DDPA Chair Robin Mandal in today’s IT. New housing, especially apartments, needs to be good quality and affordable. It should improve our cities. Reactive planning laws of the recent years have achieved the opposite
DDPA Chair Robin Mandal in today’s IT. New housing, especially apartments, needs to be good quality and affordable. It should improve our cities. Reactive planning laws of the recent years have achieved the opposite
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Everyone except the department and developers already believe this.
The voice of the NIMBY is not excluded, and it doesn’t need more power at all.
Without ministerial intervention, there would be few apartments built in the last 5 years because of restrictive local zoning and planners who think Dublin should be the largest village in the world.
We need more affordable apartments, but it’s impossible when the local government can’t even deliver basic infrastructure and makes new apartment owners pay everything on top of the apartment cost.
I’m so glad this article names names – I’ve seen Alan Kelly supporters online trying to distance him from this mess despite it being clear that he was the start of it.
It is a system that excludes the voice of the people in favour of some random bollicks who lives 2 counties over, you mean.
Good quality and affordable are all too frequently mutually exclusive.
One of the underremarked upon issues of house-building in Ireland is just how much better modern houses and apartments are than those built in the past.
The consequence of better regulation and better quality housing is an increase in cost though.
It forever blows my mind in these arguments that architectural style is never cited as a cause of objections from citizens and planners alike.
It’s no secret whatsoever that modern architectural thinking tends to be at constant loggerheads with the general public’s perception of aesthetically good and aesthetically bad. There have been numerous articles written all over the Western World about why this is, but the fact that current “modern” architecture is regarded as an eyesore by many people is surely not something anyone would dispute.
In that context, does it not make sense that developers who persistently plan developments along the lines of this style are going to come up against a public who take one look at the proposals and absolutely balk?
The Lexicon Library in Dun Laoghaire is probably the best and most well known example I can think of in recent years thanks to the controversy it generated. The new facade of the National Rehab Hospital is another, although its location relatively isolated from nearby residential developments meant that it attracted far less controversy. Have a look at both buildings on Google Street View:
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.292376,-6.1306821,3a,25.3y,321.56h,94.99t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4QPZVsZP9L-jK-yhrEZIwg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
And
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.2756229,-6.1509477,3a,35.2y,221.87h,90.54t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1smjMak-UaJNfLsHfzgwI8zQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
In both cases, it’s obvious that the designers set out intentionally to make something weird, unique, “eye catching”. Something that would stand out from the surrounding area and make people stop and think “whoa, what’s this thing?” And many, many other buildings built in the last 20 years or so follow a similar style. Random angles, irregular shapes, orientation which is at odds with the rest of the streetscape, etc etc etc.
The problem is that most of the public don’t like buildings which stand out as weird like this, they want buildings that blend in to the environment to some degree. It’s essentially the case of an egotistical approach to architecture – “My building is going to dominate the area and be talked about because it’s so different and unique” – versus the public’s desire for harmony in their environment.
It truly blows my mind that nobody ever seems to talk about or acknowledge this as an issue when it comes to NIMBYism. I’d argue that this and the issue of sunlight egress (another important architectural issue which modern architects seem to entirely ignore) are probably right at the top of the list of reasons people object to buildings, probably more so than the property value argument. Why? Because high profile cases like these attract derision not just from people who live locally but many people who comes across the story or only occasionally visit a place. When that library was unveiled, there was absolute uproar and it was *not* confined just to Dun Laogjaire – the local elections of 2014 were happening around the same time and candidates reported across the entire *county* (DLRCoCo’s ‘county’ remit stretches the whole way from Booterstown to Shankill) that the library was almost as big an election issue as the big bad of that year, water charges.
That simple cannot be explained by the usual NIMBY arguments. The only conclusion one can draw from that kind of widespread condemnation is that the public consensus was that the building itself – its style and orientation – was fundamentally ugly and drastically damaged the appearance of an otherwise regarded as beautiful area.
Why is this never talked about? Why can’t modern architecture listen to people rather than obstinately going for the “this is *art*, you plebs just don’t *get* it” line of thinking? The public realm is public; it should be obvious that anything you want to build in it has to look at least halfway decent *in the eyes of the public*. Intentionally going for shock value (the planners of the library gleefully described it as “unashamedly modern”, in other words, “we built something that would intentionally clash with everything around it which are period buildings) massively pisses people off.
I just don’t get it. Architectural style is a choice; if it’s widely acknowledged that current modern architecture is despised by so many people then why do architects insist on ramming it down our throats every time the chance to build something new comes along?
We must have a new conversation on greed.
New housing generally won’t be affordable because it’s nicer and newer. People are willing to pay more for nicer and newer, that’s pretty simple.
But failure to build sufficient nicer and newer housing means people with the money to live in those units can’t do that, so they settle for less nice and less new and push out the people who don’t have the means.
I am sympathetic to these arguments, but there is very strong evidence that restrictive zoning has a significant effect in pushing down supply and pushing up prices and that local control results in more restrictive zoning.
That’s also what you’d expect as a matter of common sense – all the arguments to the contrary involve fairly tendentious logic and very little empirical support.
Finally, even if we scrapped all of the centralising interventions of the last few years, we return to a system where existing residents have significant voice in planning applications and the potential residents, who would take up the new homes have none. That is also an illegitimate system.