Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery

Post by crdoconnor » Tue, Feb 14, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

mrec wrote: post #44

crdoconnor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" - it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services and reduce taxes by cutting red tape and reducing government waste" - sounds nice, doesn't frighten anyone Of course it frightens people. Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Bui…

> Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that. Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt. Nobody is terrified of brownfield, which is why I strongly suspect that brownfield alone isn't going to make a damn bit of difference; to steal a phrase, "if b…

>Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt.

The kinds of the people who start looking sideways at the greenbelt (the Economist very much included) implies to me that it's more about building big expensive houses for the wealthy in a nice green area than it is about building affordable housing for Londoners.

The very fact that the Economist would lobby for this while simultaneously slamming the "ultra left wing" Corbyn policy of "just build more council housing" ought to be a sign that something is amiss.

Post by Lazare » Tue, Feb 14, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

lhopki01 wrote: post #49

Lazare wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The private sector has been building 200,000 units a year [...] we used to build enough houses. The difference is that in addition to the 200,000 privately built housing units we used to have 200,000 units of government built housing a year. Right, so government stopped building public housing, but didn't allow private sources to fill the gap. That seems clear enough. > This report from local governments shows that…

Or that the private sector only caters to the top end of the market and will never cater to the the lower ends. Where do you get that the government didn't allow them to make up the shortfall? What you're claiming is that the planning permissions were tightened just enough so that despite twice the demand there was no real increase in housing built? Housing is something that is too important to leave to just market f…

> Where do you get that the government didn't allow them to make up the shortfall?

Planning permission is a thing. Again, do you have evidence that there is a significant number of planning permissions going begging that no one is applying for?

> What you're claiming is that the planning permissions were tightened just enough so that despite twice the demand there was no real increase in housing built?

Yes? I mean, it's pretty obvious that's what happened, right? It's right there in black and right when you graph it. There has been no radical increase in the granting of planning permissions.

> Housing is something that is too important to leave to just market forces because it isn't really a market.

Given the hash of it the government is making, I think there's a much stronger argument that it's too important not to leave it to the market. Something which, moreover, hasn't been tried; there's no functioning market due to the planning permission system.

Again, if you pass a law saying that needed houses cannot be built (which has been done), and then the houses aren't built (which they are not) how can you point fingers at anything except the law?

> they now have to pay market rents further inflating prices.

Only because they've choked off the supply. We don't complain about welfare inflating food prices, because we don't pass laws stopping farmers from growing food. Food is cheaper now than ever before, not despite the fact that food is supplied by market forces, but because of it.

> Everyone is better off if they just go back to building houses.

Or they could just let other people build houses. You know, like how every single country without a housing crisis does?

> Just saying build in the green belt will not achieve much. It'll divert developers from building on brownfield and lead to even more of a sprawl than there currently is in cities like London.

The government building houses will add to the sprawl too, of course.

But what really matters isn't who builds it or where, it's that units are built. And that means identifying restrictions and removing them.

Re: Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery

Re: Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery