The ‘experts’ have declared war on detached homes

The latest explanation for Britain’s housing woes is that we don’t live in apartments like Europeans. A correlation has been spotted between rising housing costs and how many people live in apartments. Leaping to assume that this correlation is the cause of our housing crisis, the experts tell us that we need to learn to love living in flats. Never mind that, hidden in the data used to make this argument, we find that, just as in Britain, a plurality of Europeans also want to live in a house.

People want a home with a garden, at least if our revealed preferences are anything to go by. Moreover, as the pandemic ended, Britain’s estate agents were surveyed about future trends in the UK housing market. Over 80 per cent said that they expected increased demand for properties with a garden. Whatever architects and planners say, most people in Britain would like a suburban home, not an apartment.

There’s nothing new about urban planners wanting us to live in high-rise blocks of flats. This was the sort of world proposed by Le Corbusier and other modernists that, when put into practice, gave us America’s grim urban housing projects, crime-ridden tower block estates in London, and the burnt-out cars of Paris’s banlieues. Yet each new generation of planners warms to the idea, saying that somehow this time the result will be happy communities.

And now they have found a new justification for their obsession: forcing us all into apartments is apparently good for the environment. Yet when Chicago’s Council on Tall Buildings commissioned a study looking at the environmental impact of apartment living compared with suburban living, it found downtown urban living was significantly more carbon intensive to build and its occupants used more energy than their suburban equivalents. Anthony Wood, one of the study’s authors, described the findings as “quite the opposite to those we thought we would find”. It seems that living in dense urban environments isn’t so good for the planet after all.

Britain’s housing crisis isn’t created by us preferring homes with gardens. The crisis comes about because we haven’t built enough of those homes: at the latest estimate we are short by more than 4million. And while building blocks of flats helps, it doesn’t meet the needs of families who want what previous generations were able to have: a house in a suburb with good schools, less crime and some peace and quiet. The task of housing policy shouldn’t be to force people into homes they don’t like because it is good for the planet or will make public transport viable. Housing policy should do what it did in the 1930s and 1950s: free developers to build the sort of homes that people want.

Britain’s housing takes up less than 5 per cent of our land. Instead of building flats that aren’t right for families and aren’t what people want, we should spare another 1 per cent of that land to build a new suburbia designed with children, families and communities in mind, rather than simply meeting housing numbers. Making it easier for people to live where they want to live would contribute to a happier and healthier country.

A new suburbia is not just about housing people, but about a family being able to sit in the garden of their own home and, as the sun shines, know that the efforts they made were worthwhile. Mum and Dad can look at the kids larking about in a paddling pool or bouncing on a trampoline and take pleasure in knowing that life is not all about work. Forcing us to live in flats in a busy city without any private outdoor space makes family formation less likely, means fewer children and a less happy life for many people.

Living in a flat isn’t better for the planet. Why can’t we build houses that people actually want to live in?

Families want a house in a suburb with good schools, less crime and some peace and quiet