It is 2028, and in the old mill towns of east Lancashire terraced houses once destined for demolition have been rescued and renovated by residents who bought them for almost nothing. In the garden towns that have grown up in Bedfordshire you can walk to work through natural landscape. In Somerset, as in other shires, the next generation no longer has to move out, thanks to additions to villages planned by and for the people who live in them.

London borough councils are jointly building tens of thousands of the homes the city needs each year. Luxury towers in London, Manchester and Birmingham, left empty after the Great Crash of 2019, have been colonised by squatters who have formed themselves into cooperatives. In the outer suburbs of the big cities, declining high streets have been revived through the construction of four- and five-storey apartment buildings.

Nationally, house prices have stopped rising, with the result that they have gradually become more affordable as incomes go up. There are more homes to rent at affordable prices. Young families on modest incomes can once again expect to grow up in houses with gardens. New housing has been planned with shared open spaces, with schools and shops in walking distance, and with minimal need for cars. It is well designed, with good space standards, abundant natural light, accessibility for the disabled, durable finishes and net energy consumption of zero. Much is built to high standards in factories and transported in pieces to site. Some is hand-crafted. Some is built by its own residents, or comes in the form of weatherproof shells that they can finish off.

There is choice. You can live in a terrace, a suburb, a tower, a bungalow, a mansion block, a concrete estate. Your home can be old or new, perhaps to a contemporary design by one of the nation’s many talented architects, or in one of the popular revivalist styles: neo-Georgian, neo-brutalist, neo-postmodern (the true early adopters now go for neo-Blairian, which with witty irony emulates the glassy, optimistic architectural style of the late 1990s). Renting is as attractive as owning. You can join one of the increasing number of co-housing projects, or buy or rent from one of many community land trusts.

In this magical year, British housing is the envy of the world for its affordability and accessibility, for its planning, for the diversity and quality of its designs, for its intelligent use of new technologies in construction, for the multiplicity of tenures and of providers of housing – community groups, councils, housing associations, large and small developers. Delegations come from China, Canada and Sweden to study and learn. It did not happen easily, though: it was only after the Great Housing Riots, also of 2019, in which young doctors, teachers and solicitors linked arms with the ever more numerous homeless, that government was forced to take measures equal to the scale of the crisis.

It has been a triumph of recent years that local authorities have been allowed to build homes again

This sounds utopian, given the current state of housing in Britain – too scarce, too expensive, small and often badly designed – and its serious effects on social mobility, family life and economic growth. In London, average house prices are 14.5 times average income. It might take decades to save up enough for a deposit. For swathes of the population under 40, the prospect of ever owning a home has dwindled almost to zero. The idea that people might get homes they actually like, in which they might repose their identities and dreams, rather than the least bad option available to them, is fading.

But the great, remarkable truth is that the ideas behind this imaginary future exist already – the tools are here now – and most are already being put successfully into practice. To be sure, their application tends to be small-scale and piecemeal. What is lacking is the concerted political will to turn valiant and thoughtful initiatives into a programme that could transform millions of lives across the country.

This vision is not-utopian in another way, in that it does not rely on a single grand plan laid on a tabula rasa. Pretty much every week, if you write about housing and architecture, you get a press release announcing that such-and-such a bright idea – exceptionally tiny flats, factory-made houses, floating homes, homes built on stilts over railway lines or hospital car parks – will “solve the housing crisis”. Invariably, they will not, but collectively they might achieve something. This is partly because, since there will always be stresses and strains as housing strives to keep up with changing needs, it will never be “solved”. More important, housing is too complex a matter to be subject to a single magic bullet. What you need depends on who you are and where you are.

The first prerequisite for getting to this promised land – hard, for market-loving conservatives – is to abandon the belief that big business always knows best. It is the mindset, clung to over decades, that has given us the Carillion catastrophe. The current housing quagmire is in large part due to the belief that volume housebuilders can, by themselves, provide homes in the numbers and at the cost the country needs. They do not, have not and never will. No amount of reduction in planning controls, the preferred option of libertarians, will change this fact. Other providers of housing – community groups, local government, housing associations and small-scale builders – will have to make good the shortfalls of the handful of companies that dominate British housebuilding.

Hence the rising popularity of community land trusts, co-housing schemes and cooperatives, concepts that vary in detail but have in common the belief that a housing project is run by and on behalf of a community. Rather than selling homes for profit, surplus is recycled as community benefit. Typically, homebuyers pay only the part of the price that reflects construction cost rather than land value, with resales carried out on the same basis. The effect is that homes can be both bought and rented for considerably lower than market rates.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An impression of Hab’s housing scheme for Kings Worthy near Winchester.

There are many forms. On a sliver of land on the edge of Keswick, for example, there are two rows of houses, available for rent and part-ownership, that aim to counterbalance the way expensive holiday homes push locals out of the market. There are new terraces in Bristol and Bournemouth. There is the conversion of St Clements hospital in east London into 252 homes, with prices starting at £130,000. There is the Rural Urban Synthesis Society, which is planning to create housing in Lewisham, south London that will be partly built by its residents. In Barnet, north London there is a block of flats for a group called Older Women’s Co-Housing, which provides just what it says on the tin.

In Leeds, there is Lilac – Low Impact Living Affordable Community – a five-year-old co-housing development of 20 homes where construction in straw bales and timber, and designs that capture and store the heat of the sun, result in heating bills of almost zero. Residents share green spaces such as allotments, a pond, play areas and a “common house”, for communal meals, laundry, parties, film screenings and whatever else they fancy.

Alongside these ingenious, bottom-up approaches there is something government can do: wield a great British invention forged in the country’s imperial zenith in the late 19th century, and since emulated all over the world. I speak of council housing. It has been a triumph of recent years that local authorities, which had been banned from building homes since Margaret Thatcher’s time, have been allowed to do so again. The result, especially in some London boroughs, has been homes not only superior to those generally offered by the private sector, but which also, in some ways, provide the best council housing the country has ever had.

One example is Dujardin Mews, the first council-led social housing created by the borough of Enfield in 40 years. Architects Karakusevic Carson have designed two rows of pitched-roof, house-y looking buildings that provide 38 homes and a sheltered common street. Another is Worland Gardens in Stratford, by Peter Barber, a brick terrace poised on a row of bouncy-looking parabolic arches. There are more, for example in the boroughs of Hackney, Camden and Brent.

The success of such projects is partly a matter of building regulations and technology, which make them warmer, drier, safer and more accessible than ever before, and of the design standards imposed by the London mayor, which give them decent dimensions and outdoor space. It is also the effect of talented and dedicated architects, who squeeze the most out of the dry constraints of designing housing. If their works lack the heroism and creative invention of the best projects of the 1950s and 60s, they also lack that period’s architectural grandstanding. They are good at the things that matter most, like the success of shared spaces such as courts and gardens, the relationships of homes to streets, or getting homes and balconies to face the right way.

And then there are the property developers, rarely popular, and less so since it was revealed that the chief executive of the housebuilders Persimmon received a bonus of £110m, with the assistance of profits probably boosted by the publicly funded “help to buy” scheme. (Help to buy what, it might be asked – private jets? Yachts? Mansions?) But here too are signs of creative thought. For some time, there have been architecturally intelligent developers producing small projects in the better-off parts of the country. I’d cite an enclave of well-lit, well-proportioned, well-sited houses that the architect Tony Fretton designed in Pewsey, Wiltshire, for the developer Baylight. Or the just finished 81-87 Weston Street in south London, by the developers Solidspace and the architects AHMM, whose split-level interiors make a home into an event, rather than an accumulation of square-footage. The agreeable mini-neighbourhoods made by Hab housing, the company of TV-personality-turned-developer Kevin McCloud, deserve mention too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Social housing designed by FAT, at New Islington Square, Manchester.

If it might be objected that these smart, intriguing projects are for now but acupunctural pin-pricks on the flabby body of new housing, the same cannot be said of the new settlements being built by Urban and Civic, a company that deals in thousands of homes at a time. Their preference is for locations rarely discussed in the great housing debate – Rugby, or smallish Cambridgeshire towns called Alconbury and Waterbeach – which nonetheless feel the pressures of growth. The houses in these projects do not look architecturally radical, but Urban and Civic aim to plan the whole development as a coherent community and promise delightfulness in, for example, the schools they are building. The significance here lies in scale – housebuilders outside London have never before been able to build in these numbers at once – and forethought.

It’s an exaggeration to say that a thousand flowers are yet blooming. But there are, thanks to people driven by public spirit, the profit motive, creative impulse and/or frustration, more and better ideas being put into practice in British housing than has been the case for decades. Importantly, they take many shapes. The doctrinaire modernists of legend once prescribed towers and slabs in all cases, and there are now dogmatic nostalgists who say everything must be formed around a street. But there are many different ways to live. As, it should be blindingly obvious, there should be: a quick survey of existing villages, towns and cities would show there are many shapes in which to live.

One of these might be the garden city, influential invention of the late Victorian parliamentary clerk Ebenezer Howard, successfully realised in the form of postwar new towns, and proffered since the 1980s as a neat and nice-sounding way to get a lot of houses built in one place. It hasn’t proved so easy in practice – the “ecotowns” proposed by the last Labour government foundered on local opposition in the areas where they were proposed – but the actual, partly achieved development of North West Cambridge realises the basic principles of a garden city. It combines building and landscape, has easy access to nature, and puts homes close to work, schools and recreation. Its main departure from Howard is that it aims for higher densities than the old guru liked. If you are looking to minimise the use of land for building, this is for the good

Should a garden city’s harmonies of buildings and nature be too enervating for you, or its well-considered reed beds and cycleways too tedious, you can still live in a dirty old city like London. You might choose a tower, a typology alternately celebrated and demonised, and the subject of renewed debate since the Grenfell disaster. In reality, a tower is intrinsically neither good nor bad, safe nor dangerous – it all depends how it’s done. You might then choose one of the 198 homes now nearing completion on the Colville Estate in Hackney, to the designs of Karakusevic Carson and Sir David Chipperfield, hexagonal 20- and 16-storey blocks that bear a superficial resemblance to the towers the borough of Hackney once liked to blow up. Thanks to the aforementioned advances in regulations and construction, and more considered design, they are likely to be more loved and long-lived.

Or, if you want something between urban vibrancy and a garden city, you might find yourself in one of the intensified suburbs promoted by mayor Sadiq Khan and envisioned by the architects HTA under the title of “Supurbia”. The idea here is that more homes can be created in outer boroughs by increasing, in areas close to public transport, the prevailing two-storey building height to four or five. More people would mean more business for local shops and restaurants, which would give a shot in the arm to declining high streets. Lest anyone fear that the special character of roads of semi-detacheds is threatened, the majority of these suburbs, further from train stations, would stay much as they are.

The past will also be part of the future: in a decade’s time most of us, bar an apocalypse, will be living in buildings that exist now. In which case, the rescue and renovation of the 19th-century Welsh Streets in Liverpool, after a long campaign by local residents and Save Britain’s Heritage, will be another model for this non-utopian utopia. There are plenty of Victorian terraced houses in ex-industrial cities. In London, they are worth six- or seven‑figure sums; in parts of the north and the Midlands, they have been threatened, as the Welsh Streets were, with demolition. They are a neglected national resource, an unmined seam of housing stock that could be recovered by selling cheaply to individuals prepared to give the energy needed for their restoration.

If new housing follows the best current models it will be exemplary in its sustainability, its use of renewal energy and encouragement of walking, cycling and public transport over cars. We know how to do these things. It may even be that, by 2028, housebuilders will have realised the century-old dream of building homes like cars, in factories in large numbers, so that they can be erected quickly, efficiently and with the better quality that comes from making elements under cover rather than outdoors. Here, I’d like to point you towards some factory-built housing in which the insurance company Legal and General has decided to invest, but it’s not here yet. Instead, you might get a glimpse of a prefabricated future in Ladywell, in the London borough of Lewisham, where Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners have created a temporary residential development that can be picked up and moved around like a set of shipping containers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rogers Stirk and Harbour’s Ladywell development in Lewisham. Photograph: RSHP/Morley Von Sternberg.

We can also hope that new homes will in some sense look good. In recent years, architects have perfected the art of building simple, well-proportioned, usually brick structures. In the capital it’s called New London Vernacular, an updated Georgian that is at best handsome and dignified, at worst inoffensive. There is, by now, a certain amount of carping from the aesthetes’ gallery that it’s getting a bit dull and predictable. Leaving aside the riposte that British cities used to be built in much the same way over decades and centuries, without ill effects, it can be hoped that these complaints will provoke some liveliness in future housing. Architects of the future might draw inspiration from Barber’s bouncy arches, or look back to housing projects in Manchester (2006) and Middlesbrough (2013) by the late lamented architectural practice FAT, whose symphonic-pop, cartoon-Dutch-style vernacular for now represents a road not taken in housing design.

Of course, there’s a high chance that in 2028 we will still be lamenting the state of housing. Not all the bright ideas popping up now will prosper. Many are small-scale and marginal, and some will remain so. Nothing will be perfect and no one will be happy with everything (which is as it should be – imagine how dismal a country it would be if every house and every place were equally likable). Some might quake at those Hackney towers; others might find insipid the pitched-roof houses traded by Hab. Speaking for myself, I don’t want to live in a garden city: again, diversity of taste as it should be.

Very little will change if government doesn’t give the same sort of financial and political support that it currently gives to high-speed rail lines. It is a small, positive gesture that the word “housing” has been added to the job title of the communities secretary, Sajid Javid. It is slightly more positive that a Conservative government has said it will fund both council housing and community building, albeit with sums inadequate to the scale of the task.

Last October, a packed house at the Hackney Empire theatre in London, nearly 1,300 people gave a standing ovation to the 88-year-old architect Neave Brown after a lecture by the former local authority employee, who thought he had been forgotten. It was as moving as the often dry business of architectural talks could be. They were clapping because, as an architect working for Camden council in the 1960s and 70s, Brown had imbued public housing with thoughtfulness and creativity, which seemed to the youngish crowd about the best thing an architect could do. On 9 January this year, Brown died. His career was proof that we have been capable of such things in this country. His legacy should be that we do so again.