Gordon Brown, the U.K. prime minister, is preparing to order local governments to expand the amount of land available for development so as to alleviate that nation’s high housing prices. Although the media presents this as a conflict between “the environment” and affordable housing, it is in fact a conflict between an elite’s desire to preserve rural open space vs. a working-class desire for decent housing.
Wendell Cox’s survey of housing prices found that the U.K. had some of the least-affordable housing in the English-speaking world. Unlike Canada and the U.S., which both have some unaffordable areas and others that are affordable, virtually all of the U.K. is unaffordable.
Urban-growth boundaries can trace their origin to Queen Elizabeth I, who in 1580 ordered her people to “desist and forbear” any new construction within three miles of the gates of London. The U.K.’s Town & Country Planning Act of 1947, probably qualifies as the world’s first modern smart-growth law.
