A comment under this article in City AM was abbreviated and published as a reader's letter today:
Modern homes, as decreed by modern planners and politicians, are too small, too dark, too inflexible, too crowded and too like C19th slums for them to be bought by anyone in their right mind - assuming they had a free choice of houses within their budget and location.
The sad truth is that 'what the State controls, the State rations' and that has never been more true than for housing and infrastructure.
The solution is blindingly obvious - scrap planning controls and let landowners, builders, developers and buyers have a free choice of what, where and how they want to live.
HD2
Bizarre.
It's private, profit maximising developers who bash out the tiny homes because they can get away with it; they arise because of the absence of state intervention. If local councils reintroduced minimum room sizes or better insulation requirements, this twat would still be shrieking about state controls and state rationing.
And who built those C19th slums? Was that not private developers operating without state regulations?
And it's the NIMBYs crying out for planning restrictions, I don't think that the government in the abstract sense could give two hoots how much gets built.
FFS.
Buyers and non-landowning "builders" (i.e. construction workers) will never be on a level playing field with landowners and developers (aka land bankers). They will never have a free choice of where to live or ply their trade
Those land bankers have got plenty of plots with planning, but to maximise their profits, they are just allowing them to trickle onto the market. A load of contsruction workers were laid off back in 2008 so that the land bankers could wait for prices to go back up, so if you are a buyer you have to wait ever so humbly and patiently until they deign to actually build one or an existing homeowner decides to sell one, it's not like you can buy from the competition instead because there isn't any.
Debate Magazine
