For years, in the developer's equivalent of slash and burn, the building industry has taken the easy option of covering thousands of acres of countryside with an excrescence of new housing estates, while leaving derelict industrial land and worn-out city centres to decay.

Now, Neville Bann of the Yorkshire and Humber House Builders' Federation, asks us not to regard house building as a threat but to recognise the social contribution of builders and offer up more countryside to them ('New Homes No Threat', Letters, January 14).

Little wonder we see a housing industry with this short term and destructive approach to land-use as a threat.

A popular place to live, York is promoted by developers as a commuter centre for the region and beyond, stimulating housing "demand" far beyond the needs of city people. Then add "social housing need" based on a City of York Council survey acknowledged to have measured only "housing aspirations" and the resulting figure for supposed housing "need" is clearly greatly inflated by induced demand.

This inflated figure is being used to justify house building on land that should be York's greenbelt. Already, despite Government policy that 60 per cent of new development should be on brownfield sites, nearly 70 per cent of land which the city council wants to allocate for housing in the Local Plan comprises attractive and valuable greenfield sites. Of course we feel threatened.

The council's developing proficiency in recycling brownfield sites, if coupled with housing targets reflecting need rather than induced demand, could ensure homes for those genuinely in need while resisting threats to countryside. If Mr Bann would stop daydreaming of bulldozers devouring fields and concentrate his mind on a 21st century approach to sustainable land use, we would feel threatened no more.

Barry Potter,

Knapton Lane,

Acomb, York.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.