Irish lust for one off housing

galwayrush · 04-12-2011 03:17PM

John_Rambo wrote: »

Sounds nice Galwayrush, would it be a village or a town evolving maybe?

Some small villages dotted around the area have grown , but it's too spread out for that to happen. I will admit, it would be nice if a decent central town would evolve, but i don't see it happening.

04-12-2011 03:23PM

galwayrush wrote: »

Some small villages dotted around the area have grown , but it's too spread out for that to happen. I will admit, it would be nice if a decent central town would evolve, but i don't see it happening.

If anything, this is really where it went wrong, planners should have been given the power & have councillor backup to have allowed development within reach of existing communities and blocked isolated one-offs.

As it happened they were often overruled when they tried to do this.

kylith · 04-12-2011 03:25PM

galwayrush wrote: »

Yeah, bastards wanted bigger and better modern houses.:rolleyes:
When we had more than double the population in this country , considering we had much smaller cities and towns, where did most of the the people live?

In one room and in poverty.

mossyc123 · 04-12-2011 03:25PM

eth0 wrote: »

It sounds that you just hate everything there is to Ireland, Irish culture and way of life like a rebellious teen that has no other way of rebelling other than trolling boards.

I don't know if you're still in Ireland but if you are I suggest you get the hell out of here and move to San Francisco or some other Modern urbanite's atheist paradise where everyone lives in a capsule apartment and goes around in driverless cars and segways and where you need a 4 year degree to pick up a kitchen knive
only a robot is allowed to use something as dangerous as a knife. Before this place drives you completely mad

Doesn't sound like you have seen all that much of Ireland either. There is no shortage of one-off houses in Norn Iron or indeed many other countries and in Letterkenny some of the nicest buildings are one-off houses while nearly all the new 'modern' development is ugly as f*ck.

Whether or not something is sustainable depends entirely on the way of life of the person living in the house, not its location.

+1.

There's a massive chip on the shoulder of young Dildo... a mass goin, GAA playin culchie Garda must have stolen his woman and now they're now planning on building a McMansion together!

:pac:

amacca · 04-12-2011 03:27PM

kylith wrote: »

In one room and in poverty.

a significant proportion lived in that one room in a tenement building in Dublin don't forget.

WesternZulu · 04-12-2011 03:36PM

dilbert2 wrote: »

Yet another silly strawman,...

What's a strawman

What are the characteristics that one needs to qualify as one?

Is everyone that is in favour of these one off houses a strawman?

johnr1 · 04-12-2011 03:37PM

OP, The most prominent emotion I have seen in this thread from people who agree with your POV is jealousy.
You have insulted and namecalled people who tried to give a different pov to yours instead of debating the issue properly.

I'll give you mine so you can do the same to me.

The valley in very rural Kerry where I live had immediately after the famine 257 houses, most at least a hundred metres or so apart, some further from each other. There was no definable village anywhere within several miles. About 1500 people lived here. Now there are 10 habitable houses here, of which 6 are fulltime occupied, 2 are holiday lets, and two are private holiday homes. Current population is 17.

If your view of the planning regs was law, I wouldnt have been able to build on the land which has been in my family for 5 generations. My immediate neighbours on both sides wouldnt be here, and that takes out the three people under forty who live here. There would be no chance of there being children in this area in the future, the old would die, and there would be nothing apart from wilderness here in 50 years. The patchwork of green fields would disappear, there would be nothing bar scrubland which no person could even walk through, and it would be yet another place where humans lived in the past but no longer can. My local school would suffer the loss, our community services meagre as they are would be discontinued, and eventually, it would be impossible to live in the general area rather than just this specific place.

Could you please explain to me how this would help you or society in general ?

Further, to suggest that in the past in Ireland rural dwellers lived in villages, and not in individually sited houses demonstrates a total lack of knowlege of the subject you're talking about. Trying to change facts to suit your pov is poor argument.

The house I liv in is a fairly large (2200sqft) architect designed house, designed to take advantage of daylight (solar gain) the view (so shoot me, cos you're jealous), it uses wood for fuel, solar panels for hot water, and costs very little to run. This is because I built it myself in 2005 when insulation and heat source tech had just become pertinent to builders.

If you walked past on an organised walk though, you'd probably be tut-tutting at the "celtic tiger pile" that bothers your poor eyesies.

I think in this case, my opinion matters more than yours. I've no intention of trying to convince you not to live in a shoebox apartment, or in "deckland" in Kildare, or under your bridge,:D or wherever you choose to. Please do us the same courtesy.

Tonyandthewhale · 04-12-2011 03:40PM

Personnally I'm against indiscrimate linear one-off housing. However, I freely aknowledge that many Irish towns and cities aren't especially nice to live in, they're full of faceless housing estates and a lot of the time they're no more walkable than many rural neighbourhoods. For that reason I think it's sort of silly to debate which is better of the two status quo's (one-off linear or a housing state in finglas), they're both flawed models.

Urban environment's need to feature denser developments, more apartment blocks and town-houses and more integration of business and residential neighbourhoods so we can have walkable-livable urban neighbourhoods with efficient public transport. The current model is too spread out and dull for urbanites to flourish in and two concrete and faceless for rural types to enjoy. They're just starter homes, and no one can afford to move up the property ladder anymore.

However, this is not to say that the current rural model is the perfect alternative. I think one-off housing is a good thing for Irish villages but a little strategic thinking is needed. Most Irish people want to live in the countryside because they want peace and quiet, an escape from perceived crime and social problems and a lower cost of living. How this dream tends to fulfill itself is that people buy a site in the countryside pretty much where-ever it becomes available and then a few years later someone builds beside you, then the other side, then across the road from you. Settlement is still low-density but you don't have that sense of rural idyl and freedom and because there's no centre of population or focal point there's no natural catalyst for community development.

Thing is, we have hundreds, infact thousands of proto-villages with a pub, a shop or maybe a church or school. There's no reason why areas around these micro-social-infrastructural centres couldn't be zoned for some medium to low density residential development. Sure you'd have neighbours on all sides of you but you could still have a decent size garden, room for a vegetable patch and a shed and a house you built yourself. You mightn't be truly in the countryside but you would be with a 1 to 3 minute walk of real countryside full of actual quietness, unspoilt vistas and y'know, actual nature.

John_Rambo · 04-12-2011 03:48PM

johnr1 wrote: »

The house I liv in is a fairly large (2200sqft) architect designed house, designed to take advantage of daylight (solar gain) the view (so shoot me, cos you're jealous), it uses wood for fuel, solar panels for hot water, and costs very little to run. This is because I built it myself in 2005 when insulation and heat source tech had just become pertinent to builders.

That sounds nice. Eco house, you have neighbours, schools, a community etc... I don't think the OP was aimed at you, but at the ugly one off houses in the middle of nowhere. At least your kids will have friends to play with, it sounds like a nice established area. Jealousy doesn't come in to it at all. I love to see houses like yours.

Some of the ones I am referring to have nothing around them. I would worry about kids living there when they hit their teens. Boredom and isolation.

(by the way, not all flats and apartments are shoeboxes and not all of Kildare is deckland, you have a warped view of life in other parts of the country if that's what you think!

)

CamperMan · 04-12-2011 03:48PM

OP... what is wrong with one off housing, there are people out there including myself that like our space, we do not want to be crammed into some tiny apartment block where you can hear your neighbour take a dump or hear them watching some crap on telly like Fair City!..

if you want to live like a sardine in a can, fine, do it but leave the people alone that want to live in their one off home!

Tonyandthewhale · 04-12-2011 03:55PM

johnr1 wrote: »

The valley in very rural Kerry where I live had immediately after the famine 257 houses, most at least a hundred metres or so apart, some further from each other. There was no definable village anywhere within several miles. About 1500 people lived here. Now there are 10 habitable houses here, of which 6 are fulltime occupied, 2 are holiday lets, and two are private holiday homes. Current population is 17.

If your view of the planning regs was law, I wouldnt have been able to build on the land which has been in my family for 5 generations. My immediate neighbours on both sides wouldnt be here, and that takes out the three people under forty who live here. There would be no chance of there being children in this area in the future, the old would die, and there would be nothing apart from wilderness here in 50 years. The patchwork of green fields would disappear, there would be nothing bar scrubland which no person could even walk through, and it would be yet another place where humans lived in the past but no longer can. My local school would suffer the loss, our community services meagre as they are would be discontinued, and eventually, it would be impossible to live in the general area rather than just this specific place.

Could you please explain to me how this would help you or society in general ?

Further, to suggest that in the past in Ireland rural dwellers lived in villages, and not in individually sited houses demonstrates a total lack of knowlege of the subject you're talking about. Trying to change facts to suit your pov is poor argument.

I haven't read every single post in this thread so I don't know if the OP has since said anything stupid but their opening post did make sense. They complained about the wide-spread nature of unregulated linear one-off development and said they preffered the way things were done in most European countries where most rural development is organised into small villages and communities.
If this model was followed in your case I can only assume you and your neighbours would have been encouraged to build your houses around a social focal point such as the local school you mentioned. There wouldn't have to be more or fewer people in the neighbourhood, they'd just be clustered together and rather than a house then a field then another house and so on you'd have a few houses, then a load of fields and such and then another few houses. The patchwork of fields you mentioned would not have to disolve into scrubland because no one (as far as I know), even village enthuasiasts such as myself has said farmers shouldn't be allowed live on the land that they make their living from.

Combatting linear rural development so as to save the countryside doesn't have to mean forcing all rural dwellers into soviet-style tower-blocks at gun-point. It can just mean re-organising patterns of rural development so that they're more sustainable and create less of an impact on the countryside.

John_Rambo · 04-12-2011 03:58PM

CamperMan wrote: »

OP... what is wrong with one off housing, there are people out there including myself that like our space, we do not want to be crammed into some tiny apartment block where you can hear your neighbour take a dump or hear them watching some crap on telly like Fair City!..

if you want to live like a sardine in a can, fine, do it but leave the people alone that want to live in their one off home!

And pay €15 for a pint and get mugged every hour and take heroine and be in a rush everywhere and beg from people and get stuck in traffic and loads of other misconceptions about urban life that you hear in your local pub?

Tonyandthewhale · 04-12-2011 04:01PM

CamperMan wrote: »

OP... what is wrong with one off housing, there are people out there including myself that like our space, we do not want to be crammed into some tiny apartment block where you can hear your neighbour take a dump or hear them watching some crap on telly like Fair City!..

if you want to live like a sardine in a can, fine, do it but leave the people alone that want to live in their one off home!

There's nothing wrong with one-off houses, it just should be organised into circles (or blobs or something) rather than in lines stretching along rural roads so no one gets to have an unspoilt view. Limiting the spread of badly planned mcMansions blighting our landscape doesn't have to mean apartments or housing estates or even living in a town. Only very small changes have to be made, they're just difficult to make.

Stained Class · 04-12-2011 04:04PM

Tonyandthewhale wrote: »

Thing is, we have hundreds, infact thousands of proto-villages with a pub, a shop or maybe a church or school. There's no reason why areas around these micro-social-infrastructural centres couldn't be zoned for some medium to low density residential development. Sure you'd have neighbours on all sides of you but you could still have a decent size garden, room for a vegetable patch and a shed and a house you built yourself. You mightn't be truly in the countryside but you would be with a 1 to 3 minute walk of real countryside full of actual quietness, unspoilt vistas and y'know, actual nature.

That would be the ideal senario alright.

But this is where the real screwup happened.

I live in a housing estate next to a small village.

It's a grand house(4 bed semi built 2002),good neighbours & location.

The big problem is the lack of a decent garden & the lack of parking space if like most households you have more than 1 car.

I find that most recently built estates of this type have the same problem.

This is the main reason people see them as 'starter homes'.

That really shouldn't be the case.

As happy as I am with my present home, my longer term aim would be to buy a half acre & do the self build.

Pity really.

johnr1 · 04-12-2011 04:11PM

Tonyandthewhale wrote: »

I haven't read every single post in this thread so I don't know if the OP has since said anything stupid but their opening post did make sense. They complained about the wide-spread nature of unregulated linear one-off development and said they preffered the way things were done in most European countries where most rural development is organised into small villages and communities.
If this model was followed in your case I can only assume you and your neighbours would have been encouraged to build your houses around a social focal point such as the local school you mentioned. There wouldn't have to be more or fewer people in the neighbourhood, they'd just be clustered together and rather than a house then a field then another house and so on you'd have a few houses, then a load of fields and such and then another few houses. The patchwork of fields you mentioned would not have to disolve into scrubland because no one (as far as I know), even village enthuasiasts such as myself has said farmers shouldn't be allowed live on the land that they make their living from.

Combatting linear rural development so as to save the countryside doesn't have to mean forcing all rural dwellers into soviet-style tower-blocks at gun-point. It can just mean re-organising patterns of rural development so that they're more sustainable and create less of an impact on the countryside.

So I and my neighbours should have been "encouraged" to go buy some land that was not for sale 6 miles away from the family farm, and leave our parents living where they were, or do you suggest they should have been "encouraged" too? What form should that encouragement have taken i wonder.......Oh yes, you posted a model for that didnt you, - I've bolded it for you.
In this area once upon a time, people were rounded up like cattle and marched at gunpoint to Cobh to be put on famine ships by a "social architect" and landlord agent called William Trench. He used many of the arguments being used on this thread.
We haven't forgotten.

cassi · 04-12-2011 04:14PM

Personally, I'd rather live in a beautiful house in the countryside with an amazing view than live surrounded by other houses with a view of other houses!

And really there aren't many places in Ireland where your completely away form everything. The country just isn't large enough for that.

Clareboy · 04-12-2011 04:21PM

amacca wrote: »

why do you see it as a failing

I think other nations greatest failing is their continuing urbanisation

I think Dublin for the most part is a disgusting sprawling monstrosity

I think Tokyo, new york etc are horrible horrible places....aesthetically and almost every other way......people living in cities like tokyo want to get out of them take your ideal to its logical conclusion and rats are what the human race become....rats packed in ever diminshing amounts of space in huge urban areas.

I am not talking about cities like New York and Tokyo. In this country, we have thousands of villages and small towns that should have been developed and built up, but instead we have mostly gone for the one off housing, which has destroyed the fabric of our villages and smaller towns.

Minstrel27 · 04-12-2011 04:28PM

John_Rambo wrote: »

At least in villages and towns kids can walk or cycle to school

Maybe this was the case twenty years ago. Nowadays we see the little darlings getting shipped around by mummy is the humongous 4x4 that will never see the terrain it was designed for.

04-12-2011 04:33PM

Minstrel27 wrote: »

Maybe this was the case twenty years ago. Nowadays we see the little darlings getting shipped around by mummy is the humongous 4x4 that will never see the terrain it was designed for.

Mums buses, that has nothing to do with rural developments, you're just as likely to see that in any town as well. That has a much to do with parents sending their kids to a "better" school that is beyond the local school bus run.

Clareboy · 04-12-2011 04:34PM

Stained Class wrote: »

That would be the ideal senario alright.

But this is where the real screwup happened.

I live in a housing estate next to a small village.

It's a grand house(4 bed semi built 2002),good neighbours & location.

The big problem is the lack of a decent garden & the lack of parking space if like most households you have more than 1 car.

I find that most recently built estates of this type have the same problem.

This is the main reason people see them as 'starter homes'.

That really shouldn't be the case.

As happy as I am with my present home, my longer term aim would be to buy a half acre & do the self build.

Pity really.

No parking space for the second car! God its a hard life for some! I could cry for you!

Stained Class · 04-12-2011 04:42PM

Clareboy wrote: »

No parking space for the second car! God its a hard life for some! I could cry for you!

When you need 2 incomes to keep a household, mortgage, bills, etc going, you will usually need 2 people working & needing a car each to get to work.

Simple fact of life for a lot of people in this country, in case you hadn't noticed.:rolleyes:

Chinasea · 04-12-2011 04:42PM

Tonyandthewhale · 04-12-2011 04:42PM

johnr1 wrote: »

So I and my neighbours should have been "encouraged" to go buy some land that was not for sale 6 miles away from the family farm, and leave our parents living where they were, or do you suggest they should have been "encouraged" too? What form should that encouragement have taken i wonder.......Oh yes, you posted a model for that didnt you, - I've bolded it for you.
In this area once upon a time, people were rounded up like cattle and marched at gunpoint to Cobh to be put on famine ships by a "social architect" and landlord agent called William Trench. He used many of the arguments being used on this thread.
We haven't forgotten.

Encouragement could take the form of planning permission restrictions, zoning, perhaps subsidies based on the infrastructual and service provision savings such a settlement pattern would provide. As for your parents, if they live on the family farm then obviously they should stay there if they so wish.
As for your parents, they should be obviously be allowed live on the family farm no one's arguing that farmers should be turfed off their land. Just that if you move into a rural neighbourhood and treat it as an extension of suburbia (ie commute to work in the city) then there should be some cohesion to where you decide to build your house. Please don't equate me to some sort of big-land-owner tyrant of Orwellian social planning. I'm just suggesting some regulations for future planning in a totally democratic framework, no need to get alarmist.

Clareboy · 04-12-2011 04:43PM

cassi wrote: »

Personally, I'd rather live in a beautiful house in the countryside with an amazing view than live surrounded by other houses with a view of other houses!

And really there aren't many places in Ireland where your completely away form everything. The country just isn't large enough for that.

What happens when the local farmers decide to sell some more sites and build more houses which will destroy the amazing views? By building in the open countryside, you are destroying what attracted you to the place in the first instance.

Clareboy · 04-12-2011 04:49PM

Stained Class wrote: »

When you need 2 incomes to keep a household, mortgage, bills, etc going, you will usually need 2 people working & needing a car each to get to work.

Simple fact of life for a lot of people in this country, in case you hadn't noticed.:rolleyes:

If people lived in villages and small towns, public transport would be an option for most people. Because of our scattered population, we can never have a proper functioning public transport service.

Stained Class · 04-12-2011 04:52PM

Clareboy wrote: »

I am not talking about cities like New York and Tokyo. In this country, we have thousands of villages and small towns that should have been developed and built up, but instead we have mostly gone for the one off housing, which has destroyed the fabric of our villages and smaller towns.

They were. Most villages round my way have at least one 'tiger era' housing estate tacked onto them.

Clareboy · 04-12-2011 04:59PM

Stained Class wrote: »

They were. Most villages round my way have at least one 'tiger era' housing estate tacked onto them.

We should have more more ' infill ' type developement and the restoration of the derelict and abandoned dwellings that now blight many of our villages and small towns.

amacca · 04-12-2011 05:03PM

Clareboy wrote: »

I am not talking about cities like New York and Tokyo. In this country, we have thousands of villages and small towns that should have been developed and built up, but instead we have mostly gone for the one off housing, which has destroyed the fabric of our villages and smaller towns.

what happened to cities like New York and Tokyo is that they developed and built up over time...do you think they just appeared as a fait accompli at some time in the past?

Stained Class · 04-12-2011 05:11PM

Clareboy wrote: »

If people lived in villages and small towns, public transport would be an option for most people. Because of our scattered population, we can never have a proper functioning public transport service.

Nah, public transport isn't really a viable option in villages, or even in small towns as it is.

goose2005 · 04-12-2011 05:12PM

amacca wrote: »

why do you see it as a failing

I think other nations greatest failing is their continuing urbanisation

How can everyone

I think Dublin for the most part is a disgusting sprawling monstrosity

I think Tokyo, new york etc are horrible horrible places....aesthetically and almost every other way......people living in cities like tokyo want to get out of them take your ideal to its logical conclusion and rats are what the human race become....rats packed in ever diminshing amounts of space in huge urban areas.

But Tokyo and NY are very different from Dublin, with dense high-rise developments - Dublin is ridiculously low-density for a capital city of over 1 million.

johnr1 wrote: »

So I and my neighbours should have been "encouraged" to go buy some land that was not for sale 6 miles away from the family farm, and leave our parents living where they were, or do you suggest they should have been "encouraged" too? What form should that encouragement have taken i wonder.......Oh yes, you posted a model for that didnt you, - I've bolded it for you.

Very well, but multiply that argument by a million people and you end up with a horrible mess of a countryside. My local village has a pop. of about 200, and there are about 1,000 people scattered around it. Wouldn't everyone be better off if there were 1,000 in the village and 200 on the land?

Irish lust for one off housing

Comments