At blooming last

[BlasterBates]

Interesting, people have on average more floor space than they did in the 1990's.

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/a...per-person.pdf

Between 1996 and 2018 floorspace per person rose from 34.8m2 to 38.1m2 in England
and from 31.4m2 to 32.6m2 in London, with very little change in the last decade

Which is not surprising since the number of dwellings in the UK has risen by 18% over the last 20 years whereas the population has risen by 10%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...gs-in-england/

he number of dwellings in England increased steadily since 2001, reaching a total of approximately 25 million dwellings as of March 31st 2021. In 2001, the first year under observation, there was a total of over 21.2 million dwellings in England, meaning that the estimated total number of dwellings increased by more than 3.6 million during the period under observation.

[NotAllThere]

Does anyone actually want a new build?

No. The apartments to the north and west of my house were demolished in 2022 and finally will be inhabited from March 2024. The noise and dust was pretty awful. I really get how the protagonist felt in "Up". We did go through the legal routes to reduce the footprint of the new apartment block and their height, but lost, since the local planning department waved the plans through. I did ask the planning inspector if he live in our town... he was embarrassed.

But - the new blocks look nice, are all for rent only, are disabled friendly and provide twice as many apartments as the previous blocks.

And apparently have increased the value of my house.

[SueEllen]

No London new build deluxe apartments are tulip even though some of them are built next to tube/train/overground stations.

You want the ones built last century before they started concrete and flat roofs particularly if you want some storage space.

[dsc]

I don't think train lines are too bad, nor motorways if done well. Lot of motorways near residentials are putting up sound barriers. Pollution i'm not sure.

A roads and the like? It's always the cheaper 'affordable' housing ones which are right next to the busy and polluting roads (the stopping and starting, brake dust etc).

It's the exit of small builders which is why every house looks the same. The big firms just use the same design all over.

A simple solution would be to reform planning permission. As it stands if a council wants to build land it must pay the land owner the post-planning permission value, which makes it economically unviable. Whereas if the council could buy the land at current value, grant itself planning permission and then building council houses it would be viable.

In most countries land near a train line / motorway is classed as b category and not meant to be used for housing, unless we are talking big, busy cities or cheap / tulip housing. Most new developments I've seen down south at least (if there is any) are always near something noisy / polluting and if not, there's absolutely **** all built around them, so you have to have a car to get to places / schools etc. No additional, new infrastructure is built to "service" these new developments, so whatever exists already just gets even more crowded. It seems that in the UK there's no thinking about what the location of a new built is, whether the area is nice and how well it would work for people that move there, it's basically "this land is available and cheap, great, lets build what we've been building all around the country for the last 20yrs even though every other country moved on with house designs".

Another issue is lack of block of flats that take much less space than houses, but if done right, are actually pretty good. Not in the UK of course, most of the ones I've seen crumble after 5yrs, are finished to a tulip standard and look like something from the 90s (London excluded perhaps, but there's other issues there).

As for self builds or buying plots of land and getting crews to build houses (what mattster mentioned) - this is also something I don't get, especially as the UK has tooooons of land. Why there isn't more companies building houses and making loads of money? I'll never understand.

[vetran]

Housing shortage drives up prices and rents. If we had as many houses per head as we had in the 80s the price of houses / flats would fall.

If we made planning permission dependant of Eco & quality standards it would add little to the price but resolve most of those issues. Remember things like insulation are controlled by building regs. Making houses modular (pre-built kitchen + bathroom) would help as well.

We will have printed houses soon.

[JustKeepSwimming]

What's worse is that they always look the same way, same house type built all over the country, same tulip look, tiny windows, tulip beige / red combo, absolutely no thought spared on how to make houses look good or modern (like elsewhere in Europe). No effort put in, as it will all sell anyway, also no effort put in in terms of outside weather resilient finishes, so it doesn't look like garbage 3 years down the line. And of course lets not forget the tulip locations, next to a train line, next to a motorway etc.

The property market in the UK never stops surprising (how tulip it is of course).

I don't think train lines are too bad, nor motorways if done well. Lot of motorways near residentials are putting up sound barriers. Pollution i'm not sure.

A roads and the like? It's always the cheaper 'affordable' housing ones which are right next to the busy and polluting roads (the stopping and starting, brake dust etc).

It's the exit of small builders which is why every house looks the same. The big firms just use the same design all over.

A simple solution would be to reform planning permission. As it stands if a council wants to build land it must pay the land owner the post-planning permission value, which makes it economically unviable. Whereas if the council could buy the land at current value, grant itself planning permission and then building council houses it would be viable.

[mattster]

What's worse is that they always look the same way, same house type built all over the country, same tulip look, tiny windows, tulip beige / red combo, absolutely no thought spared on how to make houses look good or modern (like elsewhere in Europe). No effort put in, as it will all sell anyway, also no effort put in in terms of outside weather resilient finishes, so it doesn't look like garbage 3 years down the line. And of course lets not forget the tulip locations, next to a train line, next to a motorway etc.

The property market in the UK never stops surprising (how tulip it is of course).

I'd love to see more self-build opportunities in the UK, which could both help bring down the cost for new owners and result in vastly more interesting houses. I lived in Australia for a while and a very common model there was for a company to buy a large site, put in the utilities and roads and then sell off individual building plots. People could then self-build or contract someone to build for them. Planning seemed a bit more lax as well in the sense that you didn't have to build exactly the same as everyone else and to my eye that makes a more interesting streetscape (don't worry, still plenty of crappy new build houses as well).

There was something on Channel 4 along similar lines a while back which I managed to Google: https://www.gravenhill.co.uk/move-to...ll/self-build/ C4 followed the first of the self-builders on this site and they made wildly different and interesting houses and saved a lot of money in the process.

Personally I'd like to self-build an eco (or near eco) house for retirement if I could only find/afford the plot (outside of new sites the likeliest new self building in my part of the country is to buy and knock down which gets rather expensive..)

[JustKeepSwimming]

Its better than sleeping on a park bench!

We are millions of houses short.

We are but let's not pretend homelessness in this country means rough sleeping. It doesn't. I think the average rough sleepers spends a night on the streets before outreach workers make contact and provide support, like emergency shelter. Some refuse support for various reasons, normally drug addiction.

HomelesHomelessness country is effectively overcrowding and sofa serving. 25+ year olds living with their parents because they can't afford to move out, or couples flat sharing etc.

Building high density housing in town centres would go a long way (ie high rises). 20 somethings are perfectly happy with a one bed flat until they are ready to start a family.

Thinking of my town. They could easily compulsory purchase 150 houses around the train station, these are old crappy 80s council slums. Replace tbem with a few 1000 flats. 4 large employment centres, including London are on that line.

Instead they are redeveloping a bit of land near to put in predominately office spaces.

[vetran]

Its better than sleeping on a park bench!

We are millions of houses short.

[dsc]

Does anyone actually want a new build? Even estates with prices around £300k+ houses are awful. Every garden overlooked by half dozen properties at best. Everything feels cramped, cars parked on every inch of pavements.

What's worse is that they always look the same way, same house type built all over the country, same tulip look, tiny windows, tulip beige / red combo, absolutely no thought spared on how to make houses look good or modern (like elsewhere in Europe). No effort put in, as it will all sell anyway, also no effort put in in terms of outside weather resilient finishes, so it doesn't look like garbage 3 years down the line. And of course lets not forget the tulip locations, next to a train line, next to a motorway etc.

The property market in the UK never stops surprising (how tulip it is of course).

[JustKeepSwimming]

Does anyone actually want a new build? Even estates with prices around £300k+ houses are awful. Every garden overlooked by half dozen properties at best. Everything feels cramped, cars parked on every inch of pavements.

[vetran]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-election.html

Councils are warned they WON'T be able to block drive to build 300,000 homes a year as Michael Gove vows crackdown on 'Nimbys' - as poll shows less than one in 10 renters plan to vote for the Tories at the general election