James Jackson Abrahams is a stay-at-home dad, business owner, and prospective councillor.
This weekend, I took my toddler son to oppose a NIMBY protest in my local area. I wanted him to see the faces of the people trying to destroy his future prospects of ever owning his own home in the area he and I grew up in.
I found myself in front of a semicircle, yelling this message at the top of my lungs as these people chanted louder and louder: you are destroying my and my son’s future. (This was after a weekend of tackling a succession of ridiculous arguments with some of the organisers on Facebook.)
Despite this, I am a Conservative member and am active in our local campaigns.
I strongly believe we need to build more homes. We have a national housing crisis, and we’re feeling the effects here in Epsom and Ewell. I grew up here as a teenager and my parents still live here. I wanted to move back because as a Conservative I strongly care about family and wanted my son to grow up knowing his grandparents and cousins.
I could just about afford it, having spent my 20s focusing on building my own technology business, but what I found is that on a doctor’s salary you can barely buy a flat, and local businesses are struggling with empty lots in the high street both in Ewell and in the larger nearby towns of Sutton and Epsom.
Yet the priority for the local residents seems to be blocking housing and building at every turn. The council proposed a woefully small number of houses: 5,400 new homes, a tiny dent in the four million residences we need. Yet even 2,000 proposed homes on a greenfield site has caused outrage.
The case against it is based on deeply flawed arguments. Critics have said they are not opposed to building new homes – they just want brownfield sites first. They claim to, as a group, support a plan put forward by Chris Grayling, our local MP, for development on a site close to the station.
In theory, I am in favour of this plan and like lots of aspects of it. Its location is one I know very well and, having lived in London, I like living in flats above commercial areas. However, the individuals within this cross-party pro-greenbelt group present so many flawed nimby arguments that it is hard not to treat them with suspicion.
They keep making the frankly ludicrous argument that building more homes will not decrease house prices. They would quote statistics that house building in the last 20 years hasn’t lowered house prices and suggest it is because of interest rates and financing costs.
But even the articles they send me (that looked at house prices over the last 175 years) show that at the end of the 19th Century there was a period of house price decline due to a sustained house building campaign.
Others, meanwhile, simply said that I was a moron because I cared more about people – the potentially 8,000 humans who would be living happily in the new homes – than animals, that can’t make anything or do anything themselves!
Finally they would argue that these homes won’t be affordable. They seemed to think that greedy property developers would build 2,000 homes on the green belt and leave them empty for a century as literally no one would be able to buy them.
When I read every article they sent to me, and tried to rebut them line by line, they told me they wouldn’t talk to me anymore. Stakeholder engagement at its finest.
This leads me to a place of suspicion. If these people are prepared to throw out all common sense and genuinely try and sell to me the ridiculous idea that supply and demand doesn’t work, and we can create an infinite money machine by building new homes (on the farmland that takes up 70 per cent of our land whilst providing us 0.5 per cent of our GDP), do they really want Grayling’s brownfield site plan?
Or are they merely going to stop this housing development and move on to stop some other plan? In one case they reject a plan because it is building too many expensive unaffordable homes; then they also reject other plan to build affordable flats because the building is too big.
This issue has caused a lot of soul searching as to whether this party has anything for me. However, I have concluded that I am still proud to remain a Conservative.
I see nothing on the other side doing anything close to what the Tories are doing. I believe Grayling is trying to build homes – but has to balance the local residents’ desire for stasis.
When I stood as a local councillor in Epsom and Ewell, I found Labour voters, Liberal Democrats, and non-political residents all united to stop some local businesses opening or expanding, yet I found understanding in the local Conservative branch (even if not full support).
Even the local Residents’ Association (who proposed the plan to build on the green belt) will regularly blame the central government as forcing them to do it; there is no principled stand in favour of housing.
In wider politics, Sir Keir Starmer’s latter-day conversion to the cause of building is good style, but the substance is dubious – he didn’t make it one of his five national missions.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen my young Conservative friends fight for new homes much more than their counterparts on the local left, some of whom have moved into new builds and immediately started telling me that another estate in their area was going to make things worse!
The manifesto I voted for, and some of the laws brought into reform housing at the start of this Government, was the first sliver of hope I’ve seen.
When I first stood as a local councillor, I put on my pamphlet that I would defend the green belt.
At the time I bought into the idea that, yes, maybe it’s important to compromise. I suppose wind turbines look ugly, no one wants to live in large flats, we do need more schools, infrastructure, doctors, and so on. So I kept my head down.
But now, if the party wants me to remain part of it, I will shout loudly: we need more homes, we need more buildings, we need more power plants, we need it more than every inch of the green belt, more than every last animal habitat, more than every last pretty skyline.
Hopefully, the tide will turn. But even if I fail, I will be able to look my son in the face and say: “I tried – and you were there.”
James Jackson Abrahams is a stay-at-home dad, business owner, and prospective councillor.
This weekend, I took my toddler son to oppose a NIMBY protest in my local area. I wanted him to see the faces of the people trying to destroy his future prospects of ever owning his own home in the area he and I grew up in.
I found myself in front of a semicircle, yelling this message at the top of my lungs as these people chanted louder and louder: you are destroying my and my son’s future. (This was after a weekend of tackling a succession of ridiculous arguments with some of the organisers on Facebook.)
Despite this, I am a Conservative member and am active in our local campaigns.
I strongly believe we need to build more homes. We have a national housing crisis, and we’re feeling the effects here in Epsom and Ewell. I grew up here as a teenager and my parents still live here. I wanted to move back because as a Conservative I strongly care about family and wanted my son to grow up knowing his grandparents and cousins.
I could just about afford it, having spent my 20s focusing on building my own technology business, but what I found is that on a doctor’s salary you can barely buy a flat, and local businesses are struggling with empty lots in the high street both in Ewell and in the larger nearby towns of Sutton and Epsom.
Yet the priority for the local residents seems to be blocking housing and building at every turn. The council proposed a woefully small number of houses: 5,400 new homes, a tiny dent in the four million residences we need. Yet even 2,000 proposed homes on a greenfield site has caused outrage.
The case against it is based on deeply flawed arguments. Critics have said they are not opposed to building new homes – they just want brownfield sites first. They claim to, as a group, support a plan put forward by Chris Grayling, our local MP, for development on a site close to the station.
In theory, I am in favour of this plan and like lots of aspects of it. Its location is one I know very well and, having lived in London, I like living in flats above commercial areas. However, the individuals within this cross-party pro-greenbelt group present so many flawed nimby arguments that it is hard not to treat them with suspicion.
They keep making the frankly ludicrous argument that building more homes will not decrease house prices. They would quote statistics that house building in the last 20 years hasn’t lowered house prices and suggest it is because of interest rates and financing costs.
But even the articles they send me (that looked at house prices over the last 175 years) show that at the end of the 19th Century there was a period of house price decline due to a sustained house building campaign.
Others, meanwhile, simply said that I was a moron because I cared more about people – the potentially 8,000 humans who would be living happily in the new homes – than animals, that can’t make anything or do anything themselves!
Finally they would argue that these homes won’t be affordable. They seemed to think that greedy property developers would build 2,000 homes on the green belt and leave them empty for a century as literally no one would be able to buy them.
When I read every article they sent to me, and tried to rebut them line by line, they told me they wouldn’t talk to me anymore. Stakeholder engagement at its finest.
This leads me to a place of suspicion. If these people are prepared to throw out all common sense and genuinely try and sell to me the ridiculous idea that supply and demand doesn’t work, and we can create an infinite money machine by building new homes (on the farmland that takes up 70 per cent of our land whilst providing us 0.5 per cent of our GDP), do they really want Grayling’s brownfield site plan?
Or are they merely going to stop this housing development and move on to stop some other plan? In one case they reject a plan because it is building too many expensive unaffordable homes; then they also reject other plan to build affordable flats because the building is too big.
This issue has caused a lot of soul searching as to whether this party has anything for me. However, I have concluded that I am still proud to remain a Conservative.
I see nothing on the other side doing anything close to what the Tories are doing. I believe Grayling is trying to build homes – but has to balance the local residents’ desire for stasis.
When I stood as a local councillor in Epsom and Ewell, I found Labour voters, Liberal Democrats, and non-political residents all united to stop some local businesses opening or expanding, yet I found understanding in the local Conservative branch (even if not full support).
Even the local Residents’ Association (who proposed the plan to build on the green belt) will regularly blame the central government as forcing them to do it; there is no principled stand in favour of housing.
In wider politics, Sir Keir Starmer’s latter-day conversion to the cause of building is good style, but the substance is dubious – he didn’t make it one of his five national missions.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen my young Conservative friends fight for new homes much more than their counterparts on the local left, some of whom have moved into new builds and immediately started telling me that another estate in their area was going to make things worse!
The manifesto I voted for, and some of the laws brought into reform housing at the start of this Government, was the first sliver of hope I’ve seen.
When I first stood as a local councillor, I put on my pamphlet that I would defend the green belt.
At the time I bought into the idea that, yes, maybe it’s important to compromise. I suppose wind turbines look ugly, no one wants to live in large flats, we do need more schools, infrastructure, doctors, and so on. So I kept my head down.
But now, if the party wants me to remain part of it, I will shout loudly: we need more homes, we need more buildings, we need more power plants, we need it more than every inch of the green belt, more than every last animal habitat, more than every last pretty skyline.
Hopefully, the tide will turn. But even if I fail, I will be able to look my son in the face and say: “I tried – and you were there.”