>Me in today's Sunday Times:"Experts from Kingston University's
>Centre for Suburban Studies were dreaming of dotting the countryside
>with houses, creating sprawling megacities and ushering in an era of
>cheap homes for all.
>
>"We will have a city 100 miles in diameter taking in Cambridge and
>Windsor and Brighton," declared James Heartfield, author of Let's
>Build!, a book launched at the conference that advocates ending the
>division between town and country and the building of 5m homes in
>the next decade.
>
>More at:
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2382553,00.html
>
>[...] Even farmers, for a long time considered the natural guardians of
>England's green and pleasant land, are getting agitated. "We have
>suffered a double whammy from the planning system," says Michael
>Duckett, 46, whose family operates a nursery and a fishery on his
>father's old farm in Wedmore, Somerset.
>
>"Twenty years ago we diversified into the nursery business and we
>also set up a fishery which has been booming. So we decided to go for
>growth and applied for 12 lakeside chalets so our customers could
>stay overnight. The planners said no. My brother applied for
>permission for an agricultural worker's cottage so he could stay near
>the nursery and that was turned down, too. It's all wrong. Country
>people are trying to keep employment in the countryside and the
>planners are not allowing it."
I've come to the same conclusion. In Australia, planning policies which restrict building houses in the country are justified on the basis of protecting agricultural land. However, I tend to agree that this is bullshit, that the real reason is elitism.
The way the planning laws operate is by setting minimum subdivision acreages in areas zoned for example "Rural", "Residential Low Density" etc. Then stipulating that only one house is permitted to be built on any of these relatively large parcels of land. So of course if you can afford to buy 100 hectares of land in a Rural zone, you can build yourself a house there no problem.
Even within the boundaries of many reasonable size country towns in this area of Tasmania (with sewerage and town water services) the land is mostly zoned "Residential Low Density" which means you can only build one residence on a block, which is either 5 acres or ten acres minimum. This effectively drives up the price of housing in these townships, by artificially reducing supply.
I've lived most of my life around here. A lot of that time I've taken advantage of what used to be a form of affordable housing available in rural areas, rendundant workers' cottages on farms. (Houses built to houses farm workers back before the mechanisation of farming drastically reduced the demand for farm labourers.) 20-30 years ago you could rent them for practically nothing, $5 or $10 a week. Farmers were pitifully grateful that someone would take care of some of these old houses that would otherwise fall down or have to be turned into haysheds.
These days, there are a lot less of them by far and the rents are exhorbitant. The planning laws are responsible. Farmers can't build new houses on their land, or if they do get planning permission for a new house it is often on condition that they demolish an existing (perfectly sound) established house.
Frankly, it verges on class genocide. They seem to want to squeeze out the low income population, and even working class home-buyers. Cleanse the countryside of the riff-raff. It hardly "protects agricultural land" for the planning laws to insist that people wanting to build a house in a rural area have to have at least 100 acres of land around each house. You can't farm competitively on that small an acreage in this country, so that's 100 acres lost to agriculture instead of maybe 1 acre or half an acre that you needed.
The only real effect is to keep out the riff-raff who can't afford to buy 100 acres. Its class war in the country.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas