Why are we building so many homes?

[Skunkaniseed]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g518le0r5o

This article makes a number of good points. Why are we focused on building when there is a glut of empty homes that would meet the need?

Living as close to a flood plain as I do, I wish they'd bloody well stop, that's all I can say.

Because there is profit in building, for the large building firms Taylor Wimpey, Bloor etc

There is a very nice bungalow round the corner from me. An elderly lady lived there and kept the front garden beautifully. It has never been for sale and I must assume she died about 5 years ago. It has been empty ever since and is now in rapid decline. My next door neighbours had a horrendous divorce a number of years ago it culminated in the house being unoccupied for a decade. Developers bought it and it’s now a home again. It does seem a massive waste, we were relieved when next door was sold as it was looking really tatty and think it would have devalued our house.

The article states the government target is 1.5million homes and that there are 260k long term vacant homes, so while it could be part of the solution it isn’t going to provide enough to stop new building. I suspect there’s a big disparity between where the empty homes are and where the demand is as well.

If all empty homes were brought back into use, the housing crisis would be solved at a stroke and, arguably, the government would not have to build 1.5m new homes.

This is a pretty outrageous statement considering the number of homes empty for 6 months or longer is only 261,471. That’s not exactly a crazy number considering some of those will be empty due to a large renovation, going through a sale, a sale held up by probate, an owner who has moved into a care home and doesn’t have things set up for the family to sell easily while they are still alive, holiday homes etc.

There are just short of 700,000 empty and unfurnished homes in England, according to the most recent government figures, external. Of those, 261,471 are classed as “long-term empty,” meaning no-one has lived there for six months or more.

700,000 empty homes and 261,471 long term empty

This will just turn into a bun fight about immigrants again.

We need to be building 300-500k a year to keep up with demand.

Also - they need to be in the right places.

Everyone's house was built on a field and spoilt some one view at one point.

Would the long term vacant homes include holiday homes?

People do need somewhere decent to live. What I don't quite understand is why much of the new build estates look so depressing and awful. We live in London and drive out to our DD's fairly often (further out in countryside). We pass areas where new build estates have been built. One near to DD's town is actually quite attractive - mix of different types and sizes (and presumably prices) of housing but all well designed. Another we pass on our way looks like a prison camp (I may exaggerate slightly!). I appreciate these might be 'affordable' housing but surely with a bit of imagination they could have built something that didn't look quite as bleak.

The thing is they are not affordable.
It's usually full of middle aged grey professionals
A 3 bed new build is more expensive than sn older house.
Some people have a view new is better. Some people prefer the uniformity.

The article isn’t really about some kind of swap out- using empty homes to fill demand for new homes.

its about making empty properties so unattractive that the owner either pays up a financial penalty (which goes into the pot for house building) or sells to add to available housing stock.

we don’t necessarily want people living in empty homes- they could be uninhabitable, they could have terrible energy efficiency, they could be structurally unsound etc… and of course- they belong to someone!

regardless of empty homes today we have had a housing shortage since the 1980s, which has only grown and grown. There is no solution that doesnt involve house building.

house building isn’t just about profit to taylor
Wimpy. It’s about providing employment - in many, many forms- supporting supply chain and paying tax into the pot on both the house build and sale and employer and corporation taxes. It also provides more energy efficient housing stock

Why ARE they so ugly? Is it some kind of psy-op? I live in a pretty house, in a pretty town, but every thing built in the last 50 years here is absolutely grim. Why is this? Why the boxy prisons with tiny windows and horrible bricks?

Well ugly is a matter of opinion 😂 they’re modern designs, built with modern materials and methods. They’re not supposed to look like old houses.

Well the housing crisis will not be resolved without also discussing immigration.

It certainly can be, it predates immigration and is a result of 50 years of successive governments, predating even the Eastern European immigration of the early naughties, let alone anything more recent

All of this.
When I drop DS off to Uni in the Midlands it's actually heartbreaking to see the endless swathes of crap housing estates.

Build villages with character. Make city centre housing useable and attractive. People might stay and make communities ,not using them as stop gaps until they can afford a halfway decent house with a garden that's not overlooked on three sides.

A huge chunk of farmland being developed near us will be the Coronation Street of the future - rows of terraces of red brick boxes with grey cladding on the upper elevations, being completed at record speed.

What mystifies me is they're nothing special in terms of design and probably sell for about £250k, so at the lower end of our local market (I'm on the South Coast) and probably purchased by first-time buyers, yet just about every house has a new, top-of-the-range car or SUV parked outside.

It’s an interesting assumptions that communities aren’t being built when people have made that assumption from a drive past 😂

There are a few things- firstly what does community mean for young people today? Do consider that their communities may look very different to the traditional village built 200 years ago.

being realistic though, yes, build a housing estate on the side of the M1 and there will only be so much community it’s realistic to build. However look at the plans for city centre / town centre regeneration and they’ll always detail their community plans. And before you say they’re not affordable- check ie mayor of Londons housing priorities which detail how much new housing is affordable and what that means. Don’t just look on and sneer, it’s never that simple! Lots of being done, you just don’t see it from inside your car

If you fly in to Stansted and join the queue of planes circling over Essex, this 'overpopulated' area of the south-east has vast swathes of green as far as the eye can see with the odd manor house hidden behind a hedge - easy reach of London, railways and jobs. I can't believe all this green is something useful growing - perhaps farmers being paid to leave fallow? We need new settlements with proper infrastructure and support services not mini housing developments tagged on to towns already bursting at the seams.

IMe this demographic are far more likely to have company salary sacrifice car deal or company car

I agree, the older ‘new builds’ about 30-40 years old where I live are all in attractive cul-de-sacs or are laid out in an attractive way and actually have space between them and builders actually put in trees along the roads, nowadays new builds seem to be built in massive straight lines in very narrow roads as far as the eye can see and they are so close together which I agree looks like a prison camp and there is no landscaping for trees either which makes them look and feel so bleak, add on masses of cars and they look so depressing, the more expensive ones don’t suffer from this though so it’s all down to builders not wanting to spend money on the more mass produced houses I imagine and years ago the planners wouldn’t have passed those layouts.

Predates immigration? When is this then?

In the here and now simple maths will tell you that if the level of immigration continues then even if Labour manage to build their housing quota ( they won't) then the crisis will be worse by the next election.

It's a matter of opinion, sure, but doesn't the opinion of most people matter? Why do architects feel so confident that their tastes should override the majority of people who have to live with and look at their soulless cells, shat out by the thousands over this once beautiful country?

I've never understood where this arrogance comes from. You would have thought the brutalist tower block era might have humbled the profession, but no, architects continue on, blithely concreting the world, deaf to the land or the culture they impose themselves on, magnificently certain that this grey clown house, now with wings, is obviously better than 1,000 years of vernacular wisdom.

I like the New London Vernacular buildings that are coming through, precisely because they don't do this -- they do speak to the place they are built within. It's possible to build new houses that aren't absolute dogshit, but for some reason we're choosing not to, mainly. And I don't really understand why.