Brown field

[tobyaw]

I see that England has reclassified gardens in planning terms so they are no longer “brownfield” sites (a category otherwise used for post-industrial land). This means that councils can make the planning process for building on gardens more arduous, which I welcome. Suburban gardens should be treasured and valued, rather than viewed as a money-making development opportunity. In particular, I don’t think that houses should be built on gardens in a way that significantly changes the housing density or character of a neighbourhood.

In covering this story on the BBC News channel, their report said that new houses will still need to be built. Do they?

Comments

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

It's a debatable point, though the Barker Report (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3305759.stm) back in 2003 pointed out that due to rising population and social changes meaning lower occupancy density (more single people, old people living along in a multi-bedroom house etc.) that there was a need, then, for 230,000 new properties a year but only 165,000 being built.

And also that this "get on your bike and go to where the jobs are", means lots of empty properties in Welsh villages and ex-manufacturing English towns and cities, and a greater demand for properties "where the jobs are", which pushes property prices up beyond the reach of nurses, school-leavers etc.

Half of the software engineers I work with in London are renting rooms in shared houses, most of the people who have their own place are in a two-income household and live outside zone 3 on the tube map (I'm in zone 6, colleagues not sharing "with strangers" are in Reading, Southend, Twickenham, West Drayton and Walton-on-Thames and commute in daily)

So I'm not aware of any of my colleagues that is without a roof over their heads ... but I know that several of them would welcome enough extra property (in the right places!) coming on to the market to provide affordable first-time buyer properties (or at least something affordable to rent).

And, to be honest, there's a lot of bad, high-density accommodation in inner-cities that either needs to be destroyed, or has been pulled down. Hackney tower blocks for example. Put too many rats in a cage and they start attacking each other (or so I'm told) ... some of these housing estates are much the same. Poor construction, poor maintenance, high density, and to be avoided! Vertical communities is a nice idea, but hasn't worked in many places.

Look at this picture of Ely (http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=ely&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Ely,+Cambridgeshire,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&ei=UVoPTJ6vE4r-0gSk0MmWDg&ved=0CCwQ8gEwAA&ll=52.404461,0.252342&spn=0.036759,0.076475&t=h&z=14) ... you cam see where the Greenbel/farming protect land is, by the sharp demarcation and high density housing on one side of a road, and vast clear fields the other sides. Building land is limited for new housing, so "in-fill" (or "garden grabbing") development was one way of increasing density ... which I've already said I don't like! So I applaud this change that makes gardens not "brownfield".