Re: Re: What future for housing estates?

@Graham Hickey wrote:

Prairies as it were.

What sort of densities are being achieved at the moment with housing estates, considering how in most cases the houses are being built on top of each other – you can usually put you arm out the bathroom window and touch your neighbour’s window – or even worse see into it 🙂

But is this all about the environment – either way the oil’s gonna go eventually & more sustainable modes of private transport will have to be developed. So in the long term is this simply a traffic congestion issue rather than an environmental one?

I think that suburban housing development has undergone greater changes than any other type of development in recent years. Densities have increased dramatically and developers are hungrier than ever to put in as much retail space as they think they can get away with.

The major change that has occured without doubt is the advent of the local area plan, which are getting better and better in terms of the level of detail going into them. There are some Local authorites that have not really adressed them in a meaningful way yet, but as Graham rightly points out, traffic generation is every local authorities worst nightmare as they ultimately foot the bill for non-national roads.

Regarding government intervention, I do not believe that the state needs to intervene as an equity holder, it is simply up to the Minister to start framing some guidelines encouraging higher densities in areas such as Crumlin, Killester, and linking the density issue to access to high quality transport corridors.

The most interesting residential land transaction this year without doubt was the CIE sale as Fassaugh Avenue in Cabra, which involved an old cement depot of 9 acres making 28m, but CIE retained a sufficient parcel to develop a platform for a new rail station and incorporated a public right of way into station as part of the contract.

I also feel that measures such as the new instituional land use zoning are also entirely counter productive as there are in many cases a massive correlation between Victorian Schools/Hospitals and rail lines, this new ‘social and affordable’ clause is going to be entirely counter productive as the institutions will simply not release the land.

There is a housing estate north west of Swords that was built in 1970’s it has one little shop and about one bus every 90 minutes to Swords and the City Centre it is surrounded on all sides by fields and one-off houses. An extreme example I know but transport land use planning is the only gig in town.