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There's loads of houses being built in the UK (often of questionable quality, built for maximum profit, packed into minimal amounts of space). It may still not

There's loads of houses being built in the UK (often of questionable quality, built for maximum profit, packed into minimal amounts of space). It may still not be enough to match the demand, but the real problem is we don't seem to be building any infrastructure to support these homes. More people and more homes requires more roads, railways, hospitals, police stations, power stations, sewer capacity, even reservoirs, and lots more. And this rarely seems mentioned in discussions of the housing crisis or rising immigration. And as a nation we're incapable of building infrastructure without cost and/or timescale spiralling completely out of control. See HS2.

dairylee 3y ago
The infrastructure is often insufficient for existing homes nevermind for any expansion. I've recently moved house but I'm having to stay registered to my Dentist & Doctors 30 miles away because the wait list to get registered in my new town is months.
- muteor 3y ago
  They just built over 1000 homes near me, but not one dentist or doctors. Now the small local surgeries are expected to take these new households on. Again government policy not holding up to community needs.
  - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
    To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. First the homes come, then the residents move in. Those residents will have demands, such as health and dental care. Once those demands are heard, the doctors and dentists will finally build their offices.
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.
      - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
        > Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. The world we live in, yes. > But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention. Sure, or we might end up growing the wrong crops per government order and experience massive starvation all across the country. I hope you like potatoes!
    - blitzar 3y ago
      > To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. Sure you can. When you build an office block or a shopping mall do you put in toilets or do you wait till the shoppers start shopping then see if their demands include going to the bathroom?
      - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
        You can build toilets just like you can homes. Toilets are standard in all homes and office buildings. You still can't build a doctor or a dentist. That takes a lot of hard work from someone who isn't you.
        blitzar 3y ago
        As disgusting as the toilets in the shops may be, they dont clean themselves. That takes a lot of hard work from someone who isn't you.
        dumpsterdiver 3y ago
        Agreed.
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        The problem with dentists isn't the shortage of accomodation for clinics; it's the dentists trades union restricting entry to the profession. All the talk of NHS treatment being "free at the point of delivery" is bollocks when you're talking about dentistry; NHS dentistry isn't free, unless you're a child or a pensioner. And if you need something like a crown, you probably can't get that on the NHS at all.
  - 88 3y ago
    The average fully-qualified GP has something like 2,300 patients registered to them. If you assume 2.5 people per household for those new homes, their needs would be met by the addition of a single GP to an existing surgery. Then consider that the typical buyers of new builds will be younger and healthier than average. And that of those ~2,500 new residents, some are likely to be doctors themselves who would otherwise be unable to live in the area. And that GP surgeries are private for-profit businesses. And you realise the issues are more complex than they might at first seem.
  - desas 3y ago
    There's a shortage of GPs. Two of the small local surgeries near me have reduced opening times because they don't have the staff to staff them. The need is still there - the villages are growing, but the villagers have to travel to the next village if they're lucky enough to be able to get an appointment.
- nindalf 3y ago
  Doctor only 30 miles away? Luxury! It’s unrealistic for me to get treatment from a GP in my area so I simply travel thousands of miles away to another country once a year for treatment. Thousands more homes being built as well, so this isn’t changing any time soon.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Travelling to another country for treatment sounds like the luxury to be honest. The unluxury would be no health care, or travelling 100 miles within the UK by train/bus.
    - nindalf 3y ago
      Having to wait 6 months for treatment isn’t luxury, what are you talking about. That’s effectively no health care.
      - quickthrower2 3y ago
        I am contesting the "having" part of that sentence. The UK has problems, but it is not a country in dire straits. To be clear: We are talking about GP right? To say get your blood pressure checked, or some mild antibiotics, or a rash cream, or referral to specialist? Not a specific treatment or surgery.
        adhesive_wombat 3y ago
        GPs gatekeep a most referrals, it's often virtually impossible to get any substantial treatment or surgery unless referred by a GP. Furthermore, for NHS treatments, it has to be a referral from an NHS GP, so you can't simply pay for a private GP to check something out. Or, you can just wait for it to become bad enough that you go directly from A&E to inpatient care.
      - yamazakiwi 3y ago
        Having to wait 6 months is not as bad as having no other option. Although, I do empathize for your inability to go somewhere local and need of another option.
jamespo 3y ago
The graphs in the article indicate there aren't loads of houses being built.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  Depends on the definition of 'loads'. For residents of small to medium sized towns and villages (where there's plenty of land available), the rapid sprawl and worstening traffic is incredibly visible.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dionidium 3y ago
    If your definition of "loads" is based entirely on whether you're being personally impacted, divorced from the broader context, then even small amounts of housing construction can seem like a lot. If one house goes up on my block it might be disruptive enough to make me think there's a lot of construction going on. But by no objective measure is the UK building "loads" of housing.
ideamotor 3y ago
In the US, but I find that to be a great point. I only see this mentioned in the context of environmentalism (city dwellers use less resources). But yes! They use less city resources too.
tsukikage 3y ago
We need to build houses at least as fast as the population grows. Because this has not happened for decades, we need to build houses even faster than that, to clear the backlog. This is not happening. Meanwhile, no-one will build infrastructure for settlements that do not yet exist, and we consistently elect a party that believes in less, rather than more, infrastructure in general. Rather than an investment, Tories fundamentally see infrastructure spending as an unrecoverable loss. At least if more housing gets built there will be more people in the area pestering their MPs for solutions to infrastructure problems - perhaps even enough to outnumber the NIMBYs. One can hope.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > We need to build houses at least as fast as the population grows. Because this has not happened for decades. Over those decades UK population growth [1] is lower than the new house building rate [see chart in article]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...
  - tsukikage 3y ago
    The graph shows building rate as a proportion of the size of existing stock. But the existing stock is grossly insufficient to our needs. We've been building around 200k houses a year for decades, much less than that during most years of Conservative rule: https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new-dwellings-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new... This is around 0.3% of the population. The population increase year on year is consistently larger than this. We need to be building new houses much faster than we are. We need to build at 1960s rates or faster at least until it is possible for people on median wages to have somewhere sane to live again.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Couple of things to this: You're right it's growing faster than that. E.g. Mid 2018 to mid 2019, it rose by 361k people. But the UK average household size is 2.4, so 200k new houses should in theory accommodate a population growth of 866k. If those were the only numbers that mattered, it wouldn't be a problem. We'd catch up fast. But all houses are not the same. A large part of the problem is people following jobs, and so a significantly higher rate of construction may be needed because people move, and needed types of properties change. Unless you can make the places people are moving away from to be more attractive, e.g. by infrastructure improvement to tie areas together in ways that make them attractive regions for businesses. The bigger issues, however, I think are two structural problems: 1. As long as house prices go up at a sufficient rate, the soundest strategy for a developer may be to raise capital to buy land and then sit on it until house prices go up. Your cost of capital to finance it will be financing costs for the cost of the land for however many years you sit on it, and the financing costs for the construction itself only from you start construction until sold. Doubly so because if you're a large developer, holding a large parcel of land while you're, say, developing something else nearby, and releasing only limited numbers of properties onto the market contributes to keeping the prices up. Near me, one of the best properties in the area, a huge tract right next to one of the best connected train stations in the UK (East Croydon) remained undeveloped for over a decade because developers had no urgency to do anything. It's now slowly being developed, but they're taking their good time about it, because why wouldn't they? You could address that by progressively harsher taxes by duration of under-utilisation, or strengthen ability for local government to take over land, to make it necessary for developers to either move at speed or unload the land on others, but if you fix the house price increases by other means, this problem will also go away by itself. 2. There is no political will to cause house prices to drop, because that would mean a lot of people who have seen this as a pension investment, and plan to downsize, will vote against you. To fix this you probably need a combination of starting slow - reforms that gradually cause the market to stagnate so people stop seeing it as surefire way to make money - coupled perhaps with tax and pension adjustment structured to make it feel like your reforms are relatively neutral. E.g "package" it with substantial state pension increases, or allow for some degree of writeoffs for paper losses on declining property prices, perhaps limited to pensioners only, etc. Some of it you could sunset, and some might well end up being very unfair and effectively bribing people who shouldn't have gambled on their home as their main investment asset, but if that's what it takes to get support for crashing house prices, it'd be worth it.
notahacker 3y ago
Infrastructure isn't perfect, but we talk about housing shortages because people earning double the national average wage rent rooms with other professionals in houses designed for a single family whilst trying to save up double their annual wage for a deposit on a >25 year mortgage on a flat. Whereas for all the UK's infrastructure problems, power brownouts due to lack of generation capability or lack of a local police station aren't really things people suffer from. Hard to pretend the real problem is the rail network when we have more miles of rail network and fewer houses per person than most of the rest of the world. And the UK talks about its healthcare issues non-stop, but not in the context of housing because it isn't the same problem.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  This comment shows up the other issue, the London-centric nature of UK politics. If you think the UK transport network is OK, but pick the most extreme examples of housing costs, you're probably a Londoner. The housing situation is awful elsewhere, but still a long way from London's extremes. But if you live elsewhere, try getting anywhere by road or by rail, and it's usually a grim experience.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    I don't live in London any more. Probably won't again, for reasons of housing cost. But I also live in a real world where most developed countries have significantly cheaper housing but nowhere near as many rail lines as the UK as a whole, and where it's a lot easier to build more affordable homes than to ensure there are enough roads for nobody to ever experience a traffic queue.
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    These two issues are related everywhere outside London. The reason why transport infrastructure is "so bad" is because in every city apart from London, you cannot build outside the city so developers often have to get planning permission on sites in rural areas and they can't connect transport to nearby cities. It is quite maddening because building is often actually blocked in some of these cities because of infrastructure concerns too...even though, the problem would be solved at a higher level by building closer to cities. The whole thing is bad intention arguments the whole way down.
vidarh 3y ago
One of my pet peeves is that UK infrastructure focus seems to be about getting people to the centre of London faster, and that just makes the pressure on London greater at excessive costs, and then you start the cycle all over. You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into effectively creating a bigger "third city". Then maybe link Birmingham, and purposefully delay any links to London. The problem with linking everything to London is that while it makes it easier to work from further out, it also makes London ever more attractive. But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at all. Which means that many towns are easier reached by taking a detour in towards the centre and out again, which again means there's an incentive for businesses etc. to be closer to the centre. Even when in towards the centre and out again would be the shortest route, it might be beneficial to encourage avoiding the busy routes towards the centre. Which again means that a whole lot of towns where there are town centres that have huge potential for large increases in density, and potential for lower cost upgrades of other infrastructure, without affecting the green belt, but where the demand is not there for that density increase because of the lack of efficient transport. Addressing the infrastructure problem by upgrading and committing to commuter level services to connect more of these towns together so they form more viable counter-weights to the city centres they are around would make it a lot easier to address the issues you're mentioning at far lower costs than yet another big infra upgrade like HS2 or another line in London. Successive UK governments seem to have been more focused on retrospectively managing demand surges than planning ahead, and as a result seems to be inducing demand that drives more surges to be managed and ever higher costs.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  The New York City region is like this too. Forget connecting the NJ and CT suburbs, even Queens to Brooklyn to Bronx is inconvenient.
  - 3y ago
dan-robertson 3y ago
You can look up the numbers here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/ukhousebuildingpermanentdwellingsstartedandcompleted https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/... About 120-200k per year, about 0.2% of the population. Though those numbers don’t include houses being destroyed or eg conversions from a large house to flats.
esskay 3y ago
The infrastructure issue is very much true. In my former town they got permission to build 2500 new homes on a patch of greenbelt land. In doing this they added a roundabout to the busiest road in the city, which is already suffering as it's a former country lane that is still fairly narrow. They didn't build anything to support the new development at all, so now all the local schools which were already struggling from being oversubscribed don't have any capacity, meaning there's now a daily (paid) coach service taking kids to the next town to go to school. Flooding has become a major problem in the area, the former field had a ditch system at the bottom of it, which no longer exists. That main road has now been closed on several occasions, and the older houses that run on the opposite side of the road endured several feet of water running through their houses last year. The solution? Slap a couple more drains on the road - those residents already know they'll be flooded again come winter.
brnt 3y ago
UK's housing stock is the oldest in Europe [1], so the rate of new construction is definitely not high enough to be able to say there's loads of new construction. Compared to demand, and compared to total housing stock. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/02e104fa-5959-4723-8da0-7b2b072b6474 https://www.ft.com/content/02e104fa-5959-4723-8da0-7b2b072b6...

dairylee 3y ago

The infrastructure is often insufficient for existing homes nevermind for any expansion. I've recently moved house but I'm having to stay registered to my Dentist & Doctors 30 miles away because the wait list to get registered in my new town is months.

muteor 3y ago
They just built over 1000 homes near me, but not one dentist or doctors. Now the small local surgeries are expected to take these new households on. Again government policy not holding up to community needs.
- dumpsterdiver 3y ago
  To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. First the homes come, then the residents move in. Those residents will have demands, such as health and dental care. Once those demands are heard, the doctors and dentists will finally build their offices.
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.
    - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
      > Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. The world we live in, yes. > But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention. Sure, or we might end up growing the wrong crops per government order and experience massive starvation all across the country. I hope you like potatoes!
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. Sure you can. When you build an office block or a shopping mall do you put in toilets or do you wait till the shoppers start shopping then see if their demands include going to the bathroom?
    - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
      You can build toilets just like you can homes. Toilets are standard in all homes and office buildings. You still can't build a doctor or a dentist. That takes a lot of hard work from someone who isn't you.
      - blitzar 3y ago
        As disgusting as the toilets in the shops may be, they dont clean themselves. That takes a lot of hard work from someone who isn't you.
        dumpsterdiver 3y ago
        Agreed.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      The problem with dentists isn't the shortage of accomodation for clinics; it's the dentists trades union restricting entry to the profession. All the talk of NHS treatment being "free at the point of delivery" is bollocks when you're talking about dentistry; NHS dentistry isn't free, unless you're a child or a pensioner. And if you need something like a crown, you probably can't get that on the NHS at all.
- 88 3y ago
  The average fully-qualified GP has something like 2,300 patients registered to them. If you assume 2.5 people per household for those new homes, their needs would be met by the addition of a single GP to an existing surgery. Then consider that the typical buyers of new builds will be younger and healthier than average. And that of those ~2,500 new residents, some are likely to be doctors themselves who would otherwise be unable to live in the area. And that GP surgeries are private for-profit businesses. And you realise the issues are more complex than they might at first seem.
- desas 3y ago
  There's a shortage of GPs. Two of the small local surgeries near me have reduced opening times because they don't have the staff to staff them. The need is still there - the villages are growing, but the villagers have to travel to the next village if they're lucky enough to be able to get an appointment.
nindalf 3y ago
Doctor only 30 miles away? Luxury! It’s unrealistic for me to get treatment from a GP in my area so I simply travel thousands of miles away to another country once a year for treatment. Thousands more homes being built as well, so this isn’t changing any time soon.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Travelling to another country for treatment sounds like the luxury to be honest. The unluxury would be no health care, or travelling 100 miles within the UK by train/bus.
  - nindalf 3y ago
    Having to wait 6 months for treatment isn’t luxury, what are you talking about. That’s effectively no health care.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      I am contesting the "having" part of that sentence. The UK has problems, but it is not a country in dire straits. To be clear: We are talking about GP right? To say get your blood pressure checked, or some mild antibiotics, or a rash cream, or referral to specialist? Not a specific treatment or surgery.
      - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
        GPs gatekeep a most referrals, it's often virtually impossible to get any substantial treatment or surgery unless referred by a GP. Furthermore, for NHS treatments, it has to be a referral from an NHS GP, so you can't simply pay for a private GP to check something out. Or, you can just wait for it to become bad enough that you go directly from A&E to inpatient care.
    - yamazakiwi 3y ago
      Having to wait 6 months is not as bad as having no other option. Although, I do empathize for your inability to go somewhere local and need of another option.

jamespo 3y ago

The graphs in the article indicate there aren't loads of houses being built.

bluescrn 3y ago
Depends on the definition of 'loads'. For residents of small to medium sized towns and villages (where there's plenty of land available), the rapid sprawl and worstening traffic is incredibly visible.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dionidium 3y ago
  If your definition of "loads" is based entirely on whether you're being personally impacted, divorced from the broader context, then even small amounts of housing construction can seem like a lot. If one house goes up on my block it might be disruptive enough to make me think there's a lot of construction going on. But by no objective measure is the UK building "loads" of housing.

ideamotor 3y ago

In the US, but I find that to be a great point. I only see this mentioned in the context of environmentalism (city dwellers use less resources). But yes! They use less city resources too.

tsukikage 3y ago

We need to build houses at least as fast as the population grows. Because this has not happened for decades, we need to build houses even faster than that, to clear the backlog. This is not happening. Meanwhile, no-one will build infrastructure for settlements that do not yet exist, and we consistently elect a party that believes in less, rather than more, infrastructure in general. Rather than an investment, Tories fundamentally see infrastructure spending as an unrecoverable loss. At least if more housing gets built there will be more people in the area pestering their MPs for solutions to infrastructure problems - perhaps even enough to outnumber the NIMBYs. One can hope.

blitzar 3y ago
> We need to build houses at least as fast as the population grows. Because this has not happened for decades. Over those decades UK population growth [1] is lower than the new house building rate [see chart in article]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...
- tsukikage 3y ago
  The graph shows building rate as a proportion of the size of existing stock. But the existing stock is grossly insufficient to our needs. We've been building around 200k houses a year for decades, much less than that during most years of Conservative rule: https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new-dwellings-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new... This is around 0.3% of the population. The population increase year on year is consistently larger than this. We need to be building new houses much faster than we are. We need to build at 1960s rates or faster at least until it is possible for people on median wages to have somewhere sane to live again.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Couple of things to this: You're right it's growing faster than that. E.g. Mid 2018 to mid 2019, it rose by 361k people. But the UK average household size is 2.4, so 200k new houses should in theory accommodate a population growth of 866k. If those were the only numbers that mattered, it wouldn't be a problem. We'd catch up fast. But all houses are not the same. A large part of the problem is people following jobs, and so a significantly higher rate of construction may be needed because people move, and needed types of properties change. Unless you can make the places people are moving away from to be more attractive, e.g. by infrastructure improvement to tie areas together in ways that make them attractive regions for businesses. The bigger issues, however, I think are two structural problems: 1. As long as house prices go up at a sufficient rate, the soundest strategy for a developer may be to raise capital to buy land and then sit on it until house prices go up. Your cost of capital to finance it will be financing costs for the cost of the land for however many years you sit on it, and the financing costs for the construction itself only from you start construction until sold. Doubly so because if you're a large developer, holding a large parcel of land while you're, say, developing something else nearby, and releasing only limited numbers of properties onto the market contributes to keeping the prices up. Near me, one of the best properties in the area, a huge tract right next to one of the best connected train stations in the UK (East Croydon) remained undeveloped for over a decade because developers had no urgency to do anything. It's now slowly being developed, but they're taking their good time about it, because why wouldn't they? You could address that by progressively harsher taxes by duration of under-utilisation, or strengthen ability for local government to take over land, to make it necessary for developers to either move at speed or unload the land on others, but if you fix the house price increases by other means, this problem will also go away by itself. 2. There is no political will to cause house prices to drop, because that would mean a lot of people who have seen this as a pension investment, and plan to downsize, will vote against you. To fix this you probably need a combination of starting slow - reforms that gradually cause the market to stagnate so people stop seeing it as surefire way to make money - coupled perhaps with tax and pension adjustment structured to make it feel like your reforms are relatively neutral. E.g "package" it with substantial state pension increases, or allow for some degree of writeoffs for paper losses on declining property prices, perhaps limited to pensioners only, etc. Some of it you could sunset, and some might well end up being very unfair and effectively bribing people who shouldn't have gambled on their home as their main investment asset, but if that's what it takes to get support for crashing house prices, it'd be worth it.

notahacker 3y ago

Infrastructure isn't perfect, but we talk about housing shortages because people earning double the national average wage rent rooms with other professionals in houses designed for a single family whilst trying to save up double their annual wage for a deposit on a >25 year mortgage on a flat. Whereas for all the UK's infrastructure problems, power brownouts due to lack of generation capability or lack of a local police station aren't really things people suffer from. Hard to pretend the real problem is the rail network when we have more miles of rail network and fewer houses per person than most of the rest of the world. And the UK talks about its healthcare issues non-stop, but not in the context of housing because it isn't the same problem.

bluescrn 3y ago
This comment shows up the other issue, the London-centric nature of UK politics. If you think the UK transport network is OK, but pick the most extreme examples of housing costs, you're probably a Londoner. The housing situation is awful elsewhere, but still a long way from London's extremes. But if you live elsewhere, try getting anywhere by road or by rail, and it's usually a grim experience.
- notahacker 3y ago
  I don't live in London any more. Probably won't again, for reasons of housing cost. But I also live in a real world where most developed countries have significantly cheaper housing but nowhere near as many rail lines as the UK as a whole, and where it's a lot easier to build more affordable homes than to ensure there are enough roads for nobody to ever experience a traffic queue.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  These two issues are related everywhere outside London. The reason why transport infrastructure is "so bad" is because in every city apart from London, you cannot build outside the city so developers often have to get planning permission on sites in rural areas and they can't connect transport to nearby cities. It is quite maddening because building is often actually blocked in some of these cities because of infrastructure concerns too...even though, the problem would be solved at a higher level by building closer to cities. The whole thing is bad intention arguments the whole way down.

vidarh 3y ago

One of my pet peeves is that UK infrastructure focus seems to be about getting people to the centre of London faster, and that just makes the pressure on London greater at excessive costs, and then you start the cycle all over. You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into effectively creating a bigger "third city". Then maybe link Birmingham, and purposefully delay any links to London. The problem with linking everything to London is that while it makes it easier to work from further out, it also makes London ever more attractive. But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at all. Which means that many towns are easier reached by taking a detour in towards the centre and out again, which again means there's an incentive for businesses etc. to be closer to the centre. Even when in towards the centre and out again would be the shortest route, it might be beneficial to encourage avoiding the busy routes towards the centre. Which again means that a whole lot of towns where there are town centres that have huge potential for large increases in density, and potential for lower cost upgrades of other infrastructure, without affecting the green belt, but where the demand is not there for that density increase because of the lack of efficient transport. Addressing the infrastructure problem by upgrading and committing to commuter level services to connect more of these towns together so they form more viable counter-weights to the city centres they are around would make it a lot easier to address the issues you're mentioning at far lower costs than yet another big infra upgrade like HS2 or another line in London. Successive UK governments seem to have been more focused on retrospectively managing demand surges than planning ahead, and as a result seems to be inducing demand that drives more surges to be managed and ever higher costs.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
The New York City region is like this too. Forget connecting the NJ and CT suburbs, even Queens to Brooklyn to Bronx is inconvenient.
- 3y ago

dan-robertson 3y ago

You can look up the numbers here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/ukhousebuildingpermanentdwellingsstartedandcompleted https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/... About 120-200k per year, about 0.2% of the population. Though those numbers don’t include houses being destroyed or eg conversions from a large house to flats.

esskay 3y ago

The infrastructure issue is very much true. In my former town they got permission to build 2500 new homes on a patch of greenbelt land. In doing this they added a roundabout to the busiest road in the city, which is already suffering as it's a former country lane that is still fairly narrow. They didn't build anything to support the new development at all, so now all the local schools which were already struggling from being oversubscribed don't have any capacity, meaning there's now a daily (paid) coach service taking kids to the next town to go to school. Flooding has become a major problem in the area, the former field had a ditch system at the bottom of it, which no longer exists. That main road has now been closed on several occasions, and the older houses that run on the opposite side of the road endured several feet of water running through their houses last year. The solution? Slap a couple more drains on the road - those residents already know they'll be flooded again come winter.

brnt 3y ago

UK's housing stock is the oldest in Europe [1], so the rate of new construction is definitely not high enough to be able to say there's loads of new construction. Compared to demand, and compared to total housing stock. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/02e104fa-5959-4723-8da0-7b2b072b6474 https://www.ft.com/content/02e104fa-5959-4723-8da0-7b2b072b6...