New housing in the UK

[RichTea90]

Sorry this is a bit of a ranty post but I live in South East England I’m 33 years old. Trying to get on the property ladder with a 40k deposit and a joint income of £119k. We are looking at 3 bed new build as want to start a family but they’re all so expensive and about 30-40k out of our budget.

Why is the government letting all of these greedy house building companies build and sell properties that are just not affordable to normal, every day people / couples / families. I think it’s truly scandalous.

instead im staring at Rightmove looking at a lot of properties that are so outdated or falling down and we just don’t have enough money to / disposable income to then do the property up.

feeling rather stressed 😩 is anyone else in the same position or understands what I mean

If you don't want density and you don't want encroachment onto greenbelt land, you need to tell us where we should be putting the housing we need.

We need another 4 million or so homes. They have to go somewhere.

Do we though?

The birth rate is dramatically dropping since Covid. Baby boomers are about to enter the years of higher mortality (was the polite enough 😬- you get what I’m saying facepalm 🤦‍♀️).

I know it’s no help as we do need them now I agree, but by the time they bloody build them we probably won’t need them. Maybe that’s why no one in gov is bothered.

And I don’t like the green belt idea. It’s beyond stupid. That’s the most expensive part of the U.K. And it has no infrastructure!

Build up density around transport hubs imo. Very few parts of London are actually dense. Majority of it is like a giant suburb collection of towns.

Do we? According to who?

@Scottishwildcat DH is not a planning consultant. He’s a civil, structural and environmental consulting engineer and expert witness.

You have just demonstrated you know nothing about housebuilding or how housebuilding actually happens. You have no idea about flooding risk, designing mitigation schemes, road design or anything else that’s part of detailed planning permission. The numerous hoops developers go through is massive and costly and very slow with huge numbers of people having their say. The bottom line is that housing development is slow and inevitably means developers have land stacked up. Sometimes they will sell it on without any resolution being found. The other issue is the huge costs associated with getting pp mean too little is allocated to building quality homes. That also needs to change.

Our area is inundated with "executive"homes being built on ground that is close to flooding, one site had standing water for over a year.

flooding should be alleviated by upstream planting and mitigation as well as mitigation downstream. It’s interesting that no one wants housing. Executive just means family homes in standard language! They wouldn’t be built if there was no chance of selling them. Plus they got pp. Would the council and locals have preferred flats and back to backs? Posters above don’t want high density either. This thread has brought out NIMBYs in all colours and stripes!

Yes they are building houses here right next to the motorway in an area where the noise levels are above WHO recommendations and the report says that residents will have to find another way of ventilating their homes instead of opening windows. I’m guessing that won’t be in the sales brochures!

Do I not? And just how do you know that?

You can justify your position by writing down whatever your developer-aligned husband dictates to you. You can try to minimise my knowledge and dismiss me as a NIMBY but you cannot argue the facts.

You are, unsurprisingly, a YIMBY, because your family accumulates wealth from being part of the system; you personally would benefit from that system being relaxed and thus even more profitable. Understandable, but own it rather than seeking to denigrate those with opposing views makes you look silly.

There is no upstream planting happening here, the infrastructure is creaking. We have double the number of patients per GP as average and One tower block developer is applying to reduce its already insulting 15% non-market tenure to 0, regardless of the council’s set target of 50%. It will be approved.

The ‘bottom line’ is actually that developers aim for 15-25% GDV profit in their schemes, depending on risk.

The ‘bottom line’ is that however difficult and long-winded you say it is, developers made an average of around £65k profit per new home in the last few years. During the pandemic the big firms made £7bn profit in 2 years. That’s a lot of money to have done fuck all to help the housing crisis. Don’t forget - rents have gone up massively in that time, and social housing lists haven’t reduced. Despite building 3/4-2/3 of the houses mandated, things have got worse. Not a little better, not 3/4-2/3 better - worse.

And despite all that ‘hard work’ they have to do in the planning stages, they still managed to fuck up very basic things in developments near my part of London. They built a health centre that didn’t meet CCG rules. They built retail spaces that aren’t connected to the grid. They built a car park underneath some towers on a flood plain that keeps flooding.

The council are useless and toothless and the ex-leader jumped ship to a 6 figure job at one of the main developers months after approving the schemes.

There are thousands of people with unsellable flats because the developers cut corners with cladding and now refuse to take responsibility and fix it. There are thousands facing ruin because service charges are abhorrent.

Piss poor work, lack of social tenures, onerous freeholds, ghost towers, movement of council planning leads into executive developer positions all show just how fucked up the planning system is.

It needs cleaning up not relaxing.

I reject your central premise about the scale of house building required, as do many experts, and as for the poor developers working so hard for paltry returns? Pass me a tiny violin.

Who said paltry returns? I said business should be allowed to make money and it’s no good relying on the state for houses.

You just carry on ranting. By the way, it isn’t just the fault of housing developers regarding cladding. There’s the involvement of building regs and the cladding manufacturers but you just keep spouting rubbish with no solutions.

What a wonderful, nuanced debate.

Well done on your excellent engagement with the many points I raised.

You’ve really added so much to the OPs thread.

Personally speaking, I think you make some really great points…

Intuitively, I’ve always felt something fishy has been going on with developers. Governments imo do have a duty to build more houses, that’s part of the governments role in society… and yes they grant pp to these developers, but it should be based on the premise that these houses are of good quality, have good infrastructure and are affordable. I do agree they should make some profit, but not to the levels they are and at the expense of people during a cost of living crisis off the back of a pandemic.

https://apple.news/AxLNWfrR4SOiPxBtiQ-6TMg

@RichTea90 If you want developers to clean up contaminated land, they need to make a profit. Every business in the UK needs to make a profit. Definitely those with pension funds as share holders! In effect millions of people own publicly listed companies. As I have explained. The more complex legislation gets and pp rules, the more money they have to divert to this part of the business. It’s not sensible and there’s no sign of Labour being able to build houses faster and better unless they allow developers to do it. Who else is there? Not many would want to work for the local authorities as housebuilders directly and even if they did, the contracts would be nightmarish. It’s not going to happen.

As long as we don’t want housing near us, don’t want higher rise, all demand gardens, all want the best of everything, don’t accept pp costs and decision times are huge, don’t accept developers need land and deep pockets for pp, we won’t get much housing: and we haven’t. You cannot build cheap with developers needing money for huge pre development costs nobody accepts exist. It wasn’t many years ago when their shares were worth 30p! 15 years actually.

And now they’re worth 500-1200+.

A hike of that magnitude in 15 years is proof that they are making excessive profits, whilst simultaneously shirking their regulatory responsibilities.

You just destroyed your own argument 🤣

Do not think so. Losers affect share price. Maybe you don’t have a pension bug if you did, you might understand the need for profits. Plus it’s better for employment. We need a bouyant economy and that’s linked to companies snd employees doing well. Stagnation doesn’t help anyone. The public sector isn’t helped either. Nothing wrong with profits.

Nothing wrong with profits when legal and moral responsibilities have been fulfilled.

When they haven’t been, for example:

• building less affordable / social housing than required (see many developments)
• building substandard dwellings
• poisoning the locals (see Southall)
• building something that doesn’t match the plans (see Greenwich, although amazingly they are being forced to rectify)
• pushing inappropriate developments into areas that don’t have the infrastructure, and where councils don’t have the money to fight them

Then there is something wrong with profits.

Agreed 👍