My idea to address the Housing shortage - build over railways?

[jopsuk]

Don't you think passengers already spend quite long enough in tunnels without adding more?

HS2 is a case in point. Tunnelling has been continually added to pacify nimbys such that the pleasure of the journey for passengers is in danger of being seriously compromised.

Nah. Rebuild every line coming in to London to be fully subsurface from ~30 miles out (for starters). Lots of land reclaimed AND much less weather disruption!

 

[najaB]

If house prices keep rising it is possible that the airport would be worth far more if redeveloped for housing. It is looked at every now and again by the property market. However the owners would probably also need to capture some of the value of the land that is presently blighted by the airport to make it work.

Balancing that, the reason that house prices keep rising is precisely because London's stock as a financial centre keeps increasing - which increases the utility value of an airport very nearly at the centre of that hub.

 

[AndrewE]

However, on electrified routes - why not?

Oxford, for example, is in the midst of a housing crisis. A raised linear estate of apartments and 3 storey town houses with central service road from Garsington Road to Redbridge then onwards to Wolvercote/Oxford Parkway may work very well indeed. That could accommodate around 3000 generously sized homes with integrated double garage.

Also (I can't imagine why I missed the point) why should railway land / amenities be stolen for generously sized homes with integrated double garage?

If they live over a railway line how difficult can it be to walk or cycle to a station?
A?

 

[furnessvale]

Also (I can't imagine why I missed the point) why should railway land / amenities be stolen for generously sized homes with integrated double garage?

How long before the occupants of said houses are complaining about the noise of trains?

 

[w1bbl3]

On the subject of tower blocks, materials science has come on a long way since the 1960s. I think the biggest problem with those buildings was the structural need to have dingy, narrow warrens of corridors, which promote anti-social behaviour.

Given modern materials I'm sure if there was the will we could design much more suitable buildings with larger, open spaces internally which might help prevent antisocial behaviour developing and make them much more pleasant to live in.

Even back in the 60's wider corridors and communal spaces where possible but doing so would have eaten up valuable floor space hence the corridors where small.

Current new build apartment blocks have 1.4 to 1.8m wide corridors so are generally narrower than past activities and overall new build dwelling size has been shrinking since the mid 90's.

An immediate concept could be to "stack" the equivalent of a traditional housing "close", by building 5 or so double-storey dwellings fronting a large shared communal space with the open side allowing sunlight in (or maybe an entire street of facing dwellings with a street-wide shared space between them with semi-glazed ends to let light in).

This sounds a lot like a double duplex town house, where a pair of two storey 120m2 to 150m2 dwellings are stacked on top of each other. The ground floor unit gets the external rear garden and the upper unit has a roof garden. Very common in new low rise developments within the M25, a slight variant on this theme to construct a 1st floor deck then start the dwellings off the deck. Below the deck parking, retail and community spaces can be provided.
Generally each dwelling has it's own ground level entrance so that expensive to maintain lifts are avoided and the amount of communal public space such as unsecured walkways (or corridors) is minimised.

Lower density than traditional housing blocks, but much higher density than normal surface homes. If you build the blocks large enough you could build facilities into them directly (think small shops, surgeries, etc. maybe even pubs!), which could further foster communities developing.

Hell, if you build them in clusters you could even link these floors together by aerial walkways to spread facilities out a bit, and further reduce the workload on the lifts.

Your not a million miles away from the original concept of Sheffield Park Hill and streets in the sky, sadly for various reasons possibly down to the streets being public realm and not actively managed they became rundown and unsafe for residents. The enclosed cores to get down to ground in particular. Yes I know the scheme is nine storeys but the concept was/is for three storey high module blocks stacked three modules high, strip one module from it and the density achieved would match what your describing.

 

[mr_jrt]

Your not a million miles away from the original concept of Sheffield Park Hill and streets in the sky, sadly for various reasons possibly down to the streets being public realm and not actively managed they became rundown and unsafe for residents. The enclosed cores to get down to ground in particular. Yes I know the scheme is nine storeys but the concept was/is for three storey high module blocks stacked three modules high, strip one module from it and the density achieved would match what your describing.

Thanks for that - just spent the last hour or two reading up on the concepts. Food for thought!

 

[Julia]

There's something like 500,000 empty properties in the UK.

OK, so some are justifiably so, but many were bought up for redevelopments that never happened, some (especially in London) are held empty as investments so as to deliberately exploit and exacerbate the property bubble, some are lost in not knowing who owns them (eg. investment companies that went bust, overseas buyers), some are stuck in probate. Councils have the power to compulsorily purchase houses and bring them back into use - but this government has leant on them hard not to do it. After all, the absentee owner's right to let his house rot and fall down should trump the poor guy's right to a roof over his head, shouldn't it?

 

[furnessvale]

Thanks for that - just spent the last hour or two reading up on the concepts. Food for thought!

The best cure for bad housing design is to make the architect live in one, especially tower blocks.

 

[The Ham]

There are too many people is the problem, not that there are not enough houses.

The numbers of people are not always the problem, it's the number of people per dwelling which is the problem.

Not that long ago 4 and 5 bedroom houses were pretty much the preserve of those with families, now (having seen those families grow up) it is not uncommon for there to be one or two people in large "family" homes.

Add to that the percentage of people who are not married or living as part of a family (either through choice and/or circumstances) which means that the number of people per house has dropped significantly.

Combining these two factors has lead to more houses needed for a given size of population (say per 100,000 people), meaning that even if our population was falling we would probably still need to be building a lot of houses.

I would argue that most people who have come from overseas to live and work in the UK tend live with more people per property than those who come from the UK.

Of those who are born overseas and are now "living over here" there are quite a few who were born overseas to british parents who moved back to the UK whilst their children were young (i.e. one big group are children of our armed forces) who our immigration system could not (and rightly so) stop from living here.

The numbers of immigrants who we could stop if we were a LOT more strict about letting people in is in is relatively low compared to the overall population. However, even if we did that it wouldn't solve our housing problems in fact (bearing in mind what eastern europeans did to the cost of undertaking building works) there is an argument that it would make it worse.

Likewise with the native population aging (and quite significantly, given that of the population as a whole there are now more people aged over 80 than there are aged under 18) there would be less people to undertake the jobs that need doing, and as such we need our population to be growing to enable our country to keep functioning.

One of the problems with the planning system is that a lot of objectors are based on 1980's mindsets to development (where all the local area got were the new houses and all the problems that caused to local services), whilst now with the levels of funding that developers have to provide (such as to transport, education, social housing, public open space, etc.) the balance as to whether there is a benefit or not to having development is much closer than it used to be.

That's before you take into account that if a borough has 30,000 homes a lot of it's costs are the same as if it has 25,000 homes or 35,000 homes and so economies of scale come into play, meaning that everyones council tax can go a bit further.
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There's something like 500,000 empty properties in the UK.

OK, so some are justifiably so, but many were bought up for redevelopments that never happened, some (especially in London) are held empty as investments so as to deliberately exploit and exacerbate the property bubble, some are lost in not knowing who owns them (eg. investment companies that went bust, overseas buyers), some are stuck in probate. Councils have the power to compulsorily purchase houses and bring them back into use - but this government has leant on them hard not to do it. After all, the absentee owner's right to let his house rot and fall down should trump the poor guy's right to a roof over his head, shouldn't it?

500,000 sounds a lot (current stats have it at getting on for 650,000), until you realise that there are 25 million houses which means that about 2% of all houses in the UK are empty. By the time you allow for some being empty between tenants (sometimes just for a matter of a few months whilst works to improve the properties are carried out) and all the other "justifiable reasons given I would be surprised if there were very many available to actually be useful in housing many more people.

If you look at the numbers involved which have been empty for more than 6 months and you are down to about 200,000 which although would help it would probably only make up one years worth of shortfall if they were all made available. As such, it is not surprising that the authorities aren't focusing too many resources in this area.

 

[jopsuk]

Most empty houses (not all, admittedly) are in places with higher unemployment and low property prices. Most brownfield land that is suitable for residential building and isn't already allocated for such is in places with higher unemployment and low property prices