We have a housing problem what problems do you forsee and what solutions would you suggest for the upcoming projects?
Hi Anon, Thanks for the question
One of the big problems we will face with getting the number of houses built that this government has targetted is the requirement for parking spaces for those houses. We can no longer build streets of terrace houses because each house is supposed to have room for 2 cars. This is why new build blocks of flats come with carparks and new build houses usually come with front parking spaces or garages.
I'd like to use tech to solve the problem there are underground parking garages that would fit in almost any community but they come with the risk that a breakdown would cause a neighbourhood to be without access to their cars. I've seen examples of this on Tom Scott's YouTube here which can include electric car charging and are much more secure than on-street parking.
Storing cars off the street like this makes them a hassle to access, which means that you need to build the area around that limitation. While discouraging driving you have to provide all the things a community might need. Every 100 or so houses should have a shop or commercial space, every 250 houses should have a park. This makes the area walkable and enjoyable for families.
Every 1000 houses should have some form of community resource which might be a community centre, doctor's office, library, school or faith building. The community resource should be the last thing that's built, there should be space earmarked for it and when residents have started to buy up the finished properties and move in they should get an opportunity to decide what they think they would use most.
These should often be built in conjunction with one another, if there's the opportunity for 5000 houses to be built near one another. We could end up with a village that has 2 primary schools, a doctor's office, a library/community centre, and a church for the community buildings, while in the commercial spaces there could be 5 corner shops, 5 charity shops, a salon, a barber shop, a bank, a local supermarket, 5 pubs or takeaways, 5 other faith buildings, a telecom exchange, 6 electric substations, a retirees centre, several spaces for small local businesses/offices, and to fulfil the green space requirements there'd be 10 small parks/playgrounds and 1 larger park with 10x the space maybe with basket ball/tennis courts, lawn bowls, some football posts on a field and a set of toilets. This would end up being a somewhat balanced community with room for many different sorts of people to move in and become a community through their shared access to these spaces.
Social housing should be an integral part of every community, 1/10 homes being one that should be sold to a social landlord or council, these should be picked at random so it's impossible to tell which streets or which properties in a given street are social landlords vs owned by the person living in them vs private rented. They absolutely should not be the cheapest houses the building company can provide that meets the social housing specification while other houses in the same area are bigger or have more things built into their fabric.
Making a village like this walkable and limiting the parking to the parking structures means you can forgo streets and use many of the road spaces as green spaces with walking paths, trees and so on.
If I were designing this I'd have concentric circular roads connected by spokes on T junctions where the 4th road goes into a parking structure and the spoke roads may be on every 3rd or 4th 'street'. the result should be no one is more than a few minutes walk from one parking structure or another, and each structure could have storage for 50 to 100 cars, which would probably mean people would end up meeting at the structures around rush hours adding more opportunities to build the community.
I understand that this wouldn't be workable in all areas but I think that if 5-10% of the projects looked like this they'd be able to provide a higher density of housing with an improved local environment over the concrete jungle with tarmac driveways and tiny gardens model which has come to dominate in many new build locations.
Even though I think this is a good solution, I understand that it could only be done with planning directed by the government because this shift in the layout and structure of new communities is rather radical. I see that it would face huge amounts of resistance from commercial ventures thinking that it's not viable, installing the technologies is going to take skills and extra money we don't currently have easily available relatively speaking, even if I believe there would ultimately be an appetite for this sort of community and people would easily adapt to living in these sorts of villages because it's so different it might take time to be accepted.
Yet another Complicated answer for a complicated world and this isn't the only solution out there. I'd like to hear from other people what they think of this idea and if they could see themselves living in a place like this.
