UK government wants to build 3,000,000 new houses by 2020.

http://www.aboutproperty.co.uk/news/planning/urban-planning/eco-town-plan-insufficient-meet-carbon-targets-$481925.htm

I would say, it has more effect to refurbish old houses and make them more enery efficient - althout the idea of an "eco town" is quite good.

If 3 Million new homes are going to be built until 2020, will house prices (especially of old houses) drop even more ?

the thing i dislike about new build houses is that the walls are usually plasterboard and thin, i know because i have that in my house which is only 7 years old

They also want to build more prisons.
Haven't any of these people realised yet that we are just a small island?
Where will the saturation point be acknowledged?
By the time my great-grandkids are around, no one will remember what a tree looked like.

I love those houses in the pics you've posted!! But I wonder if it makes them more 'high maintenance' - just thinking of old thatched cottages, for instance.
Like you say, hopefully they aren't going at this half-cock, and we could actually see some really amazing things going on, and like you say too, hopefully they will remember 'the environment' includes farmland, forests etc still being around.

The hay is just inside of the walls...all the oxygen is removed and then the walls are closed.. first with a layer of wood and then with some sort of clay-plaster. So there is no decay and there is not more maintenance compared to other houses.

You can even modernize old-houses with this technique and build a hay, wood and clay layer around the outer or inner walls for a better insulation.

The house is also as stable as houses made of bricks in the end.

Would fire/buildings insurance go up though?
Being thick here, cuz I don't know how it works...

I have just had a look on here on a website with faqs concerning those buildings (an Austrian website).

Those buildings are ensured the same way as massive buildings.

House prices are still high, way too high compared to the average wage.
So if this is going to stay like that then we're going to see a return to the old days of ever more people getting trapped in rented accomodtion, with no hope of ever having a house of their own.

Rents are also rising, since the rentier has to pay off the mortgage and those who don't charge the going rate, which is a whopping amount per month.
Wage rise demands are on the up, no surprise.

Only by outstripping demand with supply can things change. Now remember they have been building 400,000 homes per year in Spain, so it can be done.
If house prices fall relative to incomes then people will be able to afford homes, and if it falls enough the pressure on wage rises reduces having an beneficial effect on the whole economy.

but of course a home is not a home without all the infrastructure that supports it. Firestations, hospitals, schools, clinics, telephone exchanges and lines, roads, rail, power lines, power substations, gas pipes, etc..... the list is huge.

Or of course we could just let things rot until we get Soweto-on-Thames with people squating in shanty towns living in filth.

Is it so good to own a house? Yeap, I'd say so.

I mean its OK to talk about mobility of labour and you can either have lots of cheap housing or lots of cheap rented accomodation. Mark you, you can get away with fixed labour if you have a good transport infrastructure able to speedily move poeple from their homes to their workplaces......like we don't have.
So as far as I can see, we neither have cheap enough housing due to decent supply, cheap enough rented (as far as I see), nor do we have good transport, or work comming near to where there is cheap housing, and cheap rents.

In theory if rents are cheap enough, then you can invest the savings elsewhere, stocks, shares, etc.....and live a decent life, but down my way I see neither, cheap housing nor cheap rents.
Nor good transport, or good enough roads. I'm lucky, work is nearby, but I know some at work who come from as far as Portland and Winchester.....every day.

Rents would pauperise me! I might as well pay off a mortgage and have something after decades of poverty than have decades of poverty and nothing much at the end but even more poverty as a pensioner on a not good enough pension.

The only time I'd consider a buying a house now would be after my parents die and I inherit theirs.

Hell a 'studio flat' (aka one room with a bit of chipboard to partition off the toilet) is at its lowest 89,000, according to the local mags on property. Now to me thats the upper limit of what I can afford on my own.
So if I had to buy now on my own money its the out of the way caravan park for the 35,500 caravan. Located near the nasty part of town with all the drunks, addicts and criminals. Zero buses and getting out of the area to the rest of town is a not easy.

Went to France last year, saw a magazine on property there. Payes de Calais region, properties for 60,000 Euros, one even 43,000 Euros.
I could afford those!

Two years ago I read of a woman on 35,000 who qualified for housing support in buying her London flat and back then the average wage was certainly less than 24,000.

I agree