House building is out of control

I'm an old person, I've moved into a flat after living in houses (during my earlier family life) and it's fine. Bungalows are usually built on a larger plot of land so not a good way to house people. Also I live in an area where there are no bungalows, for just this reason, and wouldn't want to move to somewhere away from the city simply to live in one.
I can't understand why people are unwilling to live in flats, they're a normal way to live in towns in much of Europe.

@Kokeshi123 what does "dealing with service charge issues" mean? Regardless of the ownership structure, blocks of flats need to be maintained and the service charge funds that.

Leaseholders have the right to apply for right to manage if they dislike their managing agents.

Share of freehold properties give more control but (as you are essentially freeholder and leaseholder) you do need to be prepared to be involved in management of the building.

The biggest issue with flats is often people who buy them don't understand what they have bought.

Some of the derelict town centre locations are left undeveloped because big house builders are not interested and there isn't too expensive for the small ones.
Example: One bedroom flat in west midland will cost anywhere from £130-£160k: The cost of building it now with absolute minimum will not be less then £100k. At absolute minimum you need to have 30% markup (over 2 years interest will eat 10-15%). There are hundreds of risk factors you need to consider which can take your building cost through the roof.

And the plot how much does it cost? I would say the plot would need to be virtually free for any builder to even consider developing on it.
The reality is very deferent isn't the South where the house prices are higher.
(Me and my husband used to be a small family builders who left this industry).

The UK needs to deal with the service charge/leasehold issue and promote senior-friendly apartments. There is no space to build bungalows all over the place - they are a really wasteful use of land.

Honestly, if you don't like where you live, move, preferably to Canada!

I really don't recommend moving to Canada for anyone who doesn't want to spend a lot of money on housing!

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-surging-cost-living-fuels-reverse-immigration-2023-12-09/

(You could try Japan. Tokyo's actually not too bad for housing these days....)

Actually we do need lots more housing. Huge rise in single occupied housing - driven by family breakups ( so favoured by MN members yelling 'divorce him or leave him' for relatively minor infractions by DH/DP) and the elderly being reluctant to downsize, especially to sheltered housing due to unclear financial implications such as high service fees. On top of that an ever increasing population. Half a million net migration requires a lot more housing. Add to that the huge outcry over the bedroom tax which was supposed to encourage people to move to smaller homes but failed. If you have a spare room, don't complain about modern housing, nor if you support uncontrolled immigration, nor if your house is less than 50 years old because lots of people probably complained about that development too. Honestly, if you don't like where you live, move, preferably to Canada!

are you currently living in a precarious tenancy, OP, or homeless? Do you live in the countryside?

@Kazzyhoward - that's is true in some areas for sure!

@TodayInahurry - the facts do not bear out this argument. It's simply a straw man that politicians use to keep extending the gap between the rich and the poor in this country.

Agreed. Whilst so many derelict factories and town centres lie undeveloped.

There are no bungalows for old people to move to. They don't build them anymore!

But then you need to move jobs there too! The reason for over population in the SE is that the jobs have been centralised there and people have had to relocate for employment.

@AussiUnHomme I've just seen your workhouse idea....sorry, i'll assume your post was ironic.

@AussiUnHomme how do you propose to "stop people splitting up"? My mum desperately wanted to leave my cheating dad decades ago but literally couldn't because financial support for a single mum back then just wasn't there. They've trundled on miserably but only taking up one house so that's ok? I don't disagree that split families adds to the problem of housing shortages but I don't think the answer is forced togetherness 🙄

People have a right to live in the properties they own, it is very ageist to have this attitude. Immigration running at 745,000 per year is the problem, not only with housing, but schools, doctors, traffic on the roads, hospitals, destruction of our countryside.

Old people need to downsize, otherwise there's nowhere for young families to live. Somewhere along the way, people developed an expectation that they'd build wealth through property and then sit on it until they die!

My town in the Midlands is so bizarre they have knocked down unused buildings a few years ago and are leaving it to rot they are also now building flats on a car park instead of the unused land

Maybe we should:

1. Stop families breaking up and therefore splitting families over multiple different properties
2. Make it mandatory for people with two many bedrooms to move and free them up for larger families
3. Bring back workhouse for single mothers
4. Build more.properties to match demand

Yes to all of this.

But this is already happening- all over the country. (England at least).

Whole new villages. Schools, doctors, hospital, police, ambulance and fire all struggling under the strain.

Net migration needs to be dramatically reduced.

Too true!

Too many people, houses too big, not enough food growing paddocks nor bird and animal habitats, not enough water, power etc.
Curb immigration, build smaller, better insulated houses and heavily tax empty houses.

South East is already too built up and overpopulated. Houses need to be built elsewhere in other regions, in existing towns and cities.

Re brownfield sites: I've mentioned this before on threads like this, but it needs pointing out again: in practice "building on brownfield" means "building on car parking space" most of the time.

People in suburbs who are very used to be able to drive their car into the center of town are often happy to demand that cities "build those houses on brownfield instead" UNTIL the penny drops and they start to realize that their car parking spaces will disappear. Not only that, but if you fill urban centers with flats and terraces and house loads more people there who mostly don't have cars because you are not allowing parking spaces, those people will understandably want to be able to walk and ride their bikes safely in their local areas and will agitate more and more for cars to be pushed out of city centers with congestion charges, pedestrianization of many areas, traffic calming and so on.

That's not a disaster - plenty of European and Japanese cities have accepted this way of doing things for a long time. And once you have got dense clusters of users living in the center of town, it becomes fiscally viable to build good public transportation lines that will reach into the suburbs and surrounding areas as well. But it requires, as I say, a cultural shift. People in the suburbs and surrounding villages have to decide that they are OK with using park-n-rides and public transport to go into the center of town, as the price that they pay in exchange for a livelier city center with more viable shops as well as preventing housing sprawl in villages and at the edges of cities.

Yup. You won't get suburbanites to do without cars altogether, but with great public transport it's possible for suburbanites to manage comfortably with one car each for the most part. Japanese suburbs usually bubble up around commuter lines, which people use to commute, while kids are organized into walking groups for school and there is a lot more walking and biking of short distances; as a result, most families can manage just fine with one car (and it makes the suburb quieter and safer, and reduces the need for working age people to spend their time ferrying kids and elderly parents about).

It can be done. It does however take willpower and a bit of a cultural shift. And good commuter train lines that reach into the suburbs. A few poxy buses are not going to cut it!

Flats can be an excellent way of housing people, but the UK needs to iron out some issues - leasehold reform and reform of management fees, for example, and making sure flats have things like balconies, lifts, proper soundproofing and rules which allow laundry to be hung out on balconies. It can be done. Most European countries seem to manage just fine with many or even most families in apartments.

We need to shift towards properly built flats as senior housing, to persuade more older folk to downsize, as this will free up a lot of large houses for younger people to use. Older people understandably want stair-free living, yet there simply is not enough space to build huge numbers of bungalows (which are very space-hungry and require huge amounts of land per person). Nice, senior friendly flats can also be built in mid-town locations rather than strung out on the edge of cities where there is no public transport and few services. We need older folk to live in more central locations (not next to a nightclub, obviously, I just mean within walking distances of shops, services and a bus route/train station or two), so that people can stay independent if/when they lose the ability to drive safely. Most middle-aged women are working full-time; we can't rely on adult daughters and sons to drive their elderly parents around to appointments and shopping in the way that my (stay-at-home) mother did for her elderly parents when they couldn't drive any more.

Housing a bigger population will also require a move towards public transport and away from cars. Cars require huge, huge, huge amounts of space, not just for driving them but even more for parking them (you have to allow space for them to be housed overnight AND parking spaces in all the places that the car is likely to be).

A lot of the UK's problems stem from the fact that it has the usual English-speaking-country's love of cars (and dislike of public transit, bikes or walking even short distances), but unlike the US, Canada, Australia etc is too densely populated for widespread car ownership to work properly without causing problems. Building your society around cars is OK if you have a small population spread thinly across wide areas - loads of land to house and drive cars AND still have space to build. The UK doesn't have this luxury, so car dependence means clogged roads, parking wars with neighbors, and tiny newbuilds in numbers that are nowhere near adequate.