On the futility of trying to reason with NIMBYs

Chris Oakley again:

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.

Yup. NIMBYs reject 'top down authoritarianism' in favour of 'bottom up authoritarianism'. They take into account their own happiness but ignore the fact that the next generation would also like the chance buy a nice house at an affordable price in which to bring up their own children.

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.

All I have ever suggested was that maybe, just maybe, we ought to allow new homes to be built in line with population growth and increasing economic wealth, i.e. increasing housing stock by (say) one or two per cent per year. NIMBYs aren't very good with numbers and interpret "one or two per cent per year" to mean "concreting over the entire UK and building housing for a billion people".

... my travelling has taught me that there are many places less crowded, less pressurised and more pleasant to live than England.

Eighty five per cent of England is fields, lakes, rivers, mountains, beaches. They aren't crowded - or are they? NIMBYs aren't very good with comparisons and they flatly refuse to address the question: for a given population and a given surface area, which is more "crowded" - a country with one nice dwellling for each household, or a country with 0.9 dwellings per household? If we relaxed the green belt restrictions just a tiny little bit so that we could spread out a bit more, would the UK become more crowded or less crowded?

Or to use an analogy, if you have a house with five rooms and five people living in it, would the house be more crowded if everybody crammed into one room and left the others unused, or if everybody occupied a room each?

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.

Oo-er. The 3 and 4 bedroom family homes were originally built for and bought by young couples with children decades ago. The children grow up and leave, the parents grow old and choose, entirely of their own volition, to "stay in the family home"*.

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.

Oo-er. More "all or nothing" propaganda. When did I ever, ever, suggest building on the green or open spaces in fairly densely populated towns and cities?

Budvar then chimes in with this:

The thing with building everywhere to London densities is how you going to feed them all?

As I just said, oo-er. More "all or nothing" propaganda. When did I ever, ever, suggest building everywhere to London densities, which would require a UK population of over one billion? That was the whole point of my previous post.

* Interestingly, Chris quotes J S Mill to support his opinion, would that be the same J S Mill who spoke out in favour of Land Value Tax? Over-occupation and vacant properties are two more things which Land Value Tax would sort out, of course: it would incentivise people to trade down when their house has become too big for them and bring empty properties back into use. But that would be a 'dagger in the heart of property values' (TM John Redwood) so the Home-Owner-Ists refuse to contemplate this.