In the UK, everyone is talking about house prices:

Yet home ownership is at its lowest level since the 80s:

 

It’s the young who are suffering most:

The problem is that house prices are too high:

 

 

If everything else you bought increased in price at the same rate since the 1970s..

 

Why are house prices so high? One reason is that we are not building enough new houses:

 

 

The UK population is also growing at a faster rate than any time since the 1980s:

 

Another reason for high house prices is that building on the green belt was made illegal in 1947 by the Attlee government:

 

And this woman stopped building new council houses in the 1980s:

 

Today, it is illegal to build on fields like this near Watford:

 

 

Meanwhile, just over 10% of England is described as “built on”:

 

 

It is also illegal to build anything that blocks the views of St Paul’s cathedral from several key points. So London’s skyline can’t look like this:

 

 

But you can build in spaces like this “brownfield site” in Barking, Essex. Nice, isn’t it?

 

 

This is why land with planning permission is so very expensive:

 

 

Which also explains why British homes are among the world’s tiniest:

 

 

So, a new solution is “Garden Cities”, a plan that will allow cities to expand onto greenbelt land. According to the London School of Economics, if London expands by one mile into the green belt within the M25,  1m new homes could be built. The plan has been authored by David Rudlin of URBED, a design firm, who argue 40 UK  cities could double in size. Oxford, where the plan was devised, have accepted the need for 100,000 more homes. Will London follow suit?

 

With thanks to Buzzfeed. 

Posted in: Infographic of the day