Making affordable housing a distant prospect | Letter

By Guardian Staff · The Guardian Opinion

The towns newly crowned as ‘affordable’ are simply the latest recipients of metropolitan overflow, says Richard Eltringham Your piece on “affordable commuter hotspots” was a welcome reminder that, in Britain, affordability is now a theoretical concept best observed from a moving train ( Revealed: the new affordable commuter hotspots in Great Britain, 7 March ). Only here could a house become “affordable” the moment you attach a season ticket priced like a minor surgical procedure. It’s the sort of logic that would make sense only to someone who has never attempted either. We’ve quietly accepted that the solution to unaffordable housing is … distance. Not building homes, not reforming planning, just encouraging people to live far enough away that the numbers look respectable on a spreadsheet. The towns newly crowned as “affordable” are simply the latest recipients of metropolitan overflow, rewarded with more commuters and none of the infrastructure. Continue reading...