This is the only way to solve Yorkshire Dales housing crisis

I HAVE every sympathy with the views of Carl Lis on housing (The Yorkshire Post, March 14) but before we can create “affordable” housing we first have to define what the problem actually is.

Any property which is sold on the open market is inevitably going to be sold to the highest bidder, and in an area such as the Yorkshire Dales, this means wealthy individuals wanting holiday homes rather than local people earning local wages.

As far as I can see, the only possible solution is to provide homes which are not, and never will be, available for sale on the open market. That means that they need to be owned by a not-for-profit body such as a charitable housing trust, not by a commercial organisation with shareholders to satisfy, and not by a local authority because of ‘right to buy’ legislation.

Without that, all the talk of affordable housing is meaningless unless we are going to build small, cramped, badly- designed houses out of poor-quality materials.

Coun Lis hits the nail on the head when he says “landowners are not prepared to release land at a price that makes affordable housing development viable”. Of course they’re not. We can’t rely on the open market: we need to focus on a different solution.