Discussion on answer by Grimm The Opiner: Is there a feasible route by which UK housing can be made more affordable without devastating the housebuilding sector and its employees?

@jamesqf About 0.1% of the UK is densely built on. That's not 1%, it's zero point one percent. A tenth of a percent. The UK is about 1.4% not-so-densely built on. So we are a very, very, very, very long way from making the UK a suburban sprawl from sea to sea. The problem is clearly not too many people.

0.1% of the UK is 'continous urban fabric' (80% to 100% is built on); 5.3% of UK land is 'discontinuous urban fabric' (50% to 80% is built on). bbc.com/news/uk-41901297 Or: 5.9% is 'built on', 2.5% is 'green urban', 56.7% is farmland, 34.9% is 'natural'. bbc.com/news/uk-41901294 The UK doesn't have a population problem, it has a work distribution problem.

Planning permission is needed to prevent gross misuse of land, e.g. somebody building a pig rendering plant in the middle of a residential zone. It is NOT needed to promote nimbyism and support the unearned capital gains of people who bought a five bedroom house in Finchley for £25,000 in 1975.

@jamesqf The data doesn't lie. ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/… digimap.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2017/09/22/… I expect that when you were here, you were in a built up area? Were you in a town? That's how most people end up thinking that the UK is all built up. They spend most of their time in built up areas, and extrapolate that to the whole of the UK, without realising that 90 something percent of the UK isn't built on or even near a building.

@Moschops, my idea of "built up" has to do with how hard it is to get away from a built-up area. Compare Balscote (three built-up areas within a two-mile radius) to Steptoe (nearest built-up area is eight miles away).