Literary giant and social commentator Germaine Greer has turned her critical powers away from Jane Austen and onto the British housing industry. Writing in The Guardian Greer described the British house as an “environmental disaster.” She said that people want larger houses at a time when households are shrinking. “By far the highest proportion of British people now live in single-occupancy units, but there is no new thinking about how to combine them for maximum benefit to environment or inhabitants,” she said. Greer, more famous for books such as The Female Eunuch than her previously hidden knowledge of housing, appeared to back the government’s push for higher density housing. “Stacking dwellings on top of each other is the best way of reducing the built footprint; apartment blocks may stand in properly managed common land that provides habitat for the full range of species. They require less footpath, less hardstand; people who live in them in New York or Hong Kong can more easily do without cars,” she said.