[toyg]

> only propped up by house owners' short-sighted interests.

I disagree. Those sleeper villages exist because people don't want to live in cities. If they wanted to, they'd be elsewhere; but until very recently, you couldn't pay people to live in central Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham.

If you think developers want the greenfield to build high-rise, you're sorely mistaken. They will build more and more low-rise suburbia, because that's what people want.