Uk needs to double house buildng rate

[HMS Conqueror]

The US has zoning laws which do a similar thing in so far as you're only allowed to build 'housing' in a broad area, but in Britain you need specific permission for every change of use of every particular piece of land, or any external changes to the buildings on it, complete with detailed plans. This is why the houses tend to look identical, because it's too difficult to get approval for too many different designs to be worth it.

I'm actually amazed how even quite shoddily built houses in the US seem to have large gardens and driveways. There is a lot more land in the US in general of course, but there are plenty of usable parts of the UK where there is essentially no major urbanisation over thousands of square kilometers.

Tribun: No these people don't like cars. The purpose is partially to preserve the countryside, though in practice this means preserve it for the tiny minority of rich people who can actually afford to live in it, while cramming everyone else into the few areas where it's possible to build due to largely random factors of wherever there were already a lot of buildings when the system was introduced.

[Tribun]

To me that sounds like a huge clusterfuck of a system. No offense, but this sounds insane to me. There's a difference between careful planning of city extensions and a complete mess.

I actually was able to look at how it's done here in my own home city. Here, residential and commercial buildings are not strictly seperated and the city provides (sells) the land and provides the infrastructure. How you actually build and what it looks like is not their concern, thus why new residential areas look very varied (which is refreshing after the uniform areas of the 60s). Turning normal land into land for building is laughably easy, but it's more common to buy a piece of land from an area the city has declared is to be developed.

You'd surprised in what kind of areas new parts of my city are being built (the city just has 220.000 inhabitants). Fields, former sites of a brewery and a construction company and former industrial areas (after the shit got removed). Interestingly, it's desirable for the city to keep itself as compact as possible.

[Block]

It's also had the presumably unintended effect of totally separating residential areas from commercial or industrial areas. You can always tell post-1950s development because there are no shops, no pubs, no restaurants, no businesses and no factories, just a web of identical streets lined with identical houses that go nowhere.

This is also true to a large extent in the US.

Most places in the US have light commercial areas interspersed with groups of homes. They're not massive shopping complexes or anything, those do tend to be seperated out, but there's always small resteraunts, stripmalls, etc. in and around every suburban neighborhood I've ever lived in.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. You're right; I was thinking of "developments" as relatively small areas, say, less than a kilometer square. Those are often firmly one-use in the US, but the next square kilometer over will be light commercial as often as not.

[Broomstick]

There is also still quite a bit of land in the US that can be utilized for both residential and commercial purposes. As an example, the building I live in is one such, which is why it is legal for us to both live here and use it as a legal address for a business (At present, there is one residential occupant and two commercial, although 10 years ago when we were new tenants it was four residential and one commercial - the zoning hasn't changed, only who is renting). The Valparaiso, IN location of my employer is the same - commercial storefronts on the first floor, residential units on the second.

Even where the zoning is more stringent and you'd have something that's strictly residential, owners can still make quite a few modifications with little or no permissions required. When we put up a garage for someone a couple years ago they required only one permit from the city of Merrillville, which required only that the plans for the garage did not exceed the local permitted height of an outbuilding and did not impinge on others' property. There were two inspections I was aware of - one to make sure the electrical wiring was safe and conformed to local code, and one to confirm the construction was adequate for our climate (we have concerns both about how much snow a roof might need to support and structures being able to withstand high winds). I believe it took all of a month from application to approval of the building permit. Nothing got lost and so far as I know, no bribes exchanged hangs. People here whine about how there's too much regulation, but in talking to people living in Europe I gather that by their standards ours are incredibly lax.

So yes, we have suburbs, but it's because of cars and choices by private entities. It's not imposed by the government. I suspect that makes it easier to build more housing when it's needed.

[madd0ct0r]

the clusterfuck just got more intresting: Tories to make people earning over a certain limit pay to stay in social housing.
So if you're unemployed or enmployable, you'll be ok. If you're homeless you'll be shipped north, and if you're working your accomadation bill has just shot up...

The government is introducing measures that could drive thousands of families out of social housing by removing any subsidy for their rent.

In what is being billed as a "pay to stay" scheme, Downing Street has swung behind plans to introduce a new household income threshold above which social tenants must pay full market rent. The government is expected to say that rent subsidy will be capped at a household income of £60,000, meaning, for example, a couple on £30,000 each could see their rent rise by about £70 a week.

The scheme, applicable to all housing association and council properties, is explicitly designed to make social housing primarily available to the poor.

The housing minister, Grant Shapps, has referred to the idea before, but Downing Street's embrace of the proposal means it will now go ahead with a consultation paper next month.

The government says it is necessary to remove an unfairness in the system and to allocate scarce housing resources more efficiently. Critics will say the scheme will give wealthier families an incentive to buy their property at discounted rates, removing social housing from the market.

The government has been accused of driving some poor tenants from properties in wealthier inner-city areas by introducing a higher rent, set at 80% of the market rent. It has also introduced a so-called spare room tax, so that under-occupying social tenants of working age are docked £14 a week for one spare bedroom and £25 a week for two. No tenant will receive more than £500 a week in welfare payments, a measure that will affect larger families on housing benefit.

The welfare cap is, in polling terms, one of the most popular policies the government has introduced, and the new £60,000 household income cap for social housing tenants is likely to win equally wide support.

A No 10 source linked the two measures, saying: "It's not right that high earners benefit from taxpayer-funded housing subsidy. Just as we have introduced a cap on housing benefit and welfare payments to make the system fairer, now we're acting on social housing too."

Government sources added that social housing should be regarded as a precious asset to be devoted to those most in need, not a cheap option for those who can afford competitive rents or their own property.

The government consultation, due to be launched next month by Shapps, will suggest a range of options for the threshold, with the lowest at £60,000.

Ministers have been looking at a range of proposals to make social housing more flexible, including the removal of so-called lifetime tenancies, replacing them with fixed-term tenancies. Social housing tenants can also no longer pass their homes to their children.

Government research shows that as many as 6,000 social rented homes in England are lived in by people who earn a combined income of more than £100,000, including Bob Crow, leader of the RMT union. At the proposed £60,000 threshold, ministers estimate as many as 34,000 social rented homes in England alone would be affected.

It is being stressed that no one would be evicted from their home, simply that they would have to pay higher rents.

The government claims the economic subsidy provided by sub-market rents for social housing is worth £3,600 a year on average, or £69 a week.

The total cost of this annual subsidy for those above the £60,000 threshold is £122.4m, and the annual subsidy for a £100,000 threshold is £21.6m.

Social rents are set on the basis of a formula linked to size of the property, its value and local earnings.

Labour has always argued that social housing should be for a mix of tenants and not seen as the preserve of the poor. The Liberal Democrats have curbed some government housing reforms, but could arguably support the measure as a legitimate restriction on middle-class welfare.

However, social housing has been increasingly taken up as an option by young professionals unable to afford to own their own home. The cost of the cheapest quarter of homes is now more than six times average household income and eight times in London.

The overall social housing budget was cut by more than 50% in the 2010 spending review, to £4.4bn, and the number of people on council waiting lists is now 1.8m, an 80% increase in the last decade.

In a report this week, Shelter, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation said the government was failing on five of its 10 key indicators: affordability of the private rented sector, help with housing costs, homelessness, housing supply and overcrowding.

[Tribun]

Sounds like Social Darwinism at its finest. Seriously, what's wrong with that country? Was it always like that or is this a recent development?

[Simon_Jester]

This isn't unheard of. The US ran into similar problems during the 1930s and 1940s- for various reasons almost no new housing was built between 1929 and 1945. Since population never stopped growing, housing became tremendously overcrowded and expensive, especially for African-Americans who were artificially limited to a handful of segregated neighborhoods. Since more and more blacks were moving into the cities anyway in search of work, that meant that crowding became a particularly serious problem there, even for perfectly able-bodied and motivated people with families.

(Of course, much of the rest of the world experienced the same thing; the US is where I feel more qualified to speak)

Here and then, the problem was partly resolved by the boom of suburban housing (whites moving out of the cities, mostly) and desegregation (blacks moving into formerly white neighborhoods in the cities). In Britain the problem can't be solved the same way because the problem is a sheer lack of affordable housing with access to jobs.

[DarkArk]

So yes, we have suburbs, but it's because of cars and choices by private entities. It's not imposed by the government.

That's rather debatable. The government provided huge subsidies for suburban development in the 40s-50s that it didn't give to urban housing. Also you couldn't get a federally-backed mortgage for urban housing that you could get for suburban housing. In many ways the suburban lifestyle is a direct result of government money that would likely not have happened to the same degree if the government had been more equal in its distribution of federally-backed mortgages.

So if you were a young GI back from the war and were looking to buy a house, suburban housing was likely the only thing you could afford.

[Zaune]

Actually, for a long while our town planning philosophy really did hinge on the assumption that everyone had a car; Milton Keynes is the most infamous example, though the railway station and bus interchange being tacked on in the outskirts of the city as an afterthought are scarcely the end of its issues. Pressure to preserve the picturesque unspoilt beauty of the countryside at all costs, and to hell with anyone who has to live and work there on an annual salary smaller than the price of a yacht, came somewhat later. New Labour's unshakeable belief that if they just passed enough reams of complicated and contradictory regulation about absolutely everything* into law then everything would eventually turn out alright did not help, although it finally put an end to artificial stone-cladding so I suppose it's not all bad.


* Except anything that might slightly inconvenience Rupert Murdoch, merchant bankers or anyone else handing them large wads of campaign funds, oddly enough. They were dead set against excessive legislation for that sort of thing!

[Simon_Jester]

It really ought to be practical for Britain to build "up and not out;" the problem is that high-rise housing for low-income families is generally a state-subsidized project, and the state has to make a conscious decision to do so. That wasn't in the cards in the 1980s, and I don't know why but I'm sure there are reasons it hasn't happened since.

Given the relatively small size and high population density of the country, if Britain didn't have its extremely restrictive zoning laws there would be basically no English countryside left, just as there isn't a lot of it left in the Boston-Washington corridor in the US. I'm not... I'm really not convinced that preserving that isn't worthwhile, although the way you go about it obviously has to be at least semi-practical.

[Darth Tanner]

Have to say the UK situation is pretty bad, largely due to corruption and greed and NIMBYism but the UK posters here are going a bit overboard.

Milton Keynes is the most infamous example

The train station is 5 minutes from the city centre and the bus station is still right next to it, it’s the coach terminal that has just been built by the motorway exit, not a normal bus station. The city also has one of the best cycle networks in the country with dedicated routes that are not on the roads.

Pressure to preserve the picturesque unspoilt beauty of the countryside at all costs, and to hell with anyone who has to live and work there on an annual salary smaller than the price of a yacht

And the alternative? Pave over the entirety of the south east with cheaply built developments? If you removed controls on development that is exactly what would happen, then we would see how the crowded infrastructure fell apart under the additional weight.

You can always tell post-1950s development because there are no shops, no pubs, no restaurants, no businesses and no factories, just a web of identical streets lined with identical houses that go nowhere.

I'm not sure what new developments are like near you but all of them I've seen have included new schools, shops, restaurants and community centres depending on the size of the development. Obviously they’re not going to build a factory in a residential district though; it’s not the 1800s anymore that’s what industrial estates are for. Not that we are building many new factories due to our shitty economy. Most of the newer industrial estates near me are on the outskirts of Birmingham, built on new land that is at least walking distance to some of the immediate residential areas.

Most new development are indeed cul de sacs however, this appears to be what people want so I’m not sure why it’s a problem.

the same way Tesco can get a big-box megastore nodded through without even a token objection.

Although clearly a big megacoropation with its mouth still wet from a politicians cock is always going to have an easier time than a single individual its not like they can simply bypass the planning process. There are several supermarket developments near me and each has had to go through a length several year planning process with it being rejected and resubmitted with changes several times due to popular opposition (usually traffic)

There's about half a dozen big housing developers who seem to be able to slap down between six and thirty jerrybuilt cookie-cutter McMansions anywhere in the country without a second thought

All new developments by law have to include affordable housing (although the Tory scum are trying to remove that requirement) and the reason a development will have similar houses built on it, (other than obvious aesthetics) is that its bloody cheaper for them to build from a set number of designs rather than having each unique. I'm also not sure what you mean exactly by McMansions seeing as you costed one at £100,000. Most developments still include a large number of 2 bed houses and an apartment block simply to meet their legal requirements. Obviously some developments will be more expensive than others, I’m not sure why you expect 4-5 bedroom houses in the countryside to be affordable but there are urban developments which are quite reasonably priced, although clearly there are nowhere near enough of them to meet demand this is largely due to lack of land to build them on.

if you're young, able-bodied and have no kids you'll be stuck on the waiting list for years.

This is if anything an understatement, unless you’re in receipt of social benefit and preferably mother to several sprogs without a father you can more or less kiss any social housing goodbye, the fault lies with the Tory sell off of the council houses and the inability of any government since to replace them. Something we can all blame on Thatcher!

It really ought to be practical for Britain to build "up and not out;"

There are quite a few hi rise apartment blocks for low income families. The problem is that because their specifically for low income families their more or less ghetto blocks that stand out like cancerous lumps of concrete. A large problem is the market demands housing rather than apartment, partly because the apartments are usually shit holes but also because its perceived as a significantly inferior way of living and I don’t really see that changing.

Also in my experience apartments that are not shit holes are actually much more expensive than a comparably sized house although this could be that nice apartments are usually built in city centres or close to train stations where the location adds to the price.

So if you're unemployed or enmployable, you'll be ok. If you're homeless you'll be shipped north, and if you're working your accomadation bill has just shot up...

I don’t really see the problem, a family with an income of £60,000 shouldn’t be using up social housing and receiving taxpayer subsidies accommodation. I don’t think it will actually affect that many people in the first place though.

[madd0ct0r]

high rise housing has a bad history for brits - terrible build quality, terrible community damage, concentration of poverty. A few were demolished due to being unsafe for accommodation, the rest were just universally hated. It has suceded in the luxury market and student accommodation, but the concept of townhouses remain much more popular.

There's compounding factors - a lot of the housing stock in the UK isn't fit for purpose (grand old Victorian mansions that couldn't be kept warm if you stored nuclear waste in the basement or Victorian terraces from before the concept of damp= bad). There simply aren't enough homes to go around because the population is growing slowly, but people are divorcing and spreading out quickly, while there's also large numbers of empty homes or 2nd homes. Normally such huge property prices spark a building bubble, but it's hard to find land you're allowed to build on, keeping the prices artificially high. Land is actually reallistically harder to find too - there's not much of the South East left that isn't high risk floodplain, and the UK has had some major floods these recent years.

The green belt (area of no new construction around major cities) was designed to stop sprawl, but the pressure inside it is large enough now to leapfrog it. You have people living in reading and oxford who commute to london daily. It's as though the sprawl happened anyway and then Q turned a strip circle of it back into fields.

most residential construction sites i worked on were specified to 'mixed use' (ie to get planning permission the developer had to include some 'low income houses' ) so there is some 'low income' stuff being built. But quite simply put, nowhere near enough.

We need massive housing expansion, we need it to be up north, and we need job creation to be tied into that. There's a certain amount of jobs that come tied to the amount of population (hairdressers for example) but frankly the north was only starting to recover from the 80's when this recession hit. Is there anything there with a competitive advantage?

[HMS Conqueror]

One problem we have is that people see rising house prices as a sign of prosperity, presumably because it means that people who already own houses are getting richer by sitting around watching TV. Of course this is like saying it would be great if car prices kept rising so then people who owned cars would get rich. The practical effect is that everyone who owned some old banger in the 1980s would still be driving it around today, and people who didn't would be finding it very difficult to even get that.

I see a lot of the 'low income housing' requirements as a chimera. The market likes to cater to people on lower incomes because there are a lot of them, and volume is what really makes you rich. The problem is that the cost of land is sufficiently high that you can't just throw down a row of solid terraces and sell them for cheap anymore, because the money you save on building is not that big as a proportion of the total cost. It's more efficient to make some horrible 4 storey townhouse and break it up into flats. Building regulations may also contribute, as I believe that they have now gone way beyond 'make sure it doesn't randomly fall down or catch fire', but I'm not expert on that.

I would be quite happy to abolish the planning system and the green belts. I like hiking and I like the countryside, but human welfare is also important and with only ~6% urbanisation currently the balance is skewed well against it.

[Broomstick]

So yes, we have suburbs, but it's because of cars and choices by private entities. It's not imposed by the government.

That's rather debatable.

Yes, but while in the US various government regulations and programs favored suburban development they didn't compel it. There wasn't a nationally coordinated scheme here. The result is considerably less regulation on new development than in other places, and I suspect re-zoning and multi-purpose zoning is more common than elsewhere.

[HMS Conqueror]

The planning system isn't really nationally co-ordinated. Private organisations and individuals still make the proposals, and they are accepted or rejected by local governments. Policies therefore vary wildly, and as previous posters indicate it's widely known that corruption and personal contacts play a role. But localities can't opt out of 'the system', which is inherently very restrictive.

[Surlethe]

Interestingly, in the US, I have heard that the states with the strongest zoning restrictions are the states which were hardest-hit by the housing bubble and subsequently the recession. Conversely, states like Texas, with few local zoning restrictions, were states with the strongest performance during the recession.

[Sea Skimmer]

That's probably interlinked into the fact that Texas had a net influx of population, and actually needed to develop more housing to hold actual millions of people moving in. When a major push for development exists regulations tend to get more lax, and they will generally be more lax in areas with lots of room to spare and large areas which were actually never zoned before someone bought the land for development.

Its not for nothing that the worst hit areas were places with no real demand for housing, like the huge masses of worthless developments around Los Vegas and several Florida vacation cities. Rules were very lax on those areas, and the crash was so massive they had huge tracts of unfinished buildings left as shells and foundations.

[DoomSquid]

high rise housing has a bad history for brits - terrible build quality, terrible community damage, concentration of poverty. A few were demolished due to being unsafe for accommodation, the rest were just universally hated. It has suceded in the luxury market and student accommodation, but the concept of townhouses remain much more popular.

There's compounding factors - a lot of the housing stock in the UK isn't fit for purpose (grand old Victorian mansions that couldn't be kept warm if you stored nuclear waste in the basement or Victorian terraces from before the concept of damp= bad). There simply aren't enough homes to go around because the population is growing slowly, but people are divorcing and spreading out quickly, while there's also large numbers of empty homes or 2nd homes. Normally such huge property prices spark a building bubble, but it's hard to find land you're allowed to build on, keeping the prices artificially high. Land is actually reallistically harder to find too - there's not much of the South East left that isn't high risk floodplain, and the UK has had some major floods these recent years.

The green belt (area of no new construction around major cities) was designed to stop sprawl, but the pressure inside it is large enough now to leapfrog it. You have people living in reading and oxford who commute to london daily. It's as though the sprawl happened anyway and then Q turned a strip circle of it back into fields.

most residential construction sites i worked on were specified to 'mixed use' (ie to get planning permission the developer had to include some 'low income houses' ) so there is some 'low income' stuff being built. But quite simply put, nowhere near enough.

We need massive housing expansion, we need it to be up north, and we need job creation to be tied into that. There's a certain amount of jobs that come tied to the amount of population (hairdressers for example) but frankly the north was only starting to recover from the 80's when this recession hit. Is there anything there with a competitive advantage?

Well, the North has the least problem with housing expansion in theory, because it has huge areas of 'brownfield' land that once had mills and factories on it, and that sort of land is a lot easier to get planning permission for. The problem there is that there are no jobs, or at least not enough, so people are leaving, meaning that there's no demand for more housing. As a result, it tends not to get built. If you could magically breathe life back into the economy in those areas, there would probably be a building boom pretty instantaneously.

[Jade Falcon]

I wouldn't say ALL high rise housing is bad. Apparently the earliest post war examples were decent being built fairly well, but later ones were thrown up econoboxes. Glasgow had an infamous example in the Gorbals of about half a dozen blocks of flats that shortly after opening were all evacuated due to poor build quality, unsafeness and extreme damp problems. On the other hand, a now deceased friend of mine lived in a block near Clydebank which was good sized, decent quality, had been refurbished to a good standard and was comfortable.

As to housing estates post war, I lived in Bourtreehill in Scotland. Both it and the neighbouring Broomland schemes had some issues, but there were three clusters of shops. One of these had a convenience store, a pub, takeaway and Library, another a pub and store, and the largest a pub and a good spectrum of stores, post office and so on. There was also a good GP's practice. Also three churches (COS, Baptist, Catholic), four primary schools, one Catholic the others being non-demonitional. Overall it was a decent place.

[Saxtonite]

high rise housing has a bad history for brits - terrible build quality, terrible community damage, concentration of poverty. A few were demolished due to being unsafe for accommodation, the rest were just universally hated. It has suceded in the luxury market and student accommodation, but the concept of townhouses remain much more popular.

To be fair, AFAIK in the 1800s the british government did ban buildings taller than a certain height in order to preserve the "old city of london" - so there might also be a cultural aversion to high-rises by at least the English which isnt applicable in the US.

[Simon_Jester]

London rescinded its ban on tall buildings some decades ago.

[Broomstick]

To be fair, AFAIK in the 1800s the british government did ban buildings taller than a certain height in order to preserve the "old city of london" - so there might also be a cultural aversion to high-rises by at least the English which isnt applicable in the US.

High rises for poor people were a disaster in the US, too - that's why the city listed in your location field knocked most of theirs down. It's not a cultural aversion, it's that poverty+crowding in high rises just makes things worse.