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That can be a problem in some areas, but surely if other countries can solve it...

I understand people can be a bit nervous about that. You don't want a hike in fees with no maintenance anyway.

In Belfast there simply isn't a lot of land inside the area and roads are super congested.

The public transport isn't quite there, and due to the rivers splitting Belfast in half it's genuinely hard to cross over from say North Belfast to East. But yet, few apartments are being built.

You can indeed do that, if you put the garage underneath and built on top, go 3 stories, with high density houses. There's a few streets like that.

In my experience though most of it is not built like that and you get more and more sprawl. But maybe that's an easy thing to resolve by making such developments easier? It feels a bit like every council just does its own thing :)

Accessibility is also an issue, most houses simply aren't built for when you get older / have existing physical disabilities and this also hasn't changed much.

But where's the moat? :)

ooh, nice! And social housing too :)

It's mainly because we're cunts so the prospect of living above and below and well as next to, just isn't very appealing.

And because we're cunts, we'd never build nice descent sized flats with proper storage space. And even if we did we'd just use the space and storage to make extra bedrooms to flip at a profit so we could finally buy a house.

I was about to post this as a negative example.
It's shocking to me this won a prize. It looks like remodelled prison barracks. The real images
are even worse. It's like those boxes they put up under luxury high rise flats to fill their
affordable housing quota.

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This is what I mean, on the left you have the actual development with landscaping etc. and on the right some boxes modelled after Amazon packaging.

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It very much depends on what the risk appetite of the organisation is.

Those boxes are almost a million each.

I much prefer houses (not those ones though), less neighbours, no bin rooms, shared space etc...

The Barbican

Drops mic…

almost a million each.

mental.

That various housing models don't work here is just a sign of a failed society. Bin rooms
just become bin streets and the impermeable residential areas with endless fenced
off dead ends fill up with litter.

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The barbican looks a bit filthy now because of lack of maintenance but the being in the space is incredible.

With the current system, there would be too much money lost and all that would happen is the land would be more expensive.

Lots of current developments are brownfield sites that are bought with many a bribe. If you are interested, I can take you to a sites near tower bridge that a company managed to bribe the planners to grant planning permission for buildings with specs that are not legal under planning law.

Look at the redevelopment of the heygate estate in elephant and castle.

So glad you said, that I was biting my tongue.

The are planning guidelines and England and Wales councils produce projected planning ideas for the areas of the borough.

Also look at how minimum sizes of habitat spaces has dropped in the last 30 years.

This is part of the explanation why public space here is so horrendous.
Basically the police designs a lot of it.

One example Curtis gives is cul-de-sacs. Most contemporary urban designers avoid building cul-de-sacs because they chop communities into dead ends, inhibiting mobility and stopping neighbours from meeting each other. Secured by Design, however, praises “cul-de-sacs that are short in length and not linked by footpaths” claiming that permeability generates crime such as burglary.

You can clearly see the results everywhere, there are fenced off areas in old estates that were built
as open spaces.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/02/police-public-spaces-secured-by-design-uk-cities

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/apr/11/why-are-we-so-bad-at-planning-cities

That is a very good point.

Some communities sorted their alleyways

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/12/when-its-sunny-we-get-the-barbecue-out-urban-gardeners-transform-foul-alleys-into-verdant-havens

Manthorpe Road!

Eagle eye

I don't think you could enforce that, telling a private entity how to disburse an asset.

Some companies own land as a cash store and any house building firm will also have staffing limits and cashflow issues preventing "all the houses now".

Not saying that's 100% the case but you can't just shout houses now please or else.

Also no way will house prices tank based on changes to supply. Builders would just refuse to sell at tanked prices, same as I wouldn't sell mine at 60% of what I paid for it.

So what do we do about the housing crisis then? Or would you argue there isn't one?

London is very different, but in Derbyshire where I now live they really struggle to sell new builds at full price. Most end up sold at 10 - 30% off, and then sold on again 3 years for slightly less than the buyer paid. It seems to take around 5 years for them to come back to the value they were originally marketed for.

Come on, once you have a house there isn't a crisis anymore!

The Barbican

Proof that if all the 60s housing estates were situated in prime real estate they'd have thrived.

Yep, but crucially the Barbican was never envisaged as low cost social housing. It was, from initial concept, housing for the more well off, with world class concert halls, conservatories, shops, theatres, etc all built in.

It does prove though that high density housing doesn’ need to be poor quality housing