OASIS CITIES – IF BUILT ON FORMER INDUSTRIAL SITES – COULD SOLVE THE HOUSING CRISIS

A typically unimaginative waste of land.  Just 80 new homes and a “retail park” (with lots of parking) approved for this site near Glasgow.  

Since OA-Cities will need large sites – ideally close to existing cities – a possibility that should appeal to both “Greens” and NIMBY’s is that OA-Cities would be ideal for former industrial sites. Such sites are classified as either “grey-field” or “brown-field” depending on the amount and toxicity of pollutants in the soil.  There is much political agitation to “solve the housing problem” by building new housing estates on such sites – thus preserving our precious “green-fields”.  This is naive thinking as such sites can take years to thoroughly clean up and thus can end up costing much more per acre than green-field sites, which can be built-on without delay.  But even after “de-contamination” they have a lingering credibility problem as, following many media scare-stories, potential house buyers will be concerned about potentially carcinogenic leftovers in the soil. This means that houses built on such sites are difficult to sell, so developers steer away from them.

But, despite hopeful greenie-led claims that such sites could “solve the housing problem”, the truth is that there are not enough such sites, or if there are they are in the wrong place.  To quench Britain’s “current housing demand” of 300,000 per year in addition to filling the backlog – perhaps another 200,000 per year are needed to quench the demand and (hopefully) to reduce prices.   500,000 homes per year built to present low-medium density (4,000 people per sq km) SPRAWL specifications – means an area of about 300 sq km, or the size of Birmingham, needs to built-over each year for the foreseeable future.  What a horrible thought..!

If we are really serious about wanting to preserve our countryside, OA-Cities are the only way to go.

Brown-field and Grey-field sites would be ideal for OA-Cities since they would make far more efficient use of the land.  Their much higher population density would mean more money would be available to beautify the surrounds to an extent that would be un-imaginable in a typical sprawl setting.  

Concerns about latent soil toxicity would be side-lined because an OA-City site will be excavated to a much deeper level than normal houses.  Besides which, nobody will be living anywhere near ground level, as the lower levels will be used for administrative, commercial, and light industrial purposes.