Largest housing rally ever across the UK

shaggydoo

Thousands of people have gathered in Westminster at the largest rally yet to protest against the housing crisis.

Thousands is not a big rally.

Millions is a big rally.

Loughton_Monkey

ukcarper wrote: »

I disagree green belt performs a useful purpose in stopping everything merging into one that's not to say there isn't scope for building on it. As for farmland I'm not sure how much farmland in the Home Counties is actually farmed as far as I can see most is given over to horses.

Shhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

For god's sake, your talk about horses will start Hamish off again. He has a things about slaughtering the lot of them and building new houses on the pastures.

Yes, the green belt is often misunderstood. In fact there is very little of it in UK. It is typically small areas surrounding cities to stop them physically getting bigger.

Essex has virtually no green belt (apart from a bit north west of London) and yet the county is very 'green' and full of farmland, woods, and pasture.

Many villages exist purely to house the rich bankers and traders, but they wouldn't be happy if their grazing pastures and bridleways were taken away to be over-ridden by the smelly first time buyers! House values would plummet.

People wanting a house should move up North, where houses are as cheap as chips. And your minimum wages go a lot further too.

TheBlueHorse

all the imbeciles at this pointless rally are probably all the anti-UKIP brigade as well, so they want open borders and loads of people coming over here and either buying up private housing stocks, or renting privately or sponging the few council houses. These lefty imbeciles want everything. Free houses for all, free health care for all, freedom of movement for all, benefits for all, massive unfunded pensions for all, low tax for all (except the scum who work - they should be taxed til their eyes bleed to pay for it all - and borrowing obviously)

westernpromise

The issue with plonking new towns down, or massively expanding existing ones, is that all the infrastructure is based around the existing small population level.

Roads, schools, amenities etc all need to be constructed as well as the houses. If these are lumped into the price of newly-built private houses they'll probably then be unaffordable and if they're built as council houses then the cost is dumped onto everybody else, despite everybody else not usually having had the opportunity to vote on whether they agree with the expansion of population in the first place.

The planning rules we have contain an unstated assumption that the population is stable, in the sense of not increasing or doing so slowly. As such one can argue that they are working quite well - by inflating the cost of housing, they will eventually stop population increase because nobody will be able to afford to immigrate.

I am not sure that, just because immigration policy is stressing our planning policy, this means that it's the latter that has to change to accommodate the former. The reverse is also perfectly viable.

Generali

westernpromise wrote: »

by inflating the cost of housing, they will eventually stop population increase because nobody will be able to afford to immigrate.

Housing benefits being paid as a separate amount rather than being rolled up into benefits stop the cost of housing from working as a deterrent to consume housing.

Admittedly the current coalition Government is addressing that with the 'bedroom tax' and the benefits cap. These have hardly been popular policies though.

Generali

ukcarper wrote: »

I know the Guildford case quite well as I was bought up not far from there and still live fairly close. Some of the points raised are valid most of the surrounding roads especially those leading to local stations are narrow country lanes. The part of A3 where the main road into estate will be is badly congested in mornings and evenings and the M25 in area is congested most of time.

But the site is an old airfield which already has quite a bit of concrete. I can't see any of properties being affordable unless they are social housing as this area is one of the most expensive in the country.

The number of properties in the immediately area is small but they are expensive properties so it will be interesting to see what happens.

There is always a good reason to object to building. Widen the roads, put on another couple of trains.

I also know the area well. I bet the Tories have another couple of people putting their hands up to stand for council next time around.

Generali

Coveredinbees!!!! wrote: »

So basically they should concrete over the green belt.

No. They should concrete over a very small part of the Green Belt.

You raise a false dichotomy. There isn't a choice between no houses and all of the houses. There's a choice between no houses, one house, two houses and so on.

Generali

ukcarper wrote: »

Not much room for than inside M25 especially to west and for rest of Home Counties depend on what you would call a town. The develoment in Wisley would not have that much effect in terms of merging but it's a village not a town there is room for more villages like that in Surrey but the infrastructure would need to be improved.

There's a huge amount of land that could be built on between Horsham and Guildford. The A281 could be upgraded to a dual carriageway and the old railway line reopened as a bus road or light railway.

Rudgewick & Shamley Green could be made the size of Cranleigh and Bramley, Wonersh and Shaldford merged into another small town.

You could build 10,000 houses in that space quite easily while maintaining the beauty of the North Downs. You'd never even notice it from Pitch Hill or the Edge of the World.

chucknorris

Generali wrote: »

and the old railway line reopened as a bus road or light railway.

Hang on a minute, that's a great cycling route for me, my wife and dog, not in my backyard, I mean cycling route!

westernpromise

Generali wrote: »

Housing benefits being paid as a separate amount rather than being rolled up into benefits stop the cost of housing from working as a deterrent to consume housing.

But to claim the benefit, you have first to be in the house, do you not? What if there's no house?

Imagine a country in which there are 10 houses and all houses can hold 6 people each. 60 people are now living in the houses. What happens when person number 61 arrives?

The assumption seems to be that the other 60 should absorb the cost and inconvenience of allowing a new 6-person house to be built.

The trouble of course is that 6 more people may arrive. So you have kicked the can down the road but still have a problem, which is that you don't have enough houses. You've got 67 people trying to live where there's space for 66.

If you reverse the situation and allow housing to be rationed by price, the population will have to stop at 60, no? The 61st person will look around, find no house and go home?