw up a list of houses that we don't like, ask the residents to vacate them and emigrate and then demolish those houses.
8) See (4).
9) See (7). I say 'suburb', others say 'dormer towns'. Most people live in suburbs, and most people who live in suburbs are NIMBYs, and most NIMBYs don't want any commercial or industrial development near them, hey presto, there's your 'dormer town'.
10) I thought he was going to move abroad - see (5).
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10 comments:
Mrs Lola and I have 2/3rds of an acre - but we have 4 children. And two dogs. I wonder how many acres/dog there is in the UK?
"- but this is a circular argument; the NIMBYs restrict the amount of land that can be used for development, so Wimpey et al have to cram ever more houses into an ever smaller area."
Not so, developers want to build the type of house that will make them the most profit for the least expense, that's why houses in a development look more or less the same, (or soulless to some people). They resist attempts by the planning authorities to get them to put more units on a site than they'd like just as much as attempts to put less.
L, did you include the gross incomes of any of your children who still live at home when calculating your house-price-to-gross-income ratio of 7.1?
B, that's as maybe. We know that NuLab (and the Tories before them) had insance targets for building more flats and fewer houses, but where is the harm in planning reg's specifying maximum densities or minimum build quality?
In any event, I (personally) find streets tend to look a lot smarter if the homes are fairly uniform in appearance; others may disagree.
For example, there's one building site halfway between London & Torquay where the houses on the estate are all slightly different shapes, sizes and colours, which also looks quite nice - surely if people are prepared to pay a bit more for non-uniform, then that is what developers would be building? It makes no difference to the builder whether he uses yellow bricks or red bricks, does it?
1 trillion would be 20,000 times what it is now not 20 times!
AC, well spotted.
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. I can open a google accountg and use a pseudonym if that helps?
The thing with building everywhere to London densities is how you going to feed them all? What about water and sewage systems? Power plants and all the other utilities, places of work, shops to supply all these homes?
We're already reaching tipping point over water. Most by far of all the reservoirs were built during the Victorian times (many since gone I might add). These reservoirs were built when Britain had a population of about 17million. The population since has nearly quadrupled, they haven't quadrupled the scale of reservoirs to fill the shortfall. Back then people would get bathed even up to the 60s once a week, washing was done once a week in the same water also, no putting on the automatic to wash 2 pairs of smalls and a t-shirt every day like now.
B, that's as maybe. We know that NuLab (and the Tories before them) had insance targets for building more flats and fewer houses, but where is the harm in planning reg's specifying maximum densities or minimum build quality?
My personal preference would be sensible minimum room sizes. Some of these little box rooms are just an insult when listed as a bedroom.
B, The damn stuff still comes out of taps when you turn them on, doesn't it? When we get like Uzbekistan and it doesn't, then we should worry. I think the water companies can work out how to supply a few new houses every year for the next few years, and then, after the population stops expanding and household sizes stop dropping, we won't need any more new houses. If our Planning departments actually planned and not reacted, we could absorb the required new housing, yes, even in the Green Belt, quite happily and hardly anyone would notice.
Yes water still comes out the tap.
Do you remember the summer of 76? That year we had water for 2 hours a day and stand pipes to take up the slack for a few weeks, because the reservoirs had nothing but sludge in them. In the last 2 years, water got so short that treatment plants were supplied by tankers from outside the area.
Would you not agree that since 76, housing stocks and also water use has increased? When we get another summer like 76 (and it's only a matter of time) we're really going to be in the shit (literally). Sewers need a constant flow of water to keep stuff moving, but without the ability to flush toilets, empty the sink etc things get backed up. Then when everyone is using water all at once you have raw sewage flowing out the manholes. Still the Germans who now own Yorkshire water will keep the stuff still coming out the tap whatever the cost. They can't pay for all the culverts in the catchment areas that fill the reservoirs pointed up and free of weeds but still.
Where would you suggest that planners could er.. "plan" another reservoir on the scale of say Scammondon? Sure they could build one in the Highlands or Wales, but you then have the problem of getting it from there to your tap.
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