Flats as an answer to housing crisis

[Turefu]

Hello.
British people like to live in their houses, flats are not popular. However, they're very common on the continent. Isn't it the way we should go? Building more flats instead of houses. There's only so much land available , we need to build up. That way more people will have their homes. People are relucant to live in flats, specially after lockdown, cladding scandal and Grenfell Tower tragedy. If security checks are increased, pehaps that's the way to go?
Your thoughts, please.

What - more economical than using a clothes line outside, or an airer inside???

I live in NZ. When I was a child I visted my DM's cousins who lived in a flat - although not the type of flat they have in the UK. They had their washing machine (no dryer) in the kitchen and I thought it was very odd. I'm now 64, and have never seen a washing machine in a kitchen again - the flats must have been designed by someone from the UK 😁

I've lived in three flats - in two the laundry was in the hallway, the other had it in the bathroom, and of course I dry my clothes outside all year around, finishing them off on airers inside in winter.

Reading some of the posts on MN about laundry facilities and clothes drying is a education!

I live in a flat. I LOVE it. Here’s some reasons why:

1. far far less housework
2. no gardening. I loathe it. I do have a lovely balcony and overlook a beautiful park.
3. it’s in a city centre. I walk everywhere. My suburban house was a car ride to anything.
4. cinemas, restaurants, pubs, theatre, work, train station, everything on my doorstep
5. warm and well insulated. Rarely need the heating on. Never hear neighbours
6. no bin day - every day is bin day 😬
7. not overlooked at all.
8. downsizing forced me to get rid of do much shit I didn’t need.
9. no stairs (arthritic knees!)
10. I could not afford to live in this location in a house.

there’s more but you get the gist.

I'm staying (lodger) in an edge-of-city flat on a mostly flats estate. There are many hundreds of (mostly flat) households in this estate.

It's dead quiet around here.
2 parking spaces for a 2 bed flat.
There's a Tesco Extra, a primary school, take-aways 5 minutes walk away.
For me, it's 18 minute (wooded) walk to work.

I'm converted to flat living with (3) small problems... I will have 3 outdoor cats to house later in the year. I don't think i can convert them to be happy indoor-only. I won't rule out a ground floor flat, though.

I live in a flat. I like the fact that it’s easy to keep clean and tidy and it’s pretty economical in terms of utilities.

But flats in the UK are a bit shit in comparison to the ones on the continent. I’d love a laundry room in my flat rather than a washing machine in my open plan living/kitchen area which means I can’t hear the tv when it spins. A little balcony where I can sit with a coffee or glass of wine. Some outdoor storage space for recycling and camping gear rather than my hallway.

And to not to pay the best part of £2k a year to a crappy management company for someone to poke the hoover round in the communal areas every two weeks and someone else to cut the grass once a month. The service charges over here are astronomical, especially when we pay council tax as well.

Here when you live in a flat, it's the same low level gloomy interior that you see most days, all day
My block of flats was built in the '60s and shaped like an H so I have large windows facing E. S and W - full sun. The floors are concrete and the only attached wall has bedroom wardrobes along it - the peace and quiet is amazing. There is a small cupboard in the hall for washing machine and dryer. The only downside (for me, anyway) is lack of a lift so I'll have to move at some point as I'm on the first floor. More properly designed spacious flats - yes please.

OK! So we had three lockdowns and one pandemic which unlikely will ever repeat.
Most people live where they can afford to, not where they really want. If someone hasn't got a huge budget, will have to make compromises.
Flats need to be well planned, reasonably spacious, charges addressed. In the places with severe housing shortages one block of flats can provide homes for 100 families and more.

Guessing you’re not in London since all they build here is flats. Blocks and blocks of flats everywhere, constantly

You sound as if you’re chairing a meeting or reading the minutes back, OP.

As a Londoner I see flats as completely normal. I’m looking forward to moving back to one when I downsize.

The main problems in the UK are the leasehold system which puts leaseholders at the mercy of useless freeholders and management companies, plus the general tendency to build on the cheap. We should look at the better Victorian mansion blocks- beautiful inside and out and built on a human scale to a high standard. Why is no one building the modern equivalent? It’s all ugly boxes with paper-thin walls.

Decent medium density living is a solution for a lot of things and the UK came so close to having really lovely flats in the same way as many European cities did, but various factors drove it another way and we got urban sprawl, suburbs, road traffic and endless commutes instead.

When we built flats here, we build cheap shoeboxes. It's self fulfilling that they're built as "starters" and not desirable for people to live in long term, so there is less demand for flats that are suitable for family life.

The absolute best place I ever lived was when I was sharing in a mansion flat in an Edwardian building. It was glorious. High ceilings, massive windows letting in lots of light, solid walls and decent construction that meant you were barely aware of the neighbours, loads of storage in the flat including laundry space, and still more storage space in the cellar, lovely communal spaces and a large communal garden. Not so many residents as to be anonymous.

My grandmother lived in quite a similar place when I was a child (in a different country) - huge rooms, ample storage space, gorgeous views, a massive wraparound balcony area where I remember splashing in a paddling pool in summer.

But we don't build like that. Instead we've got a system set up to enable developers to wring every possible bit of cash out of a development, and it's driven the demand patterns we see now.

I live in a block of flats outside the UK. We have good soundproofing, elevators (more than one!), a big communal indoor mingling area on the ground floor, community rooms you can hire, a big bollarded outdoor space for kids to run round on, greenery planted round the building etc., and spacious balconies you can hang your washing on.

Apartment living done well is great. I love the sociability and central location. Yes, you have to pay service charges, but this has to be balanced against very cheap heating costs and not having to run a car, which saves a fortune. Stairfree living makes cleaning, laundry and childcare easy, and means you have no worry about older relatives or the long term picture. My 12yo can be incredibly independent and go most places by herself; I don't have to spend time carting her about.

My parents live in a suburban house in an area where everyone drives. It's nice, but you just exchange one type of hassle for another. You don't have to worry about little kids playing up on public transport, but you do end up worrying about car parking, getting stuck in traffic, and blinking car seats. The garden is pretty, but the time of year when it's usable is limited and kids quickly grow out of wanting to play there. We mostly used parks even though the garden was right there.

It's possible to have a house in a central location by doing the "tall skinny townhouse" thing. You can have rooftop garden where I live, and these are very nice and quite tempting! On the other hand, these houses lose so much space to stairs and landings, and you are up and down the million stairs all day with hoovers and kids' stuff and bin bags and shopping and what not, big hassle with prams and naps and stairgates (and older relatives). Nice but not my preference. It's good to have lots of choice so we can all live in our preferred type of home!

The UK would do better with apartment living if:

a) it reformed the leasehold system
b) apartments had proper sound proofing and balconies, enough bedrooms, etc.. child friendly spaces. There should be laws against rules stopping people putting washing out, seriously!

I think a big problem in the UK is that the last big spate of apartment building happened in the 1960s or so. The apartments were poorly made and not very nice at all, and were made to house the least advantaged people in society. This created a really bad image problem that has lingered to this day. What's more, this process coincided with a big crime wave and I think an association of "high rise living --> crime" formed in people's minds and has been hard to eradicate. It's complete nonsense; international comparisons show that crime went up sharply in the 60s everywhere, regardless of whether countries were building apartments en masse or not!

Why are people chatting away with AI?

@Changethetoner 31/01/2024 01:17

A better idea would be to somehow make flat or house sharing more popular. It is crazy to have so many individuals requiring a flat all to themselves, when it could be more economical to share. Students do it. Why is it not more common in the rest of society?

^ This. In Housing we see this more and more. People cannot afford a whole rental to themselves. It absorbs their entire wage, they often need a top up which isn’t guaranteed. Shared accommodation is in high demand. (Whether people like it or not!)

i lived in an apartment in HK for 14 years, London for 12 before that ( albeit without kids). I’m nearly 50 and have only lived in a house in my adult life for the last 2 years.

I loved the HK apartment- it was a 300 unit complex with shared outside space, pool, gym and open views. Even had its own soft play. My dc had so many friends there they could just call for and it was a real community. There were some annoyances ( other people’s’ kids and dogs 🤣) but overall it was a massive net positive.

What I would add is that apartment living takes a bit of a mindset adjustment. So many times I’ve seen on MN people say “ if you don’t want to hear your neighbours buy a detached house”. In HK the attitude was much more that you should be considerate about noise- the shoes off thing is about noise as well as cleanliness. People don’t just blast their music or let their kids yell their heads off.

I've lived in flats twice, as a student and as a newly single mum, and hated it.

Noise, poor access, cramped conditions, little privacy.
The inconvenience of carrying shopping and toddlers up stairs
The way people use public lifts as urinals and dump rubbish on landings
I get depressed if I have no access to green space.
Add in ludicrous surcharges, dubious leaseholds and issues with parking.
I doubt I will ever live in a flat again.

It may suit some people but it's not for me.

If anything, I think flats have more of an edge in places with cold winters, as they are MUCH cheaper to heat (you get the ambient heat from the building, and the heat distributes itself evenly around the flat).

They can actually be a bit more challenging to cool in really hot places, although the one-level thing also helps a bit - you can put just the one air con on and then have a fan playing underneath it which moves cool air throughout the flat, rather than having to cool each room, so on balance I think it mostly evens out.

I think at the end we will come back building flats. There is no other way to come out of the housing shortage. If we look at different ways the flats are build in the continent, they create a beautiful urban atmosphere, where you can have a functioning public transport, cycle ways and all amenities near by. In this country we have it went out of fashion when they were build after the war many have been demolished due to antisocial elements and we focused on house building. The problem with houses is that you can't build a sustainable public transport, people need cars. They are also less efficient in therm of heating. So higher rise urban housing is the answer.

Parts of Scandinavia have very high suicide rates. It's not all happy socialist people in beautifully design minimalist apartments.

It's interesting how you can transform some very ugly socialist architecture to beautiful vibrant living spaces. There is an interesting example with Le Plessis-Robinson on the outskirts of Paris, they used classical Parisian architecture with lots of green communal spaces to transform run down municipality. So there are lots of examples of how to approach housing shortage. But first there needs to be a national approach to the housing shortage. A complete reform of the planning laws, greenbelt allocations and developer incentives.

I agree with you 💯

Perhaps if all flats in a block had to be privately owned by residents then the social priblems would be much less. Letting to inconsiderate renters /students/airbnb are more likely to cause noise problems.

I did. It wasn’t a problem. There was a park 5 mins down the road. I grew up in a terrace but much prefer flats - I like not having the extra space to clean and accumulate junk. I prefer converted houses or small blocks though rather than towers. There’s a lot of snobbery around flats when they’re really normal in major UK cities and some are in really stunning converted Victorian factory buildings with original features left in. The leasehold system is a joke though.

This isn’t flats in general though- it’s flats in areas with social problems and ASB. The people who live in One Hyde Park aren’t dealing with urine in the lift.

Flats work well in Europe

Even the colder countries

But it has to be regulated - you know red tape that British seem to hate