New Housing Estates -

Perhaps the modern way of shortening the word “building”says it all....?

There are over a quarter of a million empty homes in England. Building on green belt land should be shelved until all empty properties are filled and brownfield sites are developed. During lockdown people have realised the benefit of being able to visit green belt land and it should be preserved for as long as possible.

The problem is also aggravated by the fact that there are 250+thousand second homes in England.

Or is it a question of building houses that the younger generation want to buy ....I wonder if today' s 20- 30year olds want big gardens which have to be maintained ...big rooms which have to be decorated, furnished, cleaned etc etc. Or do this generation want to keep the bills down minimum maintenance, enjoy all oftheir free time doing what they enjoy ? And demographic studies, which the builders base their projects on, show a great number of 1 or 2 person households ....yes, they might want a spare guest room, but that' s about it.

I agree that everything’s squashed in so that more money can be made by the builders. Whether it be building bigger houses too close together or putting more smaller ones in, it all benefits the builders. Sometimes I wonder how they get planning permission. We bought our detached house 30 years ago and they should have put some smaller houses in the mix but they wouldn’t have sold at the same exorbitant prices. And don’t get me started on parking. In our cul de sac each house has 2 or 3 cars with plenty of others visiting. There is a parking bay to take 4 cars for at least 6 houses. As the driveways parking is limited, they use the parking bay which doesn’t then leave room for visitors. We are lucky in that our driveway is holding a motorhome and a car and we still have space for one visitor's car. Next door have an integral garage with room for one car outside their garage, so they park their 2nd car in the turning point, as do neighbours across in the other turning point. Sorry for going on but it makes me so angry. Builders and Councils grrr ? oh, and selfish people! ?

These houses may seem small to many of you but a lot of my northern relatives grew up and then raised families in tiny back-to-back terraces with no bathroom and only an outside loo in the yard! They'd have LOVED to have the kind of houses the OP is describing!

In the late seventies my husbands job packed up so we applied for building permission for the our land adjoining our bungalow . Refused because it was in an area of outstanding natural beauty. So we had to move to a cheaper area. Now our old house has been demolished and six houses built. So much for natural beauty.
In the next village to me they are building 200 new houses. Not affordable. Plus there are no shops, post office etc. No public transport. Very small school No work less than twelve miles away. Means at least 400 more cars.

Given how overcrowded we are already property will suffer. For some time any new estate has included blocks of flats, terraced rows some with no front garden and the semi and detached properties all as standard. The flats and houses are all a lot smaller than say what was built in the 50s. Though, the first house I bought was a 30s terrace, had 3 bedrooms, lovely front and big back garden but the rooms were tiny. So today's standards seem to be replicating the bygone days of small, densely situated property development all to deal with the demand.Britain is small in landmass and a lot of it is unsuitable for housing in comparison to other European countries but our population is comparatively high.

I dont see any of thesehouses being around in 150 years thrown up and poorly constructed.Stud walls, wooden frames.No rather have a proper brick built house with big rooms ,garden and off road parking.

When my sister in law recently looked round a show home at a development near her she commented on the lack of storage space and was told "Oh nowadays people don't need a lot of storage - they rent storage spaces elsewhere"
Yeah, right. A blatant admission that you've built a product not fit for purpose.

Oh yes I remember 'little boxes', seen too many housing estates that apples to.

At most , about 10% of available land is built on in UK.nowhere else in the world are people dictated to as to what they can build and where and the listing system!?!? Bonkers! A structure may be g11 listed yet no available financial assistance is available to maintain it in the manner dictated to by its local authority.same with G1 listings. Thy would be happy seeing structures collapse rather than help to maintain it! Green belt was non existent before 1955 either. A way for the rich to stop the great unwashed getting too close. Nought to do with preserving our green and pleasant lands! Just see how some monstrous industrial sites have been plonked in rural areas, why? Because money talks..... So in all we need to stop being so hoyty toyty and for goodness' sakes start building homes for People to live in! Buying is not for everyone either so let's have some good local authority housing for those who cannot afford to buy and frankly are a bit I intimidated by the thought of a mortgage commitment with possibly less than secure employment prospects? How about it Britain? Can we stop thinking greedy profit and start thinking, helping people?

For those who say there is a shortage of land, housing and all other buildings, including shops, factories, etc., occupy between 2 and 3 per cent of land in the UK. Obviously a percentage of that will not be suitable for housing but I imagine there is a fairly substantial proportion that is.

There has been a lot of criticism of builders using land on flood plains. I suspect that happens because the land is much cheaper (maybe not suitable for agriculture, etc) and there are therefore bigger profits to be made.

More like the young Un's want us to simply fade away so they can get their sweaty little mitts on our beautifully maintained homes.... we've worked decades and done without all the trappings of youf like new cars every 3years 3-4 hols/year designer rubbish (!) Botox fillers plastic boobs... Fake.......whatever else they pay through their their remodelled noses for.... And we do have lovely homes and yes, big gardens can be a nightmare but if feel like having it all gravelled and flagged , it's MY garden and I'll do what WE Like so stop blasting us for that too! You can have it when I'm gone and not before.i get sick of younger gens. saying we've got more than them and have had the best and left them wiv nuffin....boo hoo! No freebies here , all worked for and wasn't easy either!

Gabrielle56 Your two recent posts seem to contradict each other. You sound quite thoughtful and non-judgmental in the first post but positively mean in the second.

Older people are much more likely to be better housed that the younger generation. A few years ago I had a conversation with a young professional in what is known to be a well paid occupation. He said he and his partner could only dream of having a garden and thought we were so lucky. My husband was a nurse when we first married and I worked part time for most of my working life, and yet we were able to afford to buy a reasonably nice house with a garden. I doubt that would be the case now and I agree with that young man, we are lucky and it is very unfair to lump all young people together and assume they are living the high life - many are not.

A fifth of Tory party donations from property sector

Anti-corruption charity says scale of donations creates ’real risk of corruption’ as controversy over planning bill continues

Property developers were behind more than one-fifth of donations to the Conservative Party over the past decade, according to anti-corruption campaigners who say the party’s reliance on the industry risks deterring ministers from tackling the housing crisis.

Transparency International said that not only did more than 20% of individual donations come from people or organisations with interests in the property sector, but that just 10 large property-sector donations accounted for one-tenth of the party’s income between 2010 and 2020.

Joey Gardiner 12 July 2021

www.housingtoday.co.uk/news/a-fifth-of-tory-party-donations-from-property-sector/5112738.article

Older people have always been better off than younger people. Most people start life with little in assets or income and gradually acquire them as they go.

Yes, we paid less for our houses, but that was mainly because interst rates were high and we were, as a whole not as well off as most young people are now, we also had to pay more for cars, new or second hand, electrical goods, clothes, holdiays and all the rest of the things people spend money on. I can go out today and buy a coat for very little more than I paid in 1964 when I started work.

Housing is the classic supply and demand market, house prices rise or fall to a level where the number of people who can buy a house equals the number of houses for sale.

In the past one third of the population never aspired to own houses, most of these lived in council housing, now everyone, no matter what their income expects to be able to buy property.

I am also amazed how much money people have available to spend on their houses once they have bought them. it doesn't matter how big or small a house it is, each house purchase is followed by an endless train of delivery vans bringing in new appliances, furniture and heaven knows what else followed by huge piles of carboard boxes for the dustnman to remove and then the workmen, kerbs lined with white vans for months.

Whenever we have moved house, we have had barely a penny left and in the first couple of years, all we could rise to was the odd pot of paint and/or roll of wallpaper, we certainly could not afford to gut the kitchen, gut the bathroom, landscape the garden etc etc. which I see happening so much.

Callistemon

Just browsing and looking at bungalows and noticed one has a bedroom size 10' 6" x 12' 12"
Is that unusual?

??Makes it a decent size I reckon *Callistemon.

Someone must have been superstitious.

Rosmurta

Oh yes I remember 'little boxes', seen too many housing estates that apples to.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4Xs

Beechnut

Callistemon

Just browsing and looking at bungalows and noticed one has a bedroom size 10' 6" x 12' 12"
Is that unusual?

??Makes it a decent size I reckon *Callistemon.

Yes, it's quite a good size. Room to swing a black cat!

Elegran I wonder how many roads don't have a Number 13?

I sometimes wonder if they do market research to find out what people actually want and can afford.

We have some truly hideous houses locally which have been on the market for some time which are not selling. Mentioning no names or places they're near to a fairly pretty village which has an ugly school by the edge. Guess which style they copied? Not the cottages, that's for sure.

I would have thought that 3-bed semi-detached houses would be popular but no, 4-bed terraces are in abundance and the prices have had to be reduced. They're only worth what people are prepared to pay, of course - and you can only think that the developers are having a laugh.

Callistemon my road has no number 13.

I live in quite a small house advertised as a three bed (though the third is a cupboard if you know what I mean). This was a new build on a small plot which has three of us in a row. Parking is difficult and the gardens are tiny. When I looked up the planning application online the builder actually wanted four houses. I have now idea how he thought that was going to happen. It is all about money and cramming as many on a plot as you can. I presume the builder of our little row saw the loss of a property as a loss of about £250k (and all he did was knock down a bungalow).

If we had a responsible government, which was not in the pocket of the volume housebuilders, and which actually wanted to address the housing shortage, the first thing they would do is address the problem of land-banking by developers.

There are two issues here.

Firstly, the developers buy up "hope land" usually on the edge of settlements. They buy it for the price of agricultural land or slightly more because they hope that it will eventually be zoned as housing land, increasing its value by 1000%

Secondly, they sit on land which has been granted planning permission for housing. Although the planning permission usually stipulates that a "start" has to be made within three years of permission being granted, they can make a "start" by doing a small amount of work onsite - eg laying the foundations of the corner of one house, which is then inspected by the council's local building inspector and certified as a "legal start".

After that the developer covers up the foundations and stops works until such time that he thinks the development will be much more profitable.

According to "The Times" there are a million unbuilt houses with planning permission.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/permission-given-for-a-million-homes-that-havent-been-built-cwcn0r5kg

I think most people just want to get a foot on the housing ladder, rather than live with their parents until they're 52, or pay ridiculous rents.