“Mr Cussen warned against “loose talk” which might suggests a doubling or trebling of the amount of zoned land would lower housing costs, without the research to prove this proposition.”
“We are dealing with a perfect storm building in relation to massive pressure to deliver out on the edges,” he said. “Everyone seems to be almost signalling a `needs must’ approach to planning and housing delivery over the next several years. This is going to bring us back to short term solutions, to having big housing estates at the edges, or even beyond, our cities and towns. We know that will take us down planning, community, infrastructure and environmental culs-de-sac.”
He’s making valid points. Whether it’s reducing standards on energy ratings, or allowing building to take place out on the very edges of towns, away from infrastructure, it all comes back to bite us in the arse. We pay for it one way or another, and just because we’ve a housing disaster, doesn’t mean we should shoot first, pay double later.
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I’ll translate for you all:
“Utterly Failed Govt. Department Thinks It Should Have More Control”.
He has a point. We have a lot of sprawl and inefficient use of land. There should be authority at government level to design what our towns and suburbs should look like. Then you can have developers bidding on who gets to build housing according to the layout agreed.
Developer-led urban planning has given us hundreds if not thousands of examples of [this horrible use of space](https://i.imgur.com/dtId7z9.png). This is part of the Dublin/Meath border, which was nearly [all fields in 1999](https://i.imgur.com/2TDtdwY.png). You would think they had to work with the existing country road system that already existed there, but a lot of those roads are less than 20 years old. With proper vision, all that previously undeveloped space could have become a high-density suburb but instead you end up with an incredibly boring place to live with no shops, limited if any public transport, and where you absolutely need a car to get home even though in theory you live in a city.
The idea should be to remove some of the small houses within the cities and build high rises there. Offices can be taller than 3 stories, why not most residential places?
New high density towns (and neighborhoods) please, with centre spaces to build community, with small shops and amenities grouped together around squares and plazas, with multigenerational and multi income levels living in close proximity, with non-car based transport options.
The planners are the very people that shoot down high density planning applications because they impact the skyline. They shouldn’t be deciding either!
Who loosened the regulations to allow for the mica bricks?