
Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery - bhum
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21716626-solve-its-housing-crisis-country-must-learn-love-urban-britains-delusions-about
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lhopki01
The utility of building on the green belt is questionable. The London green
belt is so far away from the city center that you'd be better of living in
Birmigham and taking the train than trying to get in from there. The UK's
biggest issue that the government housing stopped being built in the early
1980s and the number of privately built housing never increased. There has
been a deficit of 200,000 housing units a year for over 30 years. Even now
almost all housing that is built is built for the top end of the market and
will do nothing to bring housing prices down.

~~~
glomph
Exactly. What we need is for money to be put into affordable housing on
brownfield sites in and around the cities. People don't want to live miles
away from anything. Why ruin undeveloped land when there is an abundance of
land (and buildings) that sits unused. The reason is because the real estate
companies don't want to lose out on profit by building affordable homes on
high value land. If the government actually enforced affordable housing
requirements (or heaven forbid actually invested in housing directly) then
that would be worth something. Instead they are pushing 'garden towns', which
whatever the hell it means will probably result in facility deserts and
degenerating estates as well as the unnecessary destruction of the
countryside.

~~~
djmobley
People don't want to live in the London green belt?

Let's lift the restrictions and see if that holds true, shall we?

I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK
are enduring as a result of the housing crisis, and the range of alternatives
that would be considered an improvement for those people.

~~~
crdoconnor
>People don't want to live in the London green belt?

I'd rather live centrally. If _height_ restrictions were eliminated and
councils started building pretty much everybody who wanted to, could. The
housing crisis was entirely a deliberate creation of both the Tories (and to
an extent, New Labour).

>I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK
are enduring

I think you're vastly overestimating the effect this would have on alleviating
that.

Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational
approach than this.

~~~
mrec
> Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational
> approach than this.

Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes from (both main
parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs,
and nobody's even come close to hitting them), doesn't this run afoul of
parliamentary sovereignty?

If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then
even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new
homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give
them all away again as electoral bribes?

My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way
too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment. That's certainly
not the only problem, but it's addressable relatively cheaply via
macroprudential measures and tax law, so I'd like to see uk.gov start there
and then see what further action is needed.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes

The money would come from "people's QE" and lifting the housing revenue
account cap.

Building UP, as I mentioned before, is a better way of packing more people in
than creating sprawling suburbs in the green belt. For a city its size
London's density has been ridiculously restrained.

>both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last
few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them

Neither Blair's government nor the Tories have ever had any intention of
building council housing, instead setting targets for the private sector.

>If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then
even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new
homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give
them all away again as electoral bribes

Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you
want.

>My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way
too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment.

The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the
shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.

~~~
mrec
> The money would come from "people's QE"

Oh, yet more printy printy. Wonderful.

> Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you
> want.

No, I wouldn't prefer that. I'd quite like an affordable home of my own at
some point before I die, thank you very much. I believe social housing - free
from the inflationary incentives of the PRS - has an important role to play in
keeping the PRS honest, much like (AUIU) the NHS does a lot to keep the UK's
private health sector honest compared to the situation in the US. But after
the past few decades I don't trust uk.gov to treat social housing as an asset
in the long term.

> The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the
> shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.

I don't think that's at all obvious. When some "investors" are buying houses
and leaving them empty while they appreciate, that seems to demonstrate that
this is _at least_ as much a demand-side problem as a supply-side one. Where I
live, new high-rise housing is going up everywhere you look, and prices for a
1-bed are still stuck at around 15x average earnings.

I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that
to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" \- it's
the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services _and_ reduce taxes by
cutting red tape and reducing government waste" \- sounds nice, doesn't
frighten anyone, but if it were really that easy you'd think it would have
actually happened the last 20 times someone said it.

~~~
crdoconnor
>I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do
that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" \-
it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services and reduce taxes by
cutting red tape and reducing government waste" \- sounds nice, doesn't
frighten anyone

Of course it frightens people. Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall
in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that.

I've watched this madness for 20 years as well and it's painfully clear to me
that high house prices was a deliberate choice. The "crisis" made the ultra-
wealthy very happy and a large part of middle England were fairly okay with it
too.

~~~
mrec
> Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying.
> Building a vast amount of housing will do that.

Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry
whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt. _Nobody_ is
terrified of brownfield, which is why I strongly suspect that brownfield alone
isn't going to make a damn bit of difference; to steal a phrase, "if building
on brownfield changed anything they'd make it illegal".

> it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice

Yes, very obviously. And not just in the obvious "pandering to donor builders
and smug homeowners" sense, either; debt creation through mortgage lending is
at the heart of UK monetary policy now. Probably the most extreme example I've
ever seen of jam today at the cost of long-term disaster.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry
whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt.

The kinds of the people who start looking sideways at the greenbelt (the
Economist _very_ much included) implies to me that it's more about building
big expensive houses for the wealthy in a nice green area than it is about
building affordable housing for Londoners.

The very fact that the Economist would lobby for this while simultaneously
slamming the "ultra left wing" Corbyn policy of "just build more council
housing" ought to be a sign that something is amiss.

------
toyg
This might be a problem down South, I don't dispute it; but over here in the
North, it's anything but. There is still a huge amount of brownfield to
regenerate, and we desperately need to hold on every little bit of greenfield
the Victorians failed to build mills on.

The urban developments this pieces glorify, like New Islington, compound the
problem by being completely unbalanced towards the young and childless: small
flats built for profit, not for people to live in with kids. Medium- and High-
rise are also very much at odds with typical English individualism, and people
simply won't live in them if they can afford anything else. A lot of these
fancy new towers around Manchester are half-empty.

What we need up North is a serious policy of brownfield cleanup. Give local
authorities more money to dispose of all shit resulting from 200 years of
environmental abuse, instead of enabling _more_ abuse on what little good
greenfield is left.

------
Zenst
What an odd article, lambasting green area's and pushing that they must be
built upon. Sorry but we like to have cleaner air as best we can and think of
the green belt as the UK's Amazon.

When you view it like that then you see how silly this whole article is.

~~~
stupidcar
Who's this "we" you speak of? I guess it's Fuck-You-Got-Mine baby-boomer Tory
brigade, who bought cheap suburban houses in the 1970s and 80s and have
watched them rocket in value ever since.

Because it certainly isn't the rest of us, who have no prospect of ever buying
a home, or getting a pension, but are still expected to pay hundreds of
thousands in taxes to subsidise over our lifetime the retirement of the
aforementioned baby-boomers, while listening to their lectures about how we
don't work hard enough, and don't value the precious green belt that keeps
their house prices buoyant.

England is ~10% urban[1]; the figure is even lower in Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland. The green belt isn't about protecting some dwindling remnant
of unspoilt land, it's about propping up the house prices of people too stupid
and selfish to even admit to themselves how stupid and selfish they're being.

[1]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096)

~~~
crdoconnor
>are still expected to pay hundreds of thousands in taxes to subsidise over
our lifetime the retirement of the aforementioned baby-boomers

It's curious how the 0.1% can mysteriously grow fabulously wealthy, cut
pensions that older people rely upon, cut NHS funding which older people rely
upon, jack up tuition fees, jack up rail prices, trigger the largest financial
crisis in decades, price younger people out of the housing market and yet
still manage to convince the younger generation that their own parents are
obviously the ones who ripped them off.

~~~
coroxout
While also convincing the parents that all their and their children's worries
can be fixed by doing whatever the 0.1% wants and that they should call anyone
who disagrees an out-of-touch metropolitan elite, even/especially those never-
going-to-own-houses kids

(Disclaimer: I have been guilty of anti-boomer rhetoric elsewhere lately, but
I read your post and you are probably right.

It is still frustrating, though, to hear older people, comfortably retired
mortgage-free in houses with 3+ spare bedrooms, tell us that if only we worked
harder and didn't eat out occasionally we could surely save up for a house)

------
cylinder
No, it's time to stop trying to cram everyone into the same primary cities.
It's time for secondary cities to shine. We can help by leaving the stone age
when it comes to transportation infrastructure. Planes like the Dreamliner
means former backwaters can be connected to other sides of the planet
directly. We all know the benefits of broadband. There's no reason to keep
trying to cram into primary cities.

------
PhantomGremlin
Neither the article nor the comments here have said anything about foreign
money coming into London and buying up property as a hedge against problems in
their own countries. And then the houses and apartments sit vacant.

Is this a real, widespread, problem, or does this only apply to a small number
of expensive properties in the most desirable parts of London?

------
Paul_S
Never going to happen because it would lower the values of peoples' houses.
End of story.

I can't afford a house in the city I work in. Everyone I know lives outside
and commutes by car which is a waste of time for everyone (add cost of petrol,
pollution etc.). This is stupid.

------
youngtaff
Very little of Britain is actually built on - 2.7% according to this BBC
article
([http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096))

------
maxander
I don't see a byline for the article, so I can't Google to see what sort of
connections to the UK real estate industry that the author has. Oh well.

~~~
conistonwater
Wouldn't it be better to address the article on its own merits, whatever those
may be, instead of looking for the author trying to make an ad hominem
argument?

~~~
glomph
It is difficult to read past the potential for bias here though.

