From The FT:
Sir, Claims by the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the National Trust (Letters, August 25 and 30) that the government’s proposed planning reforms pose a serious threat to the countryside are baseless scaremongering.
If we were to build 250,000 homes a year for the next 25 years, we would largely solve England’s housing supply crisis, help make housing more affordable and generate local economic activity and jobs in the process. Yet even if a much higher proportion of these homes were built on greenfield land than over the last decade, after 25 years they would cover only 1 per cent of England’s land area. The anti-development CPRE and National Trust put protecting every blade of grass ahead of providing decent homes and our economic well-being.
It is primarily younger people who will pay the price of protecting this 1 per cent...
John Stewart, Director of Economic Affairs, Home Builders Federation
Thursday 1 September 2011
Reader's Letter Of The Day
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31 comments:
You would think that Google maps Satellite image would give people a fresh perspective. Take the Dale Farm Essex Controversy (from a planning permision perspective) 100 yards SE from the site there is larger plots of land set aside for car parks. It puts things into perspective. The way land is used in this country is insane. Lots of green plots on google earth are neither wild countryside nor being farmed. Come to think of it most modern dwellings are the footprint of half a dozen car parking spaces.
Unfortunately, this letter is from a memebr of the Housebuilders' Federation and most people's reaction will be "he would say that, wouldn't he" (which is probably the same reaction as they would have to the CPRE's special pleading, to be fair).
I think he would be better pointing out how much "Green Belt" land is actually "brownfield" like Dale Farm mentioned above.
D, on the subject of carparks, there is a ridiculous prejudice (to add to all the others) against putting car parks under supermarkets etc, instead of beside them. God knows how much valuable building land is thus wasted in car parks.
Den, good example. The problem with the 'travellers' is not the amount of land they occupy (it's negligible) but that they are, by all accounts, the neighbours from Hell.
B, sure he's from the HBF but his facts are spot on accurate, make of them what you will. Is there really a prejudice against underground car parks? I didn't know that.
He may represent a vested interest, but it's a good letter.
I think the local residents, too, have a "vested interest" but (to commies) their letters are bad.
AKH, ta.
Anon,
a) Do you own a house in your area?
b) Do you object to other people owning houses in your area? If so, do you think that other people object to your house?
c) Would you be willing to have your house demolished to protect the Hallow Greenbelt?
d) Isn't it more the case that the NIMBYs like you are the real Commies here, as they want to impose their own Five Year Plans on everybody else for their own enrichment, and to hell with the free markets and the little people?
"Is there really a prejudice against underground car parks? I didn't know that."
Possibly I'm over extrapolating, but there was in the case of the only supermarket/carpark planning matter I was involved in and how many car parks have you come across that are under supermarkets?
Sainsburys in Colliers Wood London IIRR.
AC1
BTW. According to Anonymong, Adam Smith is now a commie?!?
B, under Waitrose at the end of my road, M&S in Loughton and there is/was a Wm Morrison's in Bradford which had a roof top car park.
AC1, yes, and home builders are all Commies as well, trying to make money and provide things that people want and are prepared to pay for. Pah!
Yes I would expect them in inner cities/Greater London where land is at a premium. ISTR one under Sainsbury's Kensington as well. But they'd be just as worthwile in yer average market town...
...after 25 years they would cover only 1 per cent of England’s land area...
Given that the entire road system in this country covers less than 1.5%, that is a huge, huge area. We're talking about enough homes to house 20M people for christs sake. What would the country look like with that sort of increase? Be worth the drop in house prices do you think?
And just what sort of 'economic well-being' would you have based on a house building boom anyway. It'd be 2007 all over again.
WTF, existing homes and gardens and associated roads cover about 3.5% of UK by surface area.
"Be worth the drop in house prices do you think? "
The cold heartedness of you NIMBY baby boomers amazes me. If you were starting again, and you knew it costs £80,000 to build a nice semi, with all the trimmings but the NIMBYs had deliberately and calculatingly pushed the price up to £180,000, what would your opinion be then?
Go and have a think about that, answer the questions I directed at Anon and then get back to me, eh?
Mark: I've rented all my life, because I've never earned enough to buy. I couldn't even afford an 80k house right now.
There is more to quality of life than convenient house prices, and having no limits to the levels of population growth we've seen in this country for the last 15 years is madness. A purely free-market approach to things would just have the end result that growth would only stop when it's no better to live here than any other country in the world, and the place woud be a complete 3rd world shithole at that point.
You think I'm just a NIMBY for not wanting things to go that far?
WTF, ah "population growth", the thorny chestnut. I'm no big fan of the NuLab/EU inspired 'open the floodgates' approach to immigration, no sir, but if you look at the bigger picture, increasing life expectancies and lower mortality rates overall have contributed far more to population growth over the last sixty years.
That said, nobody likes the sound of 'overcrowding', but this is largely a perception induced by the fact that 60 million of us are squidged onto 6% of the surface area and 94% is more or less uninhabited. it has little to do with the absolute population figure.
Think about it, if you own an acre of land and you and your extended family, wife, children and grandchildren all live in one small house at one end, that's pretty crowded. But how does your perception change if you say to your son and his kids "OK, build your own house next door and move into it with your kids" and the same to your daughter etc?
Would it not feel a darn sigh less crowded if you had three houses to share with a large garden each rather than just the one small house and an absolutely massive garden? How in any way would that 'put pressure on local services' seeing as it's the same number of people in the same area? Would this reduce or add to your quality of life?
Mark: you're not allowing for the fact that people need to be fed. Lots of space to live would be very nice indeed (I'd just love a bit of land of my own), but the parts of the country that aren't filled with buildings do have some, rather crucial, uses.
It may be infra-dig to think about the nation as a while these days (rather than just the libertarian individual or the statist special interest group) but it'll eventually be a necessity, things can't keep going on as they are for ever and we need to allow for that. As the western world stagnates culturally and our leaders busily regulate the productive sector to death, it would really pay us to think about basic things like food security - we might find we need it someday.
Bayard:
I think Sainsbury's Kensington has a multistorey carpark, definitely ground level and one level above, not sure about under. There's one beneath Waitrose Finchley Road. I believe lots of inner London upper class apartment blocks also have private garages beneath (e.g. County Hall)
It is slightly more complex than 'Its just 1% of the total area' though isn't it?
Its more a case of 'Lots of people want to live in the same places and if we just build more and more houses in those places, there won't be anything but houses fairly soon'.
After all no-one's planning to concrete over the Lake District, or Dartmoor, or the Dales, or Salisbury Plain. Thats a lot of area, 1% of which won't be built on, ever. Ergo its considerably more than 1% in (say) Kent, or wherever people do want to live.
Equally its not that there aren't enough houses, its that they're in the wrong places. They were knocking down houses in Northern towns not long ago. You can buy a house for peanuts in some places. But who wants to live there? They all want to live in the SE, or within commuting distance of London. So thats where the pressure to build is the greatest, and where demand (if fulfilled) would cover considerably more than 1% of the area in any given location.
WTF, come off it, the efficiency of the economy and agriculture is such that we are still perfectly capable of feeding ourselves (the UK is more or less self-sufficient in food, despite NIMBY restrictions on green houses and stupid EU rules), I've covered this one dozens of time, if we use up one per cent of existing farmland, it's no big deal.
S: if we just build more and more houses in those places, there won't be anything but houses fairly soon'.
So? It's more environmentally efficient for people in towns and cities? If it were true that everybody wants to live in the South East (and it isn't), it would still be at a much lower density than London is now and they can demolish some towns and cities elsewhere to give the farmers a free run
It's not what they do but the way that they do it - what the HBF wants to be able to build is lots of low-density estates with four-bed houses on them in the midst of "the countryside", because that's where the biggest profit is. They want to build on the green belt, precisely because it is the green belt, because they can then pull the ladder up after them and say to their prospective purchasers "Look, here is your house, surrounded by countryside, which no one is going to build on, because it's the green belt". It's not so much that everyone wants to live near London, it's more that everyone wants to live in the countryside near London. People who just want to live in or near London can buy a nice flat in one of the many blocks that have been and are being built in and around London, without the CPRE or any NIMBYs getting their knickers in a twist.
And for the umpteenth time, Mr HBF Spokesman, building lots of houses doesn't make them any cheaper - look at Ireland, with its thousands of unsold expensive houses.
look at Ireland, with its thousands of unsold expensive houses.
LVT would soon solve that problem - the builders would sell them cheap to avoid having to pay the tax themselves.
B: "building lots of houses doesn't make them any cheaper"
Once a price bubble gets going, building lots of houses has surprisingly little effect, that is true. But in the longer term, it does very much have an effect, i.e. house prices in Ireland are falling much faster than in the UK. The same is observed in US states, some have strict zoning laws, some have no zoning laws at all, the former had price bubbles, the latter not so much.
It's not a coincidence that the two big house price bubbles happened during the period when there was a deliberate and calculated under-supply of new housing.
The fact that the house builders want to make a profit is irrelevant, so do the NIMBYs and so do the farmers, so what? It's time we stuck up for the young people a bit more who are paying the price of all this.
Ed, yes of course, there's barely an economic problem where LVT wouldn't help :-)
The LVT does tend to encourage good use of Land via Multi-story flats for those who want to live in high demand areas.
It just means that the demand is paid to the land owner (the citizens) and not privatised.
last was by ac1
"The fact that the house builders want to make a profit is irrelevant"
You are wilfully misunderstanding me there. What I am saying is that the type of housing that the HBF want to build is not the type that is going to solve any housing or price problems. The HBF don't want prices to come down, far from it, they want prices to stay as high as possible and they very much want to keep the green belt for the reasons I outlined above.
"It's time we stuck up for the young people a bit more who are paying the price of all this."
How many young people can afford a four bedroom detached house with double garage?
Mark, you are letting your dislike of the green belt and NIMBYs obscure the fact that the main reason that we have high prices across the board and not just in the green belt and other NIMBY-infested areas is to do with economics, bubbles and the low cost of renting money. Higher interest rates would sort much of these problems out almost immediately and LVT would sort out the rest.
B, why shouldn't builders build 4-bed detached houses in the countryside, if that's what people want? (To be honest, I live in a 4-bed detached house in a London commuter suburb in the HGB and it is very pleasant indeed, so what gives me the right to deny others this pleasantness?)
What you say is a bit like saying "We should prevent BMW from making posh expensive cars because this doesn't help poor people to buy a car."
In any event, a house is a house is a house, maybe our young couple can't afford such an 'executive villa', but at least they can buy the three-bed semi when its current occupants trade up; and the poor couple now in a one-bed flat can trade up to the two-bed flat vacated by the couple who've moved up to the three-bed semi, and so on. It's all good stuff.
Yes of course sensible interest rates and LVT would sort most of this out, the original letter was simply about the maths of the Hallowed Green Belt.
"B, why shouldn't builders build 4-bed detached houses in the countryside, if that's what people want?"
Mark, by the same token, why shouldn't builders be prevented from building 4-bed detached houses in the countryside, if that's what people don't want? The desire to live in a four bed house in the countryside as opposed to a four-bed flat in the city is no more valid than the desire not to have a four-bed house built next to you in the countryside. They are both simply preferences.
"the original letter was simply about the maths of the Hallowed Green Belt"
Well, no it wasn't. It was a plea for the HBF to be able to build more houses on greenfield sites. I fail to see how a house on a greenfield site solves the current house price and house supply issues better than a house built on a brownfield site.
B: " why shouldn't builders be prevented from building 4-bed detached houses in the countryside, if that's what people don't want?"
I'll tell you why, it's because the people doing the complaining are those who own 4-bed detached houses in the countryside themselves. And they don't own the land on which the new houses would be built either. F-ing hypocrites. If they were really against such houses, then let them do the decent thing and demolish their own houses first.
It's like these insufferable snobs who go on holiday and complain about all the tourists. Or car drivers who complain about all the traffic. Or train passengers who complain about over-crowding.
Green, brown, yeah yeah, developing brownfield is referred to as "garden grabbing" in NIMBY circles. Sure, it's far better to use existing developed areas as efficiently as possible (in which LVT would help, of course), but it is not without problems either.
"And they don't own the land on which the new houses would be built either."
Neither do the prospective purchasers of these houses, so that makes them equal in my book. One lot think it would be nicer for them to live in the countryside and the other lot think it would be nicer for the first lot not to live in the countryside. The prospective purchasers are not being deprived of a house, they are just being deprived of a nicer house than the one they've got, at the expense of the second lot who are being deprived of some of the niceness of their existing house and whilst the first lot are paying extra to have a nicer house, the second lot aren't being compensated by having the niceness of their houses reduced.
I know you have some huge conspiracy theory about NIMBYs having an overarching plan to keep house prices high by depriving the nation of building land, but AFAICS in 90% of the case or more it a simple case of people objecting to what they see as their quality of life being reduced without any compensation, which seems a perfectly rational reaction to me.
B, their compensation would be their LVT bill goes down accordingly. Or if the new houses don't get built, the NIMBYs end up paying more.
"Rational" is a red herring, if you spot an old lady fumbling with her purse, the "rational" thing to do is to grab it and run. There is an overriding thing called 'morality'.
Yes, but ATM we don't have LVT. I know this is one of things on a long list that would be vastly improved by LVT (as I said above), but currently I don't blame the NIMBYs. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
As for morality, where is the morality in seeking to improve your quality of life at the expense of someone else's?
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