This is an excellent article. The mention of the Croydon "SPD2" planning document was really interesting too - I hadn't heard about it. It's exactly what we need in cities if we want to truly increase density and reduce house prices.
What's unfortunate is the backlash - it seems that there was a lot of outcry over "greedy developers", and the result was the election of a new mayor who cancelled it.
It seems obvious to me that the only real way to achieve the needed housing growth in the places people want to live is to allow suburban and urban densification. Most English cities are shockingly low density - it's crazy that relatively unloved 3 bedroom terraces sit in the shadow of 50 floor apartments.
The current status quo is that a lot of these terraced houses are converted into low quality flats. The density of people is often still there, but they live in terrible accommodation. Building houses in cities should not be a controversial thing to do. Even if it means knocking down a few which aren't suitable any more.
There's an interesting summary here - https://www.platformspace.net/home/what-are-suburbs-for-pavi.... What's particularly interesting is how successful it was - Croydon seems to have had 4x the number of "homes in small (<10) developments" in the 4 years after it was brought in. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d01a7efbf4ae5... That's an incredibly good result!
What's unfortunate is the backlash - it seems that there was a lot of outcry over "greedy developers", and the result was the election of a new mayor who cancelled it.
It seems obvious to me that the only real way to achieve the needed housing growth in the places people want to live is to allow suburban and urban densification. Most English cities are shockingly low density - it's crazy that relatively unloved 3 bedroom terraces sit in the shadow of 50 floor apartments.
The current status quo is that a lot of these terraced houses are converted into low quality flats. The density of people is often still there, but they live in terrible accommodation. Building houses in cities should not be a controversial thing to do. Even if it means knocking down a few which aren't suitable any more.