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Comment by Earw0rm | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be.

We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places.

What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.

And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.

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Like Brexit, there's a huge overhang of misinformed old people who hate change, but have no vested interest in the real economy because their pensions stay the same even if they block growth.

> against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.

Quite. It's time for a campaign of bigging up the second and third cities. Of course, this immediately fell to a victory of Starmer Labour keeping HS2 cuts instead of Burnham Labour (who has done great things for Manchester).

This. London can't grow much more - it can densify up to a point, but you can't build much more on the edges of town without some enormously expensive infrastructure upgrades through the middle. Which they should probably do anyway, a tube line, a Crossrail line and a new HS line every decade or so, but neither Labour nor Tories are into that politically, because of London-envy in the rest of the country.

Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and the larger university cities on the other hand, masses of scope, and on a much smaller budget and shorter timescale.

It's also the quality of the build… most new build houses are shit because the house building companies are more interested in their profit than the quality of the product

If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back

That's partly (but not entirely) survivor bias.

The Victorians built a lot of absolute garbage.

Much of it was destroyed during or immediately after WWII, or extensively - and expensively - renovated at the tail end of the 20th century. Some of it muddles on in not-really-fit-for-purpose condition: terraced houses with lath-and-plaster walls between units, street plans that can't accommodate modern requirements for recycling bins, parking and so on, homes that are difficult to insulate or retrofit with modern heating.

It's a bit like software that's been in use for 20 years. Most of the bugs have been worked out, and all the mid-tier stuff that was written at the same time has been abandoned and forgotten.

Meanwhile, a lot of those beautiful-from-the-outside Georgian and Regency townhouses that dominate the streets of much of inner London? In many cases they're really not that great to live in, unless you gut them and rebuild the entire inside.

I'm not saying all new-builds are great, mind. Some of what I've seen seems particularly mean - small and high-density, despite being in the middle of nowhere - all the cons of density without any of the pros. You'd think we'd have learned by now, but no.

I think the new builds also highlight the problem in that we're mostly obsessed with building these weird not-quite-a-town clumps of houses rather than actually growing patterns that we know work.

That and people have no taste. I like Poundbury, but I would also accept some modernist Foster-ville if someone actually did it and was prepared to put their foot down to make it consistent.

Oh, I’m not saying old houses are better (although many of them have more generous sized rooms and plots)

I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives

A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in the back garden.

They fit them with smaller windows so they don’t have to add as much insulation… the list of shitty things the major housebuilders do is pretty long

The garden thing feels like a cultural bug. Sort of, everyone thinks they ought to have a garden, but most people don't actually, in practice, want to do the work to maintain one, nor do they want to pay the extra for the amount of space that makes a good and useful one.

Most of those new-builds with tiny, astroturf-and-slabs gardens and wooden fence panels would be better built as apartment blocks with a shared park. Or, if your cultural aversion to apartments is too strong, as seems to be the case in much of Anglo culture ("my own roof over my own head"), row/terrace-style housing again with outdoor space provided in the form of a shared public or private park.

It seems to work well in parts of Inner London anyway, the Georgian garden squares are way nicer than a garden almost any individual resident would have time to maintain. I don't know why we can't have more of that.

Yes, so destroy the current system, then we can do all that. All we basically need is a system that can properly facilitate "Yes, but" rather than "No" and has a mechanism for bartering.

Also I don't think you're right about university cities. Taking Cambridge for example, it's completely strangled, and not by a need for buses. The causality is backwards.

BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it did in 1972 because "heritage".

We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies who will literally force you to put the most godawful, hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not the 70's.

(Sorry for the mail link) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592033/Put-pebble-...

Accurate.

In fact, the only post 1972 thing you ARE allowed to do is pave over your front garden and park two Jeep Cherokees (neither of which actually fit in the available space) on it.

Ah yes, it's a delight that the pavements are now covered in SUV's too because they're too big to park legally. Very in keeping with the distinct cultural heritage of the area.

But build a bike lane or even a bike shed, and they'll drag the city council all the way to the EU Supreme Court, even though half of that demographic voted Brexit.

Hold on though, that's not 1970s pebble dash, that's 1920s pebble dash, that was on the house when it was built (ish - seems that area was built up between 184 and 1914). The house is in a conservation area, which means you've got to keep it looking original. If you don't want to do that, just don't move to a conservation area!

Found a non-Mail link BTW: https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/planning-inspecto...

And the neighbours don't have any of that awful looking pebble dash.

Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first.

Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected.

I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its character and it won't be the same place anymore if it didn't keep its distinctive look.

https://corfecastle.co.uk/the-village/

If you would just start building places that don't fit in with the rest of the village. The village wouldn't have it character and thus it wouldn't have its tourism in the Summer as a result.

There countless towns and village with a bunch of heritage that literally goes back maybe a millennia and the argument that we should throw this away to build a load of crap houses (new houses BTW are awful, I've looked at many in the last few years) is completely asinine.

But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves.

Explains a lot, actually.

I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals" (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people what their home should look like) insisting that everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up with it this way is a bit much.

I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually live in an area get to decide what it looks like. If people don't involve themselves in that process and it is monopolized by people "with too much time on their hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy bodies then they should make time and actually go to the meetings.

You decide you own level of involvement in the community.

> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.

It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.

BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.

The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.

The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.

Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B

Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A

Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.

Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.

It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.

And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows the council's true priorities. They could at least put it on the edge of the village.

> The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.

Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.

> The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves. > > Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B > > Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A > > Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more. > > Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more. > > It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.

These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically people are either moving to a particular area, or out of a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat assumed in your scenario).

The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every year.

So… if I move to a county I can decide nobody else gets to build a house there? Even on land I don’t own?

That isn't the argument being made and you know it.

It very much is, in the aggregate.

Not at all. It is quite clear that you are doing the "lets take this to the logical extreme". That might be fine in some sort of debate club tactic but it isn't what I was suggesting should happen at all and you know it. So I think we will leave it there.

That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on.

Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.

The issue is that those cities end up growing into the countryside. I like there is a big green barrier between Greater Manchester and Macclesfield.

It would help if the cities and larger towns built higher and denser.

Yes lets cram everyone in like sardines in massive sky-scrapers that blots out the sky.

The other alternative is that the UK doesn't allow 600,000 people (net) in every year.

The usual suggestion is to build cities more like Berlin (for example) which has an inner city with many 4-6 storey buildings — much denser than London's terraced houses, but without the isolation of skyscrapers.

These are all solutions that ignore the main problem. They literally cannot build enough properties (whatever they are) to fill current demand. Even if they relax the regulations that we currently have in place. Even there were enough properties built the infrastructure for utilities can't be scaled easily. There are issues building new properties right now because the electric grid cannot handle the combination of that and large data centres.

Since supply of house cannot be increased to solve this problem, you need to lessen the demand. The most obvious way to do this that I can see is to put a cap on immigration that is much lower than the number of people leaving (about 400,000 people leave the UK each year). However for various reasons this is seen as absolute verboten.

BTW, I know exactly the type of buildings you are talking about (we have them in Manchester) and they are typically look awful and usually start falling apart after shortly after construction. They are also not very nice to live in (I have lived in one for short amount of time).

Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.

Partly changing social customs - and you could, legitimately I think, argue some of this is down to immigration/multiculturalism - the old landlady/boarding house model, for example, which provided a LOT of cheap and relatively comfortable roofs over heads, was based on higher trust and cultural commonality than exists today.

But a lot of demand is driven by people living alone, either due to family breakdown, old age, or just out of personal choice.

On that basis if you wanted to increase supply, levers you could pull are an even more favourable tax treatment of rent-a-room schemes (although it's already pretty generous - people just don't want to), land value taxes to encourage under-occupiers to downsize, inheritance tax changes for the same (no more favourable "family home" treatment relative to cash or pension assets) and, more difficult this, legal and planning instruments to encourage suburban densification, get streets that are largely full of decaying HMOs knocked down and replaced by mid-rise which is fit for purpose.

> Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.

It has nothing to do with what I read on the news. It is simply numbers. You can come up with all these crazy schemes to increase supply which probably won't happen, or you could reduce demand that could literally be done tomorrow if they wanted to.

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