Damned if you do, damned if you dont
Let's do the More or Less thing. Is that a big number?
I'm big on environmentalism and regenerating England's natural habitats, but trading a percent or so of total land area to ensure people have homes seems like a no brainer. Ideally we'd build higher density to avoid having to continue suburban sprawl, but any homes > perfect homes that are never built.
trading a percent or so of total land area to ensure people have homes
Ignoring the huge amount of brownfield area we have from closed factories etc.
Honestly if it was truly about a shortage of land. I'd be all for it. But it is not. It is about refusing to clean up and build on already developed land. In an attempt to increase profits.
And the country's largest project to convert a brownfield site (Teesworks) to housing has sucked up hundreds of millions in public grants and investment, hoarded cash and extracted private profit for one man Lord Ben Houchen.
Possibly the biggest case of local government corruption and mismanagement in our time.
You do not need to pave green space to build homes. There's plenty of paved, ugly, low-density areas in desperate need of upgrades. The problem is the British public's obsession with that idea that everyone needs their own patch of grass and two cars.
I'm curious what the numbers look like for commercial properties standing empty because they're investment vehicles for legal financial shenanigans. I'm talking about how many offices we've built over the last twenty years when anyone with a lick of sense could see this was a waste of time.
I don't mean "why aren't we doing that instead" - the article just gets me wondering about how much space we've wasted on worthless concrete garbage that stands perpetually empty.
According to The Big Issue (I can't find where they got their numbers from) there are/were more than 20 million square feet of empty office spaces in London. Which if we extrapolate from data I can find on occupancy rates within just the city of London, equates to around 5% of the total office space.
Not really a particularly large amount when you also see that roughly 7-8% of residential properties are also currently unoccupied.
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