Prioritise new homes before green fields

THE recent spate of fires and alarms in high-rise buildings in Bristol is very worrying indeed.

It makes you wonder: do we need any more of these kinds of buildings? We could instead build more ‘normal rise’ homes, which survey after survey shows people actually want. These are much nicer and healthier to live in.

There is a ludicrous ‘inevitability’ narrative which says: “We can’t build more homes like that, that people want, so we must build high-rise tower blocks”.

That is just rubbish. It is not true –

and the evidence that it is not true is all around us.

Look at Bristol – how did it grow? Did we stop building new homes in the past when the city boundary hit a green field? Or did we build on it to meet human need as Bristol expanded?

Bristol is a growing city. Our population has risen by a lot in recent years and, even more importantly, there has been a massive growth in ‘household formation’ – more households have been forming than before.

So we need to build the homes to meet the need. We have underbuilt for 20 years and that is why we have crazy high house prices and crazy high rents.

We need to build the homes people say they want, and quickly. And we cannot build these on brownfield sites, as there are not enough of these brownfield sites around.

Yes, let’s use them, and yes let’s repurpose buildings, etc – but we need massive new housebuilding, and not massive high-rise, high firerisk tower blocks.

Do we want to risk a Bristol Grenfell?

There are issues to consider. There are no easy choices. We may need to build on some ‘sacred’ green belt land, just as we did in the past.

There are plenty of other fields. If you live in a city, you live in a city. If you want the countryside, go and live in it, far away.

Dynamic cities like Bristol grow and expand. So let’s build low-rise, high-quality homes for people to live in sustainable communities.

Chris Watson Bristol