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NIMBY lobby is too powerful as a function of democratic politics in a capitalist society, because rich and powerful people disproportionately live in large single-family homes in locales whose character would be damaged by large-scale construction that would also be loud and annoying for existing residents.
The only solution is removing local elites to the greatest extent possible from planning and zoning decisions. This is why in the UK I have long advocated for the establishment of some remote central planning permission authority, perhaps somewhere in a small town in Wales or Scotland, which would approve all construction in Britain and wave everything through over the gnashing of local councils in London or the green belt. In the US the federal system, unfortunately, makes this even more difficult.
I say this over and over again, but specific infrastructure aside, we don't need to build more in the UK! The population is essentially stable, barring immigration which we could stop at any time. The green belt was a good idea that failed because we allowed people to build commuter towns on the other side of the belt; we don't need more sprawl, we need more cities, and I suspect we could do that if we really wanted to. Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge are popular basically because they're like London but more expensive: let people spill further and further into cheaper communities. Fund good city centres. Clean up the charity shops. I really believe we could achieve at least some of that if we had the will.
If nothing else, let's build better. So much planning resistance comes because everybody knows that new-builds will be ugly; if they didn't damage the locale then a lot fo people would be a lot easier on them.
The UK absolutely needs to build more even if immigration drops to 0. The UK has ancient housing stock that desperately needs replacing and the so called Green Belt is strangling the country. New builds should be beautiful yes but what counts as beauty should not be up to people living locally because they're personally incentivised to veto construction that's beneficial for the country. More density would be good but barring that more houses anywhere is good as well. If you don't want density you should absolutely hate the Green Belt because it forces dense building in cities by raising land values on buildable land to the point where the only thing that makes economic sense is apartments.
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We do need to build more, because the UK has the smallest, ugliest houses (barring some good stock inhabited by some rich people and/or pre-1920ish in construction) in the West. We need to be razing entire neighborhoods of shitty 1930s-1970s semi detached streets and replacing them with much larger, better homes, which will require more land.
Since that kind of demolition is going to get blocked on environmentalist grounds, the best option is just to build more and better in the hope that these ugly places collapse in value and homeowners lobby the government to be allowed to demolish and replace them.
The UK has the most retarded wall design that it needs to abandon first, though. Cavity walls suck, because you're sandwiching the insulation layer between two layers of masonry. You'll want to replace the insulation in a couple of decades and this means you'll have to dismantle the façade to get the old insulation out.
Either make the inner leaf warm enough that you don't need additional insulation (AAC or good honeycomb bricks) or replace the outer leaf with stucco or a thin façade of brick-shaped tiles that hangs off the inner leaf.
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Forgive me, I thought you were arguing for density. Partly from pattern recognition, partly because you appeared to be expecting resistance from people who 'live in large single-family homes in locales whose character would be damaged by large-scale construction'.
I don't think I've ever seen people arguing for less density, or for replacing awful postwar buildings. I always thought this kind of thing didn't happen because left-wingers are pro-density on principle and builders are pro-density on profit grounds. I think that people in general would be more keen on this, and would be more keen to suspend environmental concerns if the results looked good.
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