Interesting Links for 21-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Covid Inquiry has my informal messages, says Sturgeon

(tags:Scotland communication pandemic )

2. Turns out that when you run the Hugo awards in a non-democratic country the voting results may look... questionable.

(tags:Hugo voting convention scifi )

3. The UK desperately needs to build massive amounts of housing

(tags:UK housing Scotland )

4. US to get first dedicated high-speed railway - helped by Network Rail

(tags:UK USA trains California )

Comments

[bens_dad]

3 Housing. The article doesn't match your headline.

Whilst the article talks about homelessness I see no suggestion that we need to *build* more.
The issue seems to be affordability. Yes, increasing the supply of *suitable* homes should reduce the price, so that could help.

The new houses that I see being built are, often large, ticky-tacky boxes crammed together or an occasional one squeezed into a corner somewhere. Usually you need a car to get to/from them. They are not potential homes for a separated man working in a chip shop, nor is it likely that a chip shop would open nearby.

I think that my new criteria for judging a housing development will be how likely that a chip shop will open up within it.

[andrewducker]

We have a massive housing shortage. We need more houses for the numbers of people that we have. This has been the case for decades, and has been getting increasingly worse. We need more homes for people to live in.

[andrewducker]

Just encountered figures for Edinburgh. In 1999 the population was 477k. It's now 559k.

So we need homes for 82k more people.

To give some context, the massive new area being planned to the west of the city will have...7k homes in it.

https://west-town-edinburgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/west_town_boards_final.pdf

So we need several of those. (It does look to have cafes, restaurants, and hopefully a chip shop.)

[channelpenguin]

Well, could always to a repeat of the whole New Towns thing from back in the day. LOL. This will NEVER happen.

I grew up in East Kilbride, which worked BRILLIANTLY ....UNTIL the large scale private building started, without the schools, shops, pubs, libraries, health centre "hubs" that the orginal planned council house developments had. Then it became a much worse place to live in pretty much all ways.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, when I see the large areas being built without all of the infrastructure I am completely baffled. It seems so obvious that it will go badly wrong.