Garden grabbing

There was an article in yesterday's Times in which the RHS bemoaned the number of people who concrete over their front gardens for parking spaces, the issues being, it reduces 'biodiversity' (I'm not sure what that is, but from the context I'm guessing it's A Good Thing) and that it increases the risk of flooding (water runs off rather than soaking into the ground). Fair enough - and they provide a simple solution - if you want to park cars in your front garden, then just reinforce the area, making it hard enough to park cars on, but allowing grass to continue growing. All good stuff.

Then of course, they smuggle in the statistics that "30,000 gardens are lost to development every year ... In 1997, 11 per cent of housing developments were on land already classified as residential, but by 2006 this had grown to 22 per cent".

That 30,000 figure has to be seen in context of there being 25 million homes in the UK, so it's not a huge figure, and the percentage increase is meaningless - maybe the number of housing developments has halved? Maybe the housing developments on existing residential land tend to be far smaller?

This is all apparently a problem because "In towns and cities, the area of land used as gardens and other green space can be crucial to the survival of wild animals and plants."

Great, because there is a simple solution to this as well - instead of encouraging development on 'brownfield' sites (which includes homes with large garden on to which you can squeeze a block of flats) - allow towns and cities to expand instead - that way everybody gets a bigger garden, there's more biodiversity, everybody wins!

UPDATE: in reply to the comment by Longrider"It hasn't happened yet, but given sufficient pressure and developers will be encouraged to use compulsory purchase to force garden owners to relinquish them", this is AFAICS a total urban myth put about by patron saint of NIMBYs and sworn enemy of the land tax movement, Caroline Spelman MP (Con, Meriden) who claimed that "Worse could be to come, with even harsher planning regulations on the way and the prospect of compulsory purchase of gardens for 'social' purposes."

Does anybody have any real life examples of this happening? The NIMBYs oppose it just as vehemently when a neighbour perfectly voluntarily decides to sell his home and large garden to build a block of flats. If you are concerned about "property rights"', then which right is more important - one landowner's right to replace his house with a block of flats; or a neighbouring landowner's right to prevent him from doing so? The best way to find a compromise between these competing 'rights' is land value tax, but that's another topic.

The article also quotes the Tories as saying "Suburban neighbourhoods risk being 'over-developed' through a proliferation of 'one-bedroom pokey flats' instead of family homes built with sufficient space for parking and a garden, the shadow minister warned."

I couldn't agree more - but the reason for this is because the NIMBYs don't just oppose more concentrated development of urban areas; they don't want to allow people to build on a single square inch of the Hallowed Green Belt either. So where exactly are those 'family homes' going to be built?