Available land for starter homes.

My son doesnt have a child.
Good quality blacks of flats can be fine for people without children. No problem at all.

I wouldn't want to keep my eye on a three year old, playing in a play area if my flat was on the 20th floor. As much as a parent may want to always be able to take a child outside and stay with them while they play, we know that is not always possible. A child is safer left momentarily unsupervised in a garden or back yard then supervised from a distance. Nowadays many high rise toddlers get little or no time outside for just that reason.

In other countries people do live successfully in high rise flats, but the success is based partly on the cultural norms of that Society, part of which is a more 'robust' attitude to the safety of the child. Many societies accept, as was common in Britain when I was a child, that tragedy though it be, accidents happen and children will drown, fall out of trees and get killed, run under cars etc etc. We now find this unacceptable and a family that allows a child outside below a societally approved age or lets them do anything that society does not approve of is pilloried. Look at the way Madeleine McCann's family have been attacked for visiting a restaurant within sight of their holiday flat and where they physically checked on the children at regular intervals instead of staying in and being in the next room to the children all evening.

In this country by far the majority of high rise residents are social housing residents. A microscopically small proportion of middle income families live in high rise blocks. In countries like Hong Kong families across the social spectrum all live in similar blocks of flats. This makes a difference

I think that it can be fine for single people. My son currently lives on the 20th floor of one in a nice city.
As ja says, they can have lots of facilities.

In many countries, most people live in high rise blocks and it is simply accepted.
We lived in one in Hongkong - and before anyone assumes it was a swanky place for expatriates, it wasn't. Most of the other occupants were Chinese.
There were about seven blocks if flats in the complex, each flat had its own balcony, but there were communal gardens and a children's playground and tennis courts & pool, so it was very pleasant.
The communal facilities meant that it was easy to get to know people and for the children to make friends perhaps more easily than say on an estate of houses in Britain.
Another advantage of living in a flat is that you aren't constantly running up and downstairs for things and it's easy to keep an eye on small children.
So I don't agree Rosesarered that it's 'no way for people to live'.

High rise living has been unpopular in this country because of poor design and construction in the sixties, but it does not have to be like that.
Byker Wall which was built in Newcastle in the 70s is listed and has won many awards for Architecture and Design.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byker_Wall

I am not sure that would solve the problem, the value of land is affected by the number of properties that can be built on them. One of the many reasons land in urban area is so much more expensive than land on the periphery of urban areas.

High density does seem to be the obvious result of building high, but in fact the amount of open space needed to be left around high rise blocks has meant that when in recent years some high rise blocks have been demolished and replaced with low rise properties, density has actually increased.

The adverse social effects of high rise building are well documented and it is not coincidental that many of the inner city council estates with the worst social problems are those where most of the housing is high rise.

I do hope not Soon, not high rise ones anyway, it's no way for people to live.

Time for houses to go upwards again?
I dont like to see blocks of flats, but perhaps needs must?

The problem is that the major part (60% or more in the south east) of the cost of a house is the cost of the land. Increasing the number of houses being built means more competition between builders for available building land. That pushes up the cost of each building plot so that although more houses are built they cannot be sold any more cheaply because of the cost of the land is so high. This keeps the price of all houses high.

The only way for house prices to fall long term is for supply of houses to outstrip demand. This would mean building several million houses, mostly in the south east over a very short time span, (2 - 3 years) but with an ever growing population even if you did that you would need to build even more houses to cater for all the new households created in the meanwhile.

The supermarkets will probably sell the land to developers. But the housing built will be anything but affordable. This has happened with land a Tesco near us sat on for a long time. They built swanky flats.

Anything is possible with governments,, but they have their own agendas and motives dont they?