Today's Daily Telegraph business section reports a house builder saying that UK homebuyers 'want to return to traditional housing'. The report shows that in 2000 15% of new builds were flats and 45% detached housing, while now 50% of new builds are flats and only 15% detached housing.Redrow is claiming that "people did not want to live in the apartments and flats that have flooded the market." Quite right. Everybody knows that there have been far too many flats built but not enough of other kinds of housing. That is, everyone except the Labour government with their crazy housing targets that force this kind of development. And the local Lib Dems, who kicked out one of their own councillors for speaking the truth and who are desperate for 12000 rabbit hutches to be built on the airport site.
The good news is the Conservatives will scrap housing targets and push down power to local councils to decide on local development priorities. Then we just need to kick out the local Lib Dems and replace them with councillors who are more in tune with Cambridge residents!
4 comments:
Hear hear! I'd also note that it was tiny Barratt-like flats that helped start push house-prices up.
I'm not a great fan of flats, but how are people going to afford these larger houses in Cambridge (which therefore require much more land, hardly a cheap resource). Surely developers are simply catering for the market and for what people can afford?
Or, Martin, are flats just fuelling asset price inflation for housing in Cmabridge? It all depends on how much you think that house prices are set by the intrinsic value of property (including land) and how much by what people can afford. I would suggest that most of the benefit in building flats goes to the landowners in the form of increased prices for land.
That's what voting for a socialist government gets you... will people ever learn?!
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