| But if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall. |
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| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, it's not regulated at all. That's the problem. Any developer can buy up a patch of land, throw up some houses in a month so close together that if you run out of toilet paper you can just reach out your window and use some of your neighbours, and with a design life just the same as the mortgage. Oh the access road totally buggers up traffic along the existing road? Oh well too bad, full speed ahead and damn the externalities! This leads to the situation that's arisen in a housing development (described as a village, where it's really about 300 houses crammed into a small field), where the houses have in fact not made it to their design life of 25 years and have had to be demolished at about 15 years old. So, you've got people paying a £400,000 mortgage on a patch of rubble and mud, who are currently taking up space in council housing with the taxpayer footing the bill. But hey! At least it provided a lot of shareholder value! Full speed ahead and damn the externalities! | | |
| ▲ | CalRobert 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The developer needs planning, what do you mean not regulated? This needs to be weighed against the externalities of homelessness. And if traffic is a problem, remove the cars and add bike infra (bloom Merwede is an example of this, albeit in a very expensive city). Where are houses from 2011 being torn down? Short of mica that seems ridiculous. | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, but getting planning is no obstacle, they'll just get that handed to them. Bike infrastructure works great in urban parts of Holland. It doesn't work well in rural Scotland. I'll tell you what - I'll scrap my 30-year-old Range Rover agricultural machinery if you can demonstrate how a bakfiets can replace it. These particular houses are in the outer part of Greater Glasgow. They're about 15 years old, the framing is absolutely rotten, and the crappy brickwork is literally falling apart. There's no saving them. They were build quickly and cheaply and sold at a premium price, like everything else. | | |
| ▲ | CalRobert 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do they throw in a lot of sweeteners to make the planners happy? Nevermind things like green belt rules, etc. Though I am not familiar with the particulars of Scottish law (right to build is England-only I think?) Worth noting that cycling works great in rural Netherlands too... For what it's worth, I made a video about cycling infrastructure and urbanism in rural Ireland (where I used to live). Not the same as Scotland but maybe there are parallels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew . In some ways rural areas are better suited to bike infra than suburban because you have more space and there's generally less traffic. And many rural areas are still a reasonable distance from a town - in fact, I found that when I was driving, I'd just go to Tullamore or Athlone, but on my bike, I'd ride to Clara, a much closer and smaller town. If more people did this it might help revitalize smaller towns. I'm not seeing anything about a wave of house demolitions in Glasgow except for a lot of old postwar towers and, oddly, this - https://www.urbanrealm.com/news/2023/06/11/glasgow-house-dem... - where the house seems quite nice. |
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