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.

But then we have to import food and this could lead to more problems

We always have to import food. It took enormous effort to grow enough food during the world war two for the population, it would not be possible with our current population.

Just chatting with one of my old neighbours (rough outer London burb) - there is now a planning application for flats on the high street. This is good news especially as we had recently had a battle to stop flats being built in the park!

Yes you are right but it's still good to be able to have some agriculture in the UK

Come to my village. Two new housing estates have been built here, both only have 50% of the houses sold after two years but planning permission has just been granted for a further 200 homes to be built, what is the sense in that?

Curious to know roughly where this but obviously understand if you don't want to say.

Plus housing for ever increasing numbers of uni students. And housing for youngsters who have to leave their home towns for work where they could have lived at home if there was work in their home towns.

@greengreengrass25 I agree. I think we should build houses on golf courses.

Exactly!

Trouble is that housing isn’t spread equally over the country. The new homes will be built where it’s already built up. Lots of land isn’t suitable for building on anyway such as moors, mountains, marshland, etc. Lots of potential building land doesn’t have inftastructure such as water, power, sewage etc.

We can add infrastructure. And much of our current housing is built on previous marshland.
Developers build where they do because it is cheaper, not because that is all that is possible.

They're building houses on land that is currently flooded just outside the town where I live. Like proper deep floods across the entire fields. There's loads of places they could build in town which would be so much better practically but then they wouldn't get to give it a bougie name and a higher price tag!

It's depressing, as is the people being put in them that shouldn't be. It wouldn't be so bad if these otherwise lovely rural areas were expanding to being equally lovely towns with families and couples prospering in them but they're a dumping ground for the people the government have to house somewhere. An example came up recently where a brand new estate was built, one of my colleagues has saved up for about 12 years to live in what's meant to be a new build on the edge of a rural village and bought one of the houses on it. Not only had he saved and scraped by but worked hard, made big sacrifices including only having one child as he and his partner couldn't afford another. A prolific burglar, previously named and shamed in the paper gets housed in the property next to him upon being released from prison. Doesn't look after the property at all, dog was left in it in a heatwave barking until police came looking for him for offending again, find the dog and help it and eventually it's apparent that he's gone back to prison and now the completely trashed property is empty. Not only do new builds not go to people who deserve them and will take care of them in all cases, they are totally abused but there will be some leftist idiot out there somewhere who probably thought a man like that should be allowed to integrate back into society and being moved to the outskirts of a rural village would do him good. It just attracted a load of wrongens that he associates with. This will keep happening though because working hard and being an upstanding member of society no longer means you're likely to get a nice home or if you do, a nice area and nice neighbours aren't garunteed. I am moving and couldn't consider a new build because of the risk of who may be put next to me.

Op I'm in south east and it's insane.
We have absolutely ghetto monumental style flats going up. Every bit of green space is being built on, green belt challenges are everywhere.

I can't bare it. I, can't remember housing issues until 15 ish years ago?? It's Maddness

India has exported large amounts of rice to Africa for many years. So much, in fact, that 70% of Senegal’s imported rice comes from India alone.

Globally India is the world’s biggest exporter of rice, accounting for nearly 40% of international trades. It produces so much rice that it is able to afford to subsidise domestic supplies to the poor.

In July India, facing rising food prices, high inflation and expecting lower crop yields due to adverse weather, banned the export of the cheaper types of rice.
The more expensive types of rice which are generally grown specifically to be sold abroad continued to be exported.

Due to the volume of Indian rice being withheld from the global market, prices shot up. African countries were at a disadvantage in the bidding war.

As the cost of rice increased it pushed up demand for other cheaper crops. In turn this led to those becoming more expensive.

Countries which relied on Indian rice to feed their populations found themselves in a precarious food supply situation. People were going hungry.

Pressure was put on the Indian governemnt to honour its trade agreements for the export of cheap rice.

The Indian government said it had a moral duty to provide food security for its citizens first.

Who is in the right - India or the countries who buy Indian rice?

Relying on mainly imported food to feed your population is risky.

A country can only import food if the exporter is willing to supply it.

Yes it's terrible. Ugly solar and wind farms rather than the proud beauty of a coal burning power station.

The NFU were on this morning talking about importance of food security.

It is going to get more important for countries as you say

There are over 5 million properties at risk of flooding. The Environment Agency has said that if current building trends continue then this number will double in the next 50 years.

Even areas which have never previously flooded are at risk if the water which would previously collect on the floodplain is forced further downstream.

Insurance companies don’t like paying out money. They assess the likelihood of having to part with cash and price their premiums accordingly.

Houses built on a floodplain have a very high likelihood of flooding. Insurance companies offer extortionate quotes to reflect the risk and deter people from taking out policies where the insurance company may end up losing money.

This means traditional types of house insurance have become unaffordable for many people living in high risk properties.

Having no house insurance is risky in itself.

The government realised this was ticking time bomb and in 2016 introduced the Flood Re-Insurance Scheme. This is a joint endeavour between the government and the insurance industry to offer affordable home insurance to people living in houses at risk of flooding.

Offering this costs the insurance companies money, and that means lower profits for their shareholders. They don’t like this.

Have you noticed your house insurance has increased in the last few years? Insurers have upped the cost of cover to offset the increase in payouts.

Build on floodplains and we all pay the price.

I agree it's important to get the facts correct. Whether England or The Netherlands comes out as more densely populated depends on whether you include the bodies of water.

Either way, I dont think it negates my point that we already have a lot of people in a small country! For comparison, our nearest neighbours come in at Ireland, 73, France 124

That was supposed to be in reply to MasterBeth querying whether England is indeed the most densely populated country in Europe.

Thats not really true though, unless you only count the bit of land the house sits on.

Theres a huge new development being built in my town. The actual houses only take up a small amount of the land. The rest is roads, pavements, driveways and gardens. Yes, gardens can be mini wildlife sanctuaries, (or decking and fake grass), but the entire area the development covers can certainly no longer be considered countryside, even if the footprint of the houses is small.

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.

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!

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.

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