No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Townhouses in London typically sell for $600,000 or more.
Flickr photo by Sacred Destinations.
A new movement has arisen to revisit the Town & Country Act and allow construction of 5 million new homes. Two weeks ago, a group called Audacity held a conference titled All Planned Out? Conference speakers (including Wendell Cox, a known antiplanner) questioned whether “planners can reconcile government policies with where and how people actually want to live.”
Meanwhile, Price Out is an associated “campaign for affordable housing prices.” Its web site informs us that “Houses are not like shares. When share prices rise it means we as a society are richer. When house prices rise on the other hand, society is no richer. We have the same houses and the same people to live in them.”
Priced Out has a “how much richer are you?” calculator for home owners. You enter when you bought your house, how much you paid for it, and where (in Britain) it is located and it informs you that “Your current home has made you £0.00 richer.” You may think the increase in your home value has made you richer, but you can realize that increase is to “sell it and move into cheaper accomodation. In reality most people move up the ladder and choose to stay in their family home through old age.”
The Antiplanner wishes Audacity and Priced Out well in their efforts to rid the United Kingdom of government planning and planners.
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Antiplanning Movement in U.K.
This year is the fiftieth anniversery of the Town & Country Act, which the British
Parliament passed in 1947. The law set aside most rural land in Britain as “greenbelts”
or otherwise off limits to development and built new homes in the form of high rises
throughout the war-
Thanks to the law, Britain today has some of the least affordable housing in the
world. For example, London realtors recently converted a 320-
Reprinted from The Antiplanner