UK housing proposals15 Jul 2024 18:55
Scary if you just visualise our landscape based on the numbers stated and how that would look within our Nation. Our small island just cannot cope with this never ending growth. Looking out of any of your windows at home, will be staring at a wall.
And as soon as they are built, they’ll be purchased by the wealthy to rent out.
Where will it stop?
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https://www.sambowman.co/p/twenty-million-londoners-the-solution
How many houses is a lot?
Even if these plans do succeed, 1.5 million homes is really not that many compared to what we need. On average over the next five years it is 300,000/year – only 20% more than we managed in 2019. I don’t say that to knock it: 2019 was the most we’ve built for many years, and if we really do manage 1.5 million over this Parliament, it will mean we are building more annually towards the end of the Parliament than that.
But we are way behind where any reasonable estimate says we ought to be. In 2004, the Barker Review said the UK needed to build 297,000 homes a year. In practice, we’ve built about 150,000 a year since then – so that’s twenty years of a roughly 150,000 annual shortfall, or 3 million homes, just to catch up with where we “should” be. If you go by the Centre for Cities’s standard of reaching housing parity with Western Europe, we need to be building 442–654,000 homes per year for the next two decades.
And my view is that the UK needs to build vastly more homes than that.
Partially that’s because some parts of the country need to become much bigger than they are: Cambridge and Oxford, as 21st Century Cardiffs and Glasgows, could probably grow by 10-20 times. London might double in population size if we let it.
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