For a start, if you build a large number of houses anywhere you have to have the infrastructure to support them – be it roads, rail, electricity, water, communications, places to work etc. Without that infrastructure the houses will either not sell or end up as a typical inner city sink estate. Add the cost of the necessary infrastructure and the cost of the housing rises.

Mark appears to be ignoring this and assuming – as a lot of people do – that by adding to the outskirts of an existing town the existing infrastructure will cope – it will not because no one builds extra facilities for possible expansion – too costly.

There are ways round some of this but the whole building industry would have to change in the UK. Producing houses in standard modules in a factory that are then bolted together on site would drop the cost per house dramatically and so cover the cost of the infrastructure – in which case new towns could be built, maybe something along the lines of Milton Keynes. This might be the way forward by both providing new housing and preserving green space round existing towns.

http://www.simondale.net/house/

http://www.lammas.org.uk/

Imagine a country with houses like that dotting around the countryside!!!

I would live in one tomorrow.