We need a national ambition to build hundreds of thousands of new homes a year, both private and socially-rented - led by someone who will not take no for an answer and who will push for diggers in the ground and homes for all come what may.
Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.
A coalition with Tories and Liberal Democrats together is a golden opportunity to create the sort of planning reform that means not only can we have more environmentally sensitive planning, but we can have more homes and more schools.
I think that there will always be a need for Housing and Urban Development.
We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.
We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both.
None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.
If we build three million new houses by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?
We can build new housing while preserving the quality and character of adjacent residential districts and ensuring infill development strengthens the surrounding neighborhood.
We need to revisit that planning decision because in many cases across our capital [London], greenbelt land doesn't deserve the name. Car parks, quarries and wastelands are being protected and we are saying there isn't enough land to build the houses we need.
I'd hate to see new housing building accelerating while taking down buildings where there's 50 people living in rent-stabilized apartments.
While it's absolutely important that we build housing for our low-income residents, when we are talking about opening up hundreds of sites for housing, we should be trying to build affordable housing for all of our residents struggling to pay rent. That means housing for teachers, for nurses, for janitors.
It's hard to improve our schools. It's hard to redistribute wealth created by the concentration of technological and financial power or to increase middle-class wages. But it might be easier to lower middle-class costs by building more housing.
It is our dream that by the time we celebrate the 75th year of independent India, all the slums are replaced by cemented houses.
The government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens.
There does need to be a speed-up of the process.It takes entirely too long to addres5 some of those concerns and, in the process, it becomes so extremely expensive and cumbersome that it tends to turn away those people and companies that want to provide much needed housing.
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
There are several ways in order to reduce the housing problem.One way is to allow a developer to buy land more cheaply if it's in an outlying area.
Everywhere - all over Africa and South America - you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul. This is the prison this planet is being turned into.
We are asking the question: What makes the most sense for public-private partnerships for affordable housing.
It is about time county councils got back into the business of providing houses.
I always thought of Levittown as a joke.
All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed.
Incentives and infrastructure should encourage development and that development needs to contain the right types of housing in the right places.
No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.
