On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:29:51 +0100, Graeme Wall wrote:

On 30/08/2012 08:57, Optimist wrote:
On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:00:04 +0100, Roland wrote:

In , at 07:37:29 on Thu, 30 Aug
2012, Martin remarked:
Unless the UK indulges in another round of building "new towns", the
national housing shortage is actually only solvable at the local
level. In other words build homes where the people and jobs are, or
move the people and jobs.

Unfortunately the policy for most of the country seems to be to build
new estates on largely brownfield and rural sites, in places where they
get the least objection. Correlating it with workplaces is the last
thing on the agenda.

An added irony is that they are often paraded as "eco" towns, when the
residents would all need cars to get to jobs.

The aim of eco-towns is to get car journeys down to 50% of all trips.
I'm not sure if that counts very local trips, but they should be
provided with enhanced public transport in order to qualify for the
name.

Policy should be to get the hundreds of thousands of empty homes back into use, rather than consuming more countryside.

Very laudable in theory. In practice many of those empty properties are
in areas no one wants to live.

Like central London, you mean? There are loads of houses in the most expensive areas which have been boarded up and the
sanitary fixtures destroyed to make them uninhabitable.