1) Housing affordability relates to building relative to growth rate. For a variety of reasons, inlcluding both London's glboal appeal and a fact that it is so dominant culturally, economically, etc. within the UK it's likely this rate of increasse was still not enough.
2) A lot of the building has not necessarily been what you'd call affordable. While you will get some benefit moving wealthier people, expats, and short term business lets, etc. to new stuff, that's way less efficient for solving the problem of affordability than just building enough homes for the people who need them directly.
3) Too much of London's (new and existing) real estate is owned as an investment and goes mostly unoccupied. This is a scandal and there should be large tax penalties for unoccupied housing.
I think what you hear is true but it is not the whole truth. It would be easy to allow developers in to build new housing in a way that wouldn't help at all (but would make them lots of money).
4) smaller households. You can add 50% more housing, but if more people are spending more of their years single, and desiring to live in their own abode, then increase in demand could easily outpace increase in supply.
The number of people per dwelling went up though, so that hasn't happened, at least not on average.
But I think the average could be misleading if the household size had gone up significantly in council homes, hiding a slightly falling household size in the private sector. But that's pure speculation.
Cities like London could absorb pretty significant population growth with high quality, high density home building of the right type, in the right areas as long as they also invest in infrastructure and services too.
Obviously making up the infrastructure and investment gap in other medium and large UK cities might make more sense. Most of the UK’s next 10-20 cities by size (at least) could probably take on a doubling or more in population while also becoming wealthier, easier to get around, and better overall for everyone who lives in them.
Just needs competent government and proper investment in the right places, which have sadly been far from forthcoming for a while now.
Probably better to ask ourselves more holistically what good urban design looks like.
There are very pleasant and extremely livable high density cities (or areas within them) as well as many example of lower density urban and suburban environments that are awful.
Also, buildings are not really getting “ever denser and taller” except in the most extreme cases. In London, for example we’re usually talking about taking low density low quality housing or currently unused or underused ex-industrial land and turning it into higher density housing, offices, and retail. But this is not so high density that it icomes close to pushing the boundaries of what’s already known to be workable, especially when paired (as it usually is in London at least) with public space, local amenities, and transport upgrades.
I agree there’s almost certainly a maximum density above which we don’t know how to make cities livable.
London is nowhere near that. The relatively dense parts that suck to live in suck for other reasons or because of poor design (read: lack of care for the people who will live there from the designers/funders). Sprawl scales as badly, though it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t.
As for the rest of the UK: there’s even more opportunity to introduce well thought out density alongside infrastructure improvements and create a net benefit for everyone.
> we're creating the problem by literally importing people.
This is the opposite of how I see it. The UK could easily grow by properly investing in cities and infrastructure without eating into green space (and still meet climate goals).
Given the current unsettled world, we should be opening the doors to the smart and ambitious with a sensible but significant plan to increase population and have multiple globally important cities in say 20 years. Check out Canada for an (albeit incomplete and not without its challenges) example.
2) A lot of the building has not necessarily been what you'd call affordable. While you will get some benefit moving wealthier people, expats, and short term business lets, etc. to new stuff, that's way less efficient for solving the problem of affordability than just building enough homes for the people who need them directly.
3) Too much of London's (new and existing) real estate is owned as an investment and goes mostly unoccupied. This is a scandal and there should be large tax penalties for unoccupied housing.
I think what you hear is true but it is not the whole truth. It would be easy to allow developers in to build new housing in a way that wouldn't help at all (but would make them lots of money).