Vocal Voices

And most of them will be pre-packed or 'prefabs' as we tend to know them.

These come on top of the 25,000 homes already announced in the £3bm Home Building Fund.

I have lived or stayed for extended periods in prefabs during my travels and they are nothing like what springs to mind from our WWII houses. Many are quite luxurious and come with all mod-cons. They are popular in N. America and Europe and the Scandinavians have got them down to a fine art, so we should not look down upon them as something inferior.

What I am wondering is where the land is to come from. Prefabs are mostly single storey structures. If they are to be starter/small-family homes, to meet modern standards and with average floor space, each plot will need to be about 150 sq/m. If they were all to be built in the same place that would be a city covering 200 square kilometres, or more, once roads and public services are put in.

Imagine that: city with a radius of 8km! It would cover an area bigger than Leeds, which is the UK's third largest.

Another worry has to be the effect these homes will have on the housing market. It is already super-inflated and it would not take much for it to implode. When deflation happens, as it probably will anyway, ever so many will be hoping that it is only their projected 'profit' from the purchase that disappears.

What I am wondering is where the land is to come from.

They have selected two sites around here for housing development in the next 15 years, both of which, I am told, are subject to a degree of flood-risk .....

We'd be better off building apartments - not horrible tower block type things - rather than houses. They need to be affordable, and family sized. Many people in Europe live in rented apartments including some of my German cousins, it is quite the norm and not considered to be at all inferior to buying your own house.

Nail on head, Kaz.

Owning a home is not the be-all-and-end-all in Europe. Having somewhere decent and safe to live in is more important. But the Europeans do not have the buy-to-let mentality of the UK. There are controls on rents, standards of accommodation, as well as obligations on landlords and tenants, plus oversight by the authorities.

In many cases renting is far superior to ownership when it is controlled - we just do not see it.

I'm afraid you are right. There isn't the attitude that one must own one's own home, and every few years buy bigger and better, out there. Even professional well off people live in apartments! They are very nice, large, comfortable ones though

My cousin Z lives in an apartment - she and her husband are both in work, she is a part-time Spanish tutor, a yoga teacher and also has another job in a laundrette, while her husband manages a large retail store. In this country they would definitely be home owners, with their joint incomes and at their ages (late 40s) but they have always rented and have no interest in buying a house. Their apartment is large, it has a balcony with a great view and it is ideally situated for their lifestyle.

Kaz wrote:We'd be better off building apartments - not horrible tower block type things - rather than houses.

Yes I agree. We just seem to be building estates of four and five bedroom houses, when the need is for starter homes.

And you expected common sense either from the central government, the hopelessly corrupt local governments or from the people who make the money out of 5 bed homes???

I certainly don't.

cromwell wrote:

Kaz wrote:We'd be better off building apartments - not horrible tower block type things - rather than houses.

Yes I agree. We just seem to be building estates of four and five bedroom houses, when the need is for starter homes.

And they are mostly on greenbelt or good quality agricultural land, after all, nobody wants a 5 bed detached on a brownfield site, do they?

I notice that nobody from government or any of its favourite 'Think Tanks' has answered the questions about these one million so-called "starter" homes and their impact on the BTL industry and house prices.