From The Westmoreland Gazette:
ANGRY Grange-over-Sands and Allithwaite residents held up placards and chanted their disgust at plans to build more housing in the towns. Cars beeped their approval to the protesters as they drove by Victoria Hall on Main Street, where dozens of people were gathered...
They were opposing aspects of South Lakeland District Council’s land allocations document, which identifies where hundreds of houses could be developed over the next 15 years. Their fears were over the increased flood risk of new houses, more traffic in towns which they say are already struggling to cope, and the effect more housing could have on tourism, among other concerns.
One set of residents protesting were the Grange Fell Action Group, who were chanting ‘Hands off Grange Fell’ during the rally. The group opposes an SLDC potential site to build up to 36 houses on Spring Bank, which consists of two farms behind the Grange Fell Bed and Breakfast on Grange Fell Road...
As APILN says, "You could hide an airport in the area and nobody would notice":
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Tuesday, 22 February 2011
NIMBYs Of The Week
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30 comments:
C'mon MW, sorry but I can't believe you are serious?
Who is it living in Grange over Sands, them or you?
We, in Witney, don't want a £17m 'link' road - but we're going to get it!
Localism?
WFW, they are and I'm not.
But wherever I have lived, I have never, ever signed one of these stupid petitions. I live in a house which some NIMBYs opposed when it was built (and I don't apologise for that), and I use roads, railways and airports which some NIMBYs opposed when they were built (and I don't apologise for that either).
What goes around comes around, live and let live and all that.
In which case, MW, if it is "live and let live" then surely whatever decision the majority of the people in Grange over Sands take, it is their decision and not the concern of anyone else?
Not attempting to be argumentative, or offensive, you understand - just playing Devil's Advocate........
Its been a boring day watching England squeeze a 'win' over the Netherlands :)
WFW, why do NIMBYs see fit to award themselves rights over other people's land or other people's decisions?
Do you think that all the present and future residents of Witney solemnly agree never to use the new link road? Or will a lot of them actually find it quite handy?
If we went back and demolished every house, building and power station which any NIMBY had originally opposed and tore up every road and railway line to which any NIMBY anywhere objects, then we'd be right back to the Dark Ages.
It's not simply a matter of space.
Apparently we have an ageing population. For decades we've had a declining birth rate among indiginous people. The population is increasing because of immigration and the birth rate amongst immigrants.
We are now facing unprecedented cuts in public services whilst pressures mount on infrastructure.
In a sane country there wouldn't be the need for increased housing.
In WW2 Churchill lost sleep over what the U boats were doing to our food supplies - the British population would have been unable to feed itself on its own produce then. It certainly wouldn't be able to do it now, but that is what we are likely to face with global competition for food increasing as it is.
Do we just keep building houses ?
We all know their unaffordability is down to baby boomers hogging the market.
But do not the majority of those who live in a community not have the right to have that majority decision upheld? Are not those imposing this decision on the community of Grange over Sands not imposing the decision to build homes not imposing their decision over the rights of a cummunity's land and the community's decision?
As it happens, with the Witney link road, an alternative version costing just £3/4million exists, but is ignored by OCC..and the fact the £17million version connects right opposite the entrance to a Sainsburys and a road that is like a carpark 'come going-home' time - and can have a queue of upto a mile at any other time of day.......?
Your last point accepted though.... :)
But at the end of the day, surely the majority decision of a community should be 'sovereign'? Is that the object of Cameron's BullS**t?
EK: "We all know their unaffordability is down to baby boomers hogging the market."
Partly, yes, but mainly due to reckless lending and because we tax incomes and not land values.
I doubt there will be 'unprecedented cuts in local services' as half what the government spends is complete crap and nothing to do with welfare or public services.
As to food security, you mentioned that a few posts ago and I responded as follows:
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. [Total area of homes and gardens = 3.5% of UK surface area, total area of roads and railways = 2% of UK surface area]
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?
---------------
Infrastructure = we can build as much as we need.
WFW, it's not the 'community's land', though, is it?
If they all want to club together and buy the all the land from the farmers and refuse to build on it, then good luck to them, I don't see a problem if they refuse to sell to a developer.
If in doubt, we should go with a majority decision, BUT not when the cosy home owning majority are trampling on the rights of others, and those are rights which that self-same majority take for granted (i.e. the right to own a home).
Until I hear about NIMBYs asking for their own houses to be demollished and going off to live in tents, I refuse to take them seriously.
I am vehemently pro-localist. I think that if these weird small towns want to preserve themselves in aspic then good for them. With real localism some places would vote for no development and others would vote for urbanisation. Existing cities would probably vote for an increase in density as have Manchester and Birmingham amongst others.
If people are willing to pay a premium to live in one of these awful blue-rinse towns like Witney they more fool them.
BE, it is almost inconceivable that you would ever get a majority voting for more development, particularly as those that oppose it are always vociferously against it, but those like me who aren't bothered either way are not going to actively campaign for more development.
Why not have proper localism where everybody can do what he likes on his own bit of land? You can't get much more local than that!
MW, First two paras - good point :) but:
When a householder wishes to say extend he/she has to apply for permission and notices are sent to surrounding properties for views/objections. If sufficient/reasonable objections are received, invariably permission is refused.
Cannot begin to understand the logic behind your last para.
Are not those imposing the building of these homes not 'trampling over the rights' of those already there to enjoy the 'serenity/peace etc that they already enjoy?
BE: "Blue-rinse" Witney may be (unfortunately) but 'I' pay no premium for living here. We have one of the lowest CT's in the land; free public parking - and a few 'numpties' in charge of the local authorities, District and County - but hey, you can't have everything..... :)
WFW, your example with the extensions just highlights the hypocrisy of Home-Owner-ist cartell behaviour - a lot of people would like to extend their OWN home but they object when other people want to extend THEIR home.
Look, there are two groups here:
a) Home owners, who want to hog everything for themselves in order to keep prices high.
b) Young people who are actively squeezed out of the market and who have to pay two or three times as much for a house as it costs to build.
It may well be that the amenity value lost by group (a) is worth a few hundred pounds a year, but the extra price that group (b) are supposed to pay is five or ten thousand pounds a year on their mortgage.
-------------------------------
To give you an analogy. Imagine the Titanic sinks and a couple of home-owners grab the first lifeboat - they would merrily sail off in it and leave others to drown because they like to enjoy the peace and quiet and eat all the provisions themselves.
Sorry, but am unable to accept your reasoning.
If one accepts the idea that 'a majority view rules' then those wishing to extend their own home must accept objections to their plans in the same manner as anyone else? They may well object, but if they accept majority decisions on others then they must accept majority decisions affecting themselves?
At the same time I accept the propositions you put forward in (a) and (b) - but then this is something for discussion by those affected and surely it is not up to those of us not involved in the local problem to arbitrarily pass judgement? Is it not up to those involved to agree a solution arrived at by a majority vote?
Also, if those that wish to live in an area of what you intimate would result in 'inflated prices' not their decision and therefore their responsibility to accumulate the necessary finance so to do? Market forces?
I have to say I believe your 'Titanic' example totally unreasonable as you are combining two entirely different situations - in the example you give the desire to help save lives can hardly be equated with the wish to maintain an environement in which one lives.
WFW: "Also, if those that wish to live in an area of what you intimate would result in 'inflated prices' not their decision and therefore their responsibility to accumulate the necessary finance so to do? Market forces?"
Yeah, but there are NIMBYs all over the UK and so anywhere worth living, houses cost at least twice as much to buy as to build, purely because of the reckless lending and scarcity value. And in Witney no doubt four times as much.
So the NIMBYs are harnessing 'market forces' by artificially restricting supply to push up prices - while being completely immune from these market forces themselves, as there is no Land Value Tax, which would at least level the playing field - to screw money out of younger generations.
So you might as well say to all the younger people "If you don't want to hand over all your net income for the next thirty years in mortgage payments or rent, you can fuck off abroad OR accept that you have to live in an area of high unemployment. In which case you are a scrounger and you can fuck off abroad".
Particularly sickening is when older people say this, who could buy a house for a sensible price (three times annual salary, let's say) back in the 1950s or 1960s when we were happily building 400,000 new homes a year AND we had Domestic Rates and Schedule A taxation.
WFW,
We, in Witney, don't want a £17m 'link' road - but we're going to get it!
Localism?
If you can decide what roads go through your area, I don't see why the people of Didcot shouldn't be able to decide whether they should have cooling towers blighting their view.
This really is arrant knee-jerk NIMBYism. The Grange Fell site could be tucked into a corner (Grange Fell Road and Spring Bank Road) of one of the two farms mentioned, with existing houses on two sides and you'd hardly notice. (You can get some idea of the area the new estate will take by counting the existing houses - it's not going to be very large.) As for "the effect more housing could have on tourism," I doubt whether many tourists come to visit this part of Grange-over-Sands. And "hundreds of houses could be developed over the next 15 years" probably means a figure between one and two hundred (if it was more, they would say "over two hundred", etc.) which works out at 10-12 houses a year. South Lakeland DC has a population of 104,000, which is roughly 35,000 houses, so we are looking at an increase of 0.06%.
However, I suspect that GoS is prime retirement country and all those pensioners have nothing better to do with their time. Bored pensioners, the scourge of modern society.
JT, WFW has already said that the new road is a colossal waste of money and that they are against that, rather than the road itself. I suspect that, in these times of cuts, many County Surveyors are trying to get as much money earmarked for road schemes as possible to prevent any of their staff being cut, "keeping the spend bouyant" in the jargon.
B, building and maintaining roads is one of the few things that the government can do which actually makes a profit (via fuel duty etc).
For sure, there must be some roads or bridges somewhere which, with the benefit of hindsight, weren't worth building, but usually society adapts to the new road and all the benefits (and drawbacks) it brings.
Give it five or ten years and ask people in the area whether they'd be happy for the road to be magicked away again and £17m to be magicked back into the state's coffers and I think you'll find they prefer the road.
It's not about space: the residents are just wary of a string of people everyday knocking on the door to ask directions to the airport (that they can't find).
I'll get my coat...
"more traffic in towns which they say are already struggling to cope"
I thought that in general when more houses were built you end up with more roads leading to the same places unless the planners are on crack of course.
Witney - bet it ain't cheap to buy a house there though!
"it is almost inconceivable that you would ever get a majority voting for more development"
Except when towns stagnate and residents see other places booming.
Mark, the problem with the ideologically pure idea of allowing people to do what they like with their land is that almost any development starts to affect other people's land. There is a very good libertarian argument to have some form of planning permission or zoning system in place to make sure people don't start building sewage treatment plants in residential areas, or blocking out people's light.
However at the moment I agree that the system is too heavily skewed in favour of the anti-development brigade.
That is why I support Mr Pickles' deregulation and localism plans.
BE, I admit balancing interests is a nigh impossible problem and 'zoning' seems like a fair compromise BUT the NIMBYs will still protest when the zone in which you are allowed to build is extended by a few yards.
The best way of matching gains and losses is (of course) via LVT - if new development really reduces amenity value (and it usually doesn't, or else rents in towns and cities would be lower than in the countryside, which is clearly not true) then people's tax bills would go down to compensate.
And of course, with LVT, there'd be more 'right sizing' so there'd be little need for new construction anyway, so the problem melts away.
PS, sewage plants are a red herring; all buildings need access to sewage plants, and for practical reasons, they have to be built in certain areas (near the bottom of valleys) and require huge amounts of space, so the chances of you next door neighbour wanting to build one in the middle of a residential area are less than zero. Ditto glue factories, pig farms etc.
PPS, The Morbidly Obese One has produced a NIMBYs' Charter, it will kill new development stone dead, as it was intended.
Blue Eyes,
"it is almost inconceivable that you would ever get a majority voting for more development"
Except when towns stagnate and residents see other places booming.
The problem is that this doesn't always work because many people don't live where they work. Towns like Henley and Marlborough are largely dormitories for people working elsewhere (Reading and Swindon respectively).
When you had people working near where they lived (pretty much the case until the car became reliable in the late 80s) they had an incentive to encourage development. That despite the downsides, they got richer.
The incentive for these people now is to protect their house prices which means not having any houses built. Normally under the guise of "damaging the historic character" (like the BMW on the drive would have been there in a Constable painting).
Give it five or ten years and ask people in the area whether they'd be happy for the road to be magicked away again and £17m to be magicked back into the state's coffers and I think you'll find they prefer the road.
I think you'll find they would have preferred the £3/4M version to the £17M one, assuming that they both do the same job. (see WFW's 3rd comment)
B, fair point, a lot of these projects go mysteriously over budget, but that's my planning minister Neil Craig's department.
But we are completely o/t here. The NIMBYs would oppose a new road even if Bill Gates offered to pay for it out of petty cash.
"The incentive for these people now is to protect their house prices which means not having any houses built. Normally under the guise of "damaging the historic character" (like the BMW on the drive would have been there in a Constable painting)."
Funnily enough, when a developer actually bothers to make the new houses look something like the old ones and doesn't just propose a Nowheresville estate of four-bed double garagers, there is a lot less opposition and the development usually goes through. So successful has this tactic been in West Dorset that the diehard NIMBYs are complaining about its use, presumably because it shows up how few people really care about newts, roads, schools etc. as opposed to aesthetics.
B, logic tells us that this is not true, or else home builders would go back to the good old days of dispensing with the services of architects and just building something that looks like everything else, only a little bit better internally.
And that's not ironic by the way, most of the Victorian/Edwardian terraces in London look exactly the same, subject to incredibly subtle variations within any borough - you can walk from the old centres (near the High Street, the station) and see how standards improved gradually between mid-1800s (near the centre) and early 1900s (five or ten minutes' walk away); then changed markedly in the 1930s (semis, not terraces); then plummeted rapidly (1960s high rises) and then scraped the barrel (Barratt's home at the edge of town).
The bits that were bombed in WW2 are the joker in the pack, see also 'regeneration'.
I'd disagree with that. High house prices suit the developers just fine and I'm sure that if planning restrictions were relaxed, the big boys would control the supply of development land coming on the market to prop up prices like any cartel. Your house-builder OTOH, doesn't have to worry about planning permission, he buys the land with the PP already in place, so he is going to be interested in putting up something that maximises his profit, which is lots of houses which are almost identical, unless there are restrictions in the PP which make him do something different, which restrictions presumably impact on the selling price of the plots from the developer. (Yes, I know the builder and developer are often one and the same, but the same still applies, AFAICS.)
B: "High house prices suit the developers just fine"
Yeah, but it's the Home-Owner-Ist coalition which wants and causes high house prices, and the people-who-make-windfall-gains-on-getting-PP (as distinct from the actual builders) just piggy back onto that.
"The big boys would control the supply of development land coming on the market to prop up prices like any cartel."
Yet another problem which LVT would solve - it would disincentivise/punish landbanking-cartel behaviour, but more importantly disincentivise/punish NIMBY-cartel behaviour.
"lots of houses which are almost identical"
What's wrong with having lots of similar buildings? Hence my example of Victorian/Edwardian terraces = lovely. Or most towns abroad, esp. Italy = lovely not DESPITE but BECAUSE all the buildings are very similar.
Conversely, rows of 1960s pre-fab concrete houses = ugly. It's the design of the buildings and NOT the homogeneity which is depressing.
"What's wrong with having lots of similar buildings?"
As you say, it's not the similarity to each other that is ugly, it's the similarity to every other house of that type in the land. I'm thinking here of developments on the edge of existing villages, where there is a sharp contrast both in appearance and layout between the existing C18th and C19th houses and the four bedroom double garagers that make up most estates. In GoS, however, all the surrounding houses are more or less that type already, give or take a garage, so more of the same would not make any difference.
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