From This Is Exeter:
ANGRY residents have taken their fight to stop hundreds of homes being built on their doorstep [by] the government. The residents want planning permission granted by East Devon District Council for 450 homes and retail units between Pinhoe and Westclyst to be re-examined...
P and W are two outer suburbs of Exeter (a city with a population of 118,800), which are surrounded by miles and miles of empty fields:
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24 comments:
Jesus, that's masses and masses of fields!!
The only valid point the "residents" (90% of whom live on the north side of Park Lane, I'd guess) have is that the land is Grade 1 agricultural and there's not an awful lot of that around. However, this just illustrates the daftness of our "planning" system. The sole reason for building the houses there is likely to be that a developer owns the land and has bribed or browbeaten the LA into giving him planning permission. All the suggestions that they are built to fulfill some sort of local need are simply flimflam. If it was because there was a need for 450 more houses, than they could just as well be built somewhere equally close to the railway and motorway junction, but not on Grade 1 land, somewhere like Pin Court Farm, assuming that's not G1 land too.
SW, the fields stretch all the way to Bristol.
B, come off it. If the land were more useful as farmland than as residential, then the farmer would always outbid the developer (or the owner would never devalue his land by applying for planning).
What's Grade 1 farmland worth? £10,000 an acre? At 10 homes/acre, each home has 'used up' £1,000's worth of farmland, well forgive me for not panicking about 'food shortages' just yet.
You do know lots of those 'miles and miles of empty field' are going to be built on for Cranbrook new town don't you? 3000 new homes addition to the 450 here
http://www.exeterandeastdevon.gov.uk/Cranbrook/
DC, yes, the article mentioned that. So my golly gosh, that's about half a square mile of land used up!
Forgive me for not panicking.
Mark, something's value does not always reflect its usefulness. It is quite possible for resources simply to be exhausted as the rising price does not keep pace with the dwindling supply, e.g.guano, mahogany in the C19th.
The point I was making is that if the locality needs 450 new homes and if "planning" meant anything, then the LA would simply choose a bit of Grade 2 or 3 land and ring up the farmer and say "How would you like planning permission for 450 new houses on your land?" (and quickly jump back before he bites their arm off).
Mark, I have to ask, just what is it you have against fields? I love living somewhere where, in 5-10 minutes walk / drive, in any direction there's green space and fresh air to be enjoyed. You know, some people like these things, it's a "quality of life" issue.
TCO, I'm an economist and I have nothing against fields.
But the point is that there are hundreds of other people who'd love to live near those fields as well. Or in fact would love to buy a reasonably priced house, full stop.
So let's imagine they build the new houses. Existing residents have a simple choice:
a) Accept that they will now have to drive for 6 minutes instead of 5 minutes to get to the fields, or
b) They can sell their old house, which is now 6 minutes away from the fields and buy a new one which is only 1 minute from the field.
Is either a) or b) so terrible?
Remember that a traditional Home-Owner-Ist objection to LVT is that 'families will be uprooted and people will be forced to move'. Now, wouldn't it be nice if the adult children of the existing residents of Exeter could afford to buy somewhere near where they grew up instead of being forced to move elsewhere where housing is cheaper?
Doesn't NIMBYism do far more uprooting than LVT ever could?
The alarming thing is not the land usage but that we need to be doing it at all.
During WWII Churchill was in a panic over food supply because of U Boats sinking merchant ships. That was in 1943. With half the population we were unable to feed our people by independent means.
To clarify. I'm not commenting on the loss of arable land. I'm commenting on the unsustainability of our population in terms of infrastructure, jobs, services, food...
EK, let's get our facts straight before we panic.
1. Since 1945, the UK population has increased by about one third
2. The area of available arable land is barely unchanged.
3. Farming productivity per acre has increased enormously since then. Pesticides, GM crops, tractors (we still used a lot of horse-drawn ploughs), greenhouses, polytunnels. I'd guess it has at least doubled.
4. We are not at war, we don't have a million working age men overseas and twice as many at home in factories wasting their efforts on armaments or German submarines sinking our ships.
5. The UK is more or less self-sufficient in food, or could be if we increased the number of people working on the land above its current level of 0.5% of the population and were prepared to accept a more boring diet.
6. If we can manufacture or export more profitable stuff than food and use the proceeds to buy cheaper or more exotic stuff from overseas, then why shouldn't we?
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Infrastructre = we can build as much as we need.
Jobs = not an issue, more people = more workers.
Services? Wot? it's people who provide services, so more people = more services.
Food = see above.
As a simple matter of fact, if we were a bit organised, this island could easily support a hundred million people or two hundred million people (as long as it's the right people and not a load of Somali drug dealers, Romanian child smugglers and Islamic extremists, of course!)
Hypothetically, if we "let rip" and let people build houses on their land without planning restriction, how soon would the building boom run for? I suggest not that long, despite the panic/fear of the NIMBYs.
If there was a genuine shortage of homes then the property market would not have crashed outside London in the way it has. In London where there is a genuine shortage of homes because people keep moving here (from the rest of the country!) home prices are actually up since the bubble burst.
Cranbrook is up the old A30, a few miles east of the airport and is is a seperate issue, planning permission was granted years ago yet still nothing has been done.
Pinhoe is within the City of Exeter while Westclyst lies within East Devon. Any development in that area would have to recieve local authority services (from education to refuse collection and social services) from East Devon, ie Honiton, 12 miles away.
By way of an anomally this is the situation in two streets within Pinhoe, Ross close and Pinn Valley Road, both of which are actually within East Devon and require a refuse collection cart to travel all the way from East Devon just to collect their rubbish.
Nearby Broadclyst is called that because it is where the river Clyst gets broad, ie it is a marsh, the whole area is very low lying and subject to frequent flooding but that is another issue.
I expect that the housing development issue is being driven by the need to fund the new Science Park which will be situated just to the east of the J29 marker on google maps; itself driven by a coalition of Exeter University and the nearby Met Office.
BE, that depends what you call 'building boom'.
B, is the fact that local authorities organise themselves in a stupid way an argument against new housing? Or is it an argument for shifting the boundary between Exeter and East Devon?
What is the relevance of Broadclyst? Of course we shouldn't build in flood zones, even I've been saying that for years, but who says that P or W are in flood zones? If it's not flood zones it's "threat to our food security" and if it's not "food security" it's "local wildlife" and so on. There's always a bloody excuse.
"Or in fact would love to buy a reasonably priced house, full stop."
Come on Mark, you know bloody well that house prices have nothing to do with supply and demand. This is all developer driven. Given exactly the same house numbers v population ratio that we have today and a Irish style bubble burst, do you think anyone would be trying to build 450 houses in Pinhoe? I'm sure those who "would love to buy a reasonably priced house" would be urging them on, so they could pick up one for little more than the cost of building plus normal OH&P, but no-one would be selling.
B, for sure, house prices are largely driven by the availability of credit; the entire windfall gain is banked by whoever owned the land at the time planning is granted; and if house prices crashed, developers would moth ball all their projects, but so what?
Without people being willing to buy those houses, nobody would want to build them, would they? The NIMBY attitude towards developers is like people who drive round in cars who castigate the big oil companies.
I fail to see how developers can force people to buy their houses, there is clearly demand for them (the fact that the owner of the land gets the windfall gain and not 'the community' and certainly not the people who buy them is a separate issue).
Bayard,
How is it "developer led"? Where is the evidence that developers don't want to build as many houses as they can?
Unless you have massive collusion (and there's too many players for that), someone is going to choose to just create a building firm, build thousands of houses for a few years and then clear off to sit in the sun for the rest of their life.
JT, slightly o/t but large home builders are a cartel.
Although they want to get as much planning as possible, their income from planning gains and increases in underlying land values vastly outweighs their profits from actually building homes (in the good years, at least, which is most of them).
We observed that in 2008 and 2009, homebuilders mothballed all their projects because they were waiting for land values to bounce back, and they prefer to dribble new houses on to the market than build as much as they can as quickly as possible.
This is nothing that LVT wouldn't sort out of course!
"I fail to see how developers can force people to buy their houses, there is clearly demand for them"
The demand would be there, whether the houses were selling for current prices or cost-of-build-plus-OH&P. The point I am making is that allowing 450 houses to be built in Pinhoe makes no difference to the selling prices of houses in the Pinhoe area, so that people who "would love to buy a reasonably priced house" will be just as priced out afterwards as before.
It's not as if there aren't plenty of houses of just the type that is likely to be built at Old Park Farm already on the market:
http://www.primelocation.com/uk-property-for-sale/search/path/uk.england.devon.pinhoe/?ls=0
"How is it "developer led"?"
No-one is saying "we need houses here" and zoning that land for residential use. What happens is that a developer buys land, any land, and applies for permission to build houses on it. Everyone else gets Hobson's Choice.
B, agreed, new construction has surprisingly little impact on house prices once a bubble is underway (see Spain, Ireland) unless it is long term and constant (parts of USA without zoning laws, the UK in 1950s and 1960s, Germany, etc). And 450 houses against a population of 120,000 are a drop in the ocean.
B, but as to the last part, you could say that for just about anything. Do women ring up Philip Green and tell him what kind of clothes they want to buy, or does he guess what might sell this year, have it manufactured and stick in the racks? So I don't see the relevance.
The relevance is that it would be as incorrect for Peter Green to say that people buy his clothes because they need clothes as it is for the developers to say that people buy their houses because they need houses. There are plenty of alternatives of the same quality and price on the market already.
B, I'm not sure what the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist has to do with it, but assuming he were in the clothes business, people would buy his clothes because a) people need clothes and b) they prefer his clothes ever so slightly to other people's clothes.
There are indeed 25 million other houses in the UK, a small percentage of which are for sale, but once you are tied to a particular suburb of a particular town where you have your job, where your kids go to school, where your friends and family live etc, then you are glad if your choice is widened, even if it is ever so slightly, a choice of one from eleven is always better than a choice of one from ten (even if the houses themselves are more or less identical).
Bloody hell, that dates me.
Yes, but you are going to be considerably less glad than those who view has changed are going to be sad. The sum of human happiness will have decreased.
Anyway, I have a new business idea:
With OwnTheView.com you can protect your cherished views for ever! Can you afford not to?
Basically, I would buy up farms that might possibly get planning permission for housing at agricultural rates, then sell them to the local NIMBYs, for whom I would form a trust. The trust rents the farm to a tenant farmer, so the NIMBYs get an income, I take a commission on the deal and everyone is happy.
B, the sum total of human happiness is increased if new houses are built (consider: it would be reduced if we demolished the houses currently standing at the edge).
As to your business idea, that is brilliant. When do we start?
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