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One off housing
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feelingstressed wrote: »I built a one off house on family land, it was one of my dreams since young to do it, ah bless
So for those subsidizing me:
A survey was done, well located, installed, pipes and pump installed, pump is serviced annually.
The council will be getting no water meter on this property!
Septic tank installed, complies with all current standards so the council are not involved here.
The road was there since before I was born so it's nothing something new.
There is a main ESB line along the road and many, many thousands were paid to the ESB to setup a connection. The ESB certainly know how to charge.
What else?
We were paying for waste collection and the wheelie bin for years while I watched Joe Higgins on the news in Dublin go to jail over it. :rolleyes:
Broadband is satellite so nobody subsidizing that. There will never be cable TV in this area.
And the Eircom line is nearby, not big deal to get a connection if that will be done someday.
If you wish to talk about wasteful housing in rural areas, it's in the villages and not one off houses.
Our village (and many others) had a developers buy a parcel of land, try to cram as many houses on it as possible. Houses that nobody was ever going to buy, the biggest local employer is the Spar shop.
They have since gone bust and the estate is locked up, nobody knows what will happen them
You don't understand the issues at all. Yes the infrastructure is already there such as roads and electricity. You're neglecting the fact that that infrastructure has to be maintained. The next time your power goes out in a storm it won't be you thats getting a bill for the repair. The next time your local road is resurfaced you won't be getting a bill for it yet if there were no people living in the countryside these costs wouldn't arise... costs which are being carried by the taxpayer to afford some the luxury of living in one off houses.0 -
oppenheimer1 wrote: »Planning is the domain of the Local authority. I've said it before and I'll say it again, that some of the counties with the worst planning decisions with regards to zoned land were Fine Gael controlled ones.
For once you cannot solely blame the bogeymen in FF for bad planning decisions across the country.
Huh ?
Where did you see me blame FF (other than the Bertie Bowl and the Dub Docklands) ?0 -
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oppenheimer1 wrote: »You don't understand the issues at all. Yes the infrastructure is already there such as roads and electricity. You're neglecting the fact that that infrastructure has to be maintained. The next time your power goes out in a storm it won't be you thats getting a bill for the repair. The next time your local road is resurfaced you won't be getting a bill for it yet if there were no people living in the countryside these costs wouldn't arise... costs which are being carried by the taxpayer to afford some the luxury of living in one off houses.
So you mean to say that whenever your road gets resurfaced or the power goes out, someone comes to your house with the bill for it?
I pay taxes and so do people in my area so we are entitled to the same needs provided by the state as everybody else is0 -
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cailinardthair wrote: »So you mean to say that whenever your road gets resurfaced or the power goes out, someone comes to your house with the bill for it?
I pay taxes and so do people in my area so we are entitled to the same needs provided by the state as everybody else is
What if taxes were imposed that reflected the costs of providing services to people in rural areas? You will find that rural roads cost more to maintain (due to the amount of them) and electricity more to provide (greater distance to travel and greater exposure to damage from the elements) in addition to serving fewer people.
Think of it like this. There is a town at the bottom of a mountain and one of the residents decided hes had enough of town life. He decides to build his house at the top of the mountain. He then expects the other people in the town to pay to upgrade the dirt track to the top of the mountain to a tarmac road, not only that they expect them to maintain it. He wants electricity for his house so he pays the ESB to bring a line to him. A storm comes and breaks the long line to his house, he expects the other residents in the town to pay for the repair.
After a while the town residents get fed up of paying for the expensive maintenance of the services to the house on the mountain. They also want to invest in a new next generation broadband system for their town. They look at their budget and they see that the road maintenance bill is mostly for this road to the man on the hill, consequently they cannot afford the new broadband which might attract investment to the town. They decide not to fix the road... the man on the hill gets angry demanding they do because he paid his taxes and is entitled to it.
The long and the short of it is that the maintenance of any network (road/comms) over a large geographic area to serve relatively few people is very expensive. This expense prohibits upgrading. For example if broadband didn't have to be brought to every backwater in the country the money used for that could have been spent in the cities to bring high speeds to a more concentrated number of people. This would stimulate growth in the urban economy. Instead we're left with a thinly spread often inadequate broadband that really serves the needs of no one.0 -
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cailinardthair wrote: »your fictional argument sounds ridiculous. people in real life don't act the way you are describing. i wonder are you a troll, or have just never been to rural Ireland.
my road hasn't been resurfaced in 9 years and there's no signs that it will be anytime soon, hardly crippling to a community, is it? you also do realize that house owners will pay by the pole to bring electricity to their house, as well as the connection fee?
you mention that the road network serves a relatively small population. what planet are you living on? if only people who had a house on it used it, maybe, but many. many people will use it.
you're making up theoretical situations to suit your argument. if you lived in a rural area then maybe you'd know what you were talking about, but i doubt you do.
you're basically saying that even though i pay just as much tax as you do, i'm not entitled to the same services just because i'm not from a town or city
Thats not what I'm saying.
In relation to your other point, roads should be resurfaced every 15 years. You road might not have been done but it will get its turn yet as some other part of your county got it this year. You will find that most roads are in rural areas even if you exclude roads linking principal towns.
As for who uses rural roads think about it for a minute. Rural dwellers do. Take a look at the map above (Longford). This is a typical scene in Ireland, the vast network of local roads only exists in order to maintain access for one off houses. If the houses were not there they could be abandoned as agricultural vehicles can negotiate rough terrain. In addition each of those roads has electricity, telephone and water.
Just for a second here imagine that the only thing the government did was make laws and provide security. In this country taxes are very low. However absolutely every other service from roads to health etc was provided for by a private company, however this hypothetical private company is not out to make a profit, it just wants to break even. Like you would expect every service you use is charged for by the amount of demands you place on the system. Ambulance trips are charged per km, cost of repair to storm damage to electricty lines is divided by the number of people the outage effects.
In this environment you'll find that a person living in a rural area will pay a lot more than someone living in a town. So much so that it would not be economically viable to live rurally. Fortunately (or unfortunately) we have a system of government that doesn't impose taxes according to use of services but rather the ability to pay. This means that urban dwellers (on the whole) subsidise rural dwellers (on the whole). In fact almost all economic activity takes place in towns so there is no reason for people to live in the countryside at all generally other than the fact that they want to.0 -
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One-off Housing killed my cat
By Mark Waters
Thursday, September 18, 2003
OK, this one's personal. One-off housing killed my cat.
For much of my youth I lived in so-called ribbon development housing on the outskirts of Castlebar. The 'development' consisted of a number of one-off houses clinging to the sides of the busy main road. Each house was individually serviced with its own water supply, electricity supply and telephone line and septic tank. Each had its own access to the main road. Each had its own means of handling refuse disposal. In short, each dwelling was a castle, self-sufficient and living in splendid isolation from its neighbours.
My cat was a beauty; her fur was a kaleidoscope of black, white and gold. We had rescued her from certain death after her mother -a stray- gave birth to a litter in a coal bag outside our house. She grew strong and healthy and one day produced a litter of her own. A few days after, following an unfortunate altercation with a neighbour's dog she decided it would be wise to take her five babies to a safer place. That place was in another neighbour's yard -on the other side of the busy main road.
The arrangement worked well for a few days. The kittens were safe and their mother would cross the road a few times a day to be fed at our house. Then one day the inevitable happened. The cat was killed crossing the road by a motorist who was driving so fast that he probably didn't even notice. We did our best to nurse the motherless kittens but without their mother it was hopeless and one by one they faded away and died.
Our cats paid the ultimate price but we ourselves suffered in little ways every day as a consequence of living in a one-off house. Services were inferior. Our electricity gave out a light that was a pale imitation of that of our friends in town. Our water supply had weak pressure. Our septic tank left our back garden looking like a marsh.
Later when the internet arrived it came at a crawl. Our telephone line was so far from the telephone exchange that we would have been quicker driving two miles to the nearest shop and buying the newspaper rather than wait for it to download.
And everything was so far away. Hours of our life were squandered travelling to and from school, to the sports clubs, swimming pool, and the houses of friends and, later on, to and from discos and pubs. Like most of our neighbours we were a single car household and huge demands were placed on the car. Cycling was an option only if you were willing to take your chances on the Russian roulette of the road.
And the road itself was like a knife cutting through the heart of the community. It was so dangerous that you were taking your life into your own hands if you dared to visit your neighbour. So we didn't. We retreated into our castles, and to our televisions, barely connected to the world by our cars -the very things that were imprisoning us in our homes.
This is the legacy of one-off housing and this is the reality of Bertie Ahern's notion of supporting one-off housing as a means of creating viable communities in the west.
One-off housing developments may save the politicians at the next election and they may save the farmers by putting a few euros in their pockets to delay the inevitable day of reckoning before they finally accept that their lifestyle is unviable and unsustainable. But they will not save the farmers' sons and daughters. The farmers cry that their children cannot build on their land and are forced to leave. But it is not the lack of one-off housing that causes the sons and daughters to jump ship; it is the cost of living and the quality of life that the consequences of one-off developments force on them. They leave because to stay means to pay more for poorer services and to suffer boredom, loneliness and a denial of their potential to contribute to and enjoy a fully functioning community.
A community of one-off houses has a serious disadvantage before it even starts out on the road to viability, sustainability and growth. Services cost more money and offer a poorer quality than they do in co-ordinated developments. Scarce resources are spread ever thinner across the landscape. The potential for economic development is limited. Everyone is pulling against everyone else instead of in the same direction.
Co-ordinated development does not provide the solution to all our problems but it provides a more solid foundation from which to tackle them. It gives us the breathing space to fulfil the potential that is often frustrated by a lack of common purpose. The loneliness and isolation of the elderly and housebound, the struggle of the GAA clubs to make the numbers for teams, the difficulty teenagers face trying to get to the disco because it's twenty miles away, the drink-driving roller coaster home after a night at a pub because of the lack of taxis, the difficulty of organising a community festival; these are just a few of the things made more difficult to deal with when we have to first surmount the obstacle of a dysfunctional and disconnected community.
We delude ourselves into thinking that one-off housing is about freedom and the rights of the individual. But if everyone is given complete freedom and the right to build where they like then no one is free. Everyone is compromised by everyone else. Without co-ordination the friction between individuals becomes so great that we all grind to a halt. With rights comes responsibilities. In the case of property rights these responsibilities are crucial. How landowners use their land has a huge impact on the broader society. It could be argued that many landowners are being so irresponsible in their attitude to the land that its potential for future generations has been irrecoverably damaged.
We delude ourselves into thinking that this is Ireland and that we are different. Dr. Seamus Caulfield, well known for his work with the Ceide Fields, has suggested that the definition of an Irish village is different to that of its British or European counterpart. He says that housing of the one-off type, where dwellings could be up to two miles apart and still be considered part of the village, were commonplace in the west of Ireland for much of our recent history and that planning strategy should take this into account.
But if we accept this argument then we must also acknowledge that many of these uniquely Irish villages were unviable and have all but disappeared and all those that do survive rely on the dubious foundations of farm subsidies and the release-valve of emigration to sustain them. To accept a one-off housing policy and to encourage development along the lines of the allegedly uniquely Irish village is to condemn us to repeat the mistakes of a past which few of us would wish to return to.
We delude ourselves into thinking that our leaders don't have the vision and ability to solve the problem. But we have county development plans and national strategies -developed with strong input from politicians- which are often models of vision, reason and common-sense but which are then totally compromised by the short-term interests of the self-same politicians.
The conflict between the short-term interests of politicians -always with an eye on the next election- and the long-term view of the planners has lead to a paralysis that has damaged the integrity of the planning process. Furthermore when politicians have the power to influence or reverse individual planning decisions it undermines confidence and defeats the whole point of the process. The politicians should only have the power to frame policy. Then they should let the planners get on with the job of implementing that policy.
Support for a one-off housing policy is tantamount to support for no housing policy at all. It shows a lack of any vision or hope for the viability and sustainability of communities in the west of Ireland. The long term benefit is sacrificed on the altar of blind short-term individualist thinking, a way of thinking that has stifled our potential so often in the past. The archaeologists at the Ceide Fields with justifiable pride state that their discovery proves that there were human settlements in Mayo 5000 years ago. Looking at the settlements around me today it is hard to see that we have made much progress since.
This article was originally published in Castlebar.News (www.castlebar.ie) on September 18th 2003.
A good pre-boom article on the topic and sums up many of my feelings. One off housing has been a disaster in this country and the place is now blighted with monstrosities such as this:
During the boom there was 70,000 of those placed on the landscape per year.0
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