Around the turn of the last century, British urban planner Ebenezer Howard published a tract called Garden Cities of To-morrow, in which he laid out his principles for town planning and launched the garden city movement. Suburbs had already existed for decades in the West, but Howard formalized the idea of small towns, situated away from busy central cities, sitting within a greenbelt, with industry divided, or zoned, away from residential and commercial areas — a far cry from the bustling, chaotic, slum-strewn industrial cities of his day.

Howard’s garden city concept was thoroughly utopian — the movement dovetailed with other trends like Georgist “land rents,” co-operative housing and alcohol prohibition — but had practical expressions in the English towns of Letchworth and Welwyn, and the modern Western suburb more generally.

The idea has cropped up again, more than a century after Garden Cities of To-morrow’s publication, as the United Kingdom grapples with its housing crisis. Housing prices in the U.K. rose back in the 1970s and skyrocketed in the ’80s, ’90s and most of all the 2000s. They have leveled off since the economic crisis, but with supply across the nation tight, they’re likely to continue their meteoric rise, especially in and around London.

Most of the U.K. political establishment has accepted tight supply as the culprit and more building as the solution. Where, exactly, to build is a dicier question. London, as the country’s shining economic star and area of highest demand, has seen a fair amount of new construction, most prominently in the city’s core — a trend championed by former mayor Ken Livingstone and architect and planning adviser Richard Rogers — and also in the boroughs of outer London.

Opening up new land for development outside London, though, has presented challenges. Surrounding the city is the Metropolitan Green Belt, the largest of a series of protected rural areas outside big U.K. cities. Piercing this belt to build anything — even relatively dense, rail-oriented garden cities — is a tall order.

In March 2012, David Cameron pushed to identify sites for new garden cities. His coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, embraced the idea, but it appears that he’s been overcome by resistance from his own party. In November, the Financial Times reported:

Plans for a new generation of garden cities announced by David Cameron last year have been all but killed off after running into hostility in the Tory [Conservative] heartlands…

“Garden cities need to be in the Tory heartlands, a great arc from Oxford across [London] to Cambridge,” said one Lib Dem aide. “That’s where the real demand is, near jobs and close to the anticipated population growth.”

Now it seems the fears have been confirmed, as the FT updates:

…while Mr Cameron remains publicly supportive of new garden cities, he has grown nervous about pushing ahead with detailed proposals for fear of prompting a backlash among “Nimby” protesters in the run-up to the 2015 general election.

The prime minister has forbidden ministers from identifying any sites for potential new towns during this parliament, according to one Downing Street official.

The newly abandoned (or at least delayed) initiative under Cameron’s coalition government has parallels to a push in the late 2000s by the then-Labour government to build new “eco-towns” throughout England. Eco-towns progressed further than Cameron’s garden cities in that sites were identified, but they faced fierce local opposition and only a few were ever approved. Only one, a development of 6,000 new homes outside Oxford, looks like it will actually get built.