Your editorial comment on the scandal of the housing crisis (The Press, June 13) calls for incentives to be urgently introduced to get builders building affordable homes again.
Most of the rules and regulations which increase costs to house-builders come from central government and little can be done about them, but local authorities do have discretion in certain areas.
As far as York is concerned, the one big incentive that could get things moving is to accept that the affordable targets are unachievable and that the threshold of just two units in villages is utterly absurd. If City of York Council would just see sense and propose a realistic target of ten per cent affordable homes on sites of only ten or more dwellings, then some houses would get built.
As it is, both 25 per cent of nothing and 35 per cent of nothing yield exactly that – nothing.
John Jones, Former house-builder, Sand Hutton Manor, York.
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