Justice
The Cracks in Britain's Big Plan to Build 30,000 Affordable Starter Homes
For one thing, its definition of “affordable” is so optimistic as to be meaningless.
The U.K. government is so tired of waiting on private developers to build new homes that it’s going to build its own.
Faced with a nationwide housing crisis, Britain just earmarked £1.2 billion to directly commission 30,000 affordable new homes on brownfield sites by 2020, part of a target of 200,000 new homes in total. To speed things up, the first five new projects will be built on government land—ex-military sites, a goods yard, and a former hospital—in Southeast England. Given that someone on median salary (£26,500, or $39,000) cannot afford to buy a property in 91 percent of the country, the plan should ease the U.K.’s desperate affordable housing drought at least a little.