Re: Re: What future for housing estates?

Numbering your ideas:
1. The most likely outcome.
2. Is not practical. Houses in Rathmines are typically twice the size in terms of floor area of a typical three bed semi – some are substantially bigger. Most are terraced and so the floor area density (to coin a phrase) is already many multiples of that of a semi-detached seventies suburban housing estate.
3. I believe the rezoning could happen but the chances of significant development happening along these lines are slight. Buying contiguous houses will be horribly expensive and even then you can be sure that the other neighbours will fight tooth and nail not to have a three story building “tower over them” or “ruin their view”. It will not be economically viable and for it to have any discernable affect it would need to happen all over the place. I know it has happened in one or two places in Dublin but these are exceptional cases.
4. You’re joking? It would be political suicide.
5. This is my favourite but will never happen. I’ve often fondly imagined certain housing estates being transformed in this manner.

This is what horrifies me about suburban sprawl. Apollo house will be lucky to reach it’s fortieth birthday; the Ballymun towers lasted thirty odd years while the estates around lucan will be there for a century at least if not many centuries. I’m often perplexed when people are more outraged by standalone architectural monstrosities which can be relatively cheaply “corrected” (i.e. replaced) than the permanent and practically irreversable damage caused by covering hundreds of acres of land in unsustainable poorly laid out low density suburban housing.