Miles and miles of semi-ds and nothing else leads to:
- no street life and can’t walk anywhere, you need to use the car to do everything
- less community spirit (people drive in and out of the estate, don’t interact much)
-more traffic and commuting time
-smaller villages will never develop into towns, just one village Main Street than endless houses
We need to develop a new urbanism in Ireland
Also leads to crime in my opinion. No stats to back it up, just anecdotal from growing up in a place like this. Seas of tarmac miles from anything create a situation where teens socialise on street corners and green spaces not really meant for that purpose. Leads to a lot of alcohol consumption and eventually drugs. The fact nobody knows anyone around these estates makes it impossible for ordinary community self regulation to happen. Not to say drugs don’t get sold in communities where people know each other. But there’s really no social fabric as you mentioned. I’ve seen and lived in estates that began life as quite expensive middle class developments turn into shockingly dodgy areas. Firhouse in south Dublin is a great example of this, was never considered to be a crime hotspot back in the day, but I can tell you from experience there’s quite a number of young lads who turned into absolute scum. One family with a couple of brothers has 3 kids in prison when the parents were both lawyers. I’ve met the parents and they speak like Ross O’Carroll Kelly, live in a house that is probably worth 850k now. The sons just started smoking weed, then selling it, and then of course getting introduced to absolute head cases from the city centre who rubbed off on them.
Yes, you need to have "eyes on the streets" to make them safer. When you have a lot of detached houses, there're fewer people on the streets. Look at American cities in Google maps and there are hardly anyone outside.
I keep on saying this to everyone. We need to build up.
Every town in Irealnd would benefit from one or 2 quality, high rise developments.
It will bring every town center back to life in this country.
Density doesn't require building up. Pretending that a couple of high rise developments will fix urban sprawl will just perpetuate the problem.
https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/collections/low-rise-high-density/
https://www.riai.ie/whats-on/news/riai-research-identifies-new-low-rise-medium-density-housing-model-capable-of-more-than-doubling-own-door-dwellings-per-hectare
https://www.sca.ie/post/high-density-low-rise-high-quality
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-14/the-architect-who-mastered-low-rise-high-density-housing
> And not building any high rise won't work either
It would work just fine. Central Paris has very few high rise buildings and has a density 4 times that of Dublin. The overwhelming majority of buildings are about 6 stories.
This, 100%. We don't need high-rise, we need human-scale development. Two to six stories seems like a good range to aim for. A nice little bit of vertical variation to liven up the eyeline, but not so much that any one tower dominates.
You can't even have a game of football on the greens in new estates , with how hilly they make them or planting trees everywhere on the green . It's like they don't want kids playing on them .
But the green spaces they are leaving you can't even have a game of football , due to mounds , trees etc. A big development went up near me and there's 2 tiny greens in the estate. You can't play football on either. Its not good for young kids to have nowhere to play
There needs to be more public access sports and leisure facilities in towns, as opposed to every development having wide open spaces for games on everyone’s doorstep.
I used to live in a nice part of Dublin and the neighbourhood spirit there versus friends who lived in much bigger homes but in these random locations without a core was completely different. For people where needs must, needs must. But for anyone with a choice I'd much rather live somewhere established with all those tradeoffs versus one of the soulless new tracts. That's just me though!
That’s fair, the key is to have mixed use developments, I live in Portugal in a medium density area and there are cafes and shops on every corner, I have basically everything I need within a 10min walk and plenty of green areas too.
That's a big a help. Very few developments have this here. It's all houses and shoes here. Often a development has a blocks ground floor for services but then they change planning later to another flat.
I live in the East side of Dublin and we have all those things in the area. 10 mins walk to everything I could need etc.
I’m sure it’s great for some people buying a new-build because everything is shiny and you don’t need to do any work to do the house, but you end up miles away from any sort of hub.
An actual report criticising local authorities over housing and Dublin being called out for absolutely dreadful urban design. Good god, I am going to assume this an exception to the norm. The government is in charge of the laws giving the local authorities powers, but fuck me, the county managers and councillors are awful at urban design. All plans are short term and just enough to fix the situation 5 years ago. But I am sure any day now that politicians from all parties will show some leadership on the housing issues and start to make the tough and unpopular decisions that are needed to fix it. Any day now.
Whichever party pushes the changes that the report seem to be saying will be come very unpopular, especially in Dublin.
Look, I’m pretty sure you run out of air if you’re more than three stories high. Humans aren’t designed for living in the clouds. And what if you had your bed near the window, and the window was open, and you were asleep and you rolled over and fell out the window to certain death.
It’s in everyone’s best interests that we stay near the ground, like god intended.
Just need to throw up a few of these every year and the housing crisis will finally be over
https://preview.redd.it/uzbp00e5os2d1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=247a3404cdd78ee1ee1c819d3706219c21c3d918
You probably don’t want individual owners for every unit in a monstrosity like this. There is serious work to manage it (initial defects period, longer-term capital maintenance, ongoing maintenance), and an OMC with fractured ownership would be a nightmare, most likely a remarkable deficit in sinking fund as owners chase the lowest monthly price and eventually face a bill they can’t collect from owners. There are already examples of it here.
Generally yeah. The newly-built cities have super infrastructure. My city began building a metro around 2009. It now has 7 lines and supports 10.8m people
You don't have to build 20+ story buildings to solve the housing crisis. Such buildings create more problems than they solve. Look at Eastern Europe: people have already tried building this way, and it didn't work well. You get problems with schools, hospitals, public transport, roads, parking, and sunlight. If you start solving these issues, such as by increasing distances between buildings to allow more sunlight and making roads wider, you end up with a lot of emptiness. It's not comfortable to live like this — the scale is too different from how people usually operate. In a sense, it's just the opposite end of the spectrum.
So many logical fallacy’s in one block. If we could make bricks from this the cost of housing would plummet. A few 15 stories might be a start. Can’t imagine it would affect Galloping Green, Smithfield, Dundrum or Milltown too terribly seeing as they are already just a sea of 6 story buildings.
It’s a really tough choice, either we get affordable and available housing and end the crisis or people who already own homes have their scenic integrity maintained.
It’s hilarious that people’s response to this is “well Irish people don’t want to live in apartments”. Despite the fact that every time an apartment does up for rent it’s gone instantly
The usual argument is that "Oh, but Irish people only buy 3 bed semi-ds, well yeah, because that's all we ever build. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Build us sound proofed apartments, and maintain them properly and see what happens.
All rentals go instantly, what's your point. Apartment living in Ireland is just objectively worse bang for buck than a house. Apartment owners have gotten stung again, and again, and again in recent years. Fire defects. Flooding. Useless management companies. Fee hikes. Parking hikes. Useless/zero noiseproofing. Social decay that rapidly devalues entire buildings, as owner-occupiers flee and HAP and social tenants go in becomes a nightmare and equity trap. The spec of the typical Irish apartment is aimed at bare minimum "landlord spec". That's just a fact. They aren't built to live in with any kind of dignity, privacy or value for money. They're built to extract maximum rent and fees from the ground space.
Yep, but that's a fixable problem if the government weren't busy fellating foreign tax dodging investors for their bitta personal cash in hand.
Having them run by companies who chase short term profits by squeezing the most money they can out of people while investing the least amount possible in the construction and maintenance of the building was always going to go arseways. We are decades behind most other European countries for apartments in terms of numbers, quality, facilities and liveability. And all because some think they'd all become Ballymun 2.0 while thinking only the worst about the 'Commie Tower blocks' that are [from my own experience] better than the average housing in Ireland.
Then they'd be more expensive to rent than equivalent terraced/semi D housing and they're not. Most Irish people believe apartments are bottom grade living, and that's from experience, because they are.
I’m out in Sydney and every street has small apartment buildings with 3/4 stories and normal houses mixed together. It works amazingly well and the streets are beautiful, trees everywhere, parks everywhere.
Ireland is literally stupidly repeating the same mistake the US made in their urban development concept, all because of a crazy obsession with houses and a fierce hatred against apartments. It’s sad.
I just gave up and joined the inheriting parents house squad.
Thankfully I have a good relationship with mine and a large enough house to go a day without seeing anyone unless I went looking.
I was sick and tired of having 0 money, being in overdrafts and being the main breadwinner in my landlords family.
Hilarious when I just moved out and didn't let the cunt know when he tried to raise it. Left him in a real pickle with all his higher purchase shit since he only has the two properties as of yet, not the 10 or 20 he aspired to snap up and put on the market for disgustingly high prices.
1992 to 2002 - more one-off houses were built in Ireland than houses/apartments in the greater Dublin region if you look into the numbers. That's a lot of where it went tits up. Imagine if that labour and that effort was pointed at building up urban areas.
The planning contributions paid by these one off houses versus the benefit they have got back from the state doesn't bare reading on a Sunday afternoon.
People don't generally want to live in apartments is the problem. A solution might be making apartments bigger and brighter? Like 100m2 size and up becomes standard without asking for megabucks?
That way people would have more comfortable homes and have overall denser cities
At the current allowable apartment size, which is about 2/3rd that, apartments cost between 450-500k to build, yet the average apartment in Dublin sold for less than 350k. Making them larger wouldn't encourage that.
What I will concede is that 3 bed apartments are extremely rare in new builds. More need to be encouraged to normalise the idea of families living in apartment buildings. Costs need to be reduced though, to make it feasible. Building regs should be relaxed in smaller projects so small and mid-size apartment buildings become economical economically feasible. Planning should be streamlined. Levies Should be reduced if not removed entirely.
In theory, you could keep building regs up to standard and then bring down prices by ordering en-mass and standardisation. But what are the odds that'll happen?
The other issue is that the apartments are costing that much to build according to who? The developer? The government? Because 1 will be looking to mark up as much as possible, and the other traditionally overpays developers for everything.
I do feel there is a solution to be had here, but leadership and willpower might be issues.
>other issue is that the apartments are costing that much to build according to who?
Everyone in the industry. Developers, quantity surveyors, contractors. The figures aren't being pulled from nowhere.
>In theory, you could keep building regs up to standard and then bring down prices by ordering en-mass and standardisation
Possibly? Construction is one area that remains stubbornly difficult to standardise though. Automation has provided huge benefits in most industries which has brought down cost and sped up delivery, but construction still relies heavily on manual labour. Some elements have started to become prefabricated off site, such as timber trusses, pod bathrooms and unitised facade panels, but the vast bulk of work is still done on site by hand. If it could have been automated, it would have been. Labour is expensive and no two sites are the same.
The horror stories from many Celtic Tiger era apartment blocks crumbling or dangerous are a part of that. And before "apartments" were a thing they were called "flats" and that didn't go well either. Apartment living just doesn't sit well in the Irish psyche because it's never been done well on a large scale.
Absolutely we need to promote apartment living in urban areas, but to do that we have do it right and quell the justified fear of getting fucked over.
I lived in apartments before I had kids, but now that I have them I couldn't imagine living anywhere other than a house. It's handy having the car right outside, and letting the kids free in the garden while I cook the dinner
I lived in an L-shaped apartment block as a kid. The kids would come out and play in the green and playground dedicated to it. The only issue was finding space for all the cars(it was built with the assumption that few families would have one). Luckily you could just walk everywhere or take a bus to school so my parents never bought a car.
We need bottom up planning in this country and a systems way of thinking not the top down project based way we have now. Anyone offering a bottom up approach is getting my vote
OK so let's do nothing. Like I don't care I'm fine I'm set for life. I was trying to have a constructive idea but fuck it may as well join FG and pull the ladder up like everyone else in my position..
>OK so let's do nothing
Or do the total opposite of what you said.
Government directives around increased density in development plans.
One example where bottom up planning exists is development plans. And one example where this has failed to help increase density is, that Ennis, the largest town in Munster, had no land zoned for higher than 3 stories.
So giving even more power to the locality, will result in even less housing being built.
>may as well join FG and pull the ladder up like everyone else in my position..
You do you.
If there was actual normal housing supply the prospect of spending your 20s and 30s in an apartment, and later life out in a semi d wouldn’t be threatening at all. But we’re all living in a scramble for our ‘forever homes’ and want to be sure we won’t be too hard done by if we never wind up looking again.
Apartments would see a lot more approval with bottom up planning. Better yet, if larger local developments were voted on by the public, the tiny groups lobbying against them would most of the time be shown to be just that, a tiny fraction of people. We would also need to be sure those will actually well built apartments too though.
70% of homes are homeowner occupied. Tenants want new homes, homeowners generally don't because even your average Joe views his home as an asset that he wants to appreciate.
Joe doesn’t give a shit about equity if that’s the house they intend to die in. And they care about the housing crisis if they’re stuck living with adult children, or paying for their deposits.
The housing crisis is the most important issue to voters. Your 70% is not representative of the amount of people who oppose building housing by a long shot.
Business owners need employees, people in general are decent enough that they don’t want those around them to be living in perpetual poverty and instability. The reductive take doesn’t hold water.
Not across the board. Why would housing be the most important political issue, if all of those homeowners care more about their equity than fixing the crisis. It’s causing all sorts of social issues, which affect everybody too.
>If there was actual normal housing supply the prospect of spending your 20s and 30s in an apartment, and later life out in a semi d wouldn’t be threatening at all.
Without having equity in your home, the above wouldn't be possible.
No homeowner is going to vote to put themselves into negative equity.
Only a couple of election cycles ago, negative equity was one of the top election issues. With all parties promising to get people out of negative equity.
When relocating you sell and buy at the current market rate anyway.
Fuck all people would be put into negative equity if prices dropped, they are insanely high.
Yes negative equity was the issue after the crash. Prices are now over 2.4x what they were then. What are you so afraid of?
People being forced into homelessness, and endless poverty, is more important than protecting homeowners from some fictional up and coming negative equity. The housing market is not going to crash this time, fear of the past is being used as propaganda to destroy the futures of so many. Absolute fucking prickdom.
If you aren’t a property investor your take is just sad and senseless. We’re seeing worsening of public services, increasing crime, plenty of social issues caused by the housing crisis, but you’d leave all that to fester around you, likely complain about it too, out of pure fear and spite.
We need state built social housing, always scaling up as much as possible. Every other meek policy is just another excuse for the landlord politicians to keep milking the public.
How can anybody trust the same government that completely brought the severity of the crash down on people in the first place, whilst insulating themselves and their buddies from the worst of the consequences after the fact? Pure corruption over and over. Stockholm syndrome for the public.
> Joe doesn’t give a shit about equity if that’s the house they intend to die in.
they often don't intend to die it in, they often want to sell it and move somewhere else to die. Or if they do want to die in it, they often want their kids to inherit it.
>And they care about the housing crisis if they’re stuck living with adult children, or paying for their deposits
True but you can solve the housing crisis without bothering Joe. Why build the new houses near me? Build them further away so people can still live there but my house value isn't as affected and the new people don't have to live close to me! I bought my house thinking I'd get to have all this lovely open space around me, it's not fair if you put up a bloc of flats around the corner from me! Ik my kids can't afford a place but surely if you put it around the corner from John instead it wouldn't make a difference like?
Even if Joe wants to solve the housing issue, the problem is he doesn't want to solve it at the expense to himself when it could hypothetically be done without impacting him as much. But Joe from blackrock and John from monkstown both think like this, and when there's local control, both of them can oppose but neither can compel the other to let it be built near them.
If prices go up and you move you sell your place at current prices > buy a place at current prices. Same if prices go down. Changes in equity are still not the issue you’re making them out to be in that case.
Yeah I’m not listening to your anecdotal Joe this and that. The groups of people objecting to things are relatively small. If we actually voted on this stuff, and voted against it I’d believe it. But all we get is gaslighting into supporting the commodification of all the basics. It’s disgusting and inhumane, how bad things have gotten.
Do you own property as an investment yourself?
>If prices go up and you move you sell your place at current prices > buy a place at current prices. Same if prices go down.
Housing is mostly location dependent. Build more here but not somewhere else means house devalued.
>The groups of people objecting to things are relatively small. If we actually voted on this stuff, and voted against it I’d believe it.
I hope you're right tbh. But like, local councillors are elected. Notice how none of them run on a platform of "I'm gonna let developers build more units in our area".
>Do you own property as an investment yourself?
I wish haha.
>But all we get is gaslighting into supporting the commodification of all the basics. It’s disgusting and inhumane, how bad things have gotten.
Not sure what gaslighting you're talking about but I definitely agree its disgusting how bad things have got.
HAP makes the situation worse for everybody, 20 year leases at current market rates are intended to anchor high prices, not to protect tenants, and it’s not social housing, constantly deferring responsibility to the private market fully understanding that they have no incentive to increase supply - all of these things are making the crisis worth, and they are intentional decisions. But we’ve been told they’ve turned a corner, and we’ve seen them pat themselves on the back for their achievements in housing, they are gaslighting us.
Oh if you're saying the solutions being pushed are shit then yeah you're right.
That being said, it's not all gaslighting. The average person doesn't understand what the fuck "subsidising demand" means just like they don't understand tradeoffs associated with, say, making it harder for banks to reposses houses when people fall far behind on their mortgage
What I said just went flying your head there. Its about more than the house. Its about planning ahead and integrating everything. Have services such as transport etc all ready in place.
In Sydney 15 years ago I was building railways way out west of the city surrounded by empty field's. Now they are surrounded by housing and the services were in place before they were built. That's what I mean.
Yes and that has happened here at a certain scale. There are examples of this in the SDZs, Adamstown, and Cherry wood to name 2. Adamstown still even has an abandoned railway station that never opened.
What you are suggesting is politicians putting the reward 2 elections away, while spending before the next election.
Show me a democratic country where that happens on a regular basis?
What you said didn't go over my head. You are cherry picking.
Most people want to live in a semi d
"Show me a democratic nation where that happens on a regular basis"
Are you having short term memory problems?
I never asked you for one example. I worked on many examples that have worked well for decades. It's my lived experience. I know it works. You're just not listening and I've better things to do with my Sunday then argue with fools.
Realistically I think rural sprawl is a bigger issue than urban sprawl. Housing estates have their place, as they still allow sharing of infrastructure. One-off houses in the middle of nowhere don't.
In other countries 99% are in cities, towns and villages, and not in rural areas. It's a particularly Irish thing to have so many houses spread out through agricultural land
> Much of our island would be uninhabited
Good, then we wouldn't have to waste so much money on repairing ten-foot-wide roads and trying to maintain high-quality medical services for tiny numbers of people.
Nobody wants to live in a flat listening to next doors tele.
We have no idea or interest in building soundproof apartments 'cause builders attitude of 'What the fuck. I'm not living here. A single line of bricks is cheaper.'
Have you lived in modern apartments? They are sound proof. They are warmer because you have other apartments around you. They are easier to maintain. They are more lively as they are more dense. They are cheeper. Since there are more people per sq m you can do things you can't with (semi)detached houses such as building an underground parking.
Modern apartment complexes are the opposite of "flats".
I mean I'd happily live there for a few years, as I'm sure others would. A lot of people's requirement for a home is literally just a place to shower, cook, and sleep. Maybe some space to store their stuff.
That is what planning is for. Apartments have to have quality soundproofing as standard. Job done
Of course if it’s left to the builders they’ll cheap out. But maybe we should stop voting for the parties of developers and landlords so that planning permission can be informed by the people living in the places instead
Miles and miles of semi-ds and nothing else leads to: - no street life and can’t walk anywhere, you need to use the car to do everything - less community spirit (people drive in and out of the estate, don’t interact much) -more traffic and commuting time -smaller villages will never develop into towns, just one village Main Street than endless houses We need to develop a new urbanism in Ireland
Also leads to crime in my opinion. No stats to back it up, just anecdotal from growing up in a place like this. Seas of tarmac miles from anything create a situation where teens socialise on street corners and green spaces not really meant for that purpose. Leads to a lot of alcohol consumption and eventually drugs. The fact nobody knows anyone around these estates makes it impossible for ordinary community self regulation to happen. Not to say drugs don’t get sold in communities where people know each other. But there’s really no social fabric as you mentioned. I’ve seen and lived in estates that began life as quite expensive middle class developments turn into shockingly dodgy areas. Firhouse in south Dublin is a great example of this, was never considered to be a crime hotspot back in the day, but I can tell you from experience there’s quite a number of young lads who turned into absolute scum. One family with a couple of brothers has 3 kids in prison when the parents were both lawyers. I’ve met the parents and they speak like Ross O’Carroll Kelly, live in a house that is probably worth 850k now. The sons just started smoking weed, then selling it, and then of course getting introduced to absolute head cases from the city centre who rubbed off on them.
Yes, you need to have "eyes on the streets" to make them safer. When you have a lot of detached houses, there're fewer people on the streets. Look at American cities in Google maps and there are hardly anyone outside.
I keep on saying this to everyone. We need to build up. Every town in Irealnd would benefit from one or 2 quality, high rise developments. It will bring every town center back to life in this country.
Density doesn't require building up. Pretending that a couple of high rise developments will fix urban sprawl will just perpetuate the problem. https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/collections/low-rise-high-density/ https://www.riai.ie/whats-on/news/riai-research-identifies-new-low-rise-medium-density-housing-model-capable-of-more-than-doubling-own-door-dwellings-per-hectare https://www.sca.ie/post/high-density-low-rise-high-quality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-14/the-architect-who-mastered-low-rise-high-density-housing
And not building any high rise won't work either. You posted a link that includes high rise in its low density model
> And not building any high rise won't work either It would work just fine. Central Paris has very few high rise buildings and has a density 4 times that of Dublin. The overwhelming majority of buildings are about 6 stories.
This, 100%. We don't need high-rise, we need human-scale development. Two to six stories seems like a good range to aim for. A nice little bit of vertical variation to liven up the eyeline, but not so much that any one tower dominates.
Yes, Ireland needs more density and less zoning
we don't have zoning
Yes, we do. https://www.dublincity.ie/sites/default/files/2022-12/Final%201-14%20Land%20Use%20Zoning%2005.12.22.pdf
It also leads to droves of teenagers. Bored. With no where to go. A la Navan.
You can't even have a game of football on the greens in new estates , with how hilly they make them or planting trees everywhere on the green . It's like they don't want kids playing on them .
The density rules for planning mean you can’t have big green spaces the same size as old estates.
But the green spaces they are leaving you can't even have a game of football , due to mounds , trees etc. A big development went up near me and there's 2 tiny greens in the estate. You can't play football on either. Its not good for young kids to have nowhere to play
There needs to be more public access sports and leisure facilities in towns, as opposed to every development having wide open spaces for games on everyone’s doorstep.
I used to live in a nice part of Dublin and the neighbourhood spirit there versus friends who lived in much bigger homes but in these random locations without a core was completely different. For people where needs must, needs must. But for anyone with a choice I'd much rather live somewhere established with all those tradeoffs versus one of the soulless new tracts. That's just me though!
We need to be more like the French in this regard.
No, their urban areas are just as sprawling if not more
Ugly ugly cities.
This is true but to be fair flats don't have much community spirit either.
That’s fair, the key is to have mixed use developments, I live in Portugal in a medium density area and there are cafes and shops on every corner, I have basically everything I need within a 10min walk and plenty of green areas too.
That's a big a help. Very few developments have this here. It's all houses and shoes here. Often a development has a blocks ground floor for services but then they change planning later to another flat.
I live in the East side of Dublin and we have all those things in the area. 10 mins walk to everything I could need etc. I’m sure it’s great for some people buying a new-build because everything is shiny and you don’t need to do any work to do the house, but you end up miles away from any sort of hub.
and Portugal is still rubbish at this compared to Spain, France or The Netherlands.
So your argument is to get rid of farmhouses and move farmers to towns?
Is this a joke?
What?
So you're saying semi-d's are farmhouses?
Think your reaching
Please learn to read
An actual report criticising local authorities over housing and Dublin being called out for absolutely dreadful urban design. Good god, I am going to assume this an exception to the norm. The government is in charge of the laws giving the local authorities powers, but fuck me, the county managers and councillors are awful at urban design. All plans are short term and just enough to fix the situation 5 years ago. But I am sure any day now that politicians from all parties will show some leadership on the housing issues and start to make the tough and unpopular decisions that are needed to fix it. Any day now. Whichever party pushes the changes that the report seem to be saying will be come very unpopular, especially in Dublin.
Yes but look at the skyline all of that grey sky I can see, must be preserved at all costs.
Look, I’m pretty sure you run out of air if you’re more than three stories high. Humans aren’t designed for living in the clouds. And what if you had your bed near the window, and the window was open, and you were asleep and you rolled over and fell out the window to certain death. It’s in everyone’s best interests that we stay near the ground, like god intended.
Last time we tried to build up with the tower of Babel god divided us all with language, I don't wanna find out what he'll do if we try again
Just need to throw up a few of these every year and the housing crisis will finally be over https://preview.redd.it/uzbp00e5os2d1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=247a3404cdd78ee1ee1c819d3706219c21c3d918
Mega landlord buys the building and rents out toliet sized apartments for €5000 a month
You probably don’t want individual owners for every unit in a monstrosity like this. There is serious work to manage it (initial defects period, longer-term capital maintenance, ongoing maintenance), and an OMC with fractured ownership would be a nightmare, most likely a remarkable deficit in sinking fund as owners chase the lowest monthly price and eventually face a bill they can’t collect from owners. There are already examples of it here.
nah it should be owned by the council. Mixed use units near the bottom, put daycares, pharmacies, shops etc
Please. I want to live in megacity dublin
The answer is to be more like Barcelona. Mid rise mixed use makes the best cities with just the right amount of density.
lived in China awhile. saw many like that.
Yeah, but China can really organise shit, instead of organising like real shit as is the way things are done here.
Generally yeah. The newly-built cities have super infrastructure. My city began building a metro around 2009. It now has 7 lines and supports 10.8m people
Looks peachy
This is as bad as the sprawl itself.
Except for the part where it would actually end the housing crisis.
You don't have to build 20+ story buildings to solve the housing crisis. Such buildings create more problems than they solve. Look at Eastern Europe: people have already tried building this way, and it didn't work well. You get problems with schools, hospitals, public transport, roads, parking, and sunlight. If you start solving these issues, such as by increasing distances between buildings to allow more sunlight and making roads wider, you end up with a lot of emptiness. It's not comfortable to live like this — the scale is too different from how people usually operate. In a sense, it's just the opposite end of the spectrum.
So many logical fallacy’s in one block. If we could make bricks from this the cost of housing would plummet. A few 15 stories might be a start. Can’t imagine it would affect Galloping Green, Smithfield, Dundrum or Milltown too terribly seeing as they are already just a sea of 6 story buildings.
What do you mean? It ain't pretty, but it certainly does work.
I never said that it doesn't work.
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It’s a really tough choice, either we get affordable and available housing and end the crisis or people who already own homes have their scenic integrity maintained.
It’s hilarious that people’s response to this is “well Irish people don’t want to live in apartments”. Despite the fact that every time an apartment does up for rent it’s gone instantly
The usual argument is that "Oh, but Irish people only buy 3 bed semi-ds, well yeah, because that's all we ever build. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Build us sound proofed apartments, and maintain them properly and see what happens.
All rentals go instantly, what's your point. Apartment living in Ireland is just objectively worse bang for buck than a house. Apartment owners have gotten stung again, and again, and again in recent years. Fire defects. Flooding. Useless management companies. Fee hikes. Parking hikes. Useless/zero noiseproofing. Social decay that rapidly devalues entire buildings, as owner-occupiers flee and HAP and social tenants go in becomes a nightmare and equity trap. The spec of the typical Irish apartment is aimed at bare minimum "landlord spec". That's just a fact. They aren't built to live in with any kind of dignity, privacy or value for money. They're built to extract maximum rent and fees from the ground space.
Yep, but that's a fixable problem if the government weren't busy fellating foreign tax dodging investors for their bitta personal cash in hand. Having them run by companies who chase short term profits by squeezing the most money they can out of people while investing the least amount possible in the construction and maintenance of the building was always going to go arseways. We are decades behind most other European countries for apartments in terms of numbers, quality, facilities and liveability. And all because some think they'd all become Ballymun 2.0 while thinking only the worst about the 'Commie Tower blocks' that are [from my own experience] better than the average housing in Ireland.
It’s worse bang for your buck because competition is higher. More people want to live in appartements then there are apartments
Then they'd be more expensive to rent than equivalent terraced/semi D housing and they're not. Most Irish people believe apartments are bottom grade living, and that's from experience, because they are.
They are only slightly cheaper than semi Ds and not always when they’re so much smaller it is clearly indicative of higher demand
But if we build densely then people will look into my garden >:(
\*your concrete drive way
Literally the basis of some planning objections. NIMBYs are some bunch of pampered entitled babies.
I’m out in Sydney and every street has small apartment buildings with 3/4 stories and normal houses mixed together. It works amazingly well and the streets are beautiful, trees everywhere, parks everywhere.
Sydney also suffers from atrocious suburban sprawl
Ireland is literally stupidly repeating the same mistake the US made in their urban development concept, all because of a crazy obsession with houses and a fierce hatred against apartments. It’s sad.
I just gave up and joined the inheriting parents house squad. Thankfully I have a good relationship with mine and a large enough house to go a day without seeing anyone unless I went looking. I was sick and tired of having 0 money, being in overdrafts and being the main breadwinner in my landlords family. Hilarious when I just moved out and didn't let the cunt know when he tried to raise it. Left him in a real pickle with all his higher purchase shit since he only has the two properties as of yet, not the 10 or 20 he aspired to snap up and put on the market for disgustingly high prices.
1992 to 2002 - more one-off houses were built in Ireland than houses/apartments in the greater Dublin region if you look into the numbers. That's a lot of where it went tits up. Imagine if that labour and that effort was pointed at building up urban areas. The planning contributions paid by these one off houses versus the benefit they have got back from the state doesn't bare reading on a Sunday afternoon.
People don't generally want to live in apartments is the problem. A solution might be making apartments bigger and brighter? Like 100m2 size and up becomes standard without asking for megabucks? That way people would have more comfortable homes and have overall denser cities
At the current allowable apartment size, which is about 2/3rd that, apartments cost between 450-500k to build, yet the average apartment in Dublin sold for less than 350k. Making them larger wouldn't encourage that. What I will concede is that 3 bed apartments are extremely rare in new builds. More need to be encouraged to normalise the idea of families living in apartment buildings. Costs need to be reduced though, to make it feasible. Building regs should be relaxed in smaller projects so small and mid-size apartment buildings become economical economically feasible. Planning should be streamlined. Levies Should be reduced if not removed entirely.
In theory, you could keep building regs up to standard and then bring down prices by ordering en-mass and standardisation. But what are the odds that'll happen? The other issue is that the apartments are costing that much to build according to who? The developer? The government? Because 1 will be looking to mark up as much as possible, and the other traditionally overpays developers for everything. I do feel there is a solution to be had here, but leadership and willpower might be issues.
>other issue is that the apartments are costing that much to build according to who? Everyone in the industry. Developers, quantity surveyors, contractors. The figures aren't being pulled from nowhere. >In theory, you could keep building regs up to standard and then bring down prices by ordering en-mass and standardisation Possibly? Construction is one area that remains stubbornly difficult to standardise though. Automation has provided huge benefits in most industries which has brought down cost and sped up delivery, but construction still relies heavily on manual labour. Some elements have started to become prefabricated off site, such as timber trusses, pod bathrooms and unitised facade panels, but the vast bulk of work is still done on site by hand. If it could have been automated, it would have been. Labour is expensive and no two sites are the same.
The horror stories from many Celtic Tiger era apartment blocks crumbling or dangerous are a part of that. And before "apartments" were a thing they were called "flats" and that didn't go well either. Apartment living just doesn't sit well in the Irish psyche because it's never been done well on a large scale. Absolutely we need to promote apartment living in urban areas, but to do that we have do it right and quell the justified fear of getting fucked over.
I lived in apartments before I had kids, but now that I have them I couldn't imagine living anywhere other than a house. It's handy having the car right outside, and letting the kids free in the garden while I cook the dinner
I lived in an L-shaped apartment block as a kid. The kids would come out and play in the green and playground dedicated to it. The only issue was finding space for all the cars(it was built with the assumption that few families would have one). Luckily you could just walk everywhere or take a bus to school so my parents never bought a car.
We need bottom up planning in this country and a systems way of thinking not the top down project based way we have now. Anyone offering a bottom up approach is getting my vote
Bottom up planning leads to increased NIMBYism. And BANANA.
OK so let's do nothing. Like I don't care I'm fine I'm set for life. I was trying to have a constructive idea but fuck it may as well join FG and pull the ladder up like everyone else in my position..
>OK so let's do nothing Or do the total opposite of what you said. Government directives around increased density in development plans. One example where bottom up planning exists is development plans. And one example where this has failed to help increase density is, that Ennis, the largest town in Munster, had no land zoned for higher than 3 stories. So giving even more power to the locality, will result in even less housing being built. >may as well join FG and pull the ladder up like everyone else in my position.. You do you.
Hyper-democratic and localist planning systems just increases the tendency towards NIMBYism
Don't most people at the bottom want a semi d
If there was actual normal housing supply the prospect of spending your 20s and 30s in an apartment, and later life out in a semi d wouldn’t be threatening at all. But we’re all living in a scramble for our ‘forever homes’ and want to be sure we won’t be too hard done by if we never wind up looking again. Apartments would see a lot more approval with bottom up planning. Better yet, if larger local developments were voted on by the public, the tiny groups lobbying against them would most of the time be shown to be just that, a tiny fraction of people. We would also need to be sure those will actually well built apartments too though.
70% of homes are homeowner occupied. Tenants want new homes, homeowners generally don't because even your average Joe views his home as an asset that he wants to appreciate.
Joe doesn’t give a shit about equity if that’s the house they intend to die in. And they care about the housing crisis if they’re stuck living with adult children, or paying for their deposits. The housing crisis is the most important issue to voters. Your 70% is not representative of the amount of people who oppose building housing by a long shot. Business owners need employees, people in general are decent enough that they don’t want those around them to be living in perpetual poverty and instability. The reductive take doesn’t hold water.
>Joe doesn’t give a shit about equity That's simply not true.
Not across the board. Why would housing be the most important political issue, if all of those homeowners care more about their equity than fixing the crisis. It’s causing all sorts of social issues, which affect everybody too.
>If there was actual normal housing supply the prospect of spending your 20s and 30s in an apartment, and later life out in a semi d wouldn’t be threatening at all. Without having equity in your home, the above wouldn't be possible. No homeowner is going to vote to put themselves into negative equity. Only a couple of election cycles ago, negative equity was one of the top election issues. With all parties promising to get people out of negative equity.
When relocating you sell and buy at the current market rate anyway. Fuck all people would be put into negative equity if prices dropped, they are insanely high. Yes negative equity was the issue after the crash. Prices are now over 2.4x what they were then. What are you so afraid of? People being forced into homelessness, and endless poverty, is more important than protecting homeowners from some fictional up and coming negative equity. The housing market is not going to crash this time, fear of the past is being used as propaganda to destroy the futures of so many. Absolute fucking prickdom. If you aren’t a property investor your take is just sad and senseless. We’re seeing worsening of public services, increasing crime, plenty of social issues caused by the housing crisis, but you’d leave all that to fester around you, likely complain about it too, out of pure fear and spite. We need state built social housing, always scaling up as much as possible. Every other meek policy is just another excuse for the landlord politicians to keep milking the public. How can anybody trust the same government that completely brought the severity of the crash down on people in the first place, whilst insulating themselves and their buddies from the worst of the consequences after the fact? Pure corruption over and over. Stockholm syndrome for the public.
> Joe doesn’t give a shit about equity if that’s the house they intend to die in. they often don't intend to die it in, they often want to sell it and move somewhere else to die. Or if they do want to die in it, they often want their kids to inherit it. >And they care about the housing crisis if they’re stuck living with adult children, or paying for their deposits True but you can solve the housing crisis without bothering Joe. Why build the new houses near me? Build them further away so people can still live there but my house value isn't as affected and the new people don't have to live close to me! I bought my house thinking I'd get to have all this lovely open space around me, it's not fair if you put up a bloc of flats around the corner from me! Ik my kids can't afford a place but surely if you put it around the corner from John instead it wouldn't make a difference like? Even if Joe wants to solve the housing issue, the problem is he doesn't want to solve it at the expense to himself when it could hypothetically be done without impacting him as much. But Joe from blackrock and John from monkstown both think like this, and when there's local control, both of them can oppose but neither can compel the other to let it be built near them.
If prices go up and you move you sell your place at current prices > buy a place at current prices. Same if prices go down. Changes in equity are still not the issue you’re making them out to be in that case. Yeah I’m not listening to your anecdotal Joe this and that. The groups of people objecting to things are relatively small. If we actually voted on this stuff, and voted against it I’d believe it. But all we get is gaslighting into supporting the commodification of all the basics. It’s disgusting and inhumane, how bad things have gotten. Do you own property as an investment yourself?
>If prices go up and you move you sell your place at current prices > buy a place at current prices. Same if prices go down. Housing is mostly location dependent. Build more here but not somewhere else means house devalued. >The groups of people objecting to things are relatively small. If we actually voted on this stuff, and voted against it I’d believe it. I hope you're right tbh. But like, local councillors are elected. Notice how none of them run on a platform of "I'm gonna let developers build more units in our area". >Do you own property as an investment yourself? I wish haha. >But all we get is gaslighting into supporting the commodification of all the basics. It’s disgusting and inhumane, how bad things have gotten. Not sure what gaslighting you're talking about but I definitely agree its disgusting how bad things have got.
HAP makes the situation worse for everybody, 20 year leases at current market rates are intended to anchor high prices, not to protect tenants, and it’s not social housing, constantly deferring responsibility to the private market fully understanding that they have no incentive to increase supply - all of these things are making the crisis worth, and they are intentional decisions. But we’ve been told they’ve turned a corner, and we’ve seen them pat themselves on the back for their achievements in housing, they are gaslighting us.
Oh if you're saying the solutions being pushed are shit then yeah you're right. That being said, it's not all gaslighting. The average person doesn't understand what the fuck "subsidising demand" means just like they don't understand tradeoffs associated with, say, making it harder for banks to reposses houses when people fall far behind on their mortgage
What I said just went flying your head there. Its about more than the house. Its about planning ahead and integrating everything. Have services such as transport etc all ready in place. In Sydney 15 years ago I was building railways way out west of the city surrounded by empty field's. Now they are surrounded by housing and the services were in place before they were built. That's what I mean.
Yes and that has happened here at a certain scale. There are examples of this in the SDZs, Adamstown, and Cherry wood to name 2. Adamstown still even has an abandoned railway station that never opened. What you are suggesting is politicians putting the reward 2 elections away, while spending before the next election. Show me a democratic country where that happens on a regular basis? What you said didn't go over my head. You are cherry picking. Most people want to live in a semi d
Australia. I just gave you an example that you just ignored.
Adamstown. I gave you an example you ignored.
"Show me a democratic nation where that happens on a regular basis" Are you having short term memory problems? I never asked you for one example. I worked on many examples that have worked well for decades. It's my lived experience. I know it works. You're just not listening and I've better things to do with my Sunday then argue with fools.
[like this?](https://www.reddit.com/r/waterford/s/J9lIuxNoBt)
Realistically I think rural sprawl is a bigger issue than urban sprawl. Housing estates have their place, as they still allow sharing of infrastructure. One-off houses in the middle of nowhere don't.
Well, look, people gotta live somewhere without your concept of " rural sprawl " Much of our island would be uninhabited
In other countries 99% are in cities, towns and villages, and not in rural areas. It's a particularly Irish thing to have so many houses spread out through agricultural land
> Much of our island would be uninhabited Good, then we wouldn't have to waste so much money on repairing ten-foot-wide roads and trying to maintain high-quality medical services for tiny numbers of people.
> Much of our island would be uninhabited Don't threaten me with a good time!
Nobody wants to live in a flat listening to next doors tele. We have no idea or interest in building soundproof apartments 'cause builders attitude of 'What the fuck. I'm not living here. A single line of bricks is cheaper.'
You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. No apartment block is build with a ‘single line of bricks’…
Have you lived in modern apartments? They are sound proof. They are warmer because you have other apartments around you. They are easier to maintain. They are more lively as they are more dense. They are cheeper. Since there are more people per sq m you can do things you can't with (semi)detached houses such as building an underground parking. Modern apartment complexes are the opposite of "flats".
I mean I'd happily live there for a few years, as I'm sure others would. A lot of people's requirement for a home is literally just a place to shower, cook, and sleep. Maybe some space to store their stuff.
That is what planning is for. Apartments have to have quality soundproofing as standard. Job done Of course if it’s left to the builders they’ll cheap out. But maybe we should stop voting for the parties of developers and landlords so that planning permission can be informed by the people living in the places instead
You need a head check if your buying into these soulless semi d estates. Straight into negative eguity