It's often said that one solution to the housing crisis would be to build on golf courses. These cover a vast area of land (3% of Greater London at the last count), are used by a tiny minority of the population and could easily be put to a much better use. But golf courses are also problematic places to build, invariably located in protected countryside a long way from convenient transport links, so are far from being the housing panacea some suggest. Instead what's needed is a much more radical approach to sourcing land in built-up areas, particularly underused space which'd be better off as housing.
Office blocks have proven to be entirely superfluous during the pandemic. Home working has been so enormously effective that it'd be extremely beneficial if these former places of work become homes instead. Most office blocks wouldn't even need significant modification other than to divide up the interior into saleable spaces, some with their own natural light and washing facilities. The resulting flats might be small but would be ideal for young people finding it hard to take their first step on the housing ladder, plus these new residents would undoubtedly enjoy living in the heart of a built-up area close to all the nightlife opportunities the heart of the city can offer.
Car parks are very often wasted space. Huge tracts of land are given over to accommodating vehicles that generally aren't present, indeed the majority of parking spaces are empty for the majority of the day. Out of town shopping malls are serial offenders, but also multi-storeys in town centres, backlots off high streets and parking bays in residential areas. This photo shows a gratuitously wasteful parking area in the midst of an estate in Bow, laid out when land was cheap and the car was king, but which could easily accommodate an extra block of flats. Its loss might inconvenience existing residents of neighbouring blocks who bought their property on the understanding it had a parking space, but given that we should be discouraging car ownership this is hardly an insurmountable issue.
Large supermarkets are an anachronism in an era of online shopping. Nobody needs to drive to a large building stocked with food and provisions when it can easily be driven to you, either pre-booked by electric van or on a whim by moped. The aisles given over to hundreds of brands, most of which you never buy, should instead be replaced by at least one substantial block of flats (and a couple more if the car park's been included). Where neighbourhoods insist on retaining a nearby source of food the optimal solution would be to build the flats anyway but shoehorn a replacement supermarket into the ground floor, this time with a significantly smaller footprint to better support the increased local population.
Our parks are invariably significantly underoccupied. They represent vast areas of open space at the very heart of our communities but are hardly ever busy, except at weekends in high summer, and even then the majority of the grass is vacant. Throw in the incontrovertible fact that parks are completely empty during the hours of darkness, which is precisely when accommodation is most needed, and the need to build on our municipal greenspaces becomes self-evident. Recreation grounds should be converted first because the tiny handful of local residents who play tennis, football, basketball and bowls can easily find alternative courts elsewhere. But parks of all sizes should be used to provide housing for hundreds of thousands in readily accessible locations, and won't be missed because there's hardly anyone in them anyway.
Churches are the epitome of a wasteful underused building. Most are only busy on Sundays, and even then at historically low occupancy levels, before spending the rest of the week virtually empty apart from a bit of flower arranging and the odd funeral. What's more most neighbourhoods have a positive surplus of places of worship, whereas by consolidating all the different denominations into a single building a significant amount of land could be released. Everyone could congregate together for one joint ecumenical service or, where this proved controversial, Sundays are easily long enough to space out several separate acts of worship across one day. Any listed buildings deemed surplus to requirements would be converted to flats while lesser churches could safely be demolished and rebuilt as blocks for social rent.
Schools are an abhorrent waste of valuable space. Each is only occupied for a few hours a day and pretty much vacated before 4pm, not to mention being closed for several weeks in the summer. School buildings are also entirely unnecessary at weekends, which is the complete opposite of places of worship, so there's an extremely strong argument for merging schools and churches into a single building. It's also the case that school playing fields could be quickly disposed of by the simple act of building a gymnasium in one corner and relocating all physical exercise within, thereby releasing vast tracts of land which would otherwise exist only to scar generations of uncoordinated schoolchildren.
Railways could simply and easily be utilised for housing. The area above the track is wasted space which could be completely transformed by constructing linear blocks of flats while trains continue running underneath. One key advantage of this approach is that residents would always be very close to excellent transport links. Construction costs might be high but these would be easily offset by the extortionate sale price of the resultant properties. The only downside is that rail passengers would no longer be able to see any kind of view as they travelled, but by providing free 4G in the tunnels they would likely never notice.
Houses are a wholly inefficient way of accommodating an urban population. They tend to accommodate just one family, or in extreme cases a single person, without making any attempt whatsoever at multi-storey uplift. Worse still they're usually surrounded by front and back gardens in which nobody whatsoever lives, whereas each and every suburban avenue could be blocks of flats as far as the eye can see. We need to demolish and completely redevelop our less dense suburbs - detached and semi-detached houses and supermarkets and parks and churches and schools and all - to create egalitarian highrise neighbourhoods providing affordable residential opportunity for all.
Think big and the housing crisis is easily solved.
