That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on.

Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.

The issue is that those cities end up growing into the countryside. I like there is a big green barrier between Greater Manchester and Macclesfield.

It would help if the cities and larger towns built higher and denser.

Yes lets cram everyone in like sardines in massive sky-scrapers that blots out the sky.

The other alternative is that the UK doesn't allow 600,000 people (net) in every year.

The usual suggestion is to build cities more like Berlin (for example) which has an inner city with many 4-6 storey buildings — much denser than London's terraced houses, but without the isolation of skyscrapers.

These are all solutions that ignore the main problem. They literally cannot build enough properties (whatever they are) to fill current demand. Even if they relax the regulations that we currently have in place. Even there were enough properties built the infrastructure for utilities can't be scaled easily. There are issues building new properties right now because the electric grid cannot handle the combination of that and large data centres.

Since supply of house cannot be increased to solve this problem, you need to lessen the demand. The most obvious way to do this that I can see is to put a cap on immigration that is much lower than the number of people leaving (about 400,000 people leave the UK each year). However for various reasons this is seen as absolute verboten.

BTW, I know exactly the type of buildings you are talking about (we have them in Manchester) and they are typically look awful and usually start falling apart after shortly after construction. They are also not very nice to live in (I have lived in one for short amount of time).

Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.

Partly changing social customs - and you could, legitimately I think, argue some of this is down to immigration/multiculturalism - the old landlady/boarding house model, for example, which provided a LOT of cheap and relatively comfortable roofs over heads, was based on higher trust and cultural commonality than exists today.

But a lot of demand is driven by people living alone, either due to family breakdown, old age, or just out of personal choice.

On that basis if you wanted to increase supply, levers you could pull are an even more favourable tax treatment of rent-a-room schemes (although it's already pretty generous - people just don't want to), land value taxes to encourage under-occupiers to downsize, inheritance tax changes for the same (no more favourable "family home" treatment relative to cash or pension assets) and, more difficult this, legal and planning instruments to encourage suburban densification, get streets that are largely full of decaying HMOs knocked down and replaced by mid-rise which is fit for purpose.

> Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.

It has nothing to do with what I read on the news. It is simply numbers. You can come up with all these crazy schemes to increase supply which probably won't happen, or you could reduce demand that could literally be done tomorrow if they wanted to.

But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves.

Explains a lot, actually.

I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals" (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people what their home should look like) insisting that everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up with it this way is a bit much.

I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually live in an area get to decide what it looks like. If people don't involve themselves in that process and it is monopolized by people "with too much time on their hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy bodies then they should make time and actually go to the meetings.

You decide you own level of involvement in the community.

> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.

It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.

BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.

The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.

The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.

Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B

Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A

Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.

Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.

It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.

And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows the council's true priorities. They could at least put it on the edge of the village.

> The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.

Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.

> The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves. > > Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B > > Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A > > Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more. > > Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more. > > It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.

These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically people are either moving to a particular area, or out of a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat assumed in your scenario).

The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every year.

So… if I move to a county I can decide nobody else gets to build a house there? Even on land I don’t own?

That isn't the argument being made and you know it.

It very much is, in the aggregate.

Not at all. It is quite clear that you are doing the "lets take this to the logical extreme". That might be fine in some sort of debate club tactic but it isn't what I was suggesting should happen at all and you know it. So I think we will leave it there.