House building, again.

[cromwell]

I know we've done this before but a trend seems to be emerging.

Developers seem to want to select a nice, expensive rural village or town, buy land around it and stick up four and five bed detached houses which they then charge top dollar for.
In leafy North Yorks there is a nice little village called Green Hammerton. Developers want to build a "garden village" there. Actually, it's a new town the size of Tadcaster that they want to build there. Many big expensive houses are planned. Which won't do anything to solve the "housing crisis", because all the pressure is at the bottom end of the market, not the top.

A few nights ago the BBC did a little piece on Jaywick, a deprived town on the Essex coast. Some of the houses originally built as holiday homes for London people are in dire need of being knocked down and large parts of the town redeveloped.

Problem - developers don't want to do it. Why should they when they can sling up detached houses on green belt and coin the money in?

In places like Jaywick, why can't the council do some compulsory purchasing and build houses themselves?

[AliasAggers]

I agree with you, Cromwell. The builders don't care a damn about anything except making money.
That is fair enough, but the need for more affordable housing is something that is best dealt with
by local government. As you say, what builders are doing now will do very little to solve present
problems, and the necessary projects need now to be tackled and organised in a different manner.

[Workingman]

I saw the thing about Jaywick, it was so depressing. Whole areas with just a few occupied properties and many of the others with plywood curtains to keep the miscreants out. It is madness in this upside down world that the local council cannot step in and take them over to either redevelop the land or make the properties habitable for new families.

Green Hammerton... hmm. Just right for a commuter dormitory 'town' in so many ways. York (15km) and Leeds (25km) are so much in need of four and five bedroom detached houses, and the land is so much cheaper than similar plots within the boundaries of those two cities. Then think of the improvements that will be made to the A59 and the new schools, medical facilities and shops that will be built as well - what could possibly go wrong?

What's that, you say? There are fracking licences at Wood Farm and Wiggington Cottage Farm only about 10 miles away. Ooops.

[TheOstrich]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but there's an interesting little "scam" going on down 'ere at the moment.

If you drive out of Shaftesbury on the A30 bound for Salisbury, it's a nice dual carriageway section for half a mile or so where Persimmon have built a housing estate of your left, and land on the right may or may not be turned into a light industrial estate. Persimmon are in trouble over the housing estate, as they are nowhere near completing the surfacing of the roads and the pavements after months of prevaracation, but that's another matter.

As soon as you come to the end of the dual carriageway, bang, you're out of Shaftesbury, straight across the county boundary into Wiltshire, and a long rural stretch of single carriageway with no development. However, there is a "secret plan" being hatched by North Dorset District Council and Wiltshire County Council to extend the "Shaftesbury Settlement Boundary" across that border and down the road into Wiltshire.

The benefit of this?

Any new houses on the Wiltshire side of the border can be counted twice - once towards Wiltshire's housing target and once towards North Dorset's housing target !

Well, that's one way to meet Government demands ....

[AliasAggers]

[Workingman]

... there is a "secret plan" being hatched by North Dorset District Council and Wiltshire County Council to extend the "Shaftesbury Settlement Boundary" across that border and down the road into Wiltshire.

The benefit of this?

Any new houses on the Wiltshire side of the border can be counted twice - once towards Wiltshire's housing target and once towards North Dorset's housing target !

That is creative accounting par excellence.

Why didn't you think of it Ossie?