Why Britain doesn’t build

The article should then address this global phenomenon rather than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.

The traditional Conservative voter is a home-owner. So you might be a rabid socialist in your youth, but once you get a job, save up for a deposit, and buy your own home, you eventually transition to become yet another middle-aged Tory voter.

That pipeline is now broken - young people are unable to save up for their own home or get a mortgage, unless they have generational wealth. House rises have risen sharply and wages have remained stagnant, and now we have inflation - for necessities like food and bills - eating into what little people had to begin with.

The solution of course is damn the torpedoes and embark on a massive house-building programme like in the post-war period, but a) the post-Thatcher Conservatives consider that against everything they believe in, and b) current home owners - their ageing voting base - are NIMBYs who don't want the wrong sort of people living near them and any reduction in demand that would reduce their value of their homes (and they're going to need to sell their homes soon, to pay for social and health care in an increasingly threadbare welfare state).

The British press of course likes to blame "woke millenials" or whatever to keep their geriatric readership happy but this is the real reason for the collapse in the Tory vote in the under 50s.

You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into effectively creating a bigger "third city". Then maybe link Birmingham, and purposefully delay any links to London.

The problem with linking everything to London is that while it makes it easier to work from further out, it also makes London ever more attractive.

But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at all.

Which means that many towns are easier reached by taking a detour in towards the centre and out again, which again means there's an incentive for businesses etc. to be closer to the centre. Even when in towards the centre and out again would be the shortest route, it might be beneficial to encourage avoiding the busy routes towards the centre.

Which again means that a whole lot of towns where there are town centres that have huge potential for large increases in density, and potential for lower cost upgrades of other infrastructure, without affecting the green belt, but where the demand is not there for that density increase because of the lack of efficient transport.

Addressing the infrastructure problem by upgrading and committing to commuter level services to connect more of these towns together so they form more viable counter-weights to the city centres they are around would make it a lot easier to address the issues you're mentioning at far lower costs than yet another big infra upgrade like HS2 or another line in London.

Successive UK governments seem to have been more focused on retrospectively managing demand surges than planning ahead, and as a result seems to be inducing demand that drives more surges to be managed and ever higher costs.

Over those decades UK population growth [1] is lower than the new house building rate [see chart in article].

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...