Submitted 11 hours ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Let’s do the More or Less thing. Is that a big number?
I’m big on environmentalism and regenerating England’s natural habitats, but trading a percent or so of total land area to ensure people have homes seems like a no brainer. Ideally we’d build higher density to avoid having to continue suburban sprawl, but any homes > perfect homes that are never built.
Damned if you, damned if you dont
They don’t have this problem in China
or France
NIMBYism is killing this country. We have the smallest available housing stock in Europe by some margin. Labour are right to be trying to make a dent in the issue.
They could always start with this issue:
There are 28 million families in the UK. [1]
Your article implies there are 25 million houses and 1 million is empty. [2]
The empty houses in the photos are not suitable for living in and should be condemned if they haven’t already. Rebuilding a mid-terrace house is not simple and even after blow all of that we managed 1 million out of the 4 million required to at least have one home per family. That sounds like a terrible plan to work on the most expensive work and ultimately not make a dent in the issue.
The effect of this would be extremely minimal. Almost all empty homes in the UK are homes that are temporarily empty pending sale or between renters. Having empty homes is actually extremely normal, you can’t really not have empty homes, as people are always moving.
The UK has far fewer empty empty homes than anywhere else in the developed world. Our housing stock isn’t enough.
There’s no other option but to build more. I hope Labour’s plans can help with that, but who knows. And it’d need to be sustained.
You do not need to pave green space to build homes. There’s plenty of paved, ugly, low-density areas in desperate need of upgrades. The problem is the British public’s obsession with that idea that everyone needs their own patch of grass and two cars.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 6 minutes ago
I'm curious what the numbers look like for commercial properties standing empty because they're investment vehicles for legal financial shenanigans. I'm talking about how many offices we've built over the last twenty years when anyone with a lick of sense could see this was a waste of time.
I don't mean "why aren't we doing that instead" - the article just gets me wondering about how much space we've wasted on worthless concrete garbage that stands perpetually empty.