Politicians are finally doing something about housing shortages

TO GET A sense of why London has such expensive housing, visit Tottenham Hale. You might expect that, next to an Underground station where central London is accessible within 15 minutes, there would be plenty of houses. In fact, there is a car wash. The land on which the car wash sits is officially classified as “green belt” land, which means that building houses on it is almost impossible. Across just five big cities in England there are over 47,000 hectares (about 116,000 acres) of similar land, which is not particularly green, is close to train stations with a good service to their centres, and yet cannot be built on. That is enough space for over 2.5m new homes at average densities.