House building is out of control

[Caterpillarsleftfoot]

Every where I turn at the moment the countryside is being turned into housing developments. If we carry on like this our habitats and green spaces will be decimated. Not to mention the flood risks. Also our beautiful rural way of life that we associate England with will be lost.

There is no way we need this many new developments. The latest one I saw is on the edge of a beautiful historical town in the countryside in a neighbouring county.

We need flats for council properties to save space and fewer air BnB properties.

So social housing should be FLATS only??

Nah

Totally agree, this is one of the reasons people are up in arms about immigration. In addition ugly solar panels are appearing everywhere😡

Same where I live. Fields that were growing crops now have houses and flats on . But the population of our City has increased by 30,000 in the last couple of decades and it’s still rapidly increasing. Even though water shortages are now predicted.

If they weren't needed, they wouldn't sell and no one would live in them. My concern is more that there's rarely sufficient infrastructure built to support the extra residents, so the education and health and other services are over-stretched even more.

Loads of buildings going up where I live no social housing being built all student accommodation or upwards of 250k for a one bed apartment. This is in a large city. What is missing is the infrastructure, Dr's, school, parking spaces.

There's also a heck of a lot of countryside left, so it might feel like everywhere you turn but it really isn't. We're not about to lose the bucolic idyll to some concrete dystopia.

"As at April 2022: 8.7% of land in England is of developed use, with 91.1% of non-developed use and the remaining 0.2% being vacant. The top 3 land use groups were 'Agriculture' (63.1%), 'Forestry, open land and water' (20.1%), and 'Residential gardens' (4.9%). 6.8% of land within the Green Belt is of developed use" https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2022/land-use-statistics-england-2022#:~:text=As%20at%20April%202022%3A,Belt%20is%20of%20developed%20use.

We have a huge housing shortage, of course the houses are needed.

We do need more homes. However:

• New-build housing stock is invariably of poor quality, cramped, crowded in together, with little outdoor space, car-focussed, and poorly planned with little to no supporting infrastructure like public transport, schools, doctors surgeries etc.

• Building on flood plains, agricultural land, and green space is a disaster. We lose food security and if the houses flood every year or two you may as well have never built them in the first place.

• We ignore the huge proliferation of second homes and holiday properties, much of which are perfectly good housing stock which has been removed from the market.

• We rarely use brownfield sites because it's "too expensive", even though those are the areas we should be focussing on because they often have supporting infrastructure around them, they help support local high streets in towns and cities, and they don't waste agricultural land.

In other words, yes to more houses, no to the warped nonsense that is our current house building policy.

It makes me so angry, we are meant to be in the middle of a climate crisis? So surely concreting over every area of green space is counter productive? Anyway there are more than enough empty buildings, second homes and disused shops etc that could be used for homes before building on and on, not all of us want to live in urban areas and actively choose to live rurally

There is no way we need this many new developments.

Of course they are needed. Do you really think developers are so stupid as to invest millions upon millions of £££ on properties that will just sit empty and rot?

YANBU, at all. I feel exactly the same. I live in a lovely rural village, with lots of open countryside for lovely walks etc, it’s beautiful. I fear by the time my children grow up, it’ll all be gone and the next generation won’t know what rural England, especially living in it, is like.

I think the eery thing for me is not knowing when this crazy rate of development will stop, as if it doesn’t, then yes, we will all live in a concrete jungle. There’s already so many antisocial behavioural problems because we just can’t get away from one another any more (unless you live rurally) everyone crammed in together, we’re bound to get on each other’s nerves.

A lot of people also need wide, open green spaces for their mental health.

The current government assessment of annual need for new homes is 300,000 per year, and that is based on a 2014 assumption that net immigration is 170,000 per year. We aren't building that many houses either - it's been around 230,000 for the last few years, and will start to drop sharply given the drop off in housing starts. So we actually aren't building anywhere near enough houses to make sure everyone has an affordable, suitable home.

Currently 8.7% of England is developed. Between 2019 and 2022, 11,400 hectares changed from a non developed to residential use - equivalent to less than 0.01% of England's total area over three years.

How about banning second home/ holiday home ownership first? So many houses in my area just sitting empty. It’s disgusting.

It's not necessarily in the right place. A third of the population have no green space within 15 minutes walk.

Everything @Flickersy says is spot on.

We need to stop building those stupid “executive” estates. More well built plants property be that flats/apartments, bungalows and 2 bed houses.

We need to stop allowing foreign money to tie up empty properties in London, stop all the second holiday home bs have home for people to actually live in. Also build on crap land not on our good farmable land.

I live in a lovely rural village, with lots of open countryside for lovely walks etc, it’s beautiful. I fear by the time my children grow up, it’ll all be gone and the next generation won’t know what rural England, especially living in it, is like.

That feels like massively catastrophising. There are problems facing the next generation for sure, but the end of rural villages is not upon us, if indeed your DC want to live in one.

I take @MereDintofPandiculation point that not all the undeveloped land is 'in the right place' for everyone to access green space, but that's not the same as people in lovely rural villages fretting because some other people want to live in their lovely rural village too and might need some new homes to do so.

New houses always sell because people want to live in new builds.
The last housing development in our town was supposed to include 20% affordable houses. Ended up 0 affordable housing or starter flats because the building company decided it wasn't affordable for them to include it and the council just let them get away with it. This happens over and over. Its bullshit.

It's a conflicting interests over and over again. The country has a real housing shortage and some people complain about countryside being build. You either agree that your kids will never afford a house where you live and will be renting a mouldy flat for the rest of their life or agree that the field next to you is redeveloped.

They wouldn't be building them if people weren't buying them and the amount of people living in B&Bs etc is shocking.

However, we need more social housing, decent roads, new schools, playgrounds, health centres etc alongside them. You can't just keep putting up ten houses on every pub that closes down and walk away.

I don’t think it is catastrophising actually. Someone up thread stated the aim is to build 300,000 new houses each year. For how many years though? Because our island isn’t going to get any bigger, we can’t acquire more land? So sooner or later, we will be building over the majority of good farmland surely?

As previously said, we need to make use of wasteland and abandoned units and properties and start building actual affordable homes, before we build on our farmland. We should be able to feed our own population without relying so heavily on imported goods and we can’t. And that won’t get better if we keep on building over farmland.

Yes but population growth is rising at an unsustainable rate, how about we tackle that too. We are a small island, no matter what anyone says. We can’t indefinitely sustain these huge increases in population year on year.

People need homes. Homelessness, and the high cost of housing, are huge problems. As people are living longer, the need for more homes will increase.

And we have labour shortages in many sectors, so we need some immigration to do the jobs that need doing. They will need homes, too.

I think there should be more emphasis on converting former industrial and commercial buildings into homes and building on brownfield sites rather than build on green belt and agricultural land though. There's a site where I live that has had planning permission for 400 homes for at least 16 years, and not a brick has been laid yet. Every few years, it's sold to yet another developer, who then applies for planning permission for a slightly different scheme. Nothing ever gets built.

There are also 3 former school sites, one privately owned and the other 2 LEA, that have been standing empty for some time. One of them is a really big site, not far from the station and town centre, and ideal for housing.

I reckon it would be possible to build a thousand homes here without encroaching beyond the existing town boundary (which would be unlikely to get permission, because it's a national park).

I agree.

Destroying ecosystems and they wonder why there's a climate crisis

I think it feels worse in my area because many local people cannot afford to buy or rent them , and schools , drs and local infastrucure is struggling .