Garden Grabbing

Anyone read this on BBC news this morning?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6744797.stm

Garden grabbing - an uncomfortable phenomenon where developers buy a house with a sizable patch of land and stick a block of flats on it.. not good :(

 

This has been happening in the Bournemouth/Poole areas for a few years now; developers are even buying fairly new houses (10 years old!) to demolish and build flats.
The government inspectors override refused planning apps on appeal because the government class gardens as "brown field sites". The problem is made worse by the fact that the majority of the new flats/townhouses/maisonettes are snapped up by fat cats for second/holiday homes, so the prices are driven way above what locals can afford.
2 bedroom apartment for �£2,000,000 anybody? Sea views if you stand on the wardrobe.
Some eejit with more money than sense spent over �£140,000 on a beach hut and you ain't allowed to sleep over in them!

 

Rising house prices do nobody any good other than estate agents, solicitors and property developers.
And possibly .........the govenment.

 

New houses have postage-stamp-sized gardens these days, probably because they have been built on the garden of a house that used to be there, or is still there and sold their garden (can you imagine doing that??)

 

Well, I have quite a large garden, and it is a struggle to get on top of it at the moment, but I just couldn't concieve of selling it off for some money grabbing developer to stick a poky little house on there!

Apart from anything else, how do you know what your new neighbours would be like... and they would be living VERY closely to you!

 

we live in a 13th floor flat with our daughter we have been trying to buy a house but everything is out of our budget because alot of what is being built at the moment is apartments (posh flats to you and me) and houses in this area are expensive

 

Dave, I suspect that people don't often sell their own gardens for the reasons you said. What does happen is that a developer or an individual buys a house with a large garden, builds in the garden, then sells both properties. if they are going to sell both - they don't care.

 

Yes Peter, I think you're right, but it has happened a few times around our way. There is one going up at the moment not far from us that is being built on a postage stamp and the owners are living in the original house.

There is a very small farm opposite our house which makes a nice view from the upstairs windows - I would hate to see that turned into yet more concrete constructons with tiny gardens...

 

Yesterdays local paper claims that 46% of new houses are "back garden" developments; it may be that what is actually happening in some cases is that a developer buys a property demolishes it and erects 2 or more on the original land this would make more sense of the figures. Still wrong though to allow it IMHO.
The other thing that gets up my nose is when a development of "affordable", often subsidised, properties goes up, within a year most of them are on the market at twice the price.

 

Until it becomes unprofitable to do it, it will go on. By that time we will all be crammed into these spaces and living on top of one another.
I hate to say it but I'd rather see a field of oil seed rape built on, rather than all this cramming.