Green belts once served a vital purpose, but now they are squeezing the life out of cities

theguardian.com:

I magine a reservoir of wealth, worth very many billions of pounds, a latter-day North Sea oil, lying underneath the country. One that, what’s more, is public property. What government would not want to turn it to the benefit of its favoured policies – for example to ending the nation’s eternally unsolved housing crisis, to returning to young and not-so-young people the degree of access to decent housing that former generations enjoyed?

This reservoir exists. It consists of the potential value of land that is released when planning permission is granted for housing, or other profitable development. Thanks to the postwar government of Clement Attlee, whose nationalisation of development rights is still partly unprivatised, it belongs to government. It could be extremely helpful to a future Labour administration, if it seriously wants to restore, as Keir Starmer put it last week, both economic renewal and the housing security that “working people… desperately need”.

In a speech to the British Chambers of Commerce and in broadcast interviews, Starmer proposed a reformed planning system and a return of the targets for new homes recently abandoned by Rishi Sunak’s government, without which “housebuilding will drop probably to its lowest level since the Second World War”. He said he would back “the builders, not the blockers”, by which he meant the more unreasonable opponents of new development. He hoped that house prices would come down, “relative to income” – a quietly remarkable statement, given that leaders of both main parties have supported house price inflation for at least 40 years. He appears to be taking sides in an intergenerational contest between housing haves and have-nots. “A generation and its hopes, an entire