Modern Houses - Update #3

Alistair Twiname replies:

Your councillor friend makes some good points about over regulation causing declining standards of housing. However the regulations encouraging minimum densities are very recent additions, the problem with modern housing is not a question of density, the number units per hectare of a typical Victorian development (Islington in London, Marchmont in Edinburgh et all) was way, way higher that what is currently built on Greenfield developments. yet these are the lofty spacious houses that we bemoan the loss of. The real problem is the developers' lack of imagination and skill in creating density, developers have decided that people would rather die than live in a terrace house or in a flat. They build detached rabbit-hutches with a garage instead of making decent terraces / tenements they have stuck to their formula and people bought it. Council's demanding higher density is more likely to be the cure rather than the cause of the problem. I am all for the reduction of the amount of regulation in the construction industry but the real problem is the lack of skill and understanding.

Building regulations, (which affect the sizes of doors, fire escapes etc) have made building a building a far more technical activity but I cannot see that as an excuse for poor building. Citing the 70s as a era that passed the building regs and repeated the formula is a fudge, that's what they did when they built Bath, Edinburgh and Bloomsbury 200 years ago.. the problem wasn't that they repeated, the problem was that they repeated something that wasn't worth repeating.