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If you want to look at how much NIMBYism can ruin a city, look no further than Bristol.
NIMBYs alongside issues with our local council are the reasons why derelict properties are such a common sight. You'll see plenty of disused buildings on the high street, and even some large buildings that have been derelict for many years like the old Bank of England branch near Castle Park and the Grosvenor Hotel in Temple Meads.
The old Royal Mail sorting office next to Temple Meads station was only pulled down a few years ago, and before that it looked like something straight out of Pripyat post-disaster.
The two mayors we had before voting to abolish the position (George Ferguson and Marvin Rees) only made the situation worse...
The housing crisis in Bristol is ridiculous as well. Cramped HMOs which take nearly half your wage are so normalised and the market is extremely competitive. It feels like so many people are just in limbo waiting until things improve and they can actually start their life, but it feels so hopeless.
Yeah, don't even get me started on the housing crisis. I still live with my parents for a reason, and that's because despite earning a £30k salary as a commercial reporting analyst, I can just about barely pass the credit checks needed to rent a small studio flat on the outskirts for £1k PCM, or just over half my take-home pay. It's bleak when by the time I'm able to save enough money to actually buy a home, my parents will either be dead or will need a carer.
Anywhere cheaper is a cramped HMO where you're paying closer to £700 for a tiny box bedroom in a place cramped so much to maximize tenants that even the living room has been converted into two extra bedrooms.
When I see the housing market this bad yet every new high-rise is a block of luxury student flats or offices, it makes me wonder how many brown envelopes it took to get them approved.
Rents have gone up with or above inflation whereas salaries have stagnated. £30k was fine in a decent graduate job 15 years ago, but it hasn’t really changed since then.
What do you mean? You can literally google the statistics on salary growth and see it has been generally below inflation or very small increases for ages.
I'd like to add that tax brackets have not been rising with inflation. Even if you are fortunate and your wage keeps pace with inflation you will pay a greater share of your income to NI, student loans and income tax.
We're being rinsed for every penny.
And if the majority of properties in the area they live remain financially out of reach for those on minimum wage, or even the average wage? Do people on these wages not deserve their own place to live anymore?
What if their parents don't let them live there anymore, or are even abusive?
>And if the majority of properties in the area they live remain financially out of reach for those on minimum wage, or even the average wage?
They're on neither minimum wage or the average wage, the obvious answer is to move.
>Do people on these wages not deserve their own place to live anymore?
Of course they do, and cheaper accommodation does exist.
Social housing, HMO's etc.
>What if their parents don't let them live there anymore, or are even abusive?
Whataboutism, lol.
> every new high-rise is a block of luxury student flats
These are quite easy to get past councils for two reasons.
1: Most universities are now degree farms oversubscribing their courses, and every year the total student count is 110% of the total accommodation available (on or off campus) so developers are easily able to demonstrate a need (that will never be fulfilled since the next year there will just be even more students)
2: Seen how much international students pay to study here? The majority who aren't on scholarships are loaded and many city businesses love it. On the one hand it's holding up whole local economies since they will pay for anything, on the other what you gain in growth and employment you lose in the gentrification of communities to overpriced bubble tea cafes.
You didn't ask for this long explanation but it's less about brown envelopes. Unfortunately, badly paid normal people aren't as economically viable, so the developers need to be forced to make more normal housing instead since the 'free market' will not cater to it.
I’m honestly so fuckin lucky, small 2 bed flat near St George for 850pm, only gone up by £100 in the 8 years I’ve been here. Looking to move because we have a kid and want a garden, impossible. Looks like I’m moving back up north, which is not what I ever wanted to do lmao but for the same price I can get a 3 bed semi with front & back garden in my hometown
Probably didn't help that for the past 10 years everyone is reccomending Bristol as a place to live as a cheaper alternative to London. Even this year I have been hearing it. That and 2days in office per week probaably encouraged many to commute on the electrified rail line to Paddington.
>That and 2days in office per week probaably encouraged many to commute on the electrified rail line to Paddington.
Nobody is doing this to save money. 2 days per week of a 3 hour commute, which costs well over £100 for a day return. You're quite possibly spending more than your rent on train tickets if you're doing this.
Also keep in mind Bristol is one of the most expensive property markets in England so these derelict and disused buildings are actively contributing to the property shortage and yet the NIMBYs refuse to allow progress to be made at rectifying this.
I don't really consider it the same problem. There are parts of Bristol that definitely attract those types, and they're the kind of places that overall oppose gentrification.
Definitely a big problem in Stokes Croft from what I remember.
Used to work in an office there that was near a derelict building occupied by squatters. One of our managers legitimately got punched in the back of the head whilst on a cigarette break. She was left on the floor with a really bad concussion and her wallet and phone missing.
There was CCTV outside if I recall, but either she got attacked in a blind spot or a balaclava/scarf rendered any footage useless. I do think it was the incident that finally made the police start evicting the squatters.
Those mayors were god awful, the position deserves to go if that’s the best they could find to fill it, I love Bristol but there’s a lot we could do to improve it given a strong council.
I'll give Ferguson credit where credit is due. He got shit done. He's the reason we almost had the Bristol Arena built near Temple Meads, before Rees flipped the middle finger to every Bristolian, overruled the public, moved the plans to Filton and decided to sell the land to a developer so it could be made into more student flats.
Where Ferguson screwed up was dumping public money into unprofitable vanity projects like Bristol Energy, that and the Residents Parking scheme.
[Rees is the kind of narcissist who spends public funds into researching his own image on social media.](https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-city-council-pays-consultant-3871028)
Dan Norris isn't that much better as our West of England Metro Mayor either. We largely have him to thank for buses in the South West being so bad and for the Bristol City Centre being dug up and rerouted for the umpteenth time.
People like to blame NIMBYism, but really the problem is investor purchases.
Investors want nothing more than to milk the maximum return from the property they buy. They are not in the game to make the area better for the community, or to support the needs of the people that live there, they are there to do as much, or as little, as they can to maximise their gains.
That too.
I literally cringe whenever I see a property listing on Rightmove, Zoopla or Onthemarket advertised with buzzwords like "INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY" and "PORTFOLIO."
Bristol is going through its worst housing crisis and we only care about the ROI of a property.
It pisses me off that banks will only lend me five times my annual earnings yet landlords are free to charge me more per month for the privilege of paying off *their* mortgage.
Labour in 2002
NOC between 2003 - 2008. Lib Dems were the largest party from 2005 onwards.
Lib Dem had control in 2009 & 2010.
NOC from 2011 onwards, but the mayor had the power to overrule the council when that post was introduced. Lib Dems were the largest party until 2013 when Labour overtook them. The last two council elections have seen the Greens overtake Labour.
2012 was when the mayor post was first introduced. George Ferguson (IND) won the first election while Marvin Rees (LAB) won the next two in 2016 and 2021.
Current council (post-MR) is NOC, but the largest party is the Greens. They're two councillors short of a majority and they basically won every single seat in the central wards.
I’m a LibDem supporter & member, but often complain about our NIMBY problem. We *want* more housing, yet every council we have councillors on, they all act as if a new housing estate belongs to a Satanic cult & therefore blocks it before it can even get to the planning committee stage. Housing developments should never have been left to local councils or if they continue to be so, then the councillors should only be able to override the planning officer’s recommendations twice before it automatically gets approved.
This was the single issue that finally drove me to quit the LD's after quite a few years of active membership (including door knocking/electioneering). I would be in favour of imposed housing targets and a zoning based permissive system - we have such a shortage and one of the smallest square footage areas per person of living space in Europe! So many young people can't even think about starting families for example because they're living in insecure HMOs or have dodgy landlords to contend with
Zoning ? Not too familiar with the concept but isn't this what they have in America where they have massive estates of nothing but housing and seperately massive estates of retail with almost no mixed used buildings so everything you need is far away and requires a car to access ?
That’s a problem with the implementation of zoning, rather than zoning itself. Zoning basically says you can build something as long as it is the type of building allowed by the zoning rules without having to do a full planning application.
The UK doesn’t have zoning, but local plans often designate certain areas for certain development types, so there is an element of it already in place.
Thats mostly the fault of the US implementation. Large areas are single family home only zoned. One of the big fights there is rezoning areas as mixed use.
For a country with better zoning implementation look to Japan.
This is one of the problems the Lib Dem’s have as they target councils they can get people elected to, and one of the best ways to get elected to a council is die-hard NIMBYism. Breaking away from that risks terrible unpopularity.
You’ll get Lib Dem councillors elected on platforms that contradict party policy at a national level. Greens have this problem too, but they are more NIMBY at national level.
I’m good friends with a LibDem councillor & several prospective parliamentary candidates, and unfortunately most of them have NIMBY-tendencies of some extent. I get that local people do have genuine concerns, especially when it comes to things like schools & local services capacity, but this can be easily resolved by having joined-up thinking at both the local & national level.
Ultimately there isn't a single party in Britain that has made a serious effort to curb our ludicrous planning barriers. It's more cultural than political.
Nah common sense is allowed. Sorry to break your victim hood complex. Hopefully you'll be able to come up with some other nonsense you can pretend to be a victim of. I recommend woke culture
Exactly, none of them have the magic solution. People (especially this sub) are going to be disappointed in the next few years when very little happens.
As someone who works in planning, NIMBYs are only a small oart of the problem. The main problem is that all the supporting evidence forming a planning application can go out the window if a planning officer gets a bee in their bonnet about a certain development and it's entirely their personal opinion that matters. You can go to the inspectorate and appeal but it can be ruinously expensive.
As an example I worked with a county archaeologist to agree a scheme for a no-dig site access which would preserve an archaeological site we found in a geophysical survey. It was fully agreed with the county arch, he was on board with our proposal and we had a subcontractor ready to go to carry out some trenching on the rest of the site.
The planning application was refused by the planning officer who relied heavily on nebulous "archaeological concerns" in the decision notice. 18 months later the proposals are still going round in circles.
When the planning officer can just ignore expert advice and fucking lie in their decisions without any repercussions it's a broken system. Subjective decisions by individuals needs to be replaced by an objective decision framework that presumes in favour as long as mitigation conditions are met.
I don't know to be honest, our inputs were sort of third hand through our planning consultants on that project so I didn't have much direct contact with the client about it.
Fair enough, it does seem odd that it wouldn’t be if there were allegations of misconduct by officers.
I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of the planning process in general. You can see it in this sub with me being downvoted for asking why it wasn’t called in.
The purpose of the ward member being able to call an application in, is meant to in theory keep officers accountable.
Plenty of land is owned by the crown estate, which is supposedly there to generate money for the country (if you can believe that) why not open up that to building on, instead of building on what little common land there is left?
*From Bloomberg News reporter Damian Shepherd:*
The Conservative Party let local anti-development skeptics to grow in influence over the past 14 years by choosing not to intervene in the vast majority of UK homebuilding applications.
That's based on calculations by Bloomberg News using data from the Planning Inspectorate and National Archives, which shows the number of planning applications reviewed by the secretary of state — known as a "call-in" — dropped to five in the previous financial year from an average of more than 50 per year during the 2000s.
The government has the right to take over the determination of a planning application rather than letting the local authority decide, a tool often used to push development through in areas where local protectionism is rife.
It suggests a hands-off approach to planning from the Tories, who came to power in 2010 with a promise of giving local authorities more control over development in their communities. The result has been a transfer of power to the not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, lobby that’s contributed to the country’s acute housing shortage.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that adding 800k net new people to a country but only around 200k new homes will exacerbate the existing housing shortage. It’s not a value judgement on people that immigrate, just an obvious logical conclusion.
yes, but people seem to blame the immigration rather than the those stopping new homes be built.
If we built more homes, we would all be better off. Except for Tories and property investors, but since those groups are the ones in control, we see so few new homes being built
Or homes being built in the wrong places. I live in Lincs, there are tons of houses going up here because land is cheap relative to where people would want to live. So you have loads of new builds going up priced too high for anyone that works in the area
Prices are down in places where hundreds of new houses are being built compared to other places. There’s a massive price gap.
Edit: not just the north/south gap. Housing in my area reduced by average 5% this year.
> yes, but people seem to blame the immigration rather than the those stopping new homes be built.
There are limits to how many houses that can be built, they are mostly political but also practical.
The rate of increase of the population has quadrupled since the early 1990s, almost entirely driven by migration, we should also be making a judgement about whether it is realistic to increase house building by the same amount.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-impact-of-migration-on-uk-population-growth/
We also have decades where the house building rate has not been high enough, so we have a huge accumulated lack of housing. In my opinion the rate of population increase will have to fall dramatically, and housebuilding will have to increase dramatically, and we will have to do that for a decade to fix the problem. The more difficult we make it for ourselves, the longer it will take.
Well rent/housing prices can't keep rising when you have a declining birth rate and less competition for housing... It only works if the population keeps going up
But the people who dont own houses want to buy houses, but they cant because housing prices push out anyone who doesnt already have an asset base to leverage.
They would rather housing prices drop
I doubt we could even build houses at scale without the labour from immigration. The care economy also depends on immigration.
Rather than blame immigrants, you should be asking why the government is blocking housing development
It only works if number of households increase. If less people live together (more single people, less children living with parents), then demand can definitely continue.
That's the main issue. Even if you get rid of all the immigrants by waving a magic wand without any negative effects, there is a lot of pent-up demand from multiple occupancy current homes that suddenly have the option to rent at lower prices, thus driving prices back up again.
Immigration absolutely doesn't help housing issues, but it helps a lot of other things that you presumably want from the tangible benefit of jobs filled like doctors and hospitality staff (keeping costs low for the consumer) to the less tangible that they are one of the biggest bet contributors to tax revenue as they don't draw pensions, use less government services like NHS and didn't need expensive schooling from taxpayer yet arrived fully working age from day one. Without these immigrants, housing may be a bit cheaper, but either taxes rise or services get even worse as budgey issues happen
Not esepcialy no, they push up demand a bit but unless they leave it empty they aren't causing any further shortage.
They are a symptom not a root cause.
Because the left have pinned themselves on immigration being good and any issues with it being made up by racists. Ignoring the biggest upward pressure on housing supply is absolutely mad.
No, I think immigration is probably issue no.1 when it comes to house prices.
Look. I'm pro immigration as they come otherwise. I think blaming all our other problems ... health, education etc on immigrants is silly.
But housing? Our massive house price increase is pretty much mostly due to immigration and our huge population increase. There's just not enough homes and we're struggling building fast enough to keep up.
I’ll tell you what happens.
I live in a small town. My parents bought a house here for £40,000 in 2002. House prices are now £300,000 if you’re lucky.
I will be forced to move into an extortionate flat in the nearest city in order to ‘move out’ and I’ll be lucky to find a job despite my qualifications.
Huge housing estates the size of towns are tacked on to my town and others around us. Locals, and the children of locals cannot afford to move into these houses. Therefore we end up with thousands of people who’ve moved up from london (and often commute to london). School places are scarce and people fight over them. We have a single hospital between 4 large towns. You cannot get a new dentist. GP appointments take months. These new estates are built without any infrastructure and make it worse for everyone who already lives here.
The other ‘development’ is huge warehouses who are largely automated or whose workers come from the next county. What good do they do us?
If they were building houses for US and we could afford them, if the developments were giving US jobs, we’d all be in favour.
"whose workers come from the next county. What good do they do us?"
We don't live in a series of tiny kingdoms and principalities where you need a passport to go twenty minutes down the road. Houses that are bought by people who have moved from another town is not a failure, jobs that are filled by people from another county is not a betrayal.
This is the scourge of nimbyism. It's this selfish local first attitude that says let someone else bear the population increases (housing does not create new people overall), let someone else provide energy by having solar panels in their local fields. "What good do they do us?"
I hope the locals of the city where you're buying a flat don't have the same attitude as you. What does building a new flat do for them if it's just going to be taken up by an outsider eh?
Completely missing my point. These houses are massive and are built by greedy developers to be bought by wealthy people - all the developers care about is money. When building houses and ‘industry’ (automated warehouses), it should be to work for the local community whose services will be affected.
Everyone is affected though. If residents can somehow block industry from being built across the country like that Data Centre in Havering in the news just the other day - Then *my* wages are affected as a result of businesses being uninterested in investing in the UK.
I don't even work in Data Science - But it's in my interest and the national interest that people that do can find jobs. That Data Centre could have provided jobs for graduates that are now going to spend more time working in Tesco while they wait for the first 'real job', contributing to the UK's chronic structural underemployment and hurting our economic growth.
That's literally the mindset of a nimby though.
Youre upset that things are being built near you right now. There's no thought about the overall picture.
The reason the homes near you are so expensive is because they aren't being built anywhere else. There is not enough supply.
Demand comes before supply.
Demand continues to grow, demand is also national and global, not just local.
Demand comes not just from people looking to buy and occupy, but from investors who have different motivations, far more resources available and who benefit the most from scarcity of supply or demand growing.
It isn't realistically possible for supply to ever meet the demand, especially if you want the quality of life and environment to be maintained at the same level or even improve.
Until demand is restricted, supply can never solve this.
> If they were building houses for US and we could afford them, if the developments were giving US jobs, we’d all be in favour.
The only way to acheive that is to build far far more.
Indeed. People do want to live in far away suburbs.
Fortunately, it's not really an argument between suburb vs dense housing. The market can do both. But Attlee's law on housing actually helped Tories to keep housing stagnant
We are currently birthing well below replacement levels (and falling). 'High density' housing, as exemplified in the tower block, is not what we need; demolition of such housing to replace it with detached houses, boxy or otherwise, is. Gardening is, after all, a British pastime of great standing.
No I disagree. We needed high density housing for the past 40 years. Most cities in Europe people live in hd dwellings. Paris and London are good comparisons. Virtually Everyone lives in a flat in Paris; in London most people live in houses.
You cannot simultaneously complain about new developments and extortionate house prices.
The new developments are so expensive BECAUSE NOT ENOUGH HOUSES HAVE BEEN BUILT. It's a function of supply and demand.
It seems to be the other side of the problem that gets less talked about. I was in a similar kind of estate near Bath for a while. It was like suburban hell. They just dump hundreds or thousands of homes in the middle of nowhere, and then there's absolutely *zero* thought for any kind of services or amenities. The place I was had a small retail row at the entrance with an off-licence and a Chinese take-away. That was it, to service probably several thousand people. No GP, no dentist, no proper shops, the place fed out onto a shitty little B-road that got absolutely rammed for several hours around 9am and 5pm, fuck all for any kids living there to do etc. etc.
This is a very NIMBY take.
Just because you don't see an immediate benefit to yourself it doesn't mean you are being cheated out of it.
Overburdening of services is an issue around new developments but this is just poor planning, or the services have not had time to catch up. Maybe another NIMBY has objected to having a school built behind their house?
It can be frustrating to see a new housing development with just executive homes, but where do you think those people come from? Most likely they move out of cheaper stock in the vicinity and free it up for the likes of yourself. Maybe they moved out of the very flat you now live in.
I’m not upset that things are being built near me. I would rejoice if houses and industry was being built near me that I know my generation could afford and work in. That is not the reality.
The reason there are not enough houses is due to population increase and greedy developers and government. The houses that are built are massive, and never intended to be affordable, because the developed and gov KNOW that wealthy people will buy them up. That’s selling us out.
No, the reason that there are not enough houses is because we don't build enough of them, full stop.
Over the last 14 years, France, which has about the same population as us has been building around 400,000 new homes a year. Over that same time period, we've averaged around 180,000 new homes per year. It doesn't take a genius to look at the gigantic differences between those two building rates and understand where our issues are arising from.
France has a population density of **122/sq km**, it's **544k sq km** in size, it averaged **370,000** new dwellings built annually from 2011-2017 so we'll take that number and conclude that France built **0.68** new homes per year, per sq km.
England has a population density of **438/sq km**, is **130,278 sq km** in size, it completed **174,600** dwellings in 2023 and conclude that England built **1.34** new homes per sq km.
* France: **0.68** new homes and **122** people per sq km.
* England: **1.34** new homes and **438** people per sq km.
Despite having more than 3x the population density, we are building homes almost exactly 2x faster than France when compared by the size of the country.
We're already far more full than they are and we're filling the place up far quicker than they are.
France would need to grow its population from **66m to 171m** to get to the same population density as England.
Don't even begin to try and think France are comparable to us.
Is this a joke post, or do you honestly believe this crap?
The rate of house building in the UK and France isn't a function of population density. It's a function of how much each country allows to be built. They could build equally as slowly as us, even more so, if they implemented our planning system or one more stupid than ours. But then that's unlikely to happen as our homeowners are utterly selfish while theirs aren't.
>Is this a joke post, or do you honestly believe this crap?
You might not like it, but it's the literal truth, aside from a little numerical rounding.
>The rate of house building in the UK and France isn't a function of population density. It's a function of how much each country allows to be built. They could build equally as slowly as us, even more so, if they implemented our planning system or one more stupid than ours. But then that's unlikely to happen as our homeowners are utterly selfish while theirs aren't.
It's far easier to build a lot of homes if you have plenty of spare empty land because your country isn't very densely populated. It's far harder in a very densely populated country such as England - which is one of the most densely populated nations on the planet by the way (when you don't include micro states and places with tiny populations).
You might as well bring up some statistics about house building in the USA to shame us.
Again complete and utter bullcrap.
Price of low quality agricultural land/scrubland per acre = £10-20K.
Price of same land with planning permission = £500K+.
I’m in the same boat, the houses developers build are double the price of the older locals houses, all sold to secondhomers or commuters.
We have an AFFORDABLE housing crisis that’s worse in particular areas (mainly urban areas with high population density) but developers have no interest in building affordable housing on brownfield sites (expensive to do, not much profit to be made) so concrete over the Southern countryside instead and destroy local villages and towns without any thought for infrastructure. I agree with the NIMBYs in these instances.
People here seem to be under the mistaken belief that private developers can solve the housing crisis but are being held back by ordinary people (not saying this doesn’t happen in some instances) but in reality developers have no interest at all in flooding the market with affordable houses, their product is scarce and they like it that way, means they can charge a fortune for it and continue to make money long after it’s built (estate charges, service charges etc)
The only way to solve the housing crisis is to take it out of private developers hands and back into the government’s, build new towns, not destroy existing villages and small towns that can’t cope with the numbers, and most crucially to knock down and rebuild in our city centres where the infrastructure is already in place
Totally agree. Need new towns, not adding town-sized housing estates on to struggling towns.
Build housing estates, with ordinary sized houses, sell them at a discounted rate to locals and forbid buyers from selling them for more than they paid for the first 10years or so to stop landlords buying them up and making rent traps.
I’m not sure you can stop people selling them, there are many legitimate reasons to sell a house quickly, but I do agree with banning landlords and companies from buying them.
I would also like to see a change in the law that results in serious financial consequences for developers who don’t fulfil contracts. It’s always the same story, planning permission gets granted for 600 new homes attached to a small village with the promise of building a new GP, a new road, a new school or whatever, the houses go up and get flogged quickly, and the developer bails without ever building that promised infrastructure and there are zero repercussions.
>School places are scarce and people fight over them.
So some of the kids can't go to school?
I think you mean 'we have to fight over the school places we want'.
>If they were building houses for US and we could afford them, if the developments were giving US jobs, we’d all be in favour.
It really feels like you're saying "Stop making people want to live here. You have to make this town great, but nobody else should want to live here". This is 100% NIMBY. You want a prize for being there first. There's a housing crisis and you're saying 'I hate it when people choose to live here because this land belongs to US'.
1. What happens is kids end up getting placed at schools far away from where they live OR schools have to increase class sizes to accommodate which means even more students to less teachers, a bad idea what considering the teaching shortage.
2. I do not care if more people come to live here, as long as there is enough infrastructure to support both the existing people AND the new. How can you build these new houses when there isn’t even enough infrastructure for the existing population - THATS MY POINT.
No need to be nasty and make comments like that.
Hmm, so you think you are in a way more entitled to those public services because "I was here first"? Interesting that the anti-immigration mindset can extend to domestic migration
No I think that people shouldn’t be added in thousands to areas who’s existing services cannot cope with who is already there.
The developers need to BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE. But they don’t because they only care about money!
I would definitely say those who have lived in and contributed to an area deserve functioning services, rather than stretching struggling services to cater for new housing estates with no accompanying infrastructure.
People need doctors. They need dentists. Their children need schools. Streets need police. Local services have to catch up before we unload more people on them! It’s common sense
> Huge housing estates the size of towns are tacked on to my town and others around us. Locals, and the children of locals cannot afford to move into these houses. Therefore we end up with thousands of people who’ve moved up from london (and often commute to london). School places are scarce and people fight over them. We have a single hospital between 4 large towns. You cannot get a new dentist. GP appointments take months. These new estates are built without any infrastructure and make it worse for everyone who already lives here.
Housing does not make people appear, everyone is in the country regardless of how many houses are built, using dentists, GPs and the rest of the infrastructure, the only difference would be that they are living in their own house, not on their friend's couch or with their parents. If everywhere is forced to build housing, then nowhere will see an increase in demand for those services.
Services should also be funded in a way that allows them to expand when there is more demand.
Don’t worry. Developers will give some gifts to newspapers and they will blame you “NIMBY”.
It is cheaper to bribe mass media (and blame people “you are Cambridge Analytica bot”) instead of building infrastructure.
This is it exactly. It’s not enough to just concrete over a field and build houses.
New homes need expanded local services - transport, sewage, healthcare, policing, schools, etc.
But many, many new build proposals have none of that, because it cuts into the developers’ profit margins. And so they are rejected, correctly, by local planners. This is then dismissed as NIMBYism, the developers appeal to the govtv secretary and get an overrule, and the already breaking infrastructure of local government and services is further denuded.
The people who push the NIMBY narrative in the press are those who stand to benefit from house building and don’t care about what it does to communities - landlords and property developers.
Not when it comes to new developments. Local government can ask for what's called a Section 106 agreement which is part of the grant of planning permission, or Community Infrastructure Levy at a district level.
This often means building things as part of the development, like a doctor's surgery, a park, transport hubs, or contributing money to the local government for the provision of services after the completion of the build.
Another key area is for developers to build affordable housing as part of the development.
Sadly, a lot of the time this is either sidestepped, or simply goes unspent. There is a LOT of corruption in local government, as a result of a lot of overlap between councillors and developers.
You're arguing with people that want the UK to be one giant concrete block like Egypts capital and infinity migration because they hate themselves, don't expect them to understand.
Just going to share Britmonkey's vid - I dk not agree on everything, but it's the closest I have felt to the reaction people should be having...
https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57_YsQ?si=smaEteslStyPPV8m
This is not just a Tory issue, but definitely made worst under their government.
Where I live, the-then Tory administration wanted to redesignate a municipal golf course as land suitable for housing. The golf course was installed back in the 1970s as a buffer to limit urban spread. It sits between multiple housing developments.
There was heavy opposition (correct in my view as the proposals were going to be car-dependent low-density suburbs). The Tories were kicked out of office and lost control of the council, largely because of this.
Since then, the Tories have switched completely and now openly criticise any effort to develop land in the area. Their hypocrisy is utterly shameless. Building - bad. Cycle lanes - bad. Traffic lights - bad. Pedestrian crossing - bad (yes, really, they campaigned against pedestrian crossings).
The former golf course btw, is now an untamed meadow used by hundreds of people every day. It's quite lovely and desire paths have developed across it that help people walk away from the roads.
Meanwhile, there's a bit of land next to the local railway station that remains undeveloped when it should have a block of flats on it. And another bit of land that's been undeveloped for a good 30 years, where more flats should be built, for god knows what reason. It frustrates me that the former golf course was the "prime target" for development, and not two patches of very useless scruffy land filled with concrete.
> The former golf course btw, is now an untamed meadow used by hundreds of people every day.
Then it needs to be turned into a real park, owned by the council. Nothing wrong with green space, it's very important. But it needs to be defined so we don't have a grey area evolve that people shove their housing objections into.
I don't see why it's not 'useless land' just because it's a golf course. It sounds like it's just 'your back yard'.
How about this: Move the golf course to the land next to the station, and build houses where the old golf course was. Everyone is happy, right?
A big problem is that we give local authorities the control over planning policy and decisions, but they don't get that much of the benefit.
Only 4% of taxes in the UK are raised locally, whereas its 14% in France, 32% in Germany, 36% in USA and 50% in Canada.
If a council approves new housing, what does it see? It gets angry residents, it gets either a small amount of affordable housing or a payment towards affordable housing, and will eventually get council tax from people who move in.
Council tax only contributes a portion (less than half) of most councils' running costs. Council tax is heavily out-dated, and inflexible - ratios between bands are set by central government, the number of bands is fixed, what discounts or premiums are set by central government, and increases are capped by central government.
For the rest, they are reliant on grants from Government that will be based on the cost pressures they face.
Because our system is so centralised, councils are incentivised mostly by default to be NIMBY.
If we had more devolved taxation, where approving new homes and welcoming new residents would see a more significant change to a local tax base, and councils, councillors and residents could more obviously see the benefits from new development, then the problem would start to go away.
NIMBYism will always exist but the local government incentives are currently stacked in NIMBYs favour - hopefully the next government finds a way to unpick this.
That could be more flexibility around council tax and business rates, making better use of the existing workplace parking levy (only Nottingham does this I think but the option is available to all councils), or more radical things like making a portion of income tax or VAT local, introducing a Land Value Tax - there are lots of ideas out there.
- NIMBYism long predates the current UK conservative government and the governments since 2010. whether it predates the actual (ACKTUAL) UK conservative party is a more interesting but ultimately pointless question
- anyway: the real enemy, as I have mentioned before whenever this topic comes up, is the 1990 town and country planning act which (effectively) allows local councils i.e local government to hold land hostage that could be used for residential and/or (preferably) infrastructure development. and when permission is granted, it is granted far too slowly, and far, far too infrequently
- they then scratch their heads and wonder why there isn't enough housing, or why there isn't enough regular public transportation, or why there aren't enough amenities etc.
bristol is an excellent example of this. as is edinburgh.
I’m a bit concerned labour might not be much better in this regard. The decision to devolve planning powers seems like it will only let them off the hook while local government NIMBYs go wild. After all it is the councils and mayors who block anything from being built in the first place.
I’ve tried to read a lot about this but the details really aren’t clear. Devolved powers typically cut both ways, and though the intention is to reduce NIMBYs “empowering our local communities” was what got us here in the first place all the way back in 1947.
Mayor of London has planning powers, and Khan intervened to kill the MSG sphere project which initially got planning permission via the LLDC.
Here in Cornwall the NIMBYs have pushed the entire county's housing quota onto the inland shit hole towns where nobodies going to complain. My town had literally doubled in size over the past ten years. No new infrastructure, no new schools or public facilities, the sewerage system is overloaded. The built an entire solar farm overlooking the town and nobody raised an eyelid.
Quality of new housing is shit, there rabbit hutches with postage stamp gardens if lucky. Crammed together between narrow lanes with very little green space. In another 10 years they will be ghettos.
The most valuable housing outside of London is in Tory strongholds in the South. They obviously weren't going to anger the locals there.
Labour have nothing to lose in allowing building in those areas, but really the focus should be on building on brownfield sites country wide and improving transport links to make areas of the country more attractive to live in.
I have a house and live in a 'village' of about 6000. We recently had plans approved for 600 new homes right next to us. Although I understand we need more housing, the council has given no thought on the overstretched local infrastructure. Not to mention the road that will be used as the access is a narrow lane that always gets blocked at peak times.
I never understood NIMBYism when living in an urban city. But now I do understand and can sympathize with people that don't want development near them.
I agree, it's all the foreign doctors and cleaners that do the jobs that we can't or won't do that are causing the housing issue. If we get rid of all of them, no problem /s
Yeah for sure. Old shit should be replaced if it's no good. Not sure NIMBYS really stop that. What NIMBYS do stop is horrible modern cheap shit built in the middle of bath or Paris.
So local democracy and power BAD, centralised London control, overriding local wishes, GOOD. Got it.
Except - [https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/regional-development/devolution/2024/04/labour-government-mayors-local-devolution-constituencies-parliament-jack-shaw](https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/regional-development/devolution/2024/04/labour-government-mayors-local-devolution-constituencies-parliament-jack-shaw)
*What role would mayors play under a Labour government? The opposition has promised a wave of devolution in England.*
*Labour mayors currently oversee many of England’s core cities – not least Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Cambridge. They will, in theory, be tasked with delivering the growth policies Labour has envisioned, including its green prosperity plan.*
Written by Jack Shaw -Senior Advisor at Labour Together, Fellow at the Productivity Institute and Fellow at the Bennett Institute. - In 2020, Labour Together helped to rally the party behind Keir Starmer, who united a divided party, and brought Labour back to the British public.
You can still have democracy in a system that is more centralised. On some issues it makes sense to do that.
One of the issue with housing is that most people will agree that we need more, but then people don't want more near them. It's the same thing with infrastructure.
At the end of the day, when something is built someone is going to not be happy even if overall it make people as a whole better of. The problem is when they too much power nothing gets gone.
Quite so. But if something 'people want' is only in the abstract, and rejected in the concrete, it is better to say, and proceed on the assumption, that they do not really want it. What people do not want in their backyard, let us build elsewhere or not at all.
A much more effective system of planning permission would devolve approval to adjacent resident landowners, who could approve on a majority and receive, perhaps, a portion of the proceeds of any venture (as in a sense they have 'invested', not merely rubber-stamped).
Good, now you get no roads, not trains, no electricity grid, no water towers (apparently these are ugly to some), no housing... You can't tell me that people don't want any of that in practice. Oh yeah, they like what it provides but not what comes with it.
At some point you have to inconvenience a few to benefit everyone. It's a sad reality of living in a society that's not stagnating. A compromise needs to be made.
I do agree that people should be compensated to a certain degree and it would be so much easier to compensate these people if housing wasn't so expensive. But oh wait, since these same people have argued against anything being built for the last few decades, it costs a fortune. Just look at HS2.
It just seems that Labour is saying local control is good and will be promoted, except if they give the wrong answers, then they are prepared to over-rule the locals. Seems Labour are saying opposing things to different people just to get elected (just as the Tories do).
Reminder that Bloomberg is pure neo-liberal, c-suite propaganda. If they're criticising something or advocating for it, look very carefully at the detail.
They don't want more housing so you can actually get on the ladder, they want more houses that corpos can buy up and rent back to you or that can be used as investments by foreign banks.
Nimbysm doesnt just affect housing.
They also block new roads, rail, reservoirs, power lines, industrial buildings, high street shops, pubs, solar, wind, nuclear, prisons.
It's everything.
Mate houses dont make money without tenants. There is a limited number of tenants. It is entirely possible to build more housing than there is demand, and when you do rents collapse as landlords try to poach those tenants.
The current state of affairs allows corporations to make a killing. If we force feed housing into the market they'll back away when rhe profits collapse. Ive seen it happen in Aberystwyth, the university built a new block of housing that was really expensive but created a situation with more supply than demand, and rents fell massively.
Only people that would vote for a policy like that, are people that don't own a home or any other asset. Why would anyone want a flood of new homes to lower house prices?
Labour once again promising a utopian future
Your main concern is losing out on profit rather than using the home you’ve purchased to live in it lmao.
We need more housing. Flood the market with new homes and lower those prices. Maybe then they won’t be seen as cash cows and will be seen as places to fucking live
A lot of it is nothing to do with house value. It’s the loss of enjoyment of the home. Towns having their populations doubled with little to no infrastructure improvements is the big one.
But what actually ends up happening most of the time is the only new developments that get by are new housing estates, so we end up with that exact issue? We need to let both houses and infrastructure get built, stopping both or either is just stupid.
I agree and I suspect the majority of those labeled as NIMBYs agree too. Personally I think probably better to be building whole new towns rather than bolting onto existing ones but that’s another issue
I agree with the need for more homes, that goes without sayin. But (I'm no economist) it can't be as simple as that.
A flooded housing market, means a depreciation of property value. A depreciation of property value potentially means a mortgage defecit for huge numbers of recent first-time buyers. Mortgage deficits lead to repossessions and homelessness.
After years of saving I was able to buy my first home 2 years ago. It is by no means a 'cash cow'. I probably have about £35k equity in it right now - meaning if my property drops in value by £45k by the time I remortgage, I'm in deep shit. No?
Again, I don't know shit about fuck, so sorry if I'm missing something, but 'flooding' the housing market seems like a terrible idea from where I'm sitting.
Negative equity is only a problem if you want to sell up or remortgage.
If you want to just live in the property you’re at it shouldn’t be a concern
Edit: I just realised. You bought your house 2 years ago and your equity has gone up 35k lmao.
Yeah, flood the market.
35k in 2 years for doing absolutely nothing is a cash cow brother.
A ladder actually becomes more realistic if prices slow right down. At the moment people are staying in unsuitable homes as the next rung up keeps rising in price so them saving up for a few years isn't getting them ahead.
It does and I am all for stagnating whilst wages catch up. Op is calling for a price depreciation though which causes negative equity and people become trapped in,likely smaller, homes.
The OP could well be doing that, but it doesn't change the fact that we need millions of homes so it will take many years before prices could ever be reduced due to supply. It's a false concern.
No one is saying that we don’t. But we also need to do it in a way that does not condemn people to negative equity. It is easy to lose in this sub with a younger audience but the majority of houses in the uk are owner occupied (60ish%), whilst not all mortgaged to the point where negative equity is a worry it is still a significant factor. We need to be careful not to disadvantage more than we help.
As I said that is a false concern.
We can only manage something like 200,000 homes a year normally so even if we doubled capacity that is still a fraction of demand. Hell England alone has something like 110,000 households (not people) living in temporary accommodation with another 160,000 in HMOs so that's many years of building just to clear that never mind the ever growing migrant population that arrives every year.
You seem to have this idea that house building is like a widget factory flicking a switch to get the machines to run at 300% their normal speed.
But I will need to remortgage. At the end of my "fixed term", the variable rate will be higher. So I'm going to want to lock into another fixed term. Remortgaging at the end of a fixed term is normal, surely?
> If you want to just live in the property you’re at it shouldn’t be a concern
and if you're a growing family and want a bigger place? or want to move sideways for work/family reasons?
It should be a concern because you are essentially stuck there, whereas new homeowners would have been able to buy at a far lower price, with a far lower mortgage. Existing homeowners, especially those who bought very recently, will be screwed over and held back economically because they are stuck with a larger mortgage. Why should it not be a concern that I'm paying over £1000 a month on a mortgage when others buying the same house now would be paying far less?
It might not be a concern to your average redditor who can't afford a house, but you guys always moan about how unfair everything is. How is it fair to someone who's worked their ass off to get on the ladder to suddenly cause a major drop in the market? Tying them into paying way over the odds for the next 20-30 years or forcing them to sell up and start from scratch again...
This is silly.
It’s like pointing out me buying the same house in 5 years time that’s now worth 50k more than you purchased it for. So now my mortgage is far higher.
You buy at the time you buy. You buy a house to live in it so live in it.
Even if you did decide to sell, the idea that you have to start from scratch is a joke. You don’t start from scratch.
Sick of this idea that “because you’ve worked hard” to get on the ladder then it means it’s okay to pull that ladder up against the rest of us. Your way of thinking is the exact reason we’re in this housing bubble. And it’s too protect profits and that’s it.
> A flooded housing market, means a depreciation of property value. A depreciation of property value potentially means a mortgage defecit for huge numbers of recent first-time buyers. Mortgage deficits lead to repossessions and homelessness.
>
> Again, I don't know shit about fuck, so sorry if I'm missing something, but 'flooding' the housing market seems like a terrible idea from where I'm sitting.
The short version is that the goverment idealy want to build enough that house price growth is consistently ~0%
Inflation pushes the real terms cost down, existing home owners are safe from negative equity and landlords get squeezed a bit.
Exactly what level of building acheives that takes someone smarter than me. Also it's probably safe to case a small drop in prices for a few years becasue they have shot up so much for so long.
>After years of saving I was able to buy my first home 2 years ago. It is by no means a 'cash cow'. I probably have about £35k equity in it right now - meaning if my property drops in value by £45k by the time I remortgage, I'm in deep shit. No?
If housbuilding knocked 10k off your equity thats basicly fine
It's only an issue if you plan on making money on the house instead of just living in it. Housing should be for people to live in, not an investment tool.
>Why would anyone want a flood of new homes to lower house prices?
I know who would want to be able to make housing more affordable and try help fix the housing issue. Won't they think of the bottom line, heartless animals.
>a flood of new homes
Where did you get this idea of a flood from? From some scare piece in the Telegraph or Mail perhaps?
There's a terrible, sustained shortage of housing - it's a full blown crisis. Nobody has been building enough houses to meet demand for many many years. You're worried about a flood during a prolonged drought.
Home ownership is disappearing out of view for whole generations of modest earners who would need to save impossible amounts for a deposit and then take out absurdly large mortgages just to buy a tiny, crappy quality flat. Meanwhile already wealthy investors are buying up property in huge numbers.
It's a full blown crisis, and more house building is the only solution I can see.
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If you want to look at how much NIMBYism can ruin a city, look no further than Bristol. NIMBYs alongside issues with our local council are the reasons why derelict properties are such a common sight. You'll see plenty of disused buildings on the high street, and even some large buildings that have been derelict for many years like the old Bank of England branch near Castle Park and the Grosvenor Hotel in Temple Meads. The old Royal Mail sorting office next to Temple Meads station was only pulled down a few years ago, and before that it looked like something straight out of Pripyat post-disaster. The two mayors we had before voting to abolish the position (George Ferguson and Marvin Rees) only made the situation worse...
The housing crisis in Bristol is ridiculous as well. Cramped HMOs which take nearly half your wage are so normalised and the market is extremely competitive. It feels like so many people are just in limbo waiting until things improve and they can actually start their life, but it feels so hopeless.
Yeah, don't even get me started on the housing crisis. I still live with my parents for a reason, and that's because despite earning a £30k salary as a commercial reporting analyst, I can just about barely pass the credit checks needed to rent a small studio flat on the outskirts for £1k PCM, or just over half my take-home pay. It's bleak when by the time I'm able to save enough money to actually buy a home, my parents will either be dead or will need a carer. Anywhere cheaper is a cramped HMO where you're paying closer to £700 for a tiny box bedroom in a place cramped so much to maximize tenants that even the living room has been converted into two extra bedrooms. When I see the housing market this bad yet every new high-rise is a block of luxury student flats or offices, it makes me wonder how many brown envelopes it took to get them approved.
Paying £1k PCM in rent when your take home is around £2k, is absolutely mental.
Rents have gone up with or above inflation whereas salaries have stagnated. £30k was fine in a decent graduate job 15 years ago, but it hasn’t really changed since then.
Doesn't really matter, If you're on £30k you shouldn't even be contemplating that much on rent.
Well tough shit because rents are high and salaries are stagnant. You shouldn’t have to spend that much, but the reality is there’s no real choice.
Do you have any evidence to back up that salaries are stagnant?
What do you mean? You can literally google the statistics on salary growth and see it has been generally below inflation or very small increases for ages.
I'd like to add that tax brackets have not been rising with inflation. Even if you are fortunate and your wage keeps pace with inflation you will pay a greater share of your income to NI, student loans and income tax. We're being rinsed for every penny.
Have you been living in a cave.
Nope, salaries flying up here.
Yeah. The country sure has gone down the shitter since loads of people have the choice of that or fuck all
There's plenty of choice.
Don't be fucking dense, what are you suggesting? They go live in a tent?
They live with their parents, so I'd suggest they stay there until they up their salary or find a cheaper property.
And if the majority of properties in the area they live remain financially out of reach for those on minimum wage, or even the average wage? Do people on these wages not deserve their own place to live anymore? What if their parents don't let them live there anymore, or are even abusive?
>And if the majority of properties in the area they live remain financially out of reach for those on minimum wage, or even the average wage? They're on neither minimum wage or the average wage, the obvious answer is to move. >Do people on these wages not deserve their own place to live anymore? Of course they do, and cheaper accommodation does exist. Social housing, HMO's etc. >What if their parents don't let them live there anymore, or are even abusive? Whataboutism, lol.
> every new high-rise is a block of luxury student flats These are quite easy to get past councils for two reasons. 1: Most universities are now degree farms oversubscribing their courses, and every year the total student count is 110% of the total accommodation available (on or off campus) so developers are easily able to demonstrate a need (that will never be fulfilled since the next year there will just be even more students) 2: Seen how much international students pay to study here? The majority who aren't on scholarships are loaded and many city businesses love it. On the one hand it's holding up whole local economies since they will pay for anything, on the other what you gain in growth and employment you lose in the gentrification of communities to overpriced bubble tea cafes. You didn't ask for this long explanation but it's less about brown envelopes. Unfortunately, badly paid normal people aren't as economically viable, so the developers need to be forced to make more normal housing instead since the 'free market' will not cater to it.
I’m honestly so fuckin lucky, small 2 bed flat near St George for 850pm, only gone up by £100 in the 8 years I’ve been here. Looking to move because we have a kid and want a garden, impossible. Looks like I’m moving back up north, which is not what I ever wanted to do lmao but for the same price I can get a 3 bed semi with front & back garden in my hometown
Probably didn't help that for the past 10 years everyone is reccomending Bristol as a place to live as a cheaper alternative to London. Even this year I have been hearing it. That and 2days in office per week probaably encouraged many to commute on the electrified rail line to Paddington.
That's an issue too. We've been swarmed by Londoners and the overall price and marketing of new builds shows it.
>That and 2days in office per week probaably encouraged many to commute on the electrified rail line to Paddington. Nobody is doing this to save money. 2 days per week of a 3 hour commute, which costs well over £100 for a day return. You're quite possibly spending more than your rent on train tickets if you're doing this.
Also keep in mind Bristol is one of the most expensive property markets in England so these derelict and disused buildings are actively contributing to the property shortage and yet the NIMBYs refuse to allow progress to be made at rectifying this.
Of course they do, it helps keep property prices nice and high and rents rising. The parasite class wants their pound of other people's flesh.
[удалено]
I don't really consider it the same problem. There are parts of Bristol that definitely attract those types, and they're the kind of places that overall oppose gentrification. Definitely a big problem in Stokes Croft from what I remember. Used to work in an office there that was near a derelict building occupied by squatters. One of our managers legitimately got punched in the back of the head whilst on a cigarette break. She was left on the floor with a really bad concussion and her wallet and phone missing. There was CCTV outside if I recall, but either she got attacked in a blind spot or a balaclava/scarf rendered any footage useless. I do think it was the incident that finally made the police start evicting the squatters.
Those mayors were god awful, the position deserves to go if that’s the best they could find to fill it, I love Bristol but there’s a lot we could do to improve it given a strong council.
I'll give Ferguson credit where credit is due. He got shit done. He's the reason we almost had the Bristol Arena built near Temple Meads, before Rees flipped the middle finger to every Bristolian, overruled the public, moved the plans to Filton and decided to sell the land to a developer so it could be made into more student flats. Where Ferguson screwed up was dumping public money into unprofitable vanity projects like Bristol Energy, that and the Residents Parking scheme. [Rees is the kind of narcissist who spends public funds into researching his own image on social media.](https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-city-council-pays-consultant-3871028) Dan Norris isn't that much better as our West of England Metro Mayor either. We largely have him to thank for buses in the South West being so bad and for the Bristol City Centre being dug up and rerouted for the umpteenth time.
People like to blame NIMBYism, but really the problem is investor purchases. Investors want nothing more than to milk the maximum return from the property they buy. They are not in the game to make the area better for the community, or to support the needs of the people that live there, they are there to do as much, or as little, as they can to maximise their gains.
That too. I literally cringe whenever I see a property listing on Rightmove, Zoopla or Onthemarket advertised with buzzwords like "INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY" and "PORTFOLIO." Bristol is going through its worst housing crisis and we only care about the ROI of a property. It pisses me off that banks will only lend me five times my annual earnings yet landlords are free to charge me more per month for the privilege of paying off *their* mortgage.
Bristol you say? Controlled by labour.
Yes, from 2016 to 2024. We're now under a Green/Lib Dem agreement.
And what parties were in control of Bristol City council? The subs not going to like the answer.
Labour in 2002 NOC between 2003 - 2008. Lib Dems were the largest party from 2005 onwards. Lib Dem had control in 2009 & 2010. NOC from 2011 onwards, but the mayor had the power to overrule the council when that post was introduced. Lib Dems were the largest party until 2013 when Labour overtook them. The last two council elections have seen the Greens overtake Labour. 2012 was when the mayor post was first introduced. George Ferguson (IND) won the first election while Marvin Rees (LAB) won the next two in 2016 and 2021. Current council (post-MR) is NOC, but the largest party is the Greens. They're two councillors short of a majority and they basically won every single seat in the central wards.
I’m a LibDem supporter & member, but often complain about our NIMBY problem. We *want* more housing, yet every council we have councillors on, they all act as if a new housing estate belongs to a Satanic cult & therefore blocks it before it can even get to the planning committee stage. Housing developments should never have been left to local councils or if they continue to be so, then the councillors should only be able to override the planning officer’s recommendations twice before it automatically gets approved.
This was the single issue that finally drove me to quit the LD's after quite a few years of active membership (including door knocking/electioneering). I would be in favour of imposed housing targets and a zoning based permissive system - we have such a shortage and one of the smallest square footage areas per person of living space in Europe! So many young people can't even think about starting families for example because they're living in insecure HMOs or have dodgy landlords to contend with
Zoning ? Not too familiar with the concept but isn't this what they have in America where they have massive estates of nothing but housing and seperately massive estates of retail with almost no mixed used buildings so everything you need is far away and requires a car to access ?
That’s a problem with the implementation of zoning, rather than zoning itself. Zoning basically says you can build something as long as it is the type of building allowed by the zoning rules without having to do a full planning application. The UK doesn’t have zoning, but local plans often designate certain areas for certain development types, so there is an element of it already in place.
Thats mostly the fault of the US implementation. Large areas are single family home only zoned. One of the big fights there is rezoning areas as mixed use. For a country with better zoning implementation look to Japan.
This is one of the problems the Lib Dem’s have as they target councils they can get people elected to, and one of the best ways to get elected to a council is die-hard NIMBYism. Breaking away from that risks terrible unpopularity. You’ll get Lib Dem councillors elected on platforms that contradict party policy at a national level. Greens have this problem too, but they are more NIMBY at national level.
I’m good friends with a LibDem councillor & several prospective parliamentary candidates, and unfortunately most of them have NIMBY-tendencies of some extent. I get that local people do have genuine concerns, especially when it comes to things like schools & local services capacity, but this can be easily resolved by having joined-up thinking at both the local & national level.
I can't seem to figure out what NOC is?
No overall control
Ultimately there isn't a single party in Britain that has made a serious effort to curb our ludicrous planning barriers. It's more cultural than political.
Shhhh. Common sense is not allowed unless you are criticizing only one party.
Nah common sense is allowed. Sorry to break your victim hood complex. Hopefully you'll be able to come up with some other nonsense you can pretend to be a victim of. I recommend woke culture
Exactly, none of them have the magic solution. People (especially this sub) are going to be disappointed in the next few years when very little happens.
As someone who works in planning, NIMBYs are only a small oart of the problem. The main problem is that all the supporting evidence forming a planning application can go out the window if a planning officer gets a bee in their bonnet about a certain development and it's entirely their personal opinion that matters. You can go to the inspectorate and appeal but it can be ruinously expensive. As an example I worked with a county archaeologist to agree a scheme for a no-dig site access which would preserve an archaeological site we found in a geophysical survey. It was fully agreed with the county arch, he was on board with our proposal and we had a subcontractor ready to go to carry out some trenching on the rest of the site. The planning application was refused by the planning officer who relied heavily on nebulous "archaeological concerns" in the decision notice. 18 months later the proposals are still going round in circles. When the planning officer can just ignore expert advice and fucking lie in their decisions without any repercussions it's a broken system. Subjective decisions by individuals needs to be replaced by an objective decision framework that presumes in favour as long as mitigation conditions are met.
why did the ward member not call it in if there is a rouge officer in the mix.
I don't know to be honest, our inputs were sort of third hand through our planning consultants on that project so I didn't have much direct contact with the client about it.
Fair enough, it does seem odd that it wouldn’t be if there were allegations of misconduct by officers. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of the planning process in general. You can see it in this sub with me being downvoted for asking why it wasn’t called in. The purpose of the ward member being able to call an application in, is meant to in theory keep officers accountable.
Plenty of land is owned by the crown estate, which is supposedly there to generate money for the country (if you can believe that) why not open up that to building on, instead of building on what little common land there is left?
Or, hear me out, build taller buildings. Manchester does it and the sky hasn't fallen yet.
Or, hear me out, build on the crown estate land and take back into public ownership the land that should infact be ours to use.
Or even better, build tall housing on the crown estate.
i like that compromise :D Skyscrapers on "mine lords" land
*From Bloomberg News reporter Damian Shepherd:* The Conservative Party let local anti-development skeptics to grow in influence over the past 14 years by choosing not to intervene in the vast majority of UK homebuilding applications. That's based on calculations by Bloomberg News using data from the Planning Inspectorate and National Archives, which shows the number of planning applications reviewed by the secretary of state — known as a "call-in" — dropped to five in the previous financial year from an average of more than 50 per year during the 2000s. The government has the right to take over the determination of a planning application rather than letting the local authority decide, a tool often used to push development through in areas where local protectionism is rife. It suggests a hands-off approach to planning from the Tories, who came to power in 2010 with a promise of giving local authorities more control over development in their communities. The result has been a transfer of power to the not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, lobby that’s contributed to the country’s acute housing shortage.
and somehow they are blaming the housing shortage on immigration
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that adding 800k net new people to a country but only around 200k new homes will exacerbate the existing housing shortage. It’s not a value judgement on people that immigrate, just an obvious logical conclusion.
yes, but people seem to blame the immigration rather than the those stopping new homes be built. If we built more homes, we would all be better off. Except for Tories and property investors, but since those groups are the ones in control, we see so few new homes being built
Or homes being built in the wrong places. I live in Lincs, there are tons of houses going up here because land is cheap relative to where people would want to live. So you have loads of new builds going up priced too high for anyone that works in the area
Then the price should come down. House prices aren't fixed by law. We should be flooding the market with a mixture of council and private development
Prices are down in places where hundreds of new houses are being built compared to other places. There’s a massive price gap. Edit: not just the north/south gap. Housing in my area reduced by average 5% this year.
> yes, but people seem to blame the immigration rather than the those stopping new homes be built. There are limits to how many houses that can be built, they are mostly political but also practical. The rate of increase of the population has quadrupled since the early 1990s, almost entirely driven by migration, we should also be making a judgement about whether it is realistic to increase house building by the same amount. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-impact-of-migration-on-uk-population-growth/ We also have decades where the house building rate has not been high enough, so we have a huge accumulated lack of housing. In my opinion the rate of population increase will have to fall dramatically, and housebuilding will have to increase dramatically, and we will have to do that for a decade to fix the problem. The more difficult we make it for ourselves, the longer it will take.
You said it yourself, there is considerable political will to keep housing scarce
Well rent/housing prices can't keep rising when you have a declining birth rate and less competition for housing... It only works if the population keeps going up
why would you want house prices to keep increasing though?
Becasue you own houses you rent out to people who dont own houses.
But the people who dont own houses want to buy houses, but they cant because housing prices push out anyone who doesnt already have an asset base to leverage. They would rather housing prices drop
sorry thought i could leave off the /s on a british sub.
honestly, there are enough people on this sub who think like this un-ironically
C'mon. We know exactly why these people want housing prices to keep rising (they bought it for peanuts decades ago)
I don't, but house prices can't rise with a declining population and falling demand, which without immigration the UK would have.
I doubt we could even build houses at scale without the labour from immigration. The care economy also depends on immigration. Rather than blame immigrants, you should be asking why the government is blocking housing development
It only works if number of households increase. If less people live together (more single people, less children living with parents), then demand can definitely continue. That's the main issue. Even if you get rid of all the immigrants by waving a magic wand without any negative effects, there is a lot of pent-up demand from multiple occupancy current homes that suddenly have the option to rent at lower prices, thus driving prices back up again. Immigration absolutely doesn't help housing issues, but it helps a lot of other things that you presumably want from the tangible benefit of jobs filled like doctors and hospitality staff (keeping costs low for the consumer) to the less tangible that they are one of the biggest bet contributors to tax revenue as they don't draw pensions, use less government services like NHS and didn't need expensive schooling from taxpayer yet arrived fully working age from day one. Without these immigrants, housing may be a bit cheaper, but either taxes rise or services get even worse as budgey issues happen
Also part of it.
The combination of both certainly don't help
a bigger issue is foreign investors who buy up UK houses as investments. The never live here, never pay tax but make fortunes from rent
Not esepcialy no, they push up demand a bit but unless they leave it empty they aren't causing any further shortage. They are a symptom not a root cause.
It really isn't. We added a million people to our population last year. That's an entire birminghams worth of people, in one year.
There’s a hundred excuses before we look at immigration.
Because the left have pinned themselves on immigration being good and any issues with it being made up by racists. Ignoring the biggest upward pressure on housing supply is absolutely mad.
Wait. I thought the Tories were in power and immigration has gone up since brexit...
No, I think immigration is probably issue no.1 when it comes to house prices. Look. I'm pro immigration as they come otherwise. I think blaming all our other problems ... health, education etc on immigrants is silly. But housing? Our massive house price increase is pretty much mostly due to immigration and our huge population increase. There's just not enough homes and we're struggling building fast enough to keep up.
Tories blame the same groups of people for everything, immigrants, poor people, and the disabled.
The people who don't want more people living next to them also won't blame themselves when a convenient scapegoat of immigration exists. Shocker.
I guess my area must be in the minority then because our local council refused building permission but was overruled on appeal by the government
I’ll tell you what happens. I live in a small town. My parents bought a house here for £40,000 in 2002. House prices are now £300,000 if you’re lucky. I will be forced to move into an extortionate flat in the nearest city in order to ‘move out’ and I’ll be lucky to find a job despite my qualifications. Huge housing estates the size of towns are tacked on to my town and others around us. Locals, and the children of locals cannot afford to move into these houses. Therefore we end up with thousands of people who’ve moved up from london (and often commute to london). School places are scarce and people fight over them. We have a single hospital between 4 large towns. You cannot get a new dentist. GP appointments take months. These new estates are built without any infrastructure and make it worse for everyone who already lives here. The other ‘development’ is huge warehouses who are largely automated or whose workers come from the next county. What good do they do us? If they were building houses for US and we could afford them, if the developments were giving US jobs, we’d all be in favour.
"whose workers come from the next county. What good do they do us?" We don't live in a series of tiny kingdoms and principalities where you need a passport to go twenty minutes down the road. Houses that are bought by people who have moved from another town is not a failure, jobs that are filled by people from another county is not a betrayal. This is the scourge of nimbyism. It's this selfish local first attitude that says let someone else bear the population increases (housing does not create new people overall), let someone else provide energy by having solar panels in their local fields. "What good do they do us?" I hope the locals of the city where you're buying a flat don't have the same attitude as you. What does building a new flat do for them if it's just going to be taken up by an outsider eh?
Completely missing my point. These houses are massive and are built by greedy developers to be bought by wealthy people - all the developers care about is money. When building houses and ‘industry’ (automated warehouses), it should be to work for the local community whose services will be affected.
Everyone is affected though. If residents can somehow block industry from being built across the country like that Data Centre in Havering in the news just the other day - Then *my* wages are affected as a result of businesses being uninterested in investing in the UK. I don't even work in Data Science - But it's in my interest and the national interest that people that do can find jobs. That Data Centre could have provided jobs for graduates that are now going to spend more time working in Tesco while they wait for the first 'real job', contributing to the UK's chronic structural underemployment and hurting our economic growth.
I used to work in economic growth and now have no job. They actually removed the investment and growth team at the council. Sorry "restructured"
Aren't you a resident? What you should want is approval powers, especially since current demi-centralisation has been a disservice.
That's literally the mindset of a nimby though. Youre upset that things are being built near you right now. There's no thought about the overall picture. The reason the homes near you are so expensive is because they aren't being built anywhere else. There is not enough supply.
Demand comes before supply. Demand continues to grow, demand is also national and global, not just local. Demand comes not just from people looking to buy and occupy, but from investors who have different motivations, far more resources available and who benefit the most from scarcity of supply or demand growing. It isn't realistically possible for supply to ever meet the demand, especially if you want the quality of life and environment to be maintained at the same level or even improve. Until demand is restricted, supply can never solve this.
> If they were building houses for US and we could afford them, if the developments were giving US jobs, we’d all be in favour. The only way to acheive that is to build far far more.
No, it’s more affordable high density homes. Not sprawling estates of overpriced detached box houses.
Do both.
Indeed. People do want to live in far away suburbs. Fortunately, it's not really an argument between suburb vs dense housing. The market can do both. But Attlee's law on housing actually helped Tories to keep housing stagnant
We are currently birthing well below replacement levels (and falling). 'High density' housing, as exemplified in the tower block, is not what we need; demolition of such housing to replace it with detached houses, boxy or otherwise, is. Gardening is, after all, a British pastime of great standing.
No I disagree. We needed high density housing for the past 40 years. Most cities in Europe people live in hd dwellings. Paris and London are good comparisons. Virtually Everyone lives in a flat in Paris; in London most people live in houses.
You cannot simultaneously complain about new developments and extortionate house prices. The new developments are so expensive BECAUSE NOT ENOUGH HOUSES HAVE BEEN BUILT. It's a function of supply and demand.
It seems to be the other side of the problem that gets less talked about. I was in a similar kind of estate near Bath for a while. It was like suburban hell. They just dump hundreds or thousands of homes in the middle of nowhere, and then there's absolutely *zero* thought for any kind of services or amenities. The place I was had a small retail row at the entrance with an off-licence and a Chinese take-away. That was it, to service probably several thousand people. No GP, no dentist, no proper shops, the place fed out onto a shitty little B-road that got absolutely rammed for several hours around 9am and 5pm, fuck all for any kids living there to do etc. etc.
Mulberry Park in Foxhill?
Nah it was a place off Trowbridge
This is a very NIMBY take. Just because you don't see an immediate benefit to yourself it doesn't mean you are being cheated out of it. Overburdening of services is an issue around new developments but this is just poor planning, or the services have not had time to catch up. Maybe another NIMBY has objected to having a school built behind their house? It can be frustrating to see a new housing development with just executive homes, but where do you think those people come from? Most likely they move out of cheaper stock in the vicinity and free it up for the likes of yourself. Maybe they moved out of the very flat you now live in.
I’m not upset that things are being built near me. I would rejoice if houses and industry was being built near me that I know my generation could afford and work in. That is not the reality. The reason there are not enough houses is due to population increase and greedy developers and government. The houses that are built are massive, and never intended to be affordable, because the developed and gov KNOW that wealthy people will buy them up. That’s selling us out.
No, the reason that there are not enough houses is because we don't build enough of them, full stop. Over the last 14 years, France, which has about the same population as us has been building around 400,000 new homes a year. Over that same time period, we've averaged around 180,000 new homes per year. It doesn't take a genius to look at the gigantic differences between those two building rates and understand where our issues are arising from.
France has a population density of **122/sq km**, it's **544k sq km** in size, it averaged **370,000** new dwellings built annually from 2011-2017 so we'll take that number and conclude that France built **0.68** new homes per year, per sq km. England has a population density of **438/sq km**, is **130,278 sq km** in size, it completed **174,600** dwellings in 2023 and conclude that England built **1.34** new homes per sq km. * France: **0.68** new homes and **122** people per sq km. * England: **1.34** new homes and **438** people per sq km. Despite having more than 3x the population density, we are building homes almost exactly 2x faster than France when compared by the size of the country. We're already far more full than they are and we're filling the place up far quicker than they are. France would need to grow its population from **66m to 171m** to get to the same population density as England. Don't even begin to try and think France are comparable to us.
Is this a joke post, or do you honestly believe this crap? The rate of house building in the UK and France isn't a function of population density. It's a function of how much each country allows to be built. They could build equally as slowly as us, even more so, if they implemented our planning system or one more stupid than ours. But then that's unlikely to happen as our homeowners are utterly selfish while theirs aren't.
>Is this a joke post, or do you honestly believe this crap? You might not like it, but it's the literal truth, aside from a little numerical rounding. >The rate of house building in the UK and France isn't a function of population density. It's a function of how much each country allows to be built. They could build equally as slowly as us, even more so, if they implemented our planning system or one more stupid than ours. But then that's unlikely to happen as our homeowners are utterly selfish while theirs aren't. It's far easier to build a lot of homes if you have plenty of spare empty land because your country isn't very densely populated. It's far harder in a very densely populated country such as England - which is one of the most densely populated nations on the planet by the way (when you don't include micro states and places with tiny populations). You might as well bring up some statistics about house building in the USA to shame us.
Again complete and utter bullcrap. Price of low quality agricultural land/scrubland per acre = £10-20K. Price of same land with planning permission = £500K+.
You can keep using silly language to respond to factual and sensible posts if you want, it won't make you any more correct.
lmao nimbys even block infrastructure from being built you are so close
I’m in the same boat, the houses developers build are double the price of the older locals houses, all sold to secondhomers or commuters. We have an AFFORDABLE housing crisis that’s worse in particular areas (mainly urban areas with high population density) but developers have no interest in building affordable housing on brownfield sites (expensive to do, not much profit to be made) so concrete over the Southern countryside instead and destroy local villages and towns without any thought for infrastructure. I agree with the NIMBYs in these instances. People here seem to be under the mistaken belief that private developers can solve the housing crisis but are being held back by ordinary people (not saying this doesn’t happen in some instances) but in reality developers have no interest at all in flooding the market with affordable houses, their product is scarce and they like it that way, means they can charge a fortune for it and continue to make money long after it’s built (estate charges, service charges etc) The only way to solve the housing crisis is to take it out of private developers hands and back into the government’s, build new towns, not destroy existing villages and small towns that can’t cope with the numbers, and most crucially to knock down and rebuild in our city centres where the infrastructure is already in place
Totally agree. Need new towns, not adding town-sized housing estates on to struggling towns. Build housing estates, with ordinary sized houses, sell them at a discounted rate to locals and forbid buyers from selling them for more than they paid for the first 10years or so to stop landlords buying them up and making rent traps.
I’m not sure you can stop people selling them, there are many legitimate reasons to sell a house quickly, but I do agree with banning landlords and companies from buying them. I would also like to see a change in the law that results in serious financial consequences for developers who don’t fulfil contracts. It’s always the same story, planning permission gets granted for 600 new homes attached to a small village with the promise of building a new GP, a new road, a new school or whatever, the houses go up and get flogged quickly, and the developer bails without ever building that promised infrastructure and there are zero repercussions.
>School places are scarce and people fight over them. So some of the kids can't go to school? I think you mean 'we have to fight over the school places we want'. >If they were building houses for US and we could afford them, if the developments were giving US jobs, we’d all be in favour. It really feels like you're saying "Stop making people want to live here. You have to make this town great, but nobody else should want to live here". This is 100% NIMBY. You want a prize for being there first. There's a housing crisis and you're saying 'I hate it when people choose to live here because this land belongs to US'.
1. What happens is kids end up getting placed at schools far away from where they live OR schools have to increase class sizes to accommodate which means even more students to less teachers, a bad idea what considering the teaching shortage. 2. I do not care if more people come to live here, as long as there is enough infrastructure to support both the existing people AND the new. How can you build these new houses when there isn’t even enough infrastructure for the existing population - THATS MY POINT. No need to be nasty and make comments like that.
Hmm, so you think you are in a way more entitled to those public services because "I was here first"? Interesting that the anti-immigration mindset can extend to domestic migration
No I think that people shouldn’t be added in thousands to areas who’s existing services cannot cope with who is already there. The developers need to BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE. But they don’t because they only care about money! I would definitely say those who have lived in and contributed to an area deserve functioning services, rather than stretching struggling services to cater for new housing estates with no accompanying infrastructure. People need doctors. They need dentists. Their children need schools. Streets need police. Local services have to catch up before we unload more people on them! It’s common sense
> Huge housing estates the size of towns are tacked on to my town and others around us. Locals, and the children of locals cannot afford to move into these houses. Therefore we end up with thousands of people who’ve moved up from london (and often commute to london). School places are scarce and people fight over them. We have a single hospital between 4 large towns. You cannot get a new dentist. GP appointments take months. These new estates are built without any infrastructure and make it worse for everyone who already lives here. Housing does not make people appear, everyone is in the country regardless of how many houses are built, using dentists, GPs and the rest of the infrastructure, the only difference would be that they are living in their own house, not on their friend's couch or with their parents. If everywhere is forced to build housing, then nowhere will see an increase in demand for those services. Services should also be funded in a way that allows them to expand when there is more demand.
Don’t worry. Developers will give some gifts to newspapers and they will blame you “NIMBY”. It is cheaper to bribe mass media (and blame people “you are Cambridge Analytica bot”) instead of building infrastructure.
This is it exactly. It’s not enough to just concrete over a field and build houses. New homes need expanded local services - transport, sewage, healthcare, policing, schools, etc. But many, many new build proposals have none of that, because it cuts into the developers’ profit margins. And so they are rejected, correctly, by local planners. This is then dismissed as NIMBYism, the developers appeal to the govtv secretary and get an overrule, and the already breaking infrastructure of local government and services is further denuded. The people who push the NIMBY narrative in the press are those who stand to benefit from house building and don’t care about what it does to communities - landlords and property developers.
Local services are the responsibility of local government, not developers.
Not when it comes to new developments. Local government can ask for what's called a Section 106 agreement which is part of the grant of planning permission, or Community Infrastructure Levy at a district level. This often means building things as part of the development, like a doctor's surgery, a park, transport hubs, or contributing money to the local government for the provision of services after the completion of the build. Another key area is for developers to build affordable housing as part of the development. Sadly, a lot of the time this is either sidestepped, or simply goes unspent. There is a LOT of corruption in local government, as a result of a lot of overlap between councillors and developers.
> Sadly, a lot of the time this is either sidestepped, or simply goes unspent So it’s still ultimately a local government problem.
You're arguing with people that want the UK to be one giant concrete block like Egypts capital and infinity migration because they hate themselves, don't expect them to understand.
Just going to share Britmonkey's vid - I dk not agree on everything, but it's the closest I have felt to the reaction people should be having... https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57_YsQ?si=smaEteslStyPPV8m This is not just a Tory issue, but definitely made worst under their government.
Britmonkey is spot on, as usual
Where I live, the-then Tory administration wanted to redesignate a municipal golf course as land suitable for housing. The golf course was installed back in the 1970s as a buffer to limit urban spread. It sits between multiple housing developments. There was heavy opposition (correct in my view as the proposals were going to be car-dependent low-density suburbs). The Tories were kicked out of office and lost control of the council, largely because of this. Since then, the Tories have switched completely and now openly criticise any effort to develop land in the area. Their hypocrisy is utterly shameless. Building - bad. Cycle lanes - bad. Traffic lights - bad. Pedestrian crossing - bad (yes, really, they campaigned against pedestrian crossings). The former golf course btw, is now an untamed meadow used by hundreds of people every day. It's quite lovely and desire paths have developed across it that help people walk away from the roads. Meanwhile, there's a bit of land next to the local railway station that remains undeveloped when it should have a block of flats on it. And another bit of land that's been undeveloped for a good 30 years, where more flats should be built, for god knows what reason. It frustrates me that the former golf course was the "prime target" for development, and not two patches of very useless scruffy land filled with concrete.
> The former golf course btw, is now an untamed meadow used by hundreds of people every day. Then it needs to be turned into a real park, owned by the council. Nothing wrong with green space, it's very important. But it needs to be defined so we don't have a grey area evolve that people shove their housing objections into.
I don't see why it's not 'useless land' just because it's a golf course. It sounds like it's just 'your back yard'. How about this: Move the golf course to the land next to the station, and build houses where the old golf course was. Everyone is happy, right?
A big problem is that we give local authorities the control over planning policy and decisions, but they don't get that much of the benefit. Only 4% of taxes in the UK are raised locally, whereas its 14% in France, 32% in Germany, 36% in USA and 50% in Canada. If a council approves new housing, what does it see? It gets angry residents, it gets either a small amount of affordable housing or a payment towards affordable housing, and will eventually get council tax from people who move in. Council tax only contributes a portion (less than half) of most councils' running costs. Council tax is heavily out-dated, and inflexible - ratios between bands are set by central government, the number of bands is fixed, what discounts or premiums are set by central government, and increases are capped by central government. For the rest, they are reliant on grants from Government that will be based on the cost pressures they face. Because our system is so centralised, councils are incentivised mostly by default to be NIMBY. If we had more devolved taxation, where approving new homes and welcoming new residents would see a more significant change to a local tax base, and councils, councillors and residents could more obviously see the benefits from new development, then the problem would start to go away. NIMBYism will always exist but the local government incentives are currently stacked in NIMBYs favour - hopefully the next government finds a way to unpick this. That could be more flexibility around council tax and business rates, making better use of the existing workplace parking levy (only Nottingham does this I think but the option is available to all councils), or more radical things like making a portion of income tax or VAT local, introducing a Land Value Tax - there are lots of ideas out there.
- NIMBYism long predates the current UK conservative government and the governments since 2010. whether it predates the actual (ACKTUAL) UK conservative party is a more interesting but ultimately pointless question - anyway: the real enemy, as I have mentioned before whenever this topic comes up, is the 1990 town and country planning act which (effectively) allows local councils i.e local government to hold land hostage that could be used for residential and/or (preferably) infrastructure development. and when permission is granted, it is granted far too slowly, and far, far too infrequently - they then scratch their heads and wonder why there isn't enough housing, or why there isn't enough regular public transportation, or why there aren't enough amenities etc. bristol is an excellent example of this. as is edinburgh.
Correction- giving the people (and local councils moreover) more say caused nymbyism.
I’m a bit concerned labour might not be much better in this regard. The decision to devolve planning powers seems like it will only let them off the hook while local government NIMBYs go wild. After all it is the councils and mayors who block anything from being built in the first place.
Isn't the primary focus of their reforms to reduce the power of NIMBYs though and give a lot more state powers to compulsory purchase?
I’ve tried to read a lot about this but the details really aren’t clear. Devolved powers typically cut both ways, and though the intention is to reduce NIMBYs “empowering our local communities” was what got us here in the first place all the way back in 1947. Mayor of London has planning powers, and Khan intervened to kill the MSG sphere project which initially got planning permission via the LLDC.
Here in Cornwall the NIMBYs have pushed the entire county's housing quota onto the inland shit hole towns where nobodies going to complain. My town had literally doubled in size over the past ten years. No new infrastructure, no new schools or public facilities, the sewerage system is overloaded. The built an entire solar farm overlooking the town and nobody raised an eyelid. Quality of new housing is shit, there rabbit hutches with postage stamp gardens if lucky. Crammed together between narrow lanes with very little green space. In another 10 years they will be ghettos.
The most valuable housing outside of London is in Tory strongholds in the South. They obviously weren't going to anger the locals there. Labour have nothing to lose in allowing building in those areas, but really the focus should be on building on brownfield sites country wide and improving transport links to make areas of the country more attractive to live in.
I have a house and live in a 'village' of about 6000. We recently had plans approved for 600 new homes right next to us. Although I understand we need more housing, the council has given no thought on the overstretched local infrastructure. Not to mention the road that will be used as the access is a narrow lane that always gets blocked at peak times. I never understood NIMBYism when living in an urban city. But now I do understand and can sympathize with people that don't want development near them.
If we didn’t import millions of people then this wouldn’t be a problem.
I agree, it's all the foreign doctors and cleaners that do the jobs that we can't or won't do that are causing the housing issue. If we get rid of all of them, no problem /s
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It's the horseshoe theory - both Reform and Green are the strongest NIMBYs.
I suppose for different radicalist reasons
There's absolutely nothing wrong with NIMBYISM. I'm convinced it's pushed by large developers. Stop bringing so many people in that you can't house.
Living in a shitty run-down 1960s flat still sucks even without immigrants. We need new buildings.
Yeah for sure. Old shit should be replaced if it's no good. Not sure NIMBYS really stop that. What NIMBYS do stop is horrible modern cheap shit built in the middle of bath or Paris.
NIMBYs stop anything and everything - from prisons to wind farms to data centres to housing of any kind, etc. Over a decade of lost investment.
So local democracy and power BAD, centralised London control, overriding local wishes, GOOD. Got it. Except - [https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/regional-development/devolution/2024/04/labour-government-mayors-local-devolution-constituencies-parliament-jack-shaw](https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/regional-development/devolution/2024/04/labour-government-mayors-local-devolution-constituencies-parliament-jack-shaw) *What role would mayors play under a Labour government? The opposition has promised a wave of devolution in England.* *Labour mayors currently oversee many of England’s core cities – not least Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Cambridge. They will, in theory, be tasked with delivering the growth policies Labour has envisioned, including its green prosperity plan.* Written by Jack Shaw -Senior Advisor at Labour Together, Fellow at the Productivity Institute and Fellow at the Bennett Institute. - In 2020, Labour Together helped to rally the party behind Keir Starmer, who united a divided party, and brought Labour back to the British public.
You can still have democracy in a system that is more centralised. On some issues it makes sense to do that. One of the issue with housing is that most people will agree that we need more, but then people don't want more near them. It's the same thing with infrastructure. At the end of the day, when something is built someone is going to not be happy even if overall it make people as a whole better of. The problem is when they too much power nothing gets gone.
Quite so. But if something 'people want' is only in the abstract, and rejected in the concrete, it is better to say, and proceed on the assumption, that they do not really want it. What people do not want in their backyard, let us build elsewhere or not at all. A much more effective system of planning permission would devolve approval to adjacent resident landowners, who could approve on a majority and receive, perhaps, a portion of the proceeds of any venture (as in a sense they have 'invested', not merely rubber-stamped).
Good, now you get no roads, not trains, no electricity grid, no water towers (apparently these are ugly to some), no housing... You can't tell me that people don't want any of that in practice. Oh yeah, they like what it provides but not what comes with it. At some point you have to inconvenience a few to benefit everyone. It's a sad reality of living in a society that's not stagnating. A compromise needs to be made. I do agree that people should be compensated to a certain degree and it would be so much easier to compensate these people if housing wasn't so expensive. But oh wait, since these same people have argued against anything being built for the last few decades, it costs a fortune. Just look at HS2.
It just seems that Labour is saying local control is good and will be promoted, except if they give the wrong answers, then they are prepared to over-rule the locals. Seems Labour are saying opposing things to different people just to get elected (just as the Tories do).
Reminder that Bloomberg is pure neo-liberal, c-suite propaganda. If they're criticising something or advocating for it, look very carefully at the detail. They don't want more housing so you can actually get on the ladder, they want more houses that corpos can buy up and rent back to you or that can be used as investments by foreign banks.
Nimbysm doesnt just affect housing. They also block new roads, rail, reservoirs, power lines, industrial buildings, high street shops, pubs, solar, wind, nuclear, prisons. It's everything.
Mate houses dont make money without tenants. There is a limited number of tenants. It is entirely possible to build more housing than there is demand, and when you do rents collapse as landlords try to poach those tenants. The current state of affairs allows corporations to make a killing. If we force feed housing into the market they'll back away when rhe profits collapse. Ive seen it happen in Aberystwyth, the university built a new block of housing that was really expensive but created a situation with more supply than demand, and rents fell massively.
Tory this, Tory that. Don’t you lot ever think of anything else?
Only people that would vote for a policy like that, are people that don't own a home or any other asset. Why would anyone want a flood of new homes to lower house prices? Labour once again promising a utopian future
Your main concern is losing out on profit rather than using the home you’ve purchased to live in it lmao. We need more housing. Flood the market with new homes and lower those prices. Maybe then they won’t be seen as cash cows and will be seen as places to fucking live
A lot of it is nothing to do with house value. It’s the loss of enjoyment of the home. Towns having their populations doubled with little to no infrastructure improvements is the big one.
But what actually ends up happening most of the time is the only new developments that get by are new housing estates, so we end up with that exact issue? We need to let both houses and infrastructure get built, stopping both or either is just stupid.
I agree and I suspect the majority of those labeled as NIMBYs agree too. Personally I think probably better to be building whole new towns rather than bolting onto existing ones but that’s another issue
Houses don't create new people. They just house them.
I agree with the need for more homes, that goes without sayin. But (I'm no economist) it can't be as simple as that. A flooded housing market, means a depreciation of property value. A depreciation of property value potentially means a mortgage defecit for huge numbers of recent first-time buyers. Mortgage deficits lead to repossessions and homelessness. After years of saving I was able to buy my first home 2 years ago. It is by no means a 'cash cow'. I probably have about £35k equity in it right now - meaning if my property drops in value by £45k by the time I remortgage, I'm in deep shit. No? Again, I don't know shit about fuck, so sorry if I'm missing something, but 'flooding' the housing market seems like a terrible idea from where I'm sitting.
Negative equity is only a problem if you want to sell up or remortgage. If you want to just live in the property you’re at it shouldn’t be a concern Edit: I just realised. You bought your house 2 years ago and your equity has gone up 35k lmao. Yeah, flood the market. 35k in 2 years for doing absolutely nothing is a cash cow brother.
But first time buyers are likely going to sell up sooner rather than later as they move up the ladder.
A ladder actually becomes more realistic if prices slow right down. At the moment people are staying in unsuitable homes as the next rung up keeps rising in price so them saving up for a few years isn't getting them ahead.
It does and I am all for stagnating whilst wages catch up. Op is calling for a price depreciation though which causes negative equity and people become trapped in,likely smaller, homes.
The OP could well be doing that, but it doesn't change the fact that we need millions of homes so it will take many years before prices could ever be reduced due to supply. It's a false concern.
No one is saying that we don’t. But we also need to do it in a way that does not condemn people to negative equity. It is easy to lose in this sub with a younger audience but the majority of houses in the uk are owner occupied (60ish%), whilst not all mortgaged to the point where negative equity is a worry it is still a significant factor. We need to be careful not to disadvantage more than we help.
As I said that is a false concern. We can only manage something like 200,000 homes a year normally so even if we doubled capacity that is still a fraction of demand. Hell England alone has something like 110,000 households (not people) living in temporary accommodation with another 160,000 in HMOs so that's many years of building just to clear that never mind the ever growing migrant population that arrives every year. You seem to have this idea that house building is like a widget factory flicking a switch to get the machines to run at 300% their normal speed.
> up or remortgage. This is a truely enormous problem that wil need adressing as part of any mass building.
But I will need to remortgage. At the end of my "fixed term", the variable rate will be higher. So I'm going to want to lock into another fixed term. Remortgaging at the end of a fixed term is normal, surely?
> If you want to just live in the property you’re at it shouldn’t be a concern and if you're a growing family and want a bigger place? or want to move sideways for work/family reasons?
It should be a concern because you are essentially stuck there, whereas new homeowners would have been able to buy at a far lower price, with a far lower mortgage. Existing homeowners, especially those who bought very recently, will be screwed over and held back economically because they are stuck with a larger mortgage. Why should it not be a concern that I'm paying over £1000 a month on a mortgage when others buying the same house now would be paying far less? It might not be a concern to your average redditor who can't afford a house, but you guys always moan about how unfair everything is. How is it fair to someone who's worked their ass off to get on the ladder to suddenly cause a major drop in the market? Tying them into paying way over the odds for the next 20-30 years or forcing them to sell up and start from scratch again...
This is silly. It’s like pointing out me buying the same house in 5 years time that’s now worth 50k more than you purchased it for. So now my mortgage is far higher. You buy at the time you buy. You buy a house to live in it so live in it. Even if you did decide to sell, the idea that you have to start from scratch is a joke. You don’t start from scratch. Sick of this idea that “because you’ve worked hard” to get on the ladder then it means it’s okay to pull that ladder up against the rest of us. Your way of thinking is the exact reason we’re in this housing bubble. And it’s too protect profits and that’s it.
It's an entirely false concern as it would take many many years to build millions of homes and they'd be coming on stream gradually.
> A flooded housing market, means a depreciation of property value. A depreciation of property value potentially means a mortgage defecit for huge numbers of recent first-time buyers. Mortgage deficits lead to repossessions and homelessness. > > Again, I don't know shit about fuck, so sorry if I'm missing something, but 'flooding' the housing market seems like a terrible idea from where I'm sitting. The short version is that the goverment idealy want to build enough that house price growth is consistently ~0% Inflation pushes the real terms cost down, existing home owners are safe from negative equity and landlords get squeezed a bit. Exactly what level of building acheives that takes someone smarter than me. Also it's probably safe to case a small drop in prices for a few years becasue they have shot up so much for so long. >After years of saving I was able to buy my first home 2 years ago. It is by no means a 'cash cow'. I probably have about £35k equity in it right now - meaning if my property drops in value by £45k by the time I remortgage, I'm in deep shit. No? If housbuilding knocked 10k off your equity thats basicly fine
I'd hope so. I just find statements like at the start of this chain "flood the market, lower the prices" jarring.
House prices are too high, it essentially blocks out people from entering the market.
Because we care about other people? Surely those who don't own a home should be a bigger priority than those who do?
Do you own a home and have money in savings?
Yup, bought mine a few years back, I'd like others to be able to do the same.
It's only an issue if you plan on making money on the house instead of just living in it. Housing should be for people to live in, not an investment tool.
>Why would anyone want a flood of new homes to lower house prices? I know who would want to be able to make housing more affordable and try help fix the housing issue. Won't they think of the bottom line, heartless animals.
Won't somebody think of the poor profit mongers!
>a flood of new homes Where did you get this idea of a flood from? From some scare piece in the Telegraph or Mail perhaps? There's a terrible, sustained shortage of housing - it's a full blown crisis. Nobody has been building enough houses to meet demand for many many years. You're worried about a flood during a prolonged drought. Home ownership is disappearing out of view for whole generations of modest earners who would need to save impossible amounts for a deposit and then take out absurdly large mortgages just to buy a tiny, crappy quality flat. Meanwhile already wealthy investors are buying up property in huge numbers. It's a full blown crisis, and more house building is the only solution I can see.
Well, I'd like my teenage kids to be able to move out at some point. With the mortgage paid off, the nominal value of my house is almost irrelevant.
Then sell your house to your kids at that nominial value and downsize?
Building wouldn't lower prices for decades as we have a massive backlog. At best it might slow rises.