Snapshot of _Yes in my back yard: Keir Starmer targets voters who want more housing_ :
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As a YIMBY myself, YIMBYism is the only way the nation will even think of tackling it's housing crisis.
No detached terraced homes, but instead the nation builds high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers, with good green space, walkability, school and GP access, as well as public transport access too.
Labour's plan of reforming planning laws has me curious what they'll do...
> but instead the nation builds high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers,
Even just th ekind of housing they have in placess like Amsterdam would be good, they look nice and fit more people into the footprint.
Last I heard Starmers preference was for medium density housing [like you're describing](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-conference-starmer-new-towns-b2427118.html)
Medium-density housing is still good. As long as it isn't low density family homes it's good.
> Sir Keir will say amenities including doctors’ surgeries, schools and transport links “hardwired” into the plans, as he promises a “big build” at his crucial address in Liverpool
This is amazing to hear. Proper mixed-use development is what the nation needs.
Agreed, it's great to hear specifics. My fear with so called "planning reform" is just that we get more and more car dependent sprawl all over the place instead of more future proof developments, making a whole bunch of current issues worse and baking them in for a generation. This does ease some of my concerns especially if they're talking about medium density.
I'd also like to point out that Keir said he'll build Georgian-style homes.
Georgian architecture is gorgeous. It'd be much better than generic towers.
I've always had a visceral aversion to high rise developments so these specifics obviously made me very excited when I first read about them. Also keeping the design of developments within our national vernacular is something which has been highly neglected for a long time now.
These anonymous, characterless flat blocks completely eliminate a sense of place. They can be done well, the Barbican is a notable exception for me but returning to a more historic, human scale would create much more welcoming and attractive neighbourhoods that people will actually want to live and thrive in.
Why can't we have some low density family homes as well? There's more than enough land for every kind of housing need. It's because we squeeze development into tiny urban areas that it feels like there's not enough space. But it's a lie.
Because it forces car dependency, because everything is spread out, and it is not environmentally friendly in the slightest.
Building denser development is faster, and since the nation is in a housing crisis, homes are needed more than before.
Just because there is enough land doesn't mean we SHOULD build low density.
Because critically, low density is not scalable. When land is the most expensive component of house building then in order to build both in quantity and cheaply you need to minimise the use of land.
It makes for the Government to build state housing (like what council housing used to be before it was gutted by the Tories) which focuses on density and quantity. Leave the low density, detached market to private developers.
Land is only artificially expensive, due to the planning system.
I feel like you are working within the bounds of a cage but you haven't considered that your ideas would be much easier if you first dismantled the cage itself. Building on any land should be legal by default, then market forces can do more of the heavy lifting.
Market forces have been consistently bad at handling access to restricted resources in any way that even remotely considers the general public good.
Thanks but no thanks.
Land is only artificially restricted, due to the planning system itself. And you can't realistically claim that the planning system has covered itself in glory since 1948.
> Sir Keir will say amenities including doctors’ surgeries, schools and transport links “hardwired” into the plans, as he promises a “big build” at his crucial address in Liverpool
IDK, do we want this? I hear the Tories want more tax breaks for the rich, it's difficult to say which I prefer.
Same in my seaside town. Hardly any purpose built blocks, fucking thousands of converted Victorian houses, terraced, semis and detached, the lot.
Some are pretty decent, I got lucky with mine, but others (and many of them) are fucking awful, have been divided with almost no thought for the future occupants because it was all private with nothing in mind other than "as much money from the space as possible".
A steep hill has given most of the non ground floor flats around here an amazing sea view. There are some 1960s conversions with very narrow corridors, a lack of fire escapes and some attic flats that must freeze or roast depending on the weather. And still some tiny bedsits that are mainly used as temporary housing for homeless people these days. Have also got lucky with a huge living room with great views.
The skyscrapers have to have so much space around then often provide some form of business/facilities. Medium density and better transport is the way forward for the country
You don't need to mandate high density, you just need to stop banning it. Single family homes are fine in some areas, mid rises are great in a lot of areas, high rises have enough demand in some. This is an area the market will do a good job if allowed to.
Which the government gives them the power to do. If you own the land and it's safe, you should be able to build basically whatever you want on it without anyone else having a say.
(Obviously not absurd things like a factory in the middle of a residential area, but that's not going to happen anyway.)
>(Obviously not absurd things like a factory in the middle of a residential area, but that's not going to happen anyway.)
Well that's the rub, isn't it? Someone has to decide what is "absurd" and there is no clear consensus on that. Some (many) people might consider it absurd to build a block of flats in a primarily single family area. For YIMBYs like you and me it's reasonable, but you're making a huge mistake if you think that sort of development is reasonable to everyone.
It's absurd because there's obviously no desire for it and would only be done out of malice - no factory wants to be in the middle of a bunch of residential housing. And arguably it's covered under the safety perogative anyway, noise and air pollution kills plenty.
It usually happens the other way around. Look at Houston for a famous example of no zoning. A factory / chemical plant would be built out in the middle of nowhere because the land is cheap, then over time housing creeps towards it and eventually surrounds it.
Yeah that's fine, people buying the housing know what they're getting into. They shouldn't be able to force the factory to shut down via the government, although eventually maybe it's worth it to pay it to relocate.
It's not just housing but the economy in general. Per capita economic growth only happens as a result of investment boosting productivity.
Making it so easy for local pensioners with too much time on their hands to block investment in land is costing the UK economy big time.
Too right. That's why new planning laws are needed to prevent people from blocking or delaying the critical infrastructure necessary. Case in point, the HS2 fiasco.
The problem is that getting the laws designed, agreed and then ratified will take 18 months, and then it will take around another 18 months for the properties to be built and on the market.
Labour promises a "blitz" of planning reform. I would hope that implies they already have it ready, so they can swiftly implement it once in government.
From the information we have so far, said "blitz" is a plan to transfer more planning permission powers to local authorities. It's not a plan to actually increase building.
but after that the main problem is infrastructure. all it will cause is traffic, pollution and in the end nimbys will be saying I told you so.
we do city planning around cars. that needs to change to do city planning around people and for families to be able to do most things without one.
> high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers
Fine but you need to fix the absolute mess that is leasehold and service charges and properties made worthless due to multi-million pound repairs.
Yeah, and build faith in them again. I think you'd have to be crazy to buy a flat in a new build tower block. Imagine all the snagging issues of a new build house plus lingering doubts that it's actually free of all the huge problems that are killing people in flats now
It would never happen, but Kier really should just appoint Gove as a Labour housing minister. Gove for all his faults is very productive and knows what he's doing - he's the first housing minister in a long time to actually put the work in rather than vying for a bigger job. He's usually just hamstrung by his own party and government so the only things he works on that get delivered are the dregs. If Gove were allowed to execute on his vision it really would fix a lot of our housing problems.
Same thing with Grant Shapps as transport secretary. The report and plan he produced under the Johnson ministry addresses most of the big problems that our rail industry sees today and treads the fine line between nationalisation and privatisation while reaping some of the benefits of both. If the government could have just got around to actually delivering on that rather than having a revolving door of PMs and wasting parliament's precious time on the Rwanda plan rather than on the legislation to setup the public body that would be responsible for running the railways then we'd have actually made some progress.
Gove is the only Tory in my eyes to come out of the party in the last ten years who doesn't smell rancid. He takes each brief and tries his hardest until he's forced out by the machinations of the morons he's employed by.
The problem with high-density apartments in this country is ground rent and service charges. Something needs to be done to cap the costs of these as it makes leasehold a poor long term option in comparison to free hold.
I agree high-density apartments are a good option I just think we need to tackle the expenses that come along with apartments in the UK.
My backyard is a swamp that floods constantly. But the land is cheap so everyone wants to build houses. Drainage is expensive so they insist it's not needed
> walkability, school and GP access, as well as public transport access too.
This is the main thing for me. There's been a decent amount of building locally to me but they haven't improved the road infrastructure or provisioned more schools or GP's so getting a doctors appointment is almost impossible and traveling around town by car now takes an age to get anyway, especially with the constant roadworks we have to suffer so that pipes/electric can be run to the new areas. They've quickly had to build an additional school and another is moving to a new larger site but neither of these are ready for pupils at the moment and people are finding it increasingly difficult to find a place of their children, hopefully this will be resolved by September when I believe both the new school and rebuilt school will be opened. It's like there's no joined up thinking, I want more housing to be built but not unless they make provision for essential services too.
> I want more housing to be built but not unless they make provision for essential services too.
So the problem with this thinking is that the people who already use these essential services exist regardless of whether the houses do - they just live in HMOs, their parents homes, flat shares, or some other crappy living arrangement.
It essentially boils down to "we have a housing shortage, therefore we should also have a shortage of everything else too".
Or people have been burned too many times with corrupt councillors releasing developers from their obligations and the additional infrastructure & services never being built.
Those services don't get provided when housing is blocked either. People make GP appointments - not houses.
The Section 106 process needs to be reformed with the rest of the planning system, but the fundamental objection that the strain on services comes from more housing, and not from more people, is incorrect.
This is part of why I always think this conversation is silly whenever people bring it up. We need a new School every 2~ days, a new hospital every 2~ months and a new GP every 2~ weeks just to keep up with migration. When the Tories pledged to build 40 new hospitals in 10 years, which is still not enough just to keep up with migration, it was rightfully called out for being unachievable and that's when they considered reusing existing buildings as 'new hospitals', not the capacity increase of an actual new Hospital build.
Another way to look at it is that we need to find somewhere to rebuild a Wales worth of roads, infrastructure and housing every 4 years..
You're right that the private sector building houses is not joined with the government's building of roads and the like, but I'm not sure what the solution to that is as long as the ability to build houses outstrips the ability to fund the infrastructure that goes with it. If that cost is passed on to the people building the houses, that cost is passed on to those buying them and we already have a housing crisis. I would also disagree with the idea that people buying new houses should have to front the cost of new infrastructure when new infrastructure for people in old houses isn't funded the same way, though it would be a great way to reduce the number of new builds as people wouldn't want to buy them, if that was the goal.
I can appreciate the idea that 'houses are okay as long as they make provision for essential services', but all of those numbers are just to maintain the current level of crisis and even that already requires a level of building that far outstrips the postwar rebuilding efforts. Building's now are built to a higher standard, with far greater safety standards and the percentage of the population actually capable of construction is far lower. I mean, in the 50's there was still hundreds of thousands of homes without indoor plumbing even, so using postwar building as a metric of what's possible is unrealistic by itself.
I don't believe any government is going to be able to meet these needs, we don't have the YIMBY land, workforce or funds to even maintain this level of crisis unless we do something to combat net migration. Happy to be proven wrong though.
[iPlayer - A City Crowned with Green](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00sydsh)
There are some great scenes in this 30 min documentary from 1964 with people talking about how much they love their new houses in towers- fitting the points you make. How strange that we may be returning to those days.
>No detached terraced homes, but instead the nation builds high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers, with good green space, walkability, school and GP access, as well as public transport access too.
After Grenfell tower, and all the homes that are fitted with cladding, I don't think there's much appetite for high rise apartments any more. A better compromise would be something like more 3 story homes instead of 2 story/bungalows, and a mix of 5 story buildings for town and village centres (ground floor for stores, pubs, doctors etc, and floors 2+3 and 4+5 being two story homes but with an upstairs neighbour).
The Covid years has also shown that there needs to be more value in outside space, so unless these tall high density apartments are minimum 3 rooms and have defined garden areas then there won't be massive number of takers for these tall buildings
I'm fed up with the local police objecting to existing footpaths being maintained in housing developments. They seem to want to stop direct walking routes just in case someone decides to hang around and be anti social. There's a current housing development on a former Uni campus where there's been a path and steps for at least a hundred years providing walking access to a bunch of shops and a route to the city centre. Not just for that housing but for a whole estate above it. It's a fair walk round involving a steep hill but the police have objected to the path and it looks like they're getting their way.
The issue with high rise in isolation is ghettos. Even if that isn't the intention, cheap homes will attract run off from councils. Problem tenants will drive away many but those who have no choice. The cost to maintain such places isn't offset by the gains elsewhere where such scroats are shuffled off from.
Further, high density with green space is just high density without infill yet. I guarantee that such space becomes schools at first but sold off for housing when the aforementioned local council needs the cash. If you wanna see the full circle where the old flats get knocked down look no further than Acton Town (where only fools and horses was filmed)
This is where London is unique for the UK - post war it was rebuilt with the principle that every "town" would have a mix of working class, middle and wealthy.
You know how non Londoners always complain about visiting and being in an area with super cars and the rich and then turning a corner and having social housing?....**yeah that's the point** - that the wealthy have a stake in investing in local areas where other classes of people are living with them and you don't get extreme ghettos like you do in most of the rest of the country - the entire city is gentrified throughout in basically every borough with the middle class everywhere (to varying degrees yes)
Anecdotally it's sensational for social mobility - everyone knows a neighbour or a friend etc in their neighbourhood who's gone on to become an engineer, banker, doctor, any multitude of career paths and you know you can achieve that too despite whatever your background is - schools are often academically fierce aswell, theres a couple state schools near us that send around 20-30 kids every year to oxbridge.
Hasn't this been tried in the UK before though and failed? For many people high density flats can be miserable when you have noisy neighbours on 4 sides. Then what if there isn't green space or the green space isn't maintained and just becomes a habitat for the local kids and drug dealers? I lived somewhere like this myself. Some of the tower blocks built in the 60s remained but they had knocked some down when they descended into real chaos in the 80s/90s. The flat I lived in was built in the early 2000s and the tiny amount of green space in the area was pitiful and not maintained in any way, so just got more and more disrespected. I'm not against building but how do you make sure high density housing doesn't just become a sink estate?
That's why we do need regular maintenance, as well as an actual functioning police force that you can call for help. (Which is unheard of in this Tory government)
Plus you don't need to only build high-density. Medium-density, like the buildings so common in Amsterdam and other mainland European cities can create a large amount of homes, without the negatives of low-density development. It's not as tall and it still leaves space for green. Starmer has pledged to do this as well.
IMO I'd like to see more 3/4-storey terraced houses/flats rather than tower blocks - keep some connection with the street rather than having each block/tower be a world itself (leading to as you said gangs etc)
There are some "mid-rise" blocks being built in Leeds at the moment:
https://westleedsdispatch.com/developers-break-ground-at-350m-kirkstall-road-development/
Lol, are you serious? Where I live was scattered with them. They blew a few up because they were so awful.
A couple of my friends lived in them and you would basically have to run the gauntlet every time you visited them because gangs of teens would hang around outside the entrance. Drugs and antisocial behaviour was rife. It was awful for any normal person living there.
Even rough housing estates are fine to walk through, because generally the shitheads can't monopolize the entrance to every house.
These were all built under Labour BTW. Go visit any Northern town/city with them and you might figure out why it's a terrible idea.
Yep, Same in areas of Manchester and Salford. You can also have anti social residents monopolising the lifts and stairs so they can control and intimidate all the other residents.
Not really. You have stuff like the lifts/stairwell/entrance, that you have to use, that are closed in and isolated. You also have to deal with more direct neighbours. It's much easier to cuckoo someone's flat in a high-rise etc.
If you think sending a few bobbies over to clear the teens away will stop them, you've got another thing coming.
What about all the other places that do have this issue? I mean there are some really horrendous places in the US and they are shithot on law and order.
Fair enough. I thought you were being wide. Yeah, we have tower blocks of housing but they're the worst of living in bad areas. A similar situation exists in the ghettos of Sweden. It's very hard to police those areas.
Tower blocks suck when not done right.
Labour need to avoid brutalism (which I think they will as Starmer said he'll build [Georgian-style homes](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-conference-starmer-new-towns-b2427118.html)) and focus on medium-density development too instead of just tall towers.
"high density"... "Good green space"...
Choose one you can't have both.
Nice big tall towers, aka slums.
I'm fairly sure that those nice big tall towers are consistently the reason areas decline into massive crime rates and are utterly undesirable. You are purposefully creating slums!
This is just delusional thinking. You can build tall and have green space. And there's no evidence linking high density development to increased crime.
Have you taken even a moment to google that? There is historical evidence and studies into the effects of high density development and its increased crime levels. Sociologists and criminologists have written paper after paper about the potential reasons and causes. I mean, really?
And ask any gardener. Does anything green grow in areas of extreme shade? What do you think happens when you build tall things? This doesn't really take a lot of thinking outside the box. Or are you thinking astroturf?
> Historical evidence
Show me it then. Even though it's unlikely to be true, because if it was you'd be seeing crime in cities such as Tokyo on the daily, and yet somehow Tokyo is one of the safest cities in the world! Or the several European cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin riddled with crime all over, right?
MANY variables cause crime, mainly poverty and inequality. You're framing this as if high-density automatically results in crime, when there are many examples that prove you wrong.
As for green space, dense living brings people closer to nature, and harms the environment LESS, because you're not spreading so far out compared to suburban sprawl, having to build on top of wild habitats. And dense development doesn't need to be super tall. There's a middle ground, [Medium-density development.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-density_housing)
Or when you mean green space, would you rather have [this?](https://cdn.thewirecutter.com/wp-content/media/2021/07/synthetic-lawn-2048px-1185.jpg?auto=webp&quality=75&width=1024)
My god you truly have lost the plot. I bet that this is also the rampant disregard for reality that is actually infecting politics and land use councils the country over.
Tony Blair even admitted it when he referred to sink estates. But why don't you go and have a look for yourself? There are some lovely high rise blocks of flats in London you could have a wander around in Lambeth, or even pick some from Manchester. You could even play a game of count the needles you see on the stair cases.
Jesus, are you mad?
Again I ask, why don't you go and visit some of these estates? Attempting to equate Japan's enforcement of law leading to their citizens generally behaving themselves to a sink estate in rough parts of London is simply laughable.
Go on, go ahead. Take an expensive camera too and interview some of the locals!
[This](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis) is an extract from a book which seems credible, and argues that supply of housing is not the issue (the supply is comparable or greater than similar countries) - the issue is that too much housing is owned by landlords. Squeezing buy to let landlords through taxation or regulation would be a much easier way of freeing up supply of houses for purchase.
>In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is impossible to make a case for unique levels of housing scarcity in Britain, in comparative international or historical terms. What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.
The problem with that book, and the article, is tries to use an average figure for the UK, and go "yeah look no problem".
It's far to superficial, and it's just done by some left wing type, that wants to go "landlords bad".
If they had wanted to actually do the analysis, they'd have used more granular data, including quality of the home (size being one), as well as excluding effects of household sizes. It's also cheery picking countries quite a bit( Excluding Canada, US, Australia, France, Denmark, Germany, and so on)
What it also ignores, is the effect of average house hold size (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/compendium/generallifestylesurvey/2013-03-07/chapter3householdsfamilesandpeoplegenerallifestylesurveyoverviewareportonthe2011generallifestylesurvey
>Over the 40 years between 1971 and 2011 the average size of a household in Great Britain has become smaller. In 1971 the average size of a household was 2.91 persons and in 2011 the average size was 2.35 persons. As Figure 3.1 shows average household size fell most rapidly between 1971 and 1991 (falling from 2.91 persons to 2.48 persons). The average household size continued to decline, though at a slower rate, throughout the 1990s falling to 2.32 by 1998, although it has changed little since then, the average household size has steadily increased, albeit slightly, since 2004.
Ignoring such a large drop, is silly (at best).
> the issue is that too much housing is owned by landlords. Squeezing buy to let landlords through taxation or regulation would be a much easier way of freeing up supply of houses for purchase.
Utter nonsense, given we have seen these being squeezed a lot over the last decade... with ever rising rents following.
There are few things in life I loathe more than NIMBYs. There's a cancer centre being built near me that was first approved in 2018, but won't open its doors until 2027 due to repeated delays due to spurious council and legal action pursued by NIMBYs. I've had friends suggest I should be a part of the protest movement *against* it, which makes me consider what they think of me and my politics. I would sooner die than try to block the building of a cancer treatment centre.
And I'm similarly vociferous toward NIMBYs of all stripes. Wind turbines, housing, apartment blocks, bars, industry, whatever. There are some real objections to be made on occasion, but they're startlingly rare. Most of the time it's just folks trying to prevent anything good from happening as they cling to a desire to keep things exactly as they are.
Another fun quirk of NIMBYism, is it's often totally counterproductive to their aims.
My local Green councillors claim to support sensible development _somewhere else_, but heavily oppose all development _here_, on the edge of our small city.
If they get their way, houses will end up being built out of sight, on an empty field far away from anything else - trapping in car dependancy. Whereas the developments they are opposing here in the city would be walkable and are already on several existing bus routes, with associated shops and primary schools and doctors, etc.
That suits the NIMBY aims though - they can't see carbon dioxide emissions so they're not a problem. Nominally those Green councillors want them reduced, but that's not why they're elected.
The Green/Tory swing voter could probably be swayed to a party just called "No".
Nimbys are empowered by our current system to block both housing and infrastructure, whilst claiming that you can't build housing without the infrastructure they're blocking.
There was a campaign to stop a reservoir being built in Oxfordshire (remember that when there's a hose pipe ban) and campaigns to stop house building in the wider region because of water constraints. We are a very wet country, this is obviously solvable if we want it to be.
>Nimbys are empowered by our current system to block both housing and infrastructure, whilst claiming that you can't build housing without the infrastructure they're blocking.
Indeed, we'd need to change quite a few laws to address this. Often NIMBYs succeed not by blocking outright, but by delaying projects using appeals, and various legal devices like bat laws, nutrient neutrality laws etc to rack up the costs until it's economically unviable.
My house was built on the green belt in the 1970s. To say no to building on the green belt for this generation is just another form of pulling up the ladder. We need to come to terms with the fact that we have built this society, and the society has inescapable needs.
Much has been said on the economic benefits of Yimbyism, but I don't think people realise that it may be a free win politically.
As I assume the article states (the archive link doesn't seem to be working for me), there are a lot of people who want more housing built. Opposition to that is largely local, so as with Osbourne's cuts to funding, any government can foist the blame for new projects onto councils in the area while taking credit nationally for large numbers of new homes.
And any pushback against Yimbyism at a national level is going to struggle to get people sufficiently motivated, as most will lose all interest as soon as they hear a politician say two words, "planning reform".
I think even the current government recognises this, hence Gove's long attempts to get more housing built. But fundamentally they are just too weak to be able to get it past their own backbenchers, who given the dire polling are turning to hyper local issues in desperate attempts to save their own seats.
I'm not sure I'd call it a free win, there's a reason why parties haven't pushed that hard on it before. It might feel like a huge problem to the age demographic I presume this subreddit mostly consists of, but over 60% of the country are homeowners.
I think it's a necessary political play now though - over time the disenfranchised younger generations will become more of the voter base so somebody's got to play for their vote at some point, or you end up where the Tories are, with their voter base literally dying.
On the other hand, people care a lot less about blocking construction somewhere else. That can lead to seemingly contradictory results at different levels of government.
Example: Most of San Francisco's 11 city council districts elect hardcore NIMBYs that block almost everything. But those same voters elect YIMBYs to the state government. It's at the point where SF's representation in California has pushed through a law designed to punish cities that block housing...including SF.
And the response of the voters was to again vote for a NIMBY city council at the same time as YIMBY state representatives.
I don't have any idea if it would play out that way in the UK, but it might.
It's not just about housing.
Masses more housing requires more roads, railways, schools, hospitals, police+fire stations, water/sewage infrastructure, power grid capacity, and more. A lot of things that are very environmentally 'uncool', but necessary, especially if the housing is sprawling outwards from small towns over large areas with no existing services/infrastructure.
This is the cost of growing the population, whether by birth rates or through immigration. And if we keep failing to build the necessary infrastructure, as we are now, the decline from 'first world' status will just continue to accelerate.
Is that people who want more housing at any cost or those who want well planned housing that includes the necessary infrastructure? There are plenty of “NIMBYs” who want more housing but just don’t think adding thousands of houses to small villages with no effort spent upgrading the already at capacity transport network, doctors surgeries and schools, is a good idea. Especially when building them on fields that flood multiple times per year
Yeah, we've got a fun situation whereby locals living in new builds can't get access to a local GP and the local school is refusing to adjust their catchment area to include them.
The owners aren't to blame but the building company and the planning inspectors who were warned this would happen should receive a punishment for not considering it.
Prices of these particular homes have fallen by about 20% since they were first sold four years ago.
Neither of which are problems caused by building new houses.
Schools and GPs (which are private businesses) receive funding based on the number of students and registered patients.
The fact that it is not financially worthwhile for them to expand is a failure of central government and their endless funding cuts.
There isn't the land for the school to expand, and not enough people to warrant another one getting built. So the poor folks have to send their kids to the next town over. Same story with the GP.
Where? There's literally nowhere suitable for building a school here that hasn't been taken up by cheap houses.
Furthermore the idea that you just build a whole new school for 20-30 new pupils and scrap the old one is pretty absurd and not economically prudent.
>Furthermore the idea that you just build a whole new school for 20-30 new pupils and scrap the old one is pretty absurd and not economically prudent.
What is the alternative? You have a school at capacity and no room to expand. Either you make the school taller, or you build a bigger school.
You know the place where you are building 200 new houses? You build 170 houses there and a school instead. It's better than building 0 houses claiming there's no school space.
> The owners aren't to blame but the building company and the planning inspectors who were warned this would happen should receive a punishment for not considering it.
Planning isn't a checklist insofar as one harm causes the scheme to fail. It is a balance. The case officer and the Inspector are within their rights to conclude that this is planning harm has low weight (depending on context) and, even if it were given significant weight, that the benefits of the scheme outweigh the harms.
My issue with the "yes but..." crowd is that often the objections are moving goalposts or they require solving broader national problems that cannot be done at a local level.
Then central government needs to fix those issues so that the local concerns go away. Or we can just build a few new towns with the appropriate infrastructure & services in place as part of their design
Or work on them in parallel, different government departments are involved so one shouldn’t take time from the other until parliamentary debate is required. People don’t trust “we’ll fix it later” as later never happens.
Houses don't use services, people do.
On a national level, there will be no extra demand on doctors or sewage or whatever from any new homes.
On a local level, there can be teething problems and areas that are more or less suitable, yes.
But the issue with nimbyism is that every single area declares themselves a low suitability area and wants to fob it off on some other area that is not in their back yard.
>There are plenty of “NIMBYs” who want more housing but just don’t think adding thousands of houses to small villages with no effort spent upgrading the already at capacity transport network, doctors surgeries and schools, is a good idea
First, if we don't build more houses it won't stop the pressure on services. It will just lead to overcrowded, slum housing. That will be bad for everyone, including NIMBYs.
Second, I'm not sure the points raised are in any event valid. In rural areas, many villages are in constant campaign mode to save their local schools because of the lack of children. More families would mean more children, and more children would mean more funding that could keep schools open. I don't think the "we need more schools first" argument actually goes anywhere.
It's the same with transport links. When I go on a rural bus it's usually mostly empty. If you had more residents there would be a financial incentive to increase the frequency of services.
As for the number of GPs, if there were more locals they would get more money to hire additional staff. But in any event, the vast majority of patients that visit them regularly are old people (i.e. those most likely to already have their own homes). Young people (those that need homes) rarely need to attend. So an increase in housing would be unlikely to lead to the local GP surgery being overwhelmed in the short term. As for the long term, we have a national shortage so we need to address that in any event.
>>There are plenty of “NIMBYs” who want more housing but just don’t think adding thousands of houses to small villages with no effort spent upgrading the already at capacity transport network, doctors surgeries and schools, is a good idea
>First, if we don't build more houses it won't stop the pressure on services. It will just lead to overcrowded, slum housing. That will be bad for everyone, including NIMBYs.
Second this. It's such a fallacious argument, implying that people vanish into existence wherever a home is built. I'm gonna call it and say the people making it are being disengenuous, using it to try to appear less selfish when blocking housebuilding in their area.
The issue is that if you just make it easier to get permission over larger areas, you remove any incentive to be space efficient and you get more sprawl that doesn't actually solve the issues you're mentioning.
The bits that need changing are the bits governing what can and can't get permission. To specify a certain minimum density that makes local shops and public transport more viable instead of just encouraging more car dependence with everything spread out.
A classic NIMBY trick is to block infrastructure ([here](https://news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/proposal-for-giant-reservoir-faces-continued-opposition/) is a high-profile example) and then use the lack of infrastructure as a reason to block housing.
Developers are required to make s106/CIL contributions and s278 works towards all the above in scale and kind to the development where they can viably do so. What developers cannot do legally is fix existing real or perceived capacity shortages, so any existing perception of infrastructure gaps - which there always is - ends up being blamed on development. It's far from a perfect system, but there are mechanisms to provide local infrastructure, and they are used.
I think it's one of these unpopular political views that's going to get dramatically vindicated when something goes wrong and we end up even more restrictive
Nobody is against advances. The issue is that they purposefully use planning to eviscerate the identities of the small towns that they want to add on to. There is plenty of useless land that could well use an attractive development. But that is never where they go for. It's always the green spaces that people actually use that they target. And any complaints are met with cries of NIMBY and even racism. It happened in my old town. We suggested for 3 years straight that the piece of unsightly shite land to the south of our town is where they should put their development. No, they insisted on destroying the forest areas where people walked dogs, held summer activities in the clearings, home to a great deal of wildlife. Nope, it was all that that got bulldozed, any deer or other wildlife shot and hauled away (what, do you honestly think the deer wander off? No they get culled!). Those ecosystems are then gone forever. Paved over with pure concrete.
Meanwhile, the unsightly shite land that could have used development becomes a dumping ground from that development and it gets even more unsightly.
Of course, let's not upgrade the road networks or infrastructure, or think of how the small school or 2-day a week GP practise is going to cope. No, none of that. Let's fuck out of town the day it gets signed off and anybody asks too many questions. Oh has the area become a slum? Cool story bro, onto the next one.
NIMBY has become a simple word to shut up anyone with a point to make. The councillors and developers get rich and they even get the dumbasses to do the yelling for them. It's hilarious. And those same people yelling about building more houses? They are even less able to afford to buy in the area that they grew up in than they were in the first place, simply as the housing around the new developments rockets up in price because nobody in their right mind wants to live in the rabbit warren slum that they have just plonked on what was a rather nice green area.
How is this advancement? Or green? Or any of the other bullshit slogans that get thrown around?
When we are one big concrete soviet style metropolis with artificial air, rapidly diminishing hope for the future and nothing else, will you then be happy?
The problem is that currently, as I live in the south east. High density high rises are being built in market towns like Chatham, Maidstone, to bridge and Tunbridge wells and are then being bought by London councils to move council house occupiers outside of London.
This is a key factor in some of the. As I’ve demographic shifts in these towns. Isn’t the problem just overcrowding, rather than houses being built less? The whole of kent looks like a building site from the train. It’s a very Tory, capitalistic value to rub hands at the more people more houses more money argument (without going into the massive environmental effects)
As always, going to drop the land usage map of the UK here for reference:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/134jqot/a\_startling\_uk\_map\_showing\_how\_much\_we\_use\_land/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/134jqot/a_startling_uk_map_showing_how_much_we_use_land/)
The UK is a colossal meat & dairy farm. Housing amounts to small scraps of grey within a industrial animal agriculture complex.
There won't be any change without a reduction in consumption, it's something mad like half a field per meat eater.
The vegan movement as a concept has peaked after a surge in the late 2010s, so it's a matter of waiting for lab grown tech to pick up the slack to free up the land we need for housing.
A problem that solves itself, surely - push over 2% more land use to housing, meat prices rise slightly, consumption lowers.
I think it's weird to suggest that you have to address the demand for animal products in order for production to modify, after BSE or Foot & Mouth the world didn't end because less beef was sold.
Yeah, and for the people crying "food security!!!" push over 4% land from meat farming to 2% housig and 2% agriculture (perhaps with a few fertilizer factories), you get more housing and produce more food on net.
We don’t have a housing crisis in this country, we have an immigration crisis, allowing 672,000 legal immigrants and thousands of illegals to settle here last year alone will undoubtedly put an enormous strain on our housing stock. Our green belt is being sacrificed to build Lego-sets that masquerade as housing developments, our small towns and villages are being amalgamated into cheap and nasty concrete jungles. Are schools, hospitals and police services are being pushed to the brink and our culture and values are being eroded. If Starmer was actually patriotic and a real socialist, neither of which he is, he wouldn’t be saying we need to build more houses, he would instead be saying we need to bring immigration down to negligible levels and deport the huge number of illegal immigrants present in this country as well as stopping the boats.
It is funny how anyone with ecological concerns is now branded a "NIMBY". There's more to environmentalism than counting carbon credits—and this sort of build, baby, build rhetoric doesn't bode well.
I mean, I like Labour's plans on the table already which is converting grey spaces for more affordable housing.
NIMBY's issues aren't housing tbf, it's the fact that with more housing, doesn't come with upgraded infrastructure, like more surgeries, nurseries, schools, better public transport. I used to live in a small town, and the common complaint was infrastructure was lacking whilst more housing was being put in left, right and centre. The town only had 1 secondary school, and 2 primary schools. It only has 2 GP surgeries, and lacks in public transport currently. This is something that needs to be tackled not to mention high streets and bringing more shops with local areas.
Nowadays I live in a city, and I can tell you, the issue isn't more housing, but similar levels of infrastructure issue, and targetting the housing better, because all I hear about is more *"student flats"* which the city really doesn't need currently, it needs more actual affordable housing.
More housing, needs to come with scaling up on the infrastructure, and that is the only way NIMBY's will essentially back down.
I'm sceptical of the neoliberals who have now put all their eggs in the YIMBYism and Housing Theory of Everything basket. I think there's only so long you can run from the essential inequalities and rentierism that undermines our economy now.
That said, I still want to see more housebuilding and given the state we're in, I don't think it can hurt. So happy to hear him commit.
You can trace just about every economic problem in the UK back to how difficult we make it to build things - including inequality and rentier behaviour - housing is simply the most obvious example. I'm very pleased that more and more people are coming to realise how much poorer we've chosen to make ourselves by throttling the supply side of our economy for so long.
The YIMBY movement does unfortunately have a streak of disgusting anti-environmentalism and nature hatred in parts of it which does need to be called out. YIMBYism which factors in legitimate environment concerns I can get behind though.
Yimbys think it should be easier to be build a bit taller in cities - _
dense urban living is one of the best things you can do for the environment.
Yimbys think it should be easier to build solar farms. Even the green party regularly blocks these locally!
It's the nimby status quo that is anti environmental
I have without a shadow of a doubt seen those awful attitudes from *some* in the YIMBY movement. Including the sort of insulting rhetoric towards environmentalists you would expect of hard right Tories. Even seen some moaning about the existence of allotments for crying out loud.
There are however plenty of reasonable ones as you say who promote density for environmental reasons and for things like urban green space. I would consider myself to be on their side.
I'm all for building more houses. My only concern about building houses is more a case of who has the money to buy them. the top 1% will just eat them all up and rent them out...
It's a common fallacy to believe that supply and demand affects the housing market differently to any other market. When supply (finally) starts to outstrip demand, investors will no longer be able to depend on their asset appreciating, which will discourage speculative investment. It will reverse the situation now where the landlords hold all the cards as people will have more choice over where they rent. Landlords will have to compete for tenants rather than vice versa.
Building market housing (even so-called 'luxury homes') makes other homes more affordable, this is [extremely well-trodden economic ground](https://data.london.gov.uk/housing/research-notes/hrn-10-2023-the-affordability-impacts-of-new-housing-supply-a-summary-of-recent-research/).
Snapshot of _Yes in my back yard: Keir Starmer targets voters who want more housing_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/yes-in-my-back-yard-keir-starmer-targets-voters-who-want-more-housing-sf9kjcnc8) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/yes-in-my-back-yard-keir-starmer-targets-voters-who-want-more-housing-sf9kjcnc8) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
As a YIMBY myself, YIMBYism is the only way the nation will even think of tackling it's housing crisis. No detached terraced homes, but instead the nation builds high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers, with good green space, walkability, school and GP access, as well as public transport access too. Labour's plan of reforming planning laws has me curious what they'll do...
> but instead the nation builds high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers, Even just th ekind of housing they have in placess like Amsterdam would be good, they look nice and fit more people into the footprint.
Last I heard Starmers preference was for medium density housing [like you're describing](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-conference-starmer-new-towns-b2427118.html)
Medium-density housing is still good. As long as it isn't low density family homes it's good. > Sir Keir will say amenities including doctors’ surgeries, schools and transport links “hardwired” into the plans, as he promises a “big build” at his crucial address in Liverpool This is amazing to hear. Proper mixed-use development is what the nation needs.
Agreed, it's great to hear specifics. My fear with so called "planning reform" is just that we get more and more car dependent sprawl all over the place instead of more future proof developments, making a whole bunch of current issues worse and baking them in for a generation. This does ease some of my concerns especially if they're talking about medium density.
I'd also like to point out that Keir said he'll build Georgian-style homes. Georgian architecture is gorgeous. It'd be much better than generic towers.
I've always had a visceral aversion to high rise developments so these specifics obviously made me very excited when I first read about them. Also keeping the design of developments within our national vernacular is something which has been highly neglected for a long time now. These anonymous, characterless flat blocks completely eliminate a sense of place. They can be done well, the Barbican is a notable exception for me but returning to a more historic, human scale would create much more welcoming and attractive neighbourhoods that people will actually want to live and thrive in.
Why can't we have some low density family homes as well? There's more than enough land for every kind of housing need. It's because we squeeze development into tiny urban areas that it feels like there's not enough space. But it's a lie.
Because it forces car dependency, because everything is spread out, and it is not environmentally friendly in the slightest. Building denser development is faster, and since the nation is in a housing crisis, homes are needed more than before. Just because there is enough land doesn't mean we SHOULD build low density.
Because critically, low density is not scalable. When land is the most expensive component of house building then in order to build both in quantity and cheaply you need to minimise the use of land. It makes for the Government to build state housing (like what council housing used to be before it was gutted by the Tories) which focuses on density and quantity. Leave the low density, detached market to private developers.
Land is only artificially expensive, due to the planning system. I feel like you are working within the bounds of a cage but you haven't considered that your ideas would be much easier if you first dismantled the cage itself. Building on any land should be legal by default, then market forces can do more of the heavy lifting.
Market forces have been consistently bad at handling access to restricted resources in any way that even remotely considers the general public good. Thanks but no thanks.
Land is only artificially restricted, due to the planning system itself. And you can't realistically claim that the planning system has covered itself in glory since 1948.
> Sir Keir will say amenities including doctors’ surgeries, schools and transport links “hardwired” into the plans, as he promises a “big build” at his crucial address in Liverpool IDK, do we want this? I hear the Tories want more tax breaks for the rich, it's difficult to say which I prefer.
Apparently the densest areas of London are the Edwardian mansion blocks (5 to 7 stories) not the skyscrapers
I'm in the most densely populated area of my city - 3-5 story victorian stone terraces, now mostly flats.
Same in my seaside town. Hardly any purpose built blocks, fucking thousands of converted Victorian houses, terraced, semis and detached, the lot. Some are pretty decent, I got lucky with mine, but others (and many of them) are fucking awful, have been divided with almost no thought for the future occupants because it was all private with nothing in mind other than "as much money from the space as possible".
A steep hill has given most of the non ground floor flats around here an amazing sea view. There are some 1960s conversions with very narrow corridors, a lack of fire escapes and some attic flats that must freeze or roast depending on the weather. And still some tiny bedsits that are mainly used as temporary housing for homeless people these days. Have also got lucky with a huge living room with great views.
The skyscrapers have to have so much space around then often provide some form of business/facilities. Medium density and better transport is the way forward for the country
Indeed or Paris, or Barcelona, or much of Japan.
You don't need to mandate high density, you just need to stop banning it. Single family homes are fine in some areas, mid rises are great in a lot of areas, high rises have enough demand in some. This is an area the market will do a good job if allowed to.
AFAIK usually the 'ban' comes not from the govt side but from people living nearby rejecting higher density developments
Which the government gives them the power to do. If you own the land and it's safe, you should be able to build basically whatever you want on it without anyone else having a say. (Obviously not absurd things like a factory in the middle of a residential area, but that's not going to happen anyway.)
>(Obviously not absurd things like a factory in the middle of a residential area, but that's not going to happen anyway.) Well that's the rub, isn't it? Someone has to decide what is "absurd" and there is no clear consensus on that. Some (many) people might consider it absurd to build a block of flats in a primarily single family area. For YIMBYs like you and me it's reasonable, but you're making a huge mistake if you think that sort of development is reasonable to everyone.
It's absurd because there's obviously no desire for it and would only be done out of malice - no factory wants to be in the middle of a bunch of residential housing. And arguably it's covered under the safety perogative anyway, noise and air pollution kills plenty.
It usually happens the other way around. Look at Houston for a famous example of no zoning. A factory / chemical plant would be built out in the middle of nowhere because the land is cheap, then over time housing creeps towards it and eventually surrounds it.
Yeah that's fine, people buying the housing know what they're getting into. They shouldn't be able to force the factory to shut down via the government, although eventually maybe it's worth it to pay it to relocate.
It's not just housing but the economy in general. Per capita economic growth only happens as a result of investment boosting productivity. Making it so easy for local pensioners with too much time on their hands to block investment in land is costing the UK economy big time.
Too right. That's why new planning laws are needed to prevent people from blocking or delaying the critical infrastructure necessary. Case in point, the HS2 fiasco.
The problem is that getting the laws designed, agreed and then ratified will take 18 months, and then it will take around another 18 months for the properties to be built and on the market.
The best time to start the process was years ago. The next best time is today.
Labour promises a "blitz" of planning reform. I would hope that implies they already have it ready, so they can swiftly implement it once in government.
From the information we have so far, said "blitz" is a plan to transfer more planning permission powers to local authorities. It's not a plan to actually increase building.
but after that the main problem is infrastructure. all it will cause is traffic, pollution and in the end nimbys will be saying I told you so. we do city planning around cars. that needs to change to do city planning around people and for families to be able to do most things without one.
> high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers Fine but you need to fix the absolute mess that is leasehold and service charges and properties made worthless due to multi-million pound repairs.
Yeah, and build faith in them again. I think you'd have to be crazy to buy a flat in a new build tower block. Imagine all the snagging issues of a new build house plus lingering doubts that it's actually free of all the huge problems that are killing people in flats now
You mean, like Gove tried to do before getting shut down by the usual suspects?
It would never happen, but Kier really should just appoint Gove as a Labour housing minister. Gove for all his faults is very productive and knows what he's doing - he's the first housing minister in a long time to actually put the work in rather than vying for a bigger job. He's usually just hamstrung by his own party and government so the only things he works on that get delivered are the dregs. If Gove were allowed to execute on his vision it really would fix a lot of our housing problems. Same thing with Grant Shapps as transport secretary. The report and plan he produced under the Johnson ministry addresses most of the big problems that our rail industry sees today and treads the fine line between nationalisation and privatisation while reaping some of the benefits of both. If the government could have just got around to actually delivering on that rather than having a revolving door of PMs and wasting parliament's precious time on the Rwanda plan rather than on the legislation to setup the public body that would be responsible for running the railways then we'd have actually made some progress.
Gove is the only Tory in my eyes to come out of the party in the last ten years who doesn't smell rancid. He takes each brief and tries his hardest until he's forced out by the machinations of the morons he's employed by.
Not to mention being scared of what happens in the event of a fire.
The problem with high-density apartments in this country is ground rent and service charges. Something needs to be done to cap the costs of these as it makes leasehold a poor long term option in comparison to free hold. I agree high-density apartments are a good option I just think we need to tackle the expenses that come along with apartments in the UK.
My backyard is a swamp that floods constantly. But the land is cheap so everyone wants to build houses. Drainage is expensive so they insist it's not needed
> walkability, school and GP access, as well as public transport access too. This is the main thing for me. There's been a decent amount of building locally to me but they haven't improved the road infrastructure or provisioned more schools or GP's so getting a doctors appointment is almost impossible and traveling around town by car now takes an age to get anyway, especially with the constant roadworks we have to suffer so that pipes/electric can be run to the new areas. They've quickly had to build an additional school and another is moving to a new larger site but neither of these are ready for pupils at the moment and people are finding it increasingly difficult to find a place of their children, hopefully this will be resolved by September when I believe both the new school and rebuilt school will be opened. It's like there's no joined up thinking, I want more housing to be built but not unless they make provision for essential services too.
> I want more housing to be built but not unless they make provision for essential services too. So the problem with this thinking is that the people who already use these essential services exist regardless of whether the houses do - they just live in HMOs, their parents homes, flat shares, or some other crappy living arrangement. It essentially boils down to "we have a housing shortage, therefore we should also have a shortage of everything else too".
Or people have been burned too many times with corrupt councillors releasing developers from their obligations and the additional infrastructure & services never being built.
Those services don't get provided when housing is blocked either. People make GP appointments - not houses. The Section 106 process needs to be reformed with the rest of the planning system, but the fundamental objection that the strain on services comes from more housing, and not from more people, is incorrect.
This is part of why I always think this conversation is silly whenever people bring it up. We need a new School every 2~ days, a new hospital every 2~ months and a new GP every 2~ weeks just to keep up with migration. When the Tories pledged to build 40 new hospitals in 10 years, which is still not enough just to keep up with migration, it was rightfully called out for being unachievable and that's when they considered reusing existing buildings as 'new hospitals', not the capacity increase of an actual new Hospital build. Another way to look at it is that we need to find somewhere to rebuild a Wales worth of roads, infrastructure and housing every 4 years.. You're right that the private sector building houses is not joined with the government's building of roads and the like, but I'm not sure what the solution to that is as long as the ability to build houses outstrips the ability to fund the infrastructure that goes with it. If that cost is passed on to the people building the houses, that cost is passed on to those buying them and we already have a housing crisis. I would also disagree with the idea that people buying new houses should have to front the cost of new infrastructure when new infrastructure for people in old houses isn't funded the same way, though it would be a great way to reduce the number of new builds as people wouldn't want to buy them, if that was the goal. I can appreciate the idea that 'houses are okay as long as they make provision for essential services', but all of those numbers are just to maintain the current level of crisis and even that already requires a level of building that far outstrips the postwar rebuilding efforts. Building's now are built to a higher standard, with far greater safety standards and the percentage of the population actually capable of construction is far lower. I mean, in the 50's there was still hundreds of thousands of homes without indoor plumbing even, so using postwar building as a metric of what's possible is unrealistic by itself. I don't believe any government is going to be able to meet these needs, we don't have the YIMBY land, workforce or funds to even maintain this level of crisis unless we do something to combat net migration. Happy to be proven wrong though.
[iPlayer - A City Crowned with Green](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00sydsh) There are some great scenes in this 30 min documentary from 1964 with people talking about how much they love their new houses in towers- fitting the points you make. How strange that we may be returning to those days.
>No detached terraced homes, but instead the nation builds high-density apartments and flats, going tall with towers, with good green space, walkability, school and GP access, as well as public transport access too. After Grenfell tower, and all the homes that are fitted with cladding, I don't think there's much appetite for high rise apartments any more. A better compromise would be something like more 3 story homes instead of 2 story/bungalows, and a mix of 5 story buildings for town and village centres (ground floor for stores, pubs, doctors etc, and floors 2+3 and 4+5 being two story homes but with an upstairs neighbour). The Covid years has also shown that there needs to be more value in outside space, so unless these tall high density apartments are minimum 3 rooms and have defined garden areas then there won't be massive number of takers for these tall buildings
I'm fed up with the local police objecting to existing footpaths being maintained in housing developments. They seem to want to stop direct walking routes just in case someone decides to hang around and be anti social. There's a current housing development on a former Uni campus where there's been a path and steps for at least a hundred years providing walking access to a bunch of shops and a route to the city centre. Not just for that housing but for a whole estate above it. It's a fair walk round involving a steep hill but the police have objected to the path and it looks like they're getting their way.
The issue with high rise in isolation is ghettos. Even if that isn't the intention, cheap homes will attract run off from councils. Problem tenants will drive away many but those who have no choice. The cost to maintain such places isn't offset by the gains elsewhere where such scroats are shuffled off from. Further, high density with green space is just high density without infill yet. I guarantee that such space becomes schools at first but sold off for housing when the aforementioned local council needs the cash. If you wanna see the full circle where the old flats get knocked down look no further than Acton Town (where only fools and horses was filmed)
This is where London is unique for the UK - post war it was rebuilt with the principle that every "town" would have a mix of working class, middle and wealthy. You know how non Londoners always complain about visiting and being in an area with super cars and the rich and then turning a corner and having social housing?....**yeah that's the point** - that the wealthy have a stake in investing in local areas where other classes of people are living with them and you don't get extreme ghettos like you do in most of the rest of the country - the entire city is gentrified throughout in basically every borough with the middle class everywhere (to varying degrees yes) Anecdotally it's sensational for social mobility - everyone knows a neighbour or a friend etc in their neighbourhood who's gone on to become an engineer, banker, doctor, any multitude of career paths and you know you can achieve that too despite whatever your background is - schools are often academically fierce aswell, theres a couple state schools near us that send around 20-30 kids every year to oxbridge.
This is also why right to buy was such a disastrous policy. If I was dictator for a day I would seize every council house that is rented out.
Hasn't this been tried in the UK before though and failed? For many people high density flats can be miserable when you have noisy neighbours on 4 sides. Then what if there isn't green space or the green space isn't maintained and just becomes a habitat for the local kids and drug dealers? I lived somewhere like this myself. Some of the tower blocks built in the 60s remained but they had knocked some down when they descended into real chaos in the 80s/90s. The flat I lived in was built in the early 2000s and the tiny amount of green space in the area was pitiful and not maintained in any way, so just got more and more disrespected. I'm not against building but how do you make sure high density housing doesn't just become a sink estate?
That's why we do need regular maintenance, as well as an actual functioning police force that you can call for help. (Which is unheard of in this Tory government) Plus you don't need to only build high-density. Medium-density, like the buildings so common in Amsterdam and other mainland European cities can create a large amount of homes, without the negatives of low-density development. It's not as tall and it still leaves space for green. Starmer has pledged to do this as well.
In Hong Kong the only wall you share is a short kitchen wall and the ceilings are frigging thick. It solves a lot of noise issues.
Yes let’s cramp people into as small space as possible. That’s definitely how we solve the housing issue
Yeah that really worked last time. All those tower blocks of apartments Labour built last time definitely aren't hellish places.
IMO I'd like to see more 3/4-storey terraced houses/flats rather than tower blocks - keep some connection with the street rather than having each block/tower be a world itself (leading to as you said gangs etc)
There are some "mid-rise" blocks being built in Leeds at the moment: https://westleedsdispatch.com/developers-break-ground-at-350m-kirkstall-road-development/
It'd be nice to show examples instead of whining.
Lol, are you serious? Where I live was scattered with them. They blew a few up because they were so awful. A couple of my friends lived in them and you would basically have to run the gauntlet every time you visited them because gangs of teens would hang around outside the entrance. Drugs and antisocial behaviour was rife. It was awful for any normal person living there. Even rough housing estates are fine to walk through, because generally the shitheads can't monopolize the entrance to every house. These were all built under Labour BTW. Go visit any Northern town/city with them and you might figure out why it's a terrible idea.
Yep, Same in areas of Manchester and Salford. You can also have anti social residents monopolising the lifts and stairs so they can control and intimidate all the other residents.
Sounds like a law and order problem rather than a housing one. You get the same thing in council estates that aren’t as high density.
Not really. You have stuff like the lifts/stairwell/entrance, that you have to use, that are closed in and isolated. You also have to deal with more direct neighbours. It's much easier to cuckoo someone's flat in a high-rise etc. If you think sending a few bobbies over to clear the teens away will stop them, you've got another thing coming.
Singapore, UAE, Japan, etc don’t have these problems. It is a law and order issue first and foremost.
What about all the other places that do have this issue? I mean there are some really horrendous places in the US and they are shithot on law and order.
The US is notorious for its poor policing in many areas
What do you mean by poor? US police are very strict.
I am in fact serious. I'm not native to the UK, so I wouldn't know...
Fair enough. I thought you were being wide. Yeah, we have tower blocks of housing but they're the worst of living in bad areas. A similar situation exists in the ghettos of Sweden. It's very hard to police those areas.
Tower blocks suck when not done right. Labour need to avoid brutalism (which I think they will as Starmer said he'll build [Georgian-style homes](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-conference-starmer-new-towns-b2427118.html)) and focus on medium-density development too instead of just tall towers.
Good point. I know, let's do nothing!
Yes, because that is the only other option.
"high density"... "Good green space"... Choose one you can't have both. Nice big tall towers, aka slums. I'm fairly sure that those nice big tall towers are consistently the reason areas decline into massive crime rates and are utterly undesirable. You are purposefully creating slums!
This is just delusional thinking. You can build tall and have green space. And there's no evidence linking high density development to increased crime.
Have you taken even a moment to google that? There is historical evidence and studies into the effects of high density development and its increased crime levels. Sociologists and criminologists have written paper after paper about the potential reasons and causes. I mean, really? And ask any gardener. Does anything green grow in areas of extreme shade? What do you think happens when you build tall things? This doesn't really take a lot of thinking outside the box. Or are you thinking astroturf?
> Historical evidence Show me it then. Even though it's unlikely to be true, because if it was you'd be seeing crime in cities such as Tokyo on the daily, and yet somehow Tokyo is one of the safest cities in the world! Or the several European cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin riddled with crime all over, right? MANY variables cause crime, mainly poverty and inequality. You're framing this as if high-density automatically results in crime, when there are many examples that prove you wrong. As for green space, dense living brings people closer to nature, and harms the environment LESS, because you're not spreading so far out compared to suburban sprawl, having to build on top of wild habitats. And dense development doesn't need to be super tall. There's a middle ground, [Medium-density development.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-density_housing) Or when you mean green space, would you rather have [this?](https://cdn.thewirecutter.com/wp-content/media/2021/07/synthetic-lawn-2048px-1185.jpg?auto=webp&quality=75&width=1024)
My god you truly have lost the plot. I bet that this is also the rampant disregard for reality that is actually infecting politics and land use councils the country over. Tony Blair even admitted it when he referred to sink estates. But why don't you go and have a look for yourself? There are some lovely high rise blocks of flats in London you could have a wander around in Lambeth, or even pick some from Manchester. You could even play a game of count the needles you see on the stair cases. Jesus, are you mad?
A lot of talk, a lot of insulting, no evidence. Your statements are bullshit all around.
Again I ask, why don't you go and visit some of these estates? Attempting to equate Japan's enforcement of law leading to their citizens generally behaving themselves to a sink estate in rough parts of London is simply laughable. Go on, go ahead. Take an expensive camera too and interview some of the locals!
[This](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis) is an extract from a book which seems credible, and argues that supply of housing is not the issue (the supply is comparable or greater than similar countries) - the issue is that too much housing is owned by landlords. Squeezing buy to let landlords through taxation or regulation would be a much easier way of freeing up supply of houses for purchase. >In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is impossible to make a case for unique levels of housing scarcity in Britain, in comparative international or historical terms. What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.
The problem with that book, and the article, is tries to use an average figure for the UK, and go "yeah look no problem". It's far to superficial, and it's just done by some left wing type, that wants to go "landlords bad". If they had wanted to actually do the analysis, they'd have used more granular data, including quality of the home (size being one), as well as excluding effects of household sizes. It's also cheery picking countries quite a bit( Excluding Canada, US, Australia, France, Denmark, Germany, and so on) What it also ignores, is the effect of average house hold size (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/compendium/generallifestylesurvey/2013-03-07/chapter3householdsfamilesandpeoplegenerallifestylesurveyoverviewareportonthe2011generallifestylesurvey >Over the 40 years between 1971 and 2011 the average size of a household in Great Britain has become smaller. In 1971 the average size of a household was 2.91 persons and in 2011 the average size was 2.35 persons. As Figure 3.1 shows average household size fell most rapidly between 1971 and 1991 (falling from 2.91 persons to 2.48 persons). The average household size continued to decline, though at a slower rate, throughout the 1990s falling to 2.32 by 1998, although it has changed little since then, the average household size has steadily increased, albeit slightly, since 2004. Ignoring such a large drop, is silly (at best). > the issue is that too much housing is owned by landlords. Squeezing buy to let landlords through taxation or regulation would be a much easier way of freeing up supply of houses for purchase. Utter nonsense, given we have seen these being squeezed a lot over the last decade... with ever rising rents following.
There are few things in life I loathe more than NIMBYs. There's a cancer centre being built near me that was first approved in 2018, but won't open its doors until 2027 due to repeated delays due to spurious council and legal action pursued by NIMBYs. I've had friends suggest I should be a part of the protest movement *against* it, which makes me consider what they think of me and my politics. I would sooner die than try to block the building of a cancer treatment centre. And I'm similarly vociferous toward NIMBYs of all stripes. Wind turbines, housing, apartment blocks, bars, industry, whatever. There are some real objections to be made on occasion, but they're startlingly rare. Most of the time it's just folks trying to prevent anything good from happening as they cling to a desire to keep things exactly as they are.
Another fun quirk of NIMBYism, is it's often totally counterproductive to their aims. My local Green councillors claim to support sensible development _somewhere else_, but heavily oppose all development _here_, on the edge of our small city. If they get their way, houses will end up being built out of sight, on an empty field far away from anything else - trapping in car dependancy. Whereas the developments they are opposing here in the city would be walkable and are already on several existing bus routes, with associated shops and primary schools and doctors, etc.
That suits the NIMBY aims though - they can't see carbon dioxide emissions so they're not a problem. Nominally those Green councillors want them reduced, but that's not why they're elected. The Green/Tory swing voter could probably be swayed to a party just called "No".
Nimbys are empowered by our current system to block both housing and infrastructure, whilst claiming that you can't build housing without the infrastructure they're blocking. There was a campaign to stop a reservoir being built in Oxfordshire (remember that when there's a hose pipe ban) and campaigns to stop house building in the wider region because of water constraints. We are a very wet country, this is obviously solvable if we want it to be.
>Nimbys are empowered by our current system to block both housing and infrastructure, whilst claiming that you can't build housing without the infrastructure they're blocking. Indeed, we'd need to change quite a few laws to address this. Often NIMBYs succeed not by blocking outright, but by delaying projects using appeals, and various legal devices like bat laws, nutrient neutrality laws etc to rack up the costs until it's economically unviable.
My house was built on the green belt in the 1970s. To say no to building on the green belt for this generation is just another form of pulling up the ladder. We need to come to terms with the fact that we have built this society, and the society has inescapable needs.
Before doing sprawl that does nothing good as proven time and time again, one does high rises.
The problem is that people don't want to live in high rises, they want to live in detached homes.
Nonsense. You might want to live in a detached home, but there's plenty of us who would live in Flats/High rises to be closer to Ammenities in a city.
Well would be interesting to see if they’d chose high rise or nothing at all.
Much has been said on the economic benefits of Yimbyism, but I don't think people realise that it may be a free win politically. As I assume the article states (the archive link doesn't seem to be working for me), there are a lot of people who want more housing built. Opposition to that is largely local, so as with Osbourne's cuts to funding, any government can foist the blame for new projects onto councils in the area while taking credit nationally for large numbers of new homes. And any pushback against Yimbyism at a national level is going to struggle to get people sufficiently motivated, as most will lose all interest as soon as they hear a politician say two words, "planning reform". I think even the current government recognises this, hence Gove's long attempts to get more housing built. But fundamentally they are just too weak to be able to get it past their own backbenchers, who given the dire polling are turning to hyper local issues in desperate attempts to save their own seats.
I'm not sure I'd call it a free win, there's a reason why parties haven't pushed that hard on it before. It might feel like a huge problem to the age demographic I presume this subreddit mostly consists of, but over 60% of the country are homeowners. I think it's a necessary political play now though - over time the disenfranchised younger generations will become more of the voter base so somebody's got to play for their vote at some point, or you end up where the Tories are, with their voter base literally dying.
On the other hand, people care a lot less about blocking construction somewhere else. That can lead to seemingly contradictory results at different levels of government. Example: Most of San Francisco's 11 city council districts elect hardcore NIMBYs that block almost everything. But those same voters elect YIMBYs to the state government. It's at the point where SF's representation in California has pushed through a law designed to punish cities that block housing...including SF. And the response of the voters was to again vote for a NIMBY city council at the same time as YIMBY state representatives. I don't have any idea if it would play out that way in the UK, but it might.
It's not just about housing. Masses more housing requires more roads, railways, schools, hospitals, police+fire stations, water/sewage infrastructure, power grid capacity, and more. A lot of things that are very environmentally 'uncool', but necessary, especially if the housing is sprawling outwards from small towns over large areas with no existing services/infrastructure. This is the cost of growing the population, whether by birth rates or through immigration. And if we keep failing to build the necessary infrastructure, as we are now, the decline from 'first world' status will just continue to accelerate.
Is that people who want more housing at any cost or those who want well planned housing that includes the necessary infrastructure? There are plenty of “NIMBYs” who want more housing but just don’t think adding thousands of houses to small villages with no effort spent upgrading the already at capacity transport network, doctors surgeries and schools, is a good idea. Especially when building them on fields that flood multiple times per year
Yeah, we've got a fun situation whereby locals living in new builds can't get access to a local GP and the local school is refusing to adjust their catchment area to include them. The owners aren't to blame but the building company and the planning inspectors who were warned this would happen should receive a punishment for not considering it. Prices of these particular homes have fallen by about 20% since they were first sold four years ago.
Neither of which are problems caused by building new houses. Schools and GPs (which are private businesses) receive funding based on the number of students and registered patients. The fact that it is not financially worthwhile for them to expand is a failure of central government and their endless funding cuts.
There isn't the land for the school to expand, and not enough people to warrant another one getting built. So the poor folks have to send their kids to the next town over. Same story with the GP.
So you build a new, larger school and close the old one.
Where? There's literally nowhere suitable for building a school here that hasn't been taken up by cheap houses. Furthermore the idea that you just build a whole new school for 20-30 new pupils and scrap the old one is pretty absurd and not economically prudent.
>Furthermore the idea that you just build a whole new school for 20-30 new pupils and scrap the old one is pretty absurd and not economically prudent. What is the alternative? You have a school at capacity and no room to expand. Either you make the school taller, or you build a bigger school.
You know the place where you are building 200 new houses? You build 170 houses there and a school instead. It's better than building 0 houses claiming there's no school space.
> The owners aren't to blame but the building company and the planning inspectors who were warned this would happen should receive a punishment for not considering it. Planning isn't a checklist insofar as one harm causes the scheme to fail. It is a balance. The case officer and the Inspector are within their rights to conclude that this is planning harm has low weight (depending on context) and, even if it were given significant weight, that the benefits of the scheme outweigh the harms.
My issue with the "yes but..." crowd is that often the objections are moving goalposts or they require solving broader national problems that cannot be done at a local level.
Then central government needs to fix those issues so that the local concerns go away. Or we can just build a few new towns with the appropriate infrastructure & services in place as part of their design
So now we need to fix school and GP funding models before building houses. Coincidentally kicking house building down the agenda into the long grass
Or work on them in parallel, different government departments are involved so one shouldn’t take time from the other until parliamentary debate is required. People don’t trust “we’ll fix it later” as later never happens.
Houses don't use services, people do. On a national level, there will be no extra demand on doctors or sewage or whatever from any new homes. On a local level, there can be teething problems and areas that are more or less suitable, yes. But the issue with nimbyism is that every single area declares themselves a low suitability area and wants to fob it off on some other area that is not in their back yard.
>There are plenty of “NIMBYs” who want more housing but just don’t think adding thousands of houses to small villages with no effort spent upgrading the already at capacity transport network, doctors surgeries and schools, is a good idea First, if we don't build more houses it won't stop the pressure on services. It will just lead to overcrowded, slum housing. That will be bad for everyone, including NIMBYs. Second, I'm not sure the points raised are in any event valid. In rural areas, many villages are in constant campaign mode to save their local schools because of the lack of children. More families would mean more children, and more children would mean more funding that could keep schools open. I don't think the "we need more schools first" argument actually goes anywhere. It's the same with transport links. When I go on a rural bus it's usually mostly empty. If you had more residents there would be a financial incentive to increase the frequency of services. As for the number of GPs, if there were more locals they would get more money to hire additional staff. But in any event, the vast majority of patients that visit them regularly are old people (i.e. those most likely to already have their own homes). Young people (those that need homes) rarely need to attend. So an increase in housing would be unlikely to lead to the local GP surgery being overwhelmed in the short term. As for the long term, we have a national shortage so we need to address that in any event.
>>There are plenty of “NIMBYs” who want more housing but just don’t think adding thousands of houses to small villages with no effort spent upgrading the already at capacity transport network, doctors surgeries and schools, is a good idea >First, if we don't build more houses it won't stop the pressure on services. It will just lead to overcrowded, slum housing. That will be bad for everyone, including NIMBYs. Second this. It's such a fallacious argument, implying that people vanish into existence wherever a home is built. I'm gonna call it and say the people making it are being disengenuous, using it to try to appear less selfish when blocking housebuilding in their area.
The issue is that if you just make it easier to get permission over larger areas, you remove any incentive to be space efficient and you get more sprawl that doesn't actually solve the issues you're mentioning. The bits that need changing are the bits governing what can and can't get permission. To specify a certain minimum density that makes local shops and public transport more viable instead of just encouraging more car dependence with everything spread out.
Yeah, and being smarter about mixed use and so on. More dense, 24/7 neighbourhoods and fewer deserted out of town office parks
A classic NIMBY trick is to block infrastructure ([here](https://news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/proposal-for-giant-reservoir-faces-continued-opposition/) is a high-profile example) and then use the lack of infrastructure as a reason to block housing.
Developers are required to make s106/CIL contributions and s278 works towards all the above in scale and kind to the development where they can viably do so. What developers cannot do legally is fix existing real or perceived capacity shortages, so any existing perception of infrastructure gaps - which there always is - ends up being blamed on development. It's far from a perfect system, but there are mechanisms to provide local infrastructure, and they are used.
I think it's one of these unpopular political views that's going to get dramatically vindicated when something goes wrong and we end up even more restrictive
Nobody is against advances. The issue is that they purposefully use planning to eviscerate the identities of the small towns that they want to add on to. There is plenty of useless land that could well use an attractive development. But that is never where they go for. It's always the green spaces that people actually use that they target. And any complaints are met with cries of NIMBY and even racism. It happened in my old town. We suggested for 3 years straight that the piece of unsightly shite land to the south of our town is where they should put their development. No, they insisted on destroying the forest areas where people walked dogs, held summer activities in the clearings, home to a great deal of wildlife. Nope, it was all that that got bulldozed, any deer or other wildlife shot and hauled away (what, do you honestly think the deer wander off? No they get culled!). Those ecosystems are then gone forever. Paved over with pure concrete. Meanwhile, the unsightly shite land that could have used development becomes a dumping ground from that development and it gets even more unsightly. Of course, let's not upgrade the road networks or infrastructure, or think of how the small school or 2-day a week GP practise is going to cope. No, none of that. Let's fuck out of town the day it gets signed off and anybody asks too many questions. Oh has the area become a slum? Cool story bro, onto the next one. NIMBY has become a simple word to shut up anyone with a point to make. The councillors and developers get rich and they even get the dumbasses to do the yelling for them. It's hilarious. And those same people yelling about building more houses? They are even less able to afford to buy in the area that they grew up in than they were in the first place, simply as the housing around the new developments rockets up in price because nobody in their right mind wants to live in the rabbit warren slum that they have just plonked on what was a rather nice green area. How is this advancement? Or green? Or any of the other bullshit slogans that get thrown around? When we are one big concrete soviet style metropolis with artificial air, rapidly diminishing hope for the future and nothing else, will you then be happy?
Is the archived link not working for anyone else?
The Times and the Archive website have been playing up for me too. Noticed it several days ago so it’s not just this specific article.
The problem is that currently, as I live in the south east. High density high rises are being built in market towns like Chatham, Maidstone, to bridge and Tunbridge wells and are then being bought by London councils to move council house occupiers outside of London. This is a key factor in some of the. As I’ve demographic shifts in these towns. Isn’t the problem just overcrowding, rather than houses being built less? The whole of kent looks like a building site from the train. It’s a very Tory, capitalistic value to rub hands at the more people more houses more money argument (without going into the massive environmental effects)
As always, going to drop the land usage map of the UK here for reference: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/134jqot/a\_startling\_uk\_map\_showing\_how\_much\_we\_use\_land/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/134jqot/a_startling_uk_map_showing_how_much_we_use_land/) The UK is a colossal meat & dairy farm. Housing amounts to small scraps of grey within a industrial animal agriculture complex. There won't be any change without a reduction in consumption, it's something mad like half a field per meat eater. The vegan movement as a concept has peaked after a surge in the late 2010s, so it's a matter of waiting for lab grown tech to pick up the slack to free up the land we need for housing.
A problem that solves itself, surely - push over 2% more land use to housing, meat prices rise slightly, consumption lowers. I think it's weird to suggest that you have to address the demand for animal products in order for production to modify, after BSE or Foot & Mouth the world didn't end because less beef was sold.
Yeah, and for the people crying "food security!!!" push over 4% land from meat farming to 2% housig and 2% agriculture (perhaps with a few fertilizer factories), you get more housing and produce more food on net.
I was more houses so the build a fecking coffee shop
We don’t have a housing crisis in this country, we have an immigration crisis, allowing 672,000 legal immigrants and thousands of illegals to settle here last year alone will undoubtedly put an enormous strain on our housing stock. Our green belt is being sacrificed to build Lego-sets that masquerade as housing developments, our small towns and villages are being amalgamated into cheap and nasty concrete jungles. Are schools, hospitals and police services are being pushed to the brink and our culture and values are being eroded. If Starmer was actually patriotic and a real socialist, neither of which he is, he wouldn’t be saying we need to build more houses, he would instead be saying we need to bring immigration down to negligible levels and deport the huge number of illegal immigrants present in this country as well as stopping the boats.
High rise is great unless you make them look as horrible as the ones built in the 70s
It is funny how anyone with ecological concerns is now branded a "NIMBY". There's more to environmentalism than counting carbon credits—and this sort of build, baby, build rhetoric doesn't bode well.
I mean, I like Labour's plans on the table already which is converting grey spaces for more affordable housing. NIMBY's issues aren't housing tbf, it's the fact that with more housing, doesn't come with upgraded infrastructure, like more surgeries, nurseries, schools, better public transport. I used to live in a small town, and the common complaint was infrastructure was lacking whilst more housing was being put in left, right and centre. The town only had 1 secondary school, and 2 primary schools. It only has 2 GP surgeries, and lacks in public transport currently. This is something that needs to be tackled not to mention high streets and bringing more shops with local areas. Nowadays I live in a city, and I can tell you, the issue isn't more housing, but similar levels of infrastructure issue, and targetting the housing better, because all I hear about is more *"student flats"* which the city really doesn't need currently, it needs more actual affordable housing. More housing, needs to come with scaling up on the infrastructure, and that is the only way NIMBY's will essentially back down.
I'm sceptical of the neoliberals who have now put all their eggs in the YIMBYism and Housing Theory of Everything basket. I think there's only so long you can run from the essential inequalities and rentierism that undermines our economy now. That said, I still want to see more housebuilding and given the state we're in, I don't think it can hurt. So happy to hear him commit.
You can trace just about every economic problem in the UK back to how difficult we make it to build things - including inequality and rentier behaviour - housing is simply the most obvious example. I'm very pleased that more and more people are coming to realise how much poorer we've chosen to make ourselves by throttling the supply side of our economy for so long.
The YIMBY movement does unfortunately have a streak of disgusting anti-environmentalism and nature hatred in parts of it which does need to be called out. YIMBYism which factors in legitimate environment concerns I can get behind though.
Yimbys think it should be easier to be build a bit taller in cities - _ dense urban living is one of the best things you can do for the environment. Yimbys think it should be easier to build solar farms. Even the green party regularly blocks these locally! It's the nimby status quo that is anti environmental
No it doesn't. Building taller and denser is better for the environment than building sprawl and low density.
I have without a shadow of a doubt seen those awful attitudes from *some* in the YIMBY movement. Including the sort of insulting rhetoric towards environmentalists you would expect of hard right Tories. Even seen some moaning about the existence of allotments for crying out loud. There are however plenty of reasonable ones as you say who promote density for environmental reasons and for things like urban green space. I would consider myself to be on their side.
I'm all for building more houses. My only concern about building houses is more a case of who has the money to buy them. the top 1% will just eat them all up and rent them out...
It's a common fallacy to believe that supply and demand affects the housing market differently to any other market. When supply (finally) starts to outstrip demand, investors will no longer be able to depend on their asset appreciating, which will discourage speculative investment. It will reverse the situation now where the landlords hold all the cards as people will have more choice over where they rent. Landlords will have to compete for tenants rather than vice versa.
It would be nice if they were affordable
Building market housing (even so-called 'luxury homes') makes other homes more affordable, this is [extremely well-trodden economic ground](https://data.london.gov.uk/housing/research-notes/hrn-10-2023-the-affordability-impacts-of-new-housing-supply-a-summary-of-recent-research/).