I am often amused by the excitement (mostly negative) that arises over in Britishland when there’s any talk of housing development — i.e. building new houses where hitherto there have been none. Mostly, of course, the fury arises from among the NIMBYs who, having purchased their houses in or near village A, don’t want anyone else to live nearby because of “character” and the loss thereof.
It makes no sense because there’s a distinct lack of affordable housing Over There, not the least because very little new housing gets built — and when it does, it is of surpassing ugliness. Here’s an example of one such development recently built near Cambridge:
Yes, dear Readers, those are single-family homes, built according to the principles of Gropius and Le Corbusier, only with slanted roofs. Anywhere else, they’d be called “apartments” because that’s what they resemble, and I leave it to your imagination to decide how people would feel about living in such surroundings. Small wonder the existing population gets upset, if what’s coming looks like that.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that. As our family often says, “architecture doesn’t have to suck”, and here’s an example of same, in Doc Russia’s neighborhood a couple of towns over from Plano.
I should point out that the interiors of the above houses are almost identical: the floorplans and footprints are as close to uniform as can be imagined, and the square footage thereof likewise. (It may not look that way, but that’s the genius of the developer’s architect.)
Basically, the developer said to the initial homeowners: “We have about a dozen different looks for the houses here. Pick one, but just note that no identical outside designs can be next door to or across the road from each other, and in fact we intend to keep the designs separate as much as possible so that the development looks like a group of custom homes, even if they aren’t. Oh, and they’re all going to cost about the same, within a couple-five thousand dollars of each other depending on what cladding you choose for the front of the house.” It is a remarkably attractive development, and the prices have increased massively over time precisely because people don’t want to live in a suburb looking like that Cambridge cell-block.
And I should point out that those Brit houses and the American ones are very close in price, even allowing for the currency difference.
So the Brits could have built something according to the same ethos, but they didn’t because… well, they didn’t care, they had no imagination,there were cost savings, they figured that the buyers would just want to get whatever they could regardless of appearance, I dunno.
Anyway, the good news is that after the Cambridge development was completed, the council housing inspectors found that the entire suburb had a systemic flaw in the foundation design, with this happy result a few months later:
…and yes, I laughed and laughed and laughed myself sick. However, I will not offer odds that the rebuilt houses will look any different from their predecessors.
By the way, I have to point out in all fairness that we in Murka have similar problems; Doc Russia’s little enclave notwithstanding, I saw on my way home from the drugstore this horrible fucking thing that sprang up in Plano over a period of a couple months:
Those architectural pustules are townhouses, and in the normal course of events they’d lie empty for decades; but sadly, there is such great demand for new housing hereabouts (Californians, uh-huh, uh-huh) that I think the houses were almost all sold before completion. Yes, they look like nothing more than white-painted Monopoly houses all crammed together, and to say that they look nothing like any other townhouse development in Plano is an understatement. These are a block or two away from my place:
I think I’ll drop an anonymous note to our housing inspectors, saying that those white blocky things may be too dangerous for habitation because of foundation problems; but sadly, our inspection process here must be different from Over There because the foundations are inspected before any walls can be built on them.
Pity, that.
