To not understand why we need so many new homes

[Pebbledash7]

Just as in the title really. I keep hearing about us building all these new houses but where are all the people currently living? There are tonnes of houses for sale in the property pages of our local paper.

I really dont understand why we can't make better use of what we have?

Several reasons:
The very low interest mortgages of the past 20 years plus the increasing get of multiples of salary you could borrow with no deposit led to house prices rising a lot.
The fact that foreign investors who pay no tax here are allowed to buy property in London and leave it sat empty.
The fact that council houses were sold off and the money was not allowed to go back into housing.
The fact that more and more baby boomers ( often divorced) live alone, in family sized houses.
The fact that when they do build houses they are of the luxury variety and not affordable at all.
By the by, I remember when social housing was just called housing. .

You are an idiot.

Some current housing stock is clearly reaching the end of the road.

Lots of run down holiday resorts have huge numbers of terraced 3/4 story ex B&Bs (8/10 bedroom) which aren't fit for purpose anymore. Their main current use is as bed-sits or other multiple occupancy and are attracting "problem" tenants due to them not being desirable/suitable for families (no gardens, too many stairs, bad areas etc). Whole streets/suburbs need raising to the ground so that modern standard housing can be built.

There's still a lot of poor quality "flats" above High street shops which are lying empty or used for low standard storage. Again, could do with mass redevelopment to bring huge swathes of unused potential housing back into use, i.e. as proper apartments or student flats above shopping streets.

There's SO MUCH unused land/building that already has the infrastructure in place and just needs redevelopment to bring back into full modern use. There's really very little need to keep ruining the countryside to build sprawling new estates when there's so much brownfield land and outdated buildings which could be redeveloped instead.

If it was made harder for the builders (i.e. forcing them to contribute a lot more towards local infrastructure, roads, schools, GP surgeries, etc) when they want to build on yet another field, they'd soon change their plans and start to think about bringing unused properties back into use in areas where they wouldn't have to pay for infrastructure (i.e. towns etc).

The thing is though, when they build in rural areas they don't add to infrastructure. So, by me, hundreds of detached houses are bring built on every available patch of green, but the roads are already jam packed, the schools are full etc. There is little usable public transport.
Meanwhile whole streets in Northern cities sit derelict. The whole thing needs to be better regulated, builders need incentives to develop existing housing, and transport needs to be sustainable.
Building detached houses on greenfield land around cities does have the effect of eliminating the "lungs" needed to offset the appalling levels of pollution. Green sites also provide spaces for wildlife (bees etc) to survive and places for children to play, so it's not always as simple as nimbyism.
The latest development near me is on the edge of a village with no bus, train or local work. There are a handful of HA houses but most of the houses will be around 350k, which is way out of most people's reach.
We need a shitload of 2 and 3 bed council houses, with schools and local shops and buses. Basically what they did in the 50s.
When my grandparents moved into their council house, there was no stigma to it. Lots of perfectly ordinary working people lived on estates. We need to get back to that. Private house prices would be levelled off, or drop, so a lot of middle aged property owners wouldn't like it, but we need proper, thought about estates, with a mix of people, near amenities.

X post with badbunny!

We bought a nice house in a nice rural spot and ive just heard that affordable housing will go up on the fields around us. Our lifestyle will be compromised, our hard earned house worth less money & our little village school will go downhill.

Entitled, much? Wow. Why would you 'little village school go downhill' pray?

Bad bad bunny- but the land these derelict houses are on can be a) situated in the middle of a "problem" area which would need entirely regenerating (this has happened quite successfully to an inner city area near me so it can be dons but it's s government decision not just "builders".

Or the land its on is too expensive to buy due to its close proximity to a city, even though it's got rundown housing on it currently.

It's not just a case of "force these greedy builders to make the whole area better. They just don't have the power. Before anything can be built it has to go through reams of planning (sometimes years) and fulfil the requirements of the area as set by policy. Builders can't just rock up and put whatever they want on a site like an entirely private arrangement.

Exactly why the government needs to offer incentives/ restrictions plus invest in infrastructure. We don't just need houses in a vacuum. We need schools, doctors, parks, buses and shops to go with them.

older couples should be incentivised to give up large family homes

The trouble with that is that if government (any government) offers the carrot it will sooner or later pick up the stick if the carrot does not work to its satisfaction.

An older empty-nester couple who turn a bedroom into a hobby-room or a guest room or a study are not under-occupying - they are occupying differently. And for many of them - and even more for widowed/divorced/single people - downsizing would mean moving away from the people they know and are at ease with. Why should they?

Where are OP?? operating the mute mode?

Come back OP! Face up to what you started, please. You've really sparked something here.

OP, you clearly don't understand how difficult it is to get a house/flat in some parts of the country. DP and I live in the South East and between us earn a really good salary. We've been saving over two years and will take another to get together the deposit that we need for a house (between 35,000-40,000). And that stupidly high amount is just for a 10% deposit for a small house! It's not just that we're saving and houses are expensive but that rent and additional bills like council tax are sky high in this area. And frankly, not everyone can live in cheaper parts of the country - DPs job doesn't exist anywhere else.

I see the OP hasn`t come back. She obviously realised how wrong and how unreasonable her views are.

Nah, she's probably gazing into her fridge and deciding nobody could possibly ever need a food bank.

She's too busy throwing her poop at the walls maybe once she's evolved she'll come back.

The op has just heard that her local council has taken her advice about blocks of flats being a much more sensible form of affordable housing, and is having the vapours as she contemplates living in the shade of a rural high rise.

No social housing development here, just 4-6 bed mansions annexed to our pretty little villages. Don't know anyone who is able to afford them... some developments shout out greed!

Someone has told the OP that the Lower Orders will be voting on Thursday. She is in shock.

The ops the very definition of 'little englander'

I've always assumed new builds are because of the population going up & up. Could be totally wrong though, haven't looked far into it.

If it wasn't the dreadful prospect of affordable housing being built near her rural idyll, she would be moaning about rusty farm machinery, sheds, tractors and cowpats blighting her precious view.

FFS, really OP? FYI a great many of us are renting. Paying a fecking fortune in rent (paying for someone else's retirement), having no security whatsoever (we've had to move to three different counties in the last six ten years because there is such competition in the rental market), unable to save a 5% deposit because of the lack of housing stock and huge house prices and because we're financially tied up forking out a massive rent each month.

If it makes you feel any better we put off having children because we were renting and didn't have our own home. The result was I missed the boat and now am unable to have children. Great.

Oh my very first !!

I'm delighted to see that the OP has fucked off as well...i love people who voice such dense opinions and then don't have enough conviction to see them through and fight their corner.

For info OP, we are in exactly the same position as bastardly. Paying exorbitant rent for a nice, but small, 2 bed house in the South East. Both myself and DH have decent, fairly well paid jobs (DH actually has 2 jobs), we save everything we can every month but unfortunately it's still not enough to scrape together a 5% deposit down here. It's got fuck all to do with working hard enough!

So do us all a favour and get down from your high horse and shut up!

Exactly....

exactly what?