Prince Philip had a very fine and fitting send off. Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
Prince Philip had a very fine and fitting send off. Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
My prediction is that the popularity of this policy will nosedive the first time a school pupil misses an emergency call from a parent and vice versa. I can see the tabloid headlines in my head. I don't mean to be grisly but I can think of a hundred legitimate reasons why a pupil might need to look at their phone for things other than entertainment. A policy this comprehensive just seems to be asking for trouble
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
I accept the romanticised idealism of the "suburban" lifestyle though it now comes with a dependency on car ownership in other parts of the world. The sprawling estates @Leon criticises are the result of having land to spare which isn't the case in London and other parts of the world.
Pre-Covid, the notion was everyone needed "access" to public transport, shops and the like but the pandemic has perhaps changed perceptions. It's less important to be near a station if you aren't commuting and less important to be near shops with home delivery and online shopping.
In East London, there's clearly no money for developers to put suburban estates onto brownfield sites. The demographic doesn't support that - the young who dominate round here want a place to live to start - not a "forever" home (that comes later and elsewhere) but a place to call home, a start. Pre pandemic, it was analogous to what you see in Hong Kong, basically a place to store clothes and sleep while social life (often based round work) meant eating out after work before the journey home on the MRT.
Now, I just wonder - you see on here those who want that life style back but is it coming back? That doesn't mean people don't need four walls and a roof they can call home but perhaps the simple "box" is no longer as attractive an option as it was.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune (except for being victorian)
A fairly recent study showed a very clear inverse correlation between the amount of traffic on a road annd the closeness of friendships on that road. Matches my observations...
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune (except for being victorian)
A fairly recent study showed a very clear inverse correlation between the amount of traffic on a road annd the closeness of friendships on that road. Matches my observations...
Yep. That is one reason suburban estates are popular compared to urban housing for families.
Prince Philip had a very fine and fitting send off. Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune (except for being victorian)
A fairly recent study showed a very clear inverse correlation between the amount of traffic on a road annd the closeness of friendships on that road. Matches my observations...
Yep. That is one reason suburban estates are popular compared to urban housing for families.
But urban housing can work too. It just takes a bit more thought to get it right. Timekeepers' Square in Salford is a good example.
My prediction is that the popularity of this policy will nosedive the first time a school pupil misses an emergency call from a parent and vice versa. I can see the tabloid headlines in my head. I don't mean to be grisly but I can think of a hundred legitimate reasons why a pupil might need to look at their phone for things other than entertainment. A policy this comprehensive just seems to be asking for trouble
Very few schools allow pupils to take calls on their phones. In an emergency, parents should ring the school, or the school will ring them.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune (except for being victorian)
A fairly recent study showed a very clear inverse correlation between the amount of traffic on a road annd the closeness of friendships on that road. Matches my observations...
Yep. That is one reason suburban estates are popular compared to urban housing for families.
But urban housing can work too. It just takes a bit more thought to get it right. Timekeepers' Square in Salford is a good example.
Sure, urban apartments are popular with European immigrants, because that is how they live, and also with childless UK couples. Given the choice though, and as immigrants assimilate to British values, they too want a slice of suburbia.
Prince Philip had a very fine and fitting send off. Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
For once, I actually agree with Foxy and disagree with your good self. It had to happen at some point!
Dominic Sandbrook explores this in his excellent post-war history books: the elites detest what they see as the mundane bourgeois nature of the suburbs, and I suspect also because they see it as a breeding ground for conservative politics, but for most people a detached house with a garden in a pleasant surburb is their dream.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
Could the struggle to sell Vauxhall/Battersea flats have anything to do with the fact that they seem to comprise the ugliest new housing stock in the entire country?
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
(See also, Stratford).
That’s a failure of planning (and of design).
I think it might also be something to do with the prices. See Nine Elms (Battersea), for example:
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune (except for being victorian)
A fairly recent study showed a very clear inverse correlation between the amount of traffic on a road annd the closeness of friendships on that road. Matches my observations...
Yep. That is one reason suburban estates are popular compared to urban housing for families.
Yet BTL is wrecking settled suburban communities in outer London as quite ordinary terraced or semi houses are turned into flats or bedsits or HMOs with a transient population and so the next down-market swiss cottage is born (although the last time I returned to the scene of my first bedsits, big money appeared to be pushing NW6 in the other direction)
Busy. Plenty of people taking advantage of the sunshine to stroll around town or sit at an outside table for something to eat or drink. Shops doing steady trade, but having to limit numbers.
The bell of the Minster was tolling for Prince Philip; we stood outside the Minster to observe the minute's silence.
Did a bit of shopping, stopped off for coffee and cake. Almost a normal Saturday.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
Could the struggle to sell Vauxhall/Battersea flats have anything to do with the fact that they seem to comprise the ugliest new housing stock in the entire country?
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
(See also, Stratford).
That’s a failure of planning (and of design).
I think it might also be something to do with the prices. See Nine Elms (Battersea), for example:
Busy. Plenty of people taking advantage of the sunshine to stroll around town or sit at an outside table for something to eat or drink. Shops doing steady trade, but having to limit numbers.
The bell of the Minster was tolling for Prince Philip; we stood outside the Minster to observe the minute's silence.
Did a bit of shopping, stopped off for coffee and cake. Almost a normal Saturday.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
I kept reading waiting for the "but" followed by a tip on Williamson, and it tickled me that when it came it was (effectively) to lay him even if he was the last man alive.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
For once, I actually agree with Foxy and disagree with your good self. It had to happen at some point!
Dominic Sandbrook explores this in his excellent post-war history books: the elites detest what they see as the mundane bourgeois nature of the suburbs, and I suspect also because they see it as a breeding ground for conservative politics, but for most people a detached house with a garden in a pleasant surburb is their dream.
The suburban housing isn’t the problem. It’s the building of such housing without the required services - a bigger problem in the New World than here, but becoming more of a problem. If your nearest pint of milk is at Sainsbury’s on a road junction two miles away, you have got a problem.
"In connection to massive ammo depots explosions in 2014 #CzechRepublic Police search for this 2 persons.
They are the same as in #Salisbury...."
Presumably they were sightseeing the cathedrals in nearby Vienna, took a wrong turning, accidentally crossed the border and tripped over the ammunition dump?
OT. Gratifying if weird to see a "crowd" at the Crucible. They are so spread out it looks like the qualifiers for the Gibraltar Open, rather than the World Championships. Baby steps.
I kept reading waiting for the "but" followed by a tip on Williamson, and it tickled me that when it came it was (effectively) to lay him even if he was the last man alive.
Some of us are more wary of laying someone on the basis of the apparent triviality that they are totally unsuited for the job, than we were.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
Finally starting to feel a little warmer round our way too, and just in time for the pubs and restaurants. One of our favourite places completely booked solid for lunch today; we chanced turning up at another one early and got in, but they were having to turn customers away later on because of all the reservations. Nice sunshine, fresh growth, flowers and butterflies appearing. Suddenly felt about ten degrees cooler every time a light breeze got up mind, but you can't have everything. Off out for another walk that way tomorrow, but will take something with us and plonk ourselves on a bench.
I'm not especially confident that we're going to be rid of all the rules and the nannying any time soon, but at least things feel like they're moving in the right general direction. Looking forward enormously to jab number 1 next Saturday, and some greater measure of liberation come May 17th.
I spent the day with friends at the beach, weather was decent. Still can't go in anywhere to get anything to eat here, which is irritating, but being able to see friends for the first time in something like 8 months is extremely good. Something of a mental weight off my shoulders to have a semi-normal Saturday.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
Good thread TSE, very funny, and I agree, this is an excellent policy, and if carried through thoroughly, will benefit childrens' education and development enormously.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
Finally starting to feel a little warmer round our way too, and just in time for the pubs and restaurants. One of our favourite places completely booked solid for lunch today; we chanced turning up at another one early and got in, but they were having to turn customers away later on because of all the reservations. Nice sunshine, fresh growth, flowers and butterflies appearing. Suddenly felt about ten degrees cooler every time a light breeze got up mind, but you can't have everything. Off out for another walk that way tomorrow, but will take something with us and plonk ourselves on a bench.
I'm not especially confident that we're going to be rid of all the rules and the nannying any time soon, but at least things feel like they're moving in the right general direction. Looking forward enormously to jab number 1 next Saturday, and some greater measure of liberation come May 17th.
Afternoon in a friend's hot tub; we thought nothing of going inside for 15 minutes afterwards.
Almost every situation I am in, now (shopping, meetings, voluntary work, actual work, family), I am the only person who isn't vaccinated. A massive benefit of living in a county with a lot of retirees!
My prediction is that the popularity of this policy will nosedive the first time a school pupil misses an emergency call from a parent and vice versa. I can see the tabloid headlines in my head. I don't mean to be grisly but I can think of a hundred legitimate reasons why a pupil might need to look at their phone for things other than entertainment. A policy this comprehensive just seems to be asking for trouble
Larry the Cat @Number10cat · 1h India still hasn’t been added to the red travel list for the UK. I’m entirely unrelated news, Boris Johnson is due to visit India in just over a week.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
This is my deal breaker. Having to get in the car or helicopter to go and do anything. I'd hate that no matter how nice the house or the garden was. I'd make a poor suburbanite or country dweller or oligarch.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
We have a convenience store, post office,cafe, GP surgery and pharmacy 10 mins walk away. Plus a primary school and church. The pub is under 5 minutes. Countryside right by us.
Just a pity the station is 25 minutes and a bloody steep hill to climb on the way home.
Since the talk is about housing, there's been a lot of new-build blocks of flats in my part of Northern Edinburgh. I haven't been that impressed. The people who live in the flats mostly seem to have new cars, and there's a lot more traffic, so I guess they must be good enough to attract people with money to spend.
And now there's an Artisan Pasta Maker in the local area - something I thought the council had zoning ordinances to restrict to Stockbridge or Morningside.
OT. Gratifying if weird to see a "crowd" at the Crucible. They are so spread out it looks like the qualifiers for the Gibraltar Open, rather than the World Championships. Baby steps.
The final is planned as full house. That will be quite something if it happens. A sort of 'end of pandemic' event. Covid finally potted as regards the UK.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
Cars are doomed?
Only a Londoner could say something so naive. Cars are how the overwhelming majority of the country get about and quite right too, they're far more productive and convenient.
Now that the ecoloons are losing the ability to scream about how fuel is destroying the world as cars switch away from oil, its time to put behind us the notion that we're getting away from cars. Two off-road parking spaces per house should be the minimum norm.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
cars are doomed
You really know fuck all about life outside London.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
OT. Gratifying if weird to see a "crowd" at the Crucible. They are so spread out it looks like the qualifiers for the Gibraltar Open, rather than the World Championships. Baby steps.
The final is planned as full house. That will be quite something if it happens. A sort of 'end of pandemic' event. Covid finally potted as regards the UK.
Would be appropriate for the first Chinese winner to sink the final ball. Full circle as it were.
The problem with phones is that they're almost free to use. No-one expected that a few years ago. If it cost £5 every time you did anything on one, you'd only use it when you really needed to, a few times a day.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
Cars are doomed?
Only a Londoner could say something so naive. Cars are how the overwhelming majority of the country get about and quite right too, they're far more productive and convenient.
Now that the ecoloons are losing the ability to scream about how fuel is destroying the world as cars switch away from oil, its time to put behind us the notion that we're getting away from cars. Two off-road parking spaces per house should be the minimum norm.
I have a nice car and live in London. If I’m going on a trip or shopping for food or hardware I use the car. If I’m going to the pub, barbers or to buy a paper I walk or get the bus. It’s easier and more efficient.
The problem with phones is that they're almost free to use. No-one expected that a few years ago. If it cost £5 every time you did anything on one, you'd only use it when you really needed to, a few times a day.
They are in fact completely free to use at the point of use now. I don’t think anyone sane pays for calls, messages or data by the unit anymore.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
If there are no retail dedicated plots, you just end up with monolithic housing estates where you have to drive two miles to reach any services. These are common in the New World, less so here, but we shouldn’t be complacent.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
There need to be some commercial premises available or you can't open those businesses in those places. Of course you don't specify in advance precisely what business will be where, but you need something.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
There need to be some commercial premises available or you can't open those businesses in those places. Of course you don't specify in advance precisely what business will be where, but you need something.
And we have that. People build the commercial premises because there's a commercial interest in doing so.
Plus people can convert premises. Since Covid began I've been using clippers to do my own hair but before then my local barber looks like it was converted from a residential premise. That's far from unprecedented.
Where the demand is there, the market finds a way to service it.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
There need to be some commercial premises available or you can't open those businesses in those places. Of course you don't specify in advance precisely what business will be where, but you need something.
And we have that. People build the commercial premises because there's a commercial interest in doing so.
Plus people can convert premises. Since Covid began I've been using clippers to do my own hair but before then my local barber looks like it was converted from a residential premise. That's far from unprecedented.
Where the demand is there, the market finds a way to service it.
Always good to have some commercial zones in a new development. If everything were houses it would be very difficult.
OT. Gratifying if weird to see a "crowd" at the Crucible. They are so spread out it looks like the qualifiers for the Gibraltar Open, rather than the World Championships. Baby steps.
The final is planned as full house. That will be quite something if it happens. A sort of 'end of pandemic' event. Covid finally potted as regards the UK.
Clinically Extremely vulnerable not allowed to attend.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
There need to be some commercial premises available or you can't open those businesses in those places. Of course you don't specify in advance precisely what business will be where, but you need something.
And we have that. People build the commercial premises because there's a commercial interest in doing so.
Plus people can convert premises. Since Covid began I've been using clippers to do my own hair but before then my local barber looks like it was converted from a residential premise. That's far from unprecedented.
Where the demand is there, the market finds a way to service it.
Always good to have some commercial zones in a new development. If everything were houses it would be very difficult.
Absolutely and we always do but that's all that's needed is zoning, not dictating that there must be a hairdresser here and a shop there and a barbershop there.
OT. Gratifying if weird to see a "crowd" at the Crucible. They are so spread out it looks like the qualifiers for the Gibraltar Open, rather than the World Championships. Baby steps.
I've always wanted to watch snooker at the Crucible but never got round to trying to organise it. It's probably one of those things that used to cost £10 a few years ago and is now very expensive. I haven't checked.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
There need to be some commercial premises available or you can't open those businesses in those places. Of course you don't specify in advance precisely what business will be where, but you need something.
And we have that. People build the commercial premises because there's a commercial interest in doing so.
Plus people can convert premises. Since Covid began I've been using clippers to do my own hair but before then my local barber looks like it was converted from a residential premise. That's far from unprecedented.
Where the demand is there, the market finds a way to service it.
Sadly that’s not the case in the majority of new build estates that lack concessions to commercial premises. The typical result is monolithic residential districts with no services.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Only if coupled with services. There’s far too many places in the New World where you have to drive to see anyone or anything. Build communities not houses.
Small supermarket, 2 pubs, fish and chips, curry, school, football pitches all within 5 minutes walk of the new housing association properties near me.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
That's good and you're lucky
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
The great thing about this country is that most supposedly rural areas are in fact only a short drive away from a small or medium-sized town (within 20 minutes), and a large city is usually less than an hour's drive away. So you get the best of both worlds.
As long as you have local services that don’t require driving. There are places still being built without shops, hairdressers or pubs to support them. We don’t want to mimic the New World by becoming car reliant.
That's ridiculous why would hairdressers etc need to be built to support homes?
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers. If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
There need to be some commercial premises available or you can't open those businesses in those places. Of course you don't specify in advance precisely what business will be where, but you need something.
And we have that. People build the commercial premises because there's a commercial interest in doing so.
Plus people can convert premises. Since Covid began I've been using clippers to do my own hair but before then my local barber looks like it was converted from a residential premise. That's far from unprecedented.
Where the demand is there, the market finds a way to service it.
Sadly that’s not the case in the majority of new build estates that lack concessions to commercial premises. The typical result is monolithic residential districts with no services.
I've never seen anywhere built here in the North with estates without any accessible commercial premises.
Have you got anywhere in mind where new estates have been built with no access to commercial premises nearby?
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate, brownbelt should always be built on first.
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate
I couldn't care less.
Ensuring people have somewhere to live is more important than whether a Councillor is yellow or blue. If you think otherwise your priorities are completely warped and you are in this for the wrong reasons.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate
I couldn't care less.
Ensuring people have somewhere to live is more important than whether a Councillor is yellow or blue. If you think otherwise your priorities are completely warped and you are in this for the wrong reasons.
Places to live also have to be liveable and building all over the greenspaces around them will not make them so.
More LD councils also will lead to more LD seats gained from the Tories in due course as they build a base in an area, as was the case pre 1997
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
Why stop at five decades.
Make it a few centuries and you'll be able to say the proportion is even bigger.
And aren't you a supporter of freedom of movement ?
If so you can't start singing "every field is scared".
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate
I couldn't care less.
Ensuring people have somewhere to live is more important than whether a Councillor is yellow or blue. If you think otherwise your priorities are completely warped and you are in this for the wrong reasons.
Places to live also have to be liveable and building all over the greenspaces around them will not make them so.
More LD councils also will lead to more LD seats gained from the Tories in due course as they build a base in an area, as was the case pre 1997
Which is more important: more people being able to have and own a home of their own, or fewer LD Councillors?
The Conservative Party is meant to be the Party that believes in people being able to own their own home. That is what led to Thatcher's landslides, that is what has led to the Renaissance in the North. Losing touch with that is what is making former safe seats like Chingford go from a 13,000 seat majority to probably a Labour gain at the next election even if we win the next election.
If you'd rather put appealling to NIMBYs ahead of people being able to own their own home then you deserve to lose the election.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
Why stop at five decades.
Make it a few centuries and you'll be able to say the proportion is even bigger.
And aren't you a supporter of freedom of movement ?
If so you can't start singing "every field is scared".
Because the main changes in land usage and the destruction of so much of our natural environment has happened since the 1960s and because the coal mines and railway sidings you were going on about weren't available for development more than 50 years ago because they were still in use. I base my arguments on actual facts. You base them on your own ill informed opinions.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate, brownbelt should always be built on first.
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
Be interesting to see how popular the Tories remain in constituencies between Oxford and Cambridge if they ever do go ahead with the plans to build 1 million houses in a corridor between the two university towns - almost all of it on green field sites.
You can't have 67 million people living in this country and not be building on greenfield sites.
We have had our population increase by more than housing capacity for decades and people wonder why there's a housing crisis.
Either we need to start building many more homes on whatever land is available and that must realistically include greenfield sites, or we don't resolve the housing crisis, or we deport or kill a few million people to bring the population back down.
I don't see anyone prepared to advocate for the last one, but they scream blue murder about the first.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate, brownbelt should always be built on first.
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
Be interesting to see how popular the Tories remain in constituencies between Oxford and Cambridge if they ever do go ahead with the plans to build 1 million houses in a corridor between the two university towns - almost all of it on green field sites.
Probably be more popular. A million new homeowners would bolster the vote quite nicely.
"Crumbling faith in No10’s lockdown strategy is turning the public into conspiracy theorists It was baffling when the Prime Minister decided to trash the British vaccine programme, which is seen as a modern miracle
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
A lot of "Brownfield" sites are actually gardens of big houses, or even a large green field like Leicester Airport (built in WW2 for bomber command, now used by private planes), which was to have 10 000 houses built on it at one time.
A housing development with decent size gardens on agricultural land used for agro-industrial monoculture probably has a lot more biodiversity when planted with garden shrubs and trees, particularly if the developer is given that brief.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
You can't have 67 million people living in this country and not be building on greenfield sites.
We have had our population increase by more than housing capacity for decades and people wonder why there's a housing crisis.
Either we need to start building many more homes on whatever land is available and that must realistically include greenfield sites, or we don't resolve the housing crisis, or we deport or kill a few million people to bring the population back down.
I don't see anyone prepared to advocate for the last one, but they scream blue murder about the first.
Hasn't the population fallen in the past year?
Let's keep the trend going, and happy days.
Make it financially attractive for folk to rent out their spare rooms, and that would soak up a big chunk of demand from single people.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it imminently or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate, brownbelt should always be built on first.
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
Be interesting to see how popular the Tories remain in constituencies between Oxford and Cambridge if they ever do go ahead with the plans to build 1 million houses in a corridor between the two university towns - almost all of it on green field sites.
Probably be more popular. A million new homeowners would bolster the vote quite nicely.
I'm not sure about that. People don't always credit politicians the way politicians expect them to. Margaret got credit for selling council houses, but that was an obvious and visible government action. I'm not sure that private sector developers building houses and selling them on would be so visible to the home buyers.
But the NIMBYs would undoubtedly blame the Conservatives for ruining their views.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
A lot of "Brownfield" sites are actually gardens of big houses, or even a large green field like Leicester Airport (built in WW2 for bomber command, now used by private planes), which was to have 10 000 houses built on it at one time.
A housing development with decent size gardens on agricultural land used for agro-industrial monoculture probably has a lot more biodiversity when planted with garden shrubs and trees, particularly if the developer is given that brief.
It has to be a bloody big garden. It must be a minimum of 0.25 hectares - about 2/3rds of an acre. There aren't that many gardens (it has to be garden within the curtilage, attached land does not count) which are 2/3rds of an acre outside of seriously big houses most of which will be listed anyway.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate, brownbelt should always be built on first.
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
Be interesting to see how popular the Tories remain in constituencies between Oxford and Cambridge if they ever do go ahead with the plans to build 1 million houses in a corridor between the two university towns - almost all of it on green field sites.
Probably be more popular. A million new homeowners would bolster the vote quite nicely.
I'm not sure about that. People don't always credit politicians the way politicians expect them to. Margaret got credit for selling council houses, but that was an obvious and visible government action. I'm not sure that private sector developers building houses and selling them on would be so visible to the home buyers.
But the NIMBYs would undoubtedly blame the Conservatives for ruining their views.
People wildly overestimate the impact of NIMBYs.
The single biggest determinant of whether people vote Conservative or not is time tested: does the voter own their own home or not?
If voters own their own homes, they don't want to see the economic system torn up. If they don't, they're more likely to vote for radical left solutions.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
What about revoking planning permission after a year? Wouldn't that be even more effective?
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
Why stop at five decades.
Make it a few centuries and you'll be able to say the proportion is even bigger.
And aren't you a supporter of freedom of movement ?
If so you can't start singing "every field is scared".
Because the main changes in land usage and the destruction of so much of our natural environment has happened since the 1960s and because the coal mines and railway sidings you were going on about weren't available for development more than 50 years ago because they were still in use. I base my arguments on actual facts. You base them on your own ill informed opinions.
So because I pointed out that there is currently a lot of house building on old mining land you start complaining about house building on farmland in the 1960s.
What do you want to do about it ?
Go back in time and tell Bob Ferris that he can't have his new suburban house because somebody might be offended in the 2020s ?
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
What about revoking planning permission after a year? Wouldn't that be even more effective?
But the point is we do need the houses built. So revoking planning permission doesn't help. Particularly if the land they are sitting on and refusing to develop is the land we want houses on. Better to make it cost them a lot to refuse to do what they said they would do. They are granted a temporary relief on land tax to enable them to start the development process but if they haven't started a defined process after 1 year then they get taxed heavily on the land.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd be entirely in favour of a greater loosening making it easier for anyone and everyone to build. But short of that then easier for the developers to do so is at least progress. The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from those arguing against building at all, or building on greenfield, which is entirely unviable - not from the perspective of arguing to make it even easier still for everyone which would take more of the power out of the hands of the developers.
If anyone and everyone could build a home easily then there'd be no reason to have developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
Comments
Pre-Covid, the notion was everyone needed "access" to public transport, shops and the like but the pandemic has perhaps changed perceptions. It's less important to be near a station if you aren't commuting and less important to be near shops with home delivery and online shopping.
In East London, there's clearly no money for developers to put suburban estates onto brownfield sites. The demographic doesn't support that - the young who dominate round here want a place to live to start - not a "forever" home (that comes later and elsewhere) but a place to call home, a start. Pre pandemic, it was analogous to what you see in Hong Kong, basically a place to store clothes and sleep while social life (often based round work) meant eating out after work before the journey home on the MRT.
Now, I just wonder - you see on here those who want that life style back but is it coming back? That doesn't mean people don't need four walls and a roof they can call home but perhaps the simple "box" is no longer as attractive an option as it was.
This is neither the time or plaice for this
Dominic Sandbrook explores this in his excellent post-war history books: the elites detest what they see as the mundane bourgeois nature of the suburbs, and I suspect also because they see it as a breeding ground for conservative politics, but for most people a detached house with a garden in a pleasant surburb is their dream.
https://twitter.com/nnatmmac/status/1383411588347011082?s=21
Busy. Plenty of people taking advantage of the sunshine to stroll around town or sit at an outside table for something to eat or drink. Shops doing steady trade, but having to limit numbers.
The bell of the Minster was tolling for Prince Philip; we stood outside the Minster to observe the minute's silence.
Did a bit of shopping, stopped off for coffee and cake. Almost a normal Saturday.
https://twitter.com/FilipHorky/status/1383486624181354506
"In connection to massive ammo depots explosions in 2014 #CzechRepublic Police search for this 2 persons.
They are the same as in #Salisbury...."
I kept reading waiting for the "but" followed by a tip on Williamson, and it tickled me that when it came it was (effectively) to lay him even if he was the last man alive.
Could happen to anyone.
Gratifying if weird to see a "crowd" at the Crucible.
They are so spread out it looks like the qualifiers for the Gibraltar Open, rather than the World Championships.
Baby steps.
Pub busy this afternoon with more than 20 tables occupied all afternoon in the sunshine. Good social distancing and compliance. 2 of my colleagues who live in the city quite converted to village life. Sunshine and gamboling new born lambs always help.
However, the majority of that population still works in agriculture. Meaning that the situation in the massive cities must be pretty horrendous.
I'm not especially confident that we're going to be rid of all the rules and the nannying any time soon, but at least things feel like they're moving in the right general direction. Looking forward enormously to jab number 1 next Saturday, and some greater measure of liberation come May 17th.
The point is, this is often not the case. You need pubs, shops, supermarkets, curry house, and schools all within easy walking distance. ie less than 20 minutes max, WALKING
Do that, with single owner doors and decent but not lavish gardens, and you have a happy community. And it can be done, with housing inspired by our Georgian and Victorian forebears
It also means fewer cars, and cars are doomed anyway, so this is the future
Bloody bonkers that they can come here when we can't go there (wherever there is).
20 minutes round trip for shops, doctor, dentist, playground, pubs etc
40 mins there and back for school
MAX
Ideally, less
Almost every situation I am in, now (shopping, meetings, voluntary work, actual work, family), I am the only person who isn't vaccinated. A massive benefit of living in a county with a lot of retirees!
Generations of children managed without phones.
They shouldn't be allowed in schools. Full stop.
@Number10cat
·
1h
India still hasn’t been added to the red travel list for the UK. I’m entirely unrelated news, Boris Johnson is due to visit India in just over a week.
Just a pity the station is 25 minutes and a bloody steep hill to climb on the way home.
And now there's an Artisan Pasta Maker in the local area - something I thought the council had zoning ordinances to restrict to Stockbridge or Morningside.
Only a Londoner could say something so naive. Cars are how the overwhelming majority of the country get about and quite right too, they're far more productive and convenient.
Now that the ecoloons are losing the ability to scream about how fuel is destroying the world as cars switch away from oil, its time to put behind us the notion that we're getting away from cars. Two off-road parking spaces per house should be the minimum norm.
You really know fuck all about life outside London.
North Americans, East Asians or Western Europeans ?
Full circle as it were.
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a hairdressers.
If homes are there, if the demand is there, then someone will open a pub. Someone will open a shop.
We don't need someone in Whitehall or anywhere else planning to the n-th degress what facilities go with homes. Let people build homes, let people build shops, pubs etc and people will invest commercially to profit on the homes by providing a service. We don't need some busybody in a Council centrally planning it.
Plus people can convert premises. Since Covid began I've been using clippers to do my own hair but before then my local barber looks like it was converted from a residential premise. That's far from unprecedented.
Where the demand is there, the market finds a way to service it.
Do the zones and let the market sort it out.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
Have you got anywhere in mind where new estates have been built with no access to commercial premises nearby?
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
Ensuring people have somewhere to live is more important than whether a Councillor is yellow or blue. If you think otherwise your priorities are completely warped and you are in this for the wrong reasons.
More LD councils also will lead to more LD seats gained from the Tories in due course as they build a base in an area, as was the case pre 1997
Make it a few centuries and you'll be able to say the proportion is even bigger.
And aren't you a supporter of freedom of movement ?
If so you can't start singing "every field is scared".
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out.
- planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses.
- Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The Conservative Party is meant to be the Party that believes in people being able to own their own home. That is what led to Thatcher's landslides, that is what has led to the Renaissance in the North. Losing touch with that is what is making former safe seats like Chingford go from a 13,000 seat majority to probably a Labour gain at the next election even if we win the next election.
If you'd rather put appealling to NIMBYs ahead of people being able to own their own home then you deserve to lose the election.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Naturally ignoring the fact that this is to fulfil new build requirements stipulated by the Tory government.
Whoever is responsible, it is a fecking disgrace.
We have had our population increase by more than housing capacity for decades and people wonder why there's a housing crisis.
Either we need to start building many more homes on whatever land is available and that must realistically include greenfield sites, or we don't resolve the housing crisis, or we deport or kill a few million people to bring the population back down.
I don't see anyone prepared to advocate for the last one, but they scream blue murder about the first.
It was baffling when the Prime Minister decided to trash the British vaccine programme, which is seen as a modern miracle
JANET DALEY" {£}
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/17/crumbling-faith-no10s-covid-policies-turning-public-conspiracy/
A housing development with decent size gardens on agricultural land used for agro-industrial monoculture probably has a lot more biodiversity when planted with garden shrubs and trees, particularly if the developer is given that brief.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Let's keep the trend going, and happy days.
Make it financially attractive for folk to rent out their spare rooms, and that would soak up a big chunk of demand from single people.
Anyway. Bedtime.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it imminently or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
But the NIMBYs would undoubtedly blame the Conservatives for ruining their views.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
The single biggest determinant of whether people vote Conservative or not is time tested: does the voter own their own home or not?
If voters own their own homes, they don't want to see the economic system torn up. If they don't, they're more likely to vote for radical left solutions.
Hence why the Red Wall fell. Its been getting developed with affordable "Barratt" style homes that people have bought - and as a result those seats have swung Tory: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/04/03/the-truth-behind-the-tories-northern-strongholds
Hence why London has gone Red. Its absolutely unaffordable and as a result those seats have gone Labour.
What do you want to do about it ?
Go back in time and tell Bob Ferris that he can't have his new suburban house because somebody might be offended in the 2020s ?
I'd be entirely in favour of a greater loosening making it easier for anyone and everyone to build. But short of that then easier for the developers to do so is at least progress. The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from those arguing against building at all, or building on greenfield, which is entirely unviable - not from the perspective of arguing to make it even easier still for everyone which would take more of the power out of the hands of the developers.
If anyone and everyone could build a home easily then there'd be no reason to have developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.