Older poorly insulated homes push low income families into fuel poverty, which has health knock on effects, which in turn affects the economy as well as the personal social distress this causes. Keeping old houses for the sake of it is not a good thing at all.
"contrary to popular belief, we are not living on a crowded and urbanised island, but only in crowded and extremely dense cities."
"Our rigid and nationalised planning system is also delivering the wrong kind of housing. In a March 2005 MORI poll, 50 per cent of those questioned favoured a detached house and 22 per cent a bungalow. Just 2 per cent wanted a low rise flat and 1 per cent a flat in a high rise block. But houses and bungalows use more land, so while in 1990 about an eighth of newly built dwellings were apartments, by 2004 this had increased to just under a half."
"Our housing compares poorly by international standards too. Britain has some of the smallest and oldest housing in Europe, and what is being built now is even smaller than the existing stock. Yet despite this, house prices in the UK have risen much more strongly than other developed countries, meaning that despite real growth in our incomes we are not able to afford more and better housing, in the way that we can afford better cars and food as we get wealthier."
"Recent research into the impact of increased urban densities concluded that
'urban compaction' results in a loss of urban environmental quality and 'questioned whether the loss of environmental quality and urban character in low density housing areas is a price worth paying'. To put those questions more directly than academic researchers might do: do we want gardens to be
more and more expensive and, eventually, built over? Do we want the few low density urban conservation areas we have to be destroyed in order to preserve a few acres of countryside that few can visit? Do we want the whole of every urban area to be covered in tarmac? Should we not keep some trees in urban areas? Do we want playing fields to gradually disappear as being uneconomic, given the price of land? Do we want future generations to live walled up in urban areas in blocks of flats? Do we want biodiversity to be reduced as the scientific evidence shows that it would be?"
Read the documents:
Unaffordable Housing
http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/ima...images/143.pdf
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks