Posted Sep 25, 2017, 4:44 PM
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Loosen Britain’s Green Belt. It Is Stunting Our Young People
Loosen Britain’s Green Belt. It Is Stunting Our Young People
22 September 2017
By Jonn Elledge
Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...lanning-policy
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The creation of the metropolitan green belt fixed the boundaries of London as wherever the suburbs happened to stop. So Goodwood Avenue stops midway at an unconvincing simulacrum of countryside that’s hemmed in by homes on three sides. There are two tube stations within a mile, yet despite the housing shortage, there’s no building on this land. Not because it’s unsuitable; simply because nobody’s ever built there.
- There are places like this not only all over London, but around a dozen other British cities, too. Green belts separate Coventry from Birmingham, Nottingham from Derby, Sunderland from Newcastle. Around some smaller cities – Oxford, Cambridge, York – the green belt is many times larger than the city it surrounds. Sometimes this land is picturesque, often it is not: wander the green belt and before long you find yourself in a field of nettles, or a wooded clearing full of discarded, stinking cans. Yet suggesting there might be better uses for these places is generally the quickest way to radicalise local people.
- Land use policy designed for the 1950s is an imperfect fit for the 2010s. The modern green belt is often not green at all, but grey or beige, full of quarries, dumps and breakers’ yards. Even where it is green it often takes the form of private golf or pony clubs rather than anything as useful as a park. Huge chunks are intensively farmed agricultural land with limited access, chemical pesticides and a total lack of biodiversity. And while the green belt may have contained London’s sprawl, it has simply displaced this growth to the outer ring of commuter towns. Longer commutes means bigger carbon footprints. Try getting by in Milton Keynes without a car.
- The green belt is also clearly implicated in the nation’s housing crisis. There are many reasons why we don’t build enough homes where demand is greatest, including the collapse of council building and the vagaries of the private developers’ business models. But a big one is that we simply don’t have the space. For example, Oxford is so tightly constrained by its green belt that there is no room to build significant numbers of homes. It’s not a coincidence that, once incomes are factored in, it is the least affordable place to live in Britain. So far, politicians have been reticent to explain the problem. Every major candidate in last year’s London mayoral election – including Sadiq Khan – pledged to protect the green belt.
- The simple, depressing truth is that most people who own homes in the suburbs don’t want those suburbs to expand – because it will lower their house price, or block their view, or ruin their favourite walking route with the dog. There are a lot of these people, and they are settled, they are vocal, and they vote. No wonder that politicians listen to them. Every time they do, though, they are making it harder for Britain to build the homes it needs. They are selling younger people down the river. And gradually, the group that benefits from the green belt is shrinking, and the group it blights is growing. Younger people vote now, too.
- In cities like London and Oxford, Cambridge and York, it’s almost impossible to see a solution to the housing crisis that won’t require green belt reform. There isn’t enough brownfield land outside of the green belt. And “densification”, while necessary, by definition means demolishing existing homes to rebuild sites to contain more of them. I’ve noticed that people who propose redeveloping council estates rarely to live on them. The good news is that we really don’t need much green belt land to fix this. In a 2015 report, the Adam Smith Institute found that just 3.7% of the capital’s green belt would be enough to provide a million new homes, all within walking distance of a station.
- Almost nobody believes we should scrap the green belt altogether, but by planning properly – working out which bits have decent transport, and are sufficiently ugly they would be better used for housing – we could have a transformative effect on the housing crisis. Looking down from the air, you would barely even notice. And if we don’t do that? Prices will rise, overcrowding will increase, commutes will get longer, and the economy will suffer as our most productive cities fail to grow. People love the green belt. Perhaps you love it too. But that, to me, seems like a very high price to pay to protect a few nettle-strewn fields.
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