When The Guardian started talking about “Noddy” housing, they are not referring to the wooden cartoon character that drove around in a yellow and red taxi with a police officer named Mr. Plod. “Noddy housing” refers in this context to buildings that are built with low quality and little design feature, and in Britain refer to small houses built in the last thirty years by larger property development corporations.
In talking about “Noddy” or suburban tract low quality housing, the true costs of living in suburbia are discussed, a concept already explored in Price Tags in the enterprising work of transportation expert Todd Litman. Todd was talking about was the false economy of living in cheaper housing farther out from where people work, where car dependency and a lack of transit options means driving more and driving longer, with higher commuting costs.
In Great Britain, “Researchers visited 20 new housing developments around the country, many of which, in the report’s words, didn’t “connect to anything other than the road network…Central government assigns housebuilding targets to councils, which they must deliver purely on the basis of numbers. Local planners ask meekly for funding to integrate new developments into public transport networks and are told to get lost, because properly planned and integrated transport takes time, money and, above all, political will.”
Just like in Canada, Britain looks to the Netherlands where new development must demonstrate solid walking,cycling and public transport options for connectivity. Car journeys are rising in Britain after the 2008 financial crash. And sadly “Britain right after the war was better served by public transport than it is now. Until the late 1950s most towns and cities had extensive and cheap tram and trolleybus networks to complement buses. Rural and semi-rural areas were served by an extensive branch railway network until the 1963 Beeching report cut thousands of miles from the national network and closed more than 2,000 stations. Only in the late 1970s did some councils, facing increasing congestion and pollution, try to redress the imbalance by offering super-cheap bus fares on their municipal services.”
Until planners can require mandatory transit and walking and cycling connections as part of suburban development, “the bar was set miserably low, but only by necessity…Developments like these may as well be on the moon, for all they enable people to live the healthier lives they are told they should be living, to make the car-free journeys they are told they should be making, to be the citizens of “somewhere” rather than “nowhere” that they are exhorted to be.”
I think one of the main problems in the UK in regards to anything to do with housing and transportation policy is classism. People who are not in a car are considered low class and therefore no one in power feels their worth spending money on. People who might choose other ways if things were different don’t want to be in a lower class and struggle to pay for the higher class lifestyle.
For me living in the city with the high cost of housing has been okay. I can make more money than I can elsewhere. Food and transportation costs are lower. You could say that it evens out.