The Guardian: "London housing crisis: who dares to brown the greenbelt?"

"A London School of Economics professor argues that we should build homes on the capital's greenbelt, but London politicians prepared to back this view are few"

LInk to web site 
(and to the full LSE version from there)

"I liked Paul Cheshire's diagnosis of Britain's housing affordability crisis from the off:

"When things go wrong it is always handy to blame foreigners and currently even the liberal press are blaming them for our crisis of housing affordability.

"... "The problem is not 50 luxury houses empty on London's Bishops Avenue or foreign speculators buying luxury flats to keep empty. It is that we have not been building enough houses for more than 30 years – and those we have been building have too often been in the wrong place or of the wrong type to meet demand."

"So, what would Cheshire do to put things right? He'd start by busting a few myths about the greenbelt, not least by demonstrating its lack of actual greenness compared with urban parks and gardens and its lack of value to people who aren't farmers, golfers, consumers of 'horseyculture' or home owners within greenbelt areas. He writes:

"The reality is that a child in Haringey gets no welfare from the fact that five miles away in Barnet, there are 2,380 hectares of greenbelt land; or in Havering another 6,010 hectares.

"... What greenbelts really seem to be is a very British form of discriminatory zoning, keeping the urban unwashed out of the Home Counties - and of course helping to turn houses into investment assets instead of places to live."