SIR – Your editorial comment ‘Homes fight not a class struggle’ (T&A, January 26) was one of the best-considered responses to the emotive subject of ‘housing shortages’ I have yet read.
The supposed need for 45,500 new homes in the Bradford area is, as you say, based on unconvincing models of need and supply and has “mythological unchallengeable status”. Housing need is something very different from homelessness or forced overcrowding, and affording a home is different from building “affordable housing”.
Reclamation and restoration of large numbers of empty buildings will offer far more diverse and challenging employment to a wider range of skilled tradespeople and clever designers than will building uninspiring acres of new-builds.
Serious mistakes have been made around rehousing issues within our lifetimes: high-rise housing and large estates which have had to be demolished, and tiny apartments that do not meet anyone’s needs.
One of the redeeming features for working people living in Northern industrial towns has been ready access to nearby green open spaces. Campaigners are not all middle-class NIMBYs. Green spaces are “the lungs” of the wider locality, not only in an ecological sense but in a psychological and spiritual sense.
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