Solved the housing crisis, but created a few new problems.
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I don’t know about the UK, but in the U.S. they’re usually allowed to operate unregulated until the inevitable accident happens. This happens every few years with the “dollar vans” that serve NYC neighbourhoods neglected by the MTA.
I tend to think that as the U.S. and UK continue to regress to highly unequal societies that governments will start treating these exurban favelas like their developing-world counterparts: as long as the poors aren’t encroaching on the enclaves of the wealthy they’ll be allowed to risk food poisoning and traffic accidents where they live.
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That struck me as too low as well. But I spent 20 seconds on Google and found it was $6-7 / US Gallon
It seems low because the exchange rate is historically very low - the “normal” exchange rate GBP-USD is ~1.5-1.6. So that would put this at closer to $8/gallon
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Gotta’ love the useless sidewalks. At least here in SW Ontario where we see similar development, we don’t kid ourselves. We build the road, we build the townhouse, and we separate the two with a gutter.
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California as it exists now was entirely built around the automobile. The few pre-automobile urban layouts that existed were either totally destroyed or radically re-worked, early-to-mid 20th century, to make way for cars (with the exception of parts of San Francisco, and a few random blocks here and there in some city centers). I don’t think the UK can catch up without leveling the country and starting over. (So… maybe post-Brexit…)
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And given that the average income in England is about £27,000…
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This also sounds like the Atlanta suburbs of 10-15 years ago. (Probably like the Atlanta suburbs of today, too, but I haven’t been there in 10-15 years.)
Which will, of course, have insufficient parking spaces in its car park, because of the same planning regime that allows housing developments that cannot be inhabited UNLESS you have a car, to encourage use of public transport - that does not exist. Welcome to the UK’s utterly bonkers planning system.
So all the streets around the station will become congested with parked cars until the council bans non-resident on-street parking and even residents have to buy expensive permits to do it.
I despair.
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If zoning laws allow, and if there’s still room and not completely surrounded, it may not be too late for some add-ons to make it more like this:
https://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/
It may happen naturally.
Nothing like a blank slate.
Gotta start somewhere.
Once it gets lived in a bit, and if some people are a bit creative, things could change…
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I’m reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling right now. I was struck by his descriptions of how much more car use there is now compared to 20 years ago (when he wrote Notes From a Small Island). Small villages with basically one-lane roads used to be accessible on the weekends but are now all but un-visitable because of traffic and overflowing parking lots. Sounds hideous, not to mention incongruous.
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I really wish the UK would stop copying the awful bits of the USA. They’re not supposed to be an example.
That’s been done, hugfely sucessfully.
I am concerned to see that the developers are insuring against the imminent announcement of a Window Tax in the upcoming UK Budget.
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Originally a “dollar” was a one-ounce silver coin, and of course a “pound” was twelve ounces …
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A perfect place for introverts 
Blimey - Corby - I went there once as I lived down the road in Kettering (for my sins) and I was curious to see what everyone was talking about. Having lived in deprived areas for a reasonable proportion of my adult life I’m fairly inured to urban squalor, shitty town centres full of charity and betting shops with very little else, no decent facilities and the best thing about such places being the road out. But still…Corby…wow. The epitome of ‘concrete and piss’ living. One of the worst places I have ever seen, and certainly the worst one with the temerity to call itself a town. If people are moving there from London…I know it’s doable commuter-wise (although the rail service is not the best, as memory serves), and probably cheap…but folks, it’s not a place you want to raise your children.
BTW they’ve been building developments of that style of ‘housing’ in Yorkshire for years. We call them the internment centres. Many of them are built on historic flood plains or contaminated land, and the build quality is shockingly awful; the Victorian terraces, of which these are the modern equivalent, let’s face it, will outlast these pooped-out cardboardy excrescences by at least a hundred years. What is Britain coming to? Gods it’s depressing. Bring on the asteroid to finish us all off.
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These house are for people to buy, and you can’t be poor and buy a house in the UK. You can’t even earn an average wage and afford to buy a house in the UK if it’s within commuting range of London.
This is more like making sure the middle classes don’t encroach on the enclaves of the wealthy (whilst getting more wealthy by selling them the shitty houses in the first place).
(Average wage in uk: £27,000, largest mortgage you’ll be able to get with that wage: ~£135,000, average house price in Corby: £185,000. Sucks to be under forty)
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I really wish I could share your optimism. But do you remember a British TV show from years ago called 1990?
That, folks, is where we are headed, unless we manage a fairly major volte-face, and sharpish.
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In my original comment I was talking about the future, when they become exurban favelas.
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Technically the American term projects refers to government-subsidized housing in urban areas, often with the subsidies paid to contractors which build and manage the housing, providing the minimum safety standards and landlord services they can possibly get away with without being sued, and occasionally crossing even that line. The UK equivalent would be council housing.
These “exurbs” (beyond the suburbs) are commuter towns (though calling them towns or villages is pushing the term) built by developers hoping to cash in on people who don’t qualify for public housing, but can’t afford to rent or own private housing in increasingly expensive urban and suburban price bubbles caused by a number of factors but deliberately exacerbated by investors who increase their returns on their investments driving up the cost.
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lol, I lived in Newton Aycliffe for six years when I was a kid.
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