How excellent that people are trying to build houses where people want to live
Here is a complaint about something, a complaint about something that we rather cheer. Indeed it cheers us to see this thing happening. The complaint is that builders and developers are trying to build housing where people want to live. It is this thing which we both cheer and cheers us:
Swathes of Home Counties green belt could be buried beneath bricks and concrete under plans to build thousands of new homes in the region, environmental campaigners have warned.
Nearly 200 sites on green belt land across Hertfordshire, Surrey and Essex are under threat of development.
Campaigners say the proposals threaten to fundamentally weaken the protection against urban sprawl enjoyed by since the creation of the green belt around London.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) will published a map this week showing the extent of the threat to the capital’s green belt and the Home Counties.
It shows plans for 41,500 homes in Hertfordshire; 20,000 in Surrey and 27,000 in Essex. There are also plans for a further 29,500 homes across the green belt in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Kent.
People desire to live and work in the South East of England, near London. That such housebuilding as is happening is happening there seems to us to be quite the thing to be happening.
After all, the entire point of the existence of either or both of government and or an economy is to maximise the amount of, and number of people who can, people being able to do as they wish. Subject only to that restriction that their doing so does not restrict the rights of others to do the same. Thus if people desire to live near London then that's where the houses should be built, no?
It may well be that the CPRE thinks Surrey looks better covered in gold courses than housing (it is actually true that more of Surrey is covered with golf courses than it is with housing) and they of course are at perfect liberty to say so. Yet given our general desire to maximise utility we also have that right to tell them to toddle off and do something else.
While we get on with the implementation of a sensible planning policy, the entire destruction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.