House building is out of control

Trouble with retail is that it's mostly owned by pension funds, and the pension scheme rules/laws prohibit residential use, so the pension funds themselves can't convert to rent them out as residential units. Neither can they sell them at currently depressed values as that shows the pension fund to be undervalued and risks causing sell offs of assets to meet liquidity criteria (as happened with Liz Truss and the minor market collapse she caused). The only way to get large amounts of empty retail space (and empty flats above used retail space) is to change the pension scheme rules to allow them to own residential property. Gordon Brown proposed that but then changed his mind!!

Absolutely!
I had a boyfriend years ago who lived on the Ille St Louis in Paris in a 17th Century apartment- it was so characterful and gorgeous.
Venice and Amsterdam too- old houses that look great despite their great ages.
Most modern builds ( unless made of green oak and traditional materials) are hard on the eye, and will not age well.

The issue with flats is NOISE.
If one couldn’t hear or smell ( cooking smells, smoking smells) one’s neighbours, it wouldn’t be as bad.
Tower blocks sound like hell with antisocial behaviours added on.

Who is this to? Not sure who is meant to be ‘insane’

I can’t see any mention of a fear of pg or infertility, yes they are very sad but not the only factors to lower birth rate

Flats are great if they have sound insulation, balconies, well-maintained communal areas, provision for drying clothes, lifts that are kept working, kitchens that aren’t a windowless afterthought… but often they don’t have any of those things, because they’re built with the ROI for pension funds in mind, not to provide a home for residents. We shouldn’t allow land and building materials to be squandered on ugly, uncomfortable, unsustainable human cages that will hang around for a few decades and then be bulldozed. It’s fucked up that nearly all of Europe’s most attractive towns and cities are beautiful because they’re full of centuries-old buildings that are still lived in, and now we can barely manage to build houses that will be habitable in 50 years, never mind that actually add something to their surroundings.

Been happening for years

The Elephant and Castle neighbourhood is being physically, socially and ethnically transformed. This started with the demolition of the Heygate estate, a classic for stigmatised perceptions of council housing and the people who live in it. As the local 35% Campaign has meticulously documented, a succession of promises to Heygate residents were broken to arrive at a situation where 1,214 council homes were demolished, to be replaced with 2,704 new homes, of which only 82 (3%) are for social rent. The HA partner was London and Quadrant. To be eligible for the cheapest one-bedroom home built by them on the Heygate site, people needed a minimum household income of £57,500. The average household income in that part of Southwark is £24,324

Infertility is devastating, as is the fear of making babies. But it's fine because the less humans there are, the cooler the planet becomes. Are you insane?

Population decline will help with climate issues too

Exactly.

fewer people are having children and many countries in Western Europe are reporting population decline.
Who are these new houses for?

The trouble is that those who support endless building in our disappearing spaces put no value on wildlife.
We need bees and insects to sustain life; when every blade of grass and tree has been destroyed, you might find life becomes unsustainable.
And what is wrong with living in a flat?
We can’t all live in McMansions beloved of developers.

The kind of changes people are talking about re restrictions on sale or who can buy would certainly drive prices down - but the issues are that these new builds are better than what can be afforded in cities and if you have a traditional set up of one parent at home you can afford your detached home. This is what people, a quite a lot on Mumsnet consider desirable!

There has been a lot of building in my rural area lately too. While the houses are probably needed the people who need them most - youngsters just starting out - aren't going to be able to afford £250K plus. Those rented out by the council are 'affordable' rent rather than social rent so £800 plus a month. Then there is the problem of service and infrastructure not being factored in.

There needs to be cheaper and smaller properties built too for the younger generation who might not be on much more than min wage or starting wages.

Not all white families in this country are English. Many Polish and other ethnicities. But that's a discussion for another thread.

I appreciate the current residents may not think so; but developers are built to where the demand is, and what sells

I think they build where they can get the land.

And yes, they often do sell, but leaving empty properties elsewhere. It doesn't solve the housing problem. We should have stricter rules on foreigners owing property here too, like other countries (Denmark, New Zealand) do.

only England which has had a huge population increase over the last 20 years, almost entirely from immigration

I am not sure it is almost entirely down to immigration - I see lots of White families with multiple kids. Even though people are apparently having fewer kids, it doesn't seem like it!

We don't have a housing shortage, we have a problem with distribution of housing.

Too many second and holiday homes

Too many empty homes

Get as many of those back into residential use - either owner occupied, or rented, and we won't have a housing shortage.

We don't need loads of poorly built houses on green field developments.

Yeah, there isn't an overpopulation crisis in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff or the Welsh valleys.

The population of London alone is not far off double that of Scotland and treble that of Wales.

The amount of people in the UK is a lot but it'd be less of an issue if it was distributed better. Even so, there's a tipping point. 60 million would be more realistic but once you're getting over 70 million on the island it's too many and where will it stop?

The U.K. isn't the most densely populated country in Europe, but England is. It's pointless to talk about the U.K., when it is only England which has had a huge population increase over the last 20 years, almost entirely from immigration.

And figures about how much of the country is built on can be misleading. Some of them only include the land taken up by the house/building, whereas I would argue the garden and the driveway/yard should be counted as built on.

It also ignores the blight and the noise pollution. Houses need roads, and you can hardly get away from the noise of traffic as it is.

Of course people need decent housing; we have to build enough to make sure everyone is housed adequately. But we should also be doing whatever it takes to stop our population from increasing in such huge numbers, or preferably at all. We can never keep up.

There's lots of suggestions as to how we can increase the housing stock without building on the countryside, but even in the unlikely event we did manage to implement them, they would only solve the problem for a year or two.

Because even if there were no boats coming in it wouldn't really impact the immigration figures. The boats are a distraction technique for the fact that legal net migration is annually in the hundreds of thousands under a Tory government that talks big on stopping/slowing immigration.

@Panicmode1 "We cannot have a sensible conversation about housebuilding, without having a sensible conversation around migration - if we allow (in numerical terms) a city the size of Leeds to arrive in this country every year, we need to find space to put those people. IF people don't like the numbers arriving, then we need to pay people more to do the jobs that other people are coming here to do......and all of us need to accept that more land is going to be needed"

I haven't RTFT so don't know if anyone has commented on this.

I agree with you. But also, we need to think about what jobs we need people to fill.

I have just left a very outer burb of North London. I was in that particular spot for 20 years in total. One really striking thing in the last few years was the proliferation of people getting things like MacDonalds and Starbucks delivered. Both 3 - 7 mins walk away (i give that range because I got slow due an injury, for most people, it's 3 mins max). And it was a big high rise block with mostly one and two beds.

You were lucky to get in the lift at certain times because it was constantly in use by someone delivering one fecking cup of coffee. Yes, people have the right to want what they want. But there's bound to be an overpopulation crisis when it's considered important to have this service.

(I appreciate that the people ordering one coffee to save them a 2 min walk - or heaven forbid, making their own coffee - are probably not the same ones complaining about overpopulation though).

So it's not just about paying more. It's asking how much business we can do on this small island, because the price of that is not just about GDP. It's about quality of life.

Meanwhile, half of that high street was either empty shops or units occupied by someone selling tat they got from a drop shipper. More sensible to build flats there than on green space.

This is about preferred taste isn't it? You don't have lots of asylum seekers moving into the countryside estates, but Brits who are culturally attuned to "Englishman's home is his castle". People want detached houses, it's half the reason the current inhabitants want to be there imo. You will not stop British people wanting these places; they are places better specified, with more space for their family, and this is the demand.

I live in London. Compared to 20 years ago it is very crowded. Maybe there are 10 million people now. The cost of even a flat is outrageous.

If you have a family, can WFH a few days a week and are tired of city or suburban living these places are ideal. I appreciate the current residents may not think so; but developers are built to where the demand is, and what sells.

Totally agree with this. Especially about brownfield sites. Building on the few green spaces within towns and cities makes air quality even poorer, and once sports and recreation land is lost, it's very hard to get it back elsewhere.

Immigration is just another resource for capitalists. But they never bother to think about the infrastructure to keep up with the endless population increase it brings.

Not all cities are overpopulated. Many are short of people, particularly of working age and it's more common in towns. The problem is everyone pisses off to university from these places at 18 and then they won't go back and will live in or commute to London (or another big city like Manchester/Birmingham/Leeds).

It's not just house planning that's been fucked up in this country, it's centralising investment and jobs around the big cities, mostly London and other regional capitals. To then continue to ignore these places while concreting over the countryside is just bloody stupid. They go on about levelling up - rather than a soundbite we should actually do it properly.