Politicians are finally doing something about housing shortages

TO GET A sense of why London has such expensive housing, visit Tottenham Hale. You might expect that, next to an Underground station where central London is accessible within 15 minutes, there would be plenty of houses. In fact, there is a car wash. The land on which the car wash sits is officially classified as “green belt” land, which means that building houses on it is almost impossible. Across just five big cities in England there are over 47,000 hectares (about 116,000 acres) of similar land, which is not particularly green, is close to train stations with a good service to their centres, and yet cannot be built on. That is enough space for over 2.5m new homes at average densities.

For decades the green belt was sacred. The British public imagine it, wrongly, as idyllic pasture where horses drink from streams. Politicians dared not talk about it. This is now changing. “It is time to burst the myth that the green belt is green,” Siobhain McDonagh, a Labour MP, argued last year, “and start using the non-green sites for the homes that our children so desperately need.” A cross-party group of MPs called upon the government to loosen planning in parts of the green belt. Ministers say that they are looking seriously at the issue.

Britain is not the only place where change is afoot. In 2017 Germany reformed its urban-...

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