7 ms·

Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery

31 points by bhum 10y ago

maxander 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Osmium 10y ago
  The Economist famously doesn't use bylines: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-1 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec... https://andreaskluth.org/2008/11/20/why-the-economist-has-no-bylines/ https://andreaskluth.org/2008/11/20/why-the-economist-has-no... Generally, I imagine they're reputable enough that they should disclose any conflicts of interest, but who knows...
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  Ha! Cynical! Personally I think raising taxes on second homes, rentals, etc would free up a lot of housing to purchase. Do we want to do that? Are people happy renting and not buying? I'm not sure.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    It is difficult to read past the potential for bias here though.
- djmobley 10y ago
  The profit maximising situation for the large UK housebuilders is not one in which planning restrictions are lifted and the price of land collapses. Why would they be trying to advance these policies?
  - toyg 10y ago
    You are mixing landowner profits and developer profits. Developers want low prices for new land in greenfield areas that will make the resulting houses appealing. Landowners want high prices but they also want to actually be able to sell - it doesn't matter how much your land is theoretically worth if nobody wants to buy it because they can't build on it.
    - djmobley 10y ago
      1) House builders are big land owners; 2) The price of the land is passed on to property buyers in its entirety.
toyg 10y ago
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 10y ago
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.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  And there is plenty of room to build up. There is a lot of low density housing that could be replaced with nice highrise buildings. We need greenbelt, even the crap that PEOPLE don't like, wildlife does, especially on the stuff that dog walkers avoid. It's full of rabbits, badgers, invertebrates etc.
- stupidcar 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    >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.
cylinder 10y ago
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.
lhopki01 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      >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.
youngtaff 10y ago
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)
Paul_S 10y ago
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.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
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?

31 points by bhum 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Osmium 10y ago
The Economist famously doesn't use bylines: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-1 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec... https://andreaskluth.org/2008/11/20/why-the-economist-has-no-bylines/ https://andreaskluth.org/2008/11/20/why-the-economist-has-no... Generally, I imagine they're reputable enough that they should disclose any conflicts of interest, but who knows...
monk_e_boy 10y ago
Ha! Cynical! Personally I think raising taxes on second homes, rentals, etc would free up a lot of housing to purchase. Do we want to do that? Are people happy renting and not buying? I'm not sure.
conistonwater 10y ago
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 10y ago
  It is difficult to read past the potential for bias here though.
djmobley 10y ago
The profit maximising situation for the large UK housebuilders is not one in which planning restrictions are lifted and the price of land collapses. Why would they be trying to advance these policies?
- toyg 10y ago
  You are mixing landowner profits and developer profits. Developers want low prices for new land in greenfield areas that will make the resulting houses appealing. Landowners want high prices but they also want to actually be able to sell - it doesn't matter how much your land is theoretically worth if nobody wants to buy it because they can't build on it.
  - djmobley 10y ago
    1) House builders are big land owners; 2) The price of the land is passed on to property buyers in its entirety.

toyg 10y ago

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 10y ago

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.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
And there is plenty of room to build up. There is a lot of low density housing that could be replaced with nice highrise buildings. We need greenbelt, even the crap that PEOPLE don't like, wildlife does, especially on the stuff that dog walkers avoid. It's full of rabbits, badgers, invertebrates etc.
stupidcar 10y ago
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 10y ago
  >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.

cylinder 10y ago

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.

lhopki01 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    >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.

youngtaff 10y ago

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)

Paul_S 10y ago

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.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago

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?