Comment by YellOh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YellOh | Hacker News Reader

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I'm very interested to see how this goes, especially since I was not aware of Ireland's particular housing shortage.

I'm a big fan of infill/increased urban density in general, as long as it is ~equally beautiful to the surroundings. (Ex. live-work units can be much more beautiful than single-family homes, but 5-over-1s are usually not)

Some other topical sites I've been reading recently that I'd recommend:

https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

https://www.strongtowns.org/ (North America specific)

One quote I'm unsure about:

> [Popular housing reform] means having strict rules on parking and driving, ensuring congestion doesn’t increase.

I'm unsure whether to read this as strict rules to increase car infrastructure as housing is increased to make way for more people's vehicles, or to make sure new housing development holds steady car flow / implements alternative transportation so as not to increase the number of cars.

The first interpretation would make me concerned about induced demand.

> (Ex. live-work units can be much more beautiful than single-family homes, but 5-over-1s are usually not)

I'm not sure why this is presented as fact. Most single-family homes in the US are humble midcentury boxes, or bland suburban copy/pastes, or hideously garish McMansions. None of these are any prettier to look at than a 5-over-1.

I would rather walk past a 5-over-1 than SFH populated by roommates-who-don’t-want-roommates and homeless people on the sidewalk.

If maintaining an “aesthetic” costs keeping people in bad conditions, it’s not worth it.

And I agree, it’s a false dichotomy anyway as the most attractive development targets in a given area are the less desirable (ie less expensive) plots.

It's moot anyway. You shouldn't be able to veto a building you neither own nor live in simply because it doesn't suit your aesthetic tastes (ostensibly. I'm not convinced the accusations of "it's ugly!" aren't just another convenient excuse to shout down new structures).

I'm pretty YIMBY, but I don't really have an issue with popularly mandated style guides for development. As long as they are A) set in advance, not in response to individual development plans and B) aren't deliberately prohibitive of varying types of development. If an area wants to, say, mandate that all buildings are Art Deco, that'd be pretty cool to live in and visit. An area that wants to ban anything but single family homes should go rot.

I agree, you shouldn't be able to single-handedly veto buildings that have nothing to do with you. And I'd vastly prefer ugly dense buildings over the current failure to build anything.

However, we can build dense housing that isn't awful to look at for only marginal price increases in many cases, and where possible, I think it makes sense to do so. No individual should have veto power, but I think it makes sense for a community to have a stake in building beautiful urban areas.

I wasn't familiar with this term, so I'm dropping this here for the benefit of others who also are not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

Ireland is an extremely car-dependent country and has copied the worst of US urban design patterns.

Yeah, the estates are crazy. Typical newer estates have one exit, and Walls/Fences surrounding them to make it difficult to cut through.

Essentially, They're designed so that there's no reason to enter the estate unless you're going there. There's minimal network of paths for walking or cycling, and all the car traffic is funneled into increasingly difficult turns onto the main roads.

Older estates might have a few footpaths out -- We're in the closest one to town, 3 different walking ways out, and the ability to walk places is so much nicer than farther out. (Note, there's a dog in the house that drives a lot of the walking we do.)

I live near Tullamore and it's horrifying how car-dependent even brand new estates are. My kid goes to school there (we drive, sadly, because I am hell-bent on her being in a secular school and not the local ones) and I was chatting with another dad about grabbing a coffee. We realized the only option even remotely near was an Applegreen a 22 minute walk away. It's a wasteland.

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