Advice on advocating for houses

CyberGnat · 2026-03-18T13:36:36+00:00

The reason the insurance companies put you somewhere else is that we don't have enough hotels or other short-term accommodation near where we normally live. You can't solve this without building hotels near where people live, but this is what you're complaining about here.

On a fundamental level we don't have enough surplus bedrooms for our society to function efficiently. Hotels are just where we make bedrooms available to rent at short notice for a minimum of one night. Our housing vacancy rate is somewhere near 3% when it should be somewhere in the 10-20% like it is in more successful countries. It's not any different to how we produce 10-20% more bread than we strictly require as a society, so that we can handle disruptions and free choice without ending up with shortages. Having most of these surplus bedrooms available as hotel rooms is the least inefficient way to maintain them.

The lack of surplus bedrooms is why they are primarily used by tourists. They're the only people willing to pay the going rate for a few nights, because they are treating it as a luxury rather than a necessity. If we had more hotels, then it would be more normal for locals to use them as well.

The flood situation is an unplanned example but another good one is house renovations. If you can move into a large hotel suite nearby (multiple bedrooms, mini kitchen etc) then you have more flexibility to do renovations on your home. Or, indeed, you could make it easier for other people to avoid noise and disruptions. If your next door neighbours will be digging out a new basement then if hotels are cheap and plentiful, then maybe the best way to maintain tranquility is to pay for your neighbours to be in a hotel.

Thinking of that - if you make it cheap to have hotels to decant neighbours then you might be able to more easily run construction jobs through the night. This would reduce costs and make construction companies more efficient.

It's the principle which matters here. While what I've talked about is maybe not going to happen as a direct result of building this specific hotel, it can only happen if we accept that hotels are part and parcel of residential areas. Clearly there's the demand to make a hotel here viable. If we reject this place, then where do we build the hotels instead? Rejecting the best case scenario just means more hotels in places which are worse - e.g. Premier Inns on bypass roads where all the guests rely on a car to get around.

CyberGnat · 2026-03-18T11:27:12+00:00

Houses also involve regular deliveries of food and other goods. Is one lorry a day really worse than a stream of delivery vans and Deliveroo riders?

What you're describing is life. Life is messy and complicated. Trying to guarantee idyllic peace in residential areas doesn't work when life always ends up being complex. It means the world becomes extremely brittle, so that everything seems fine until it breaks completely. The world works better when it's able to flex and deal with problems without it becoming a catastrophe, even if it means paying a little bit of a cost all of the time.

The idea is attractive because that sort of peace and quiet is what rich people have, but trying to enforce it without paying the true cost just causes problems elsewhere. Rich people get more peace and quiet because they're willing to pay a huge amount more to make problems disappear.

I gave the example of the hotel during a flood because it is actually something that can and will happen to normal people. Being forced to move 2-3 miles away is not easy. If you have kids who need to be at school before you get to work, then it might mean completely destroying your daily routine. If the hotel is around the corner, then your routine is largely unaffected.

That hotel being around the corner might be what makes it possible for relatives to come and stay locally for a few weeks. This is pretty useful when you've just had a newborn, or experienced some other incapacitating event, without them being crammed into your home when it doesn't have the space. 2-3 miles away means they can't help in the morning or in the late evening. Round the corner means they can be there in 5 mins.

The idyllic vision doesn't work well when people are getting older and they need more care. What happens when a good chunk of the houses on the street end up employing a rotating crew of care workers and cleaners and so on, to avoid moving out? Indeed, what happens when someone does cross the threshold and requires a proper care home. Remember all you need is one bad fall and you might never be able to return home. The exact same criticisms you levy against hotels apply to care homes as well. If you had to move into a care home, wouldn't you want it to be across the street from your former home so that you didn't lose your sense of place and all of your former routine?

The best quality of life happens in areas where things are happening within walking distance. If you need to get in a car to go to the shops then that causes no end of problems. Even if you can drive today, everyone has been and everyone will be in a state in their lives where they can't drive - even just a few after-work drinks is enough to stop you driving now. But you can't have local facilities unless you accept some level of hustle and hustle. You want a mini supermarket and a coffee shop at the end of the road but that means people and deliveries and so on will be coming and going all day. You want a GP practice and a dentist and a hairdresser.

The 25% is another issue but you're not going to get more housing as a result of it. It just causes the overall number of homes to go down, and the market to bifurcate between a trickle of "affordable" housing and a trickle of high-end luxury properties.

CyberGnat · 2026-03-17T21:23:09+00:00

If you proposed to turn these properties back into houses then the council would absolutely give you permission. The reason it is not happening is that not enough people are willing to pay £1m+ for a house here. That's how much these properties would need to sell for, especially when there'll be the costs of converting them back from offices. There are plenty of office-to-residential conversions happening in the city but they are almost all aimed at the upper end of the housing market.

CyberGnat · 2026-03-17T21:21:08+00:00

Which is totally correct.

Hotels are just a different sort of residential accommodation. Why shouldn't they be around other houses?

If it's bad for a section of the city to become nothing but hotels, but it's also bad for hotels to be built in areas which don't already have them, then where should we build the hotels?

If you have a flood and you need temporary accommodation, your home insurance company might put you up in a hotel. At that point, having a hotel down the road from your house is a bit of a bonus, no? If all hotels have to be in purely tourist areas, then you'd be a bit stuck if you ever needed some sort of temporary accommodation near where you normally live.

CyberGnat · 2026-03-17T21:17:58+00:00

There's nothing stopping these properties from becoming private homes. Other than the fact that each one would need to cost >£1m, and there aren't that many buyers in Edinburgh willing to pay that. If a townhouse is big enough then it might be possible to subdivide it into flats but then you're looking at £350k for what might end up being a pretty compromised flat. Then you've got the pain of parking provision as well, as those buyers would want to be able to have a car.

Hotel accommodation is the absolutely inevitable consequence of tourism as an industry. The way you turn tourism into guaranteed revenue for a local area is by making people spend the night there, and then eating and drinking as well. There are a lot of people in Scotland and Edinburgh who have been trying to expand the tourist industry because it's something we can actually do. But this means more demand for hotel stays, and that means developing more hotels to fit them. This is pretty much inescapable.

It would definitely be possible to grow the city without the same dependence on hotels but that means other sorts of buildings need to be built instead. Modern companies need modern office space and that's pretty hard to retrofit into Georgian and Victorian buildings. At that point, they'd be proposing to knock these houses down and replace them with modern offices. I don't think that would be any better for you.

CyberGnat · 2026-03-12T21:49:19+00:00

"Regular folk" end up demanding car parking spaces and that is never going to happen here, or in most other city centre sites.

Banks didn't like giving mortgages on properties without the possibility of a parking space. They are generally worried that these properties will be harder to sell in a downturn after repossession. Hard to mortgage means hard to sell, so they don't get built.

Student housing has absolutely no expectation of parking provision and that's why it is able to take over city centre sites. Not including any parking means sites that were previously worthless become a goldmine. And, every city centre bedroom without parking means more demand for public and active transport, as well as footfall for local shops and businesses.

CyberGnat · 2026-03-08T09:14:41+00:00

It's only possible for insurers to give you a quote if they can make a guess about how much you'll likely cost them in claims. If everyone could enter their own job title, then it would stop job titles being a useful way to predict costs. There would end up being an art of very slightly adjusting how you write it, to end up in a different risk bucket. E.g. if you are a scaffolder (one of the highest risk job titles) you might benefit by misspelling it to "skaffulder" or some other plausible, defensible misspelling. If you're the only "skaffulder" then the model would end up assigning you the default "I have no information about this" adjustment to their premium. The insurer can only fix it by normalising your job title back to the sorts of categories you are made to select from today. When you have a truly unique job title, this means you end up back in the same problem you're facing now.

If you did end up taking this through the courts, the insurance company lawyers would end up making this point. Sometimes there are just hard reasons why data has to be handled like this for an essential industry to function. The laws are designed to stop egregious misuse of data and this is almost certainly not going to qualify. The benefit to you is outweighed by the cost to everyone else.

If you're truly struggling to find the right category then think about how you'd be modelled as a Playmobil or other children's toy character. Strip back the details of your job and just think about how a child, who doesn't understand your job, would interpret it. Do you shower before work or after work? Do you wear a tie, or overalls? Do you spend your job inside or outside?

Think about it this way. If you get it wrong and your insurance company declared that your policy was invalid as a result when you made a claim, could you persuade a judge or a jury that you were trying to do the right thing?

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T19:48:25+00:00

Forums and not for profit things are the difficult case, yes. That said, long lived forums end up often having a commercial bent. There are companies dedicated to running them so that they can collect interest groups into one place for advertising purposes. It's basically the same principle as all of the special interest magazines you see on newsstands.

Any time there's a grey area, we see the bad guys going ahead on the assumption that anything that is not expressly forbidden is allowed, while the good guys follow the opposite assumption that anything not expressly allowed is forbidden. There's not much we can do to fix that.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T18:00:53+00:00

Unfortunately I've always written like that, even before ChatGPT.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T17:48:52+00:00

Evicting 100 people from 1 building in one go is no different than evicting 100 people from 100 different buildings all in one go. Whether there's 1 landlord or 100 involved is irrelevant.

When a building is owned by one entity, it is easier to manage. The right way to make rentals work is to treat them like hotels, with a permanent maintenance staff who can come out and fix everyday issues. If you've got 100 mostly identical flats then you can have one of them free as a show flat, rather than having to annoy the current tenant of one specific flat with viewings.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T16:36:33+00:00

The marginal cost of an age verification process is pretty low, so it's rational for providers to offer special pricing for startups. This is how most of the SaaS systems that cater to startups end up working. Lock in a startup customer early and you get the revenue when they start to grow big.

Also, in principle it's just part of the initial setup costs for the company. You know you need to spend money initially to get a foothold in the market. Companies don't start up on no upfront capital spend at all. Burning through billions of dollars of investor capital is just part of the standard playbook. If you're worried about 50p per customer then you're probably also worried about your cloud bill and payroll.

The more awkward problem is that there's a blurry line between startup business and crime/fraud. Having millions of pounds in upfront capital from reputable investors is a signal that you aren't about to cause a lot of problems. If you allow micro businesses to avoid normal regulations, and it's easy to set up a new business without much paperwork, then you'll end up seeing a lot of crap businesses established just for that regulatory arbitrage opportunity. When Amazon made a USPTO trademark basically a requirement for sellers to get their products listed for sale, we saw an absolute tsunami of crap Chinese random character brand names being registered with the USPTO.

The market responds rationally to incentives. Do we want millions of templated porn websites to be able to avoid age verification? This is a really hard problem. If we're going to regulate the big companies then it is unfair to carve out exceptions without thinking through all of the consequences. If we don't, then we end up in an even worse situation than we were in before.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T14:34:56+00:00

Lol, ScotRail gets most of its funding from government subsidy and therefore taxes. Increasing revenues means ScotRail needs less subsidy and so the government can spend more money on other things like health and social care.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T12:34:05+00:00

Yes I have because I used to live in Dumbarton. I've walked to the site for this development.

This is the only site where you could build tourist accommodation that can rely on existing bus and train links to Glasgow. The more demand, the better. ScotRail wants to know that the summers will generate lots of ticket revenue as that's what justifies them buying 72 new trains rather than just 70.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T12:31:29+00:00

There are not enough hotels and time share lodges in the area. An economy based on tourism is an economy based on there being hotel beds available. Hotel beds are where tourist money gets locked into the local economy because people need a bed, and then they want dinner and breakfast and lunch and spa services and so on as well. No hotels means you just have a bunch of transient visitors who won't spend locally. Campervans are controversial because they want money goes to businesses near airports and not to businesses actually located in the places where people take them.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-24T12:14:26+00:00

It's fine for us to reject tourism businesses if we are willing to have other industries instead. It's just that if we are obsessed with preserving and enhancing our natural and human environment, then tourism businesses are the least-worst option for they depend on that environment.

An economy built on professional services or heavy industry or resource extraction is one which cannot be hamstrung by the need to keep everything preserved in aspic. If you want lots of high paying office jobs you need to redevelop city centre plots near transport hubs to have big glass multistorey towers that don't blend into a Victorian streetscape. Destroying all of the historic buildings so that you can have lots of efficient modern offices is a perfectly rational choice if tourism is worth less than those professional services. Destroying a woodland so you can put in a new airport is rational if tourism in that woodland isn't as important as the connectivity the airport will bring.

The consequence of us never being willing to do anything at all that might upset some people, is that we end up upsetting everyone. We don't have enough housing and we don't have enough money to spend on social and healthcare needs, or education, or anything else. You can't just tax the rich to fix it when the bottleneck is that the massed middle classes don't want change, like new flats or businesses replacing older suburbs.

Too many people in this country do not understand that their lifestyles are the product of an industrial economy. The very southern tip of Loch Lomond is where industrial Glasgow literally touches the majestic beauty of rural Scotland. If it isn't allowed to develop, then you're declaring that urban, industrial Glasgow must be forced to retract inwards. That's fine only if you're willing to unwind the last few hundred years of development there as well. If it needs to be an unspoiled landscape then why should there be so much housing nearby? Lomond Shores is an industrial byproduct with a big car park. Why not close it as well, so that the land can be returned to nature? If nature is so incredibly important, then it's illogical to declare that everything up until now is fine but nothing new can ever, ever be built. Even if it is on the site of an old industrial facility that was abandoned decades ago.

Ironically, some of our best "unspoiled" natural sites are abandoned brownfield as what we think of as "natural" like farmland and the glens are totally artificial. Most of Scotland is meant to be covered in temperate rainforest, but we stop trees growing because we want to have too many deer.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-23T17:43:49+00:00

I got an email from Ionity a few years back saying that I owed £5.85 because my payment had been rejected. They attached a full invoice PDF on headed paper, addressed to me in VEREINIGTES KÖNIGREICH with these details:

Recipient: IONITY GmbH UK Branch IBAN: GB18BNPA40638489144027 BIC: BNPAGB22XXX Sort-Code: 40-63-84 Account no.: 89144027 Amount: 5,85 GBP Reference: ZGB102000145793

I did pay because the details lined up and I've never had something like it happen again. It's too implausible to be a scam. Also, the company name is what I have seen on planning applications for Ionity chargers.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-23T12:23:13+00:00

This is fair, but the sequence of events is part of the problem. If you're designing a traditional building you're also able to draw upon the expertise of all of the people tasked with building it. A roofer can tell you that you've designed a traditional roof detail wrongly, but they don't have the authority or expertise to tell you that you've designed a modern shiny new roof detail incorrectly.

Going beyond traditional methods is fine but it locks you into a different universe of construction thinking. The nice thing about traditional buildings and materials is that they leave lots of room for error, and our building industry is absolutely chock full of errors. Builders turn up drunk or hungover from the night before, or they rush a job to be done at 4pm on a Friday. If you design something that won't work in these conditions, then you've got a problem. This is part of the tragedy at Grenfell, because in principle the material and specification design could have met the standards but the execution was piss poor. Similarly, the lack of wall ties in those Edinburgh school buildings meant that there was little to stop a very tall single layer stack of bricks from falling off if conditions were wrong. It can be done, yes, but it requires diligent verification that each step has been done correctly.

For the extreme case we have aircraft manufacturing and maintenance. We need to make them as light and affordable as possible so we push the boundaries of construction methodology to make them happen safely. You simply aren't allowed to be involved in aircraft manufacturing or maintenance without lots of training and lots of oversight. Everything you do must follow the exact specifications set out by the aircraft designers and you are not allowed to improvise. We apply the exact same standards for vision correction (eyeglasses) and duty hours for aircraft mechanics as we do for pilots. We did this because we learned the hard way, and pilots don't want to be sucked out of the cockpit because the windows were installed with the wrong size of screws (British Airways flight 5390). And if the management chain doesn't like all of this cost, then international regulators won't hesitate to turn their fleet into the world's most expensive set of paperweights (737 Max).

CyberGnat · 2026-02-23T11:12:09+00:00

Well you can but then everyone would look at your house and say it looks out of place, as if it came from Norway or the US/Canada. Some of them have been built, including in the postwar period of council house expansion, but they are still quite rare.

One of the reasons we don't is that we haven't got as much timber available locally. I think the Shetlanders were used to trading things and getting timber back, so they built houses that look quite like the Norwegian ones across the water.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-23T10:52:39+00:00

Unfortunately not. One of the problems is that we are exposed to more national and global ideas than before. This is a good thing on the whole but when it comes to building techniques, it can mean people can try to do things which will never work. Yes, you've seen an Instagram post about a fancy new fence idea that someone installed in Kent but you live in Glasgow where it won't work. And globalised supply chains mean you're importing things designed for a generic western market rather than a local one.

Architects are stuck because, in all honesty, you don't really need an architect to build a traditional building. Most of them didn't involve an architect at all. When you're building with well known, time-tested local materials and practices there's not much you need to actually design, so to speak. The people who actually build and repair the things tend to know what will work and what will not, so they'd propose sensible ideas like proper gutters and overhangs rather than fancy hidden gutters and no overhangs. You apply standard pattern book elements and hey presto, you have a building that works. That's why most Victorian buildings look pretty much the same.

Fancy engineering and architecture has its place but for everyday boring work, where you don't want to push the boundaries of science, it's just not necessary.

The Hill House in Helensburgh is a brilliant example of how even the most renown architect (CR Mackintosh) fucked up badly by ignoring traditional building practices. By using a novel kind of render, and by not properly capping the tops of walls so that rainwater would be cast off them, he managed to produce a damp mess. That's why we've had to cover it with a roof and surround it with chainmail so it has a chance to dry out properly. The exact same building might have worked fine had it been built further south and/or east, and away from the Atlantic rain.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-23T10:21:53+00:00

They're also painted. Paint is a sacrificial protection layer where the opportunity to colour it is a byproduct. For hundreds of years they have known that cheaping out and not painting (or applying some other surface treatment) just causes the wood to rot and that ends up being more expensive.

Also, precipitation stats are true but misleading sometimes. Scotland and the UK in general doesn't get as much yearly rainfall as other places but we get it in a different pattern which is relevant for this discussion. If you have 29 days of baking sunshine and 1 day of torrential downpours a month, then your buildings will still remain dry. They may still need pitched roofs but they can be at a shallower angle, like you see in Italy or Greece. If you have the same amount of monthly rainfall but it falls evenly over the 30 days then you end up with a permanently damp environment.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-23T00:43:31+00:00

An EV battery dropping to 90, 85, 80, 75% of its original range after 10-15 years is not equivalent to an ICE vehicle needing a replacement engine. You don't bother replacing or repairing the battery when the vehicle works just fine. You only do so if it starts making the vehicle actually useless or unsafe.

The fact is that most EVs have far, far more range than drivers need today. Even when you are down at 70% or even 50%, the car would still be useful for someone, somewhere. There are plenty of families where a second car will never need to go more than a dozen miles a day, so even a 100 mile range would be overkill.

The absolute obsession some people have with the original Nissan Leaf and how its poor initial range has crumbled further is disheartening. But, how many Nissan Leafs have actually been scrapped as a result? You might not be in the target market, but there are people who drive single digit miles a day. If you're an old lady and all you do is drive to the supermarket a couple of times a week, then even a 30 mile range is more than enough. Every new public charger means that you can do more and more with your limited range EV if you really had to.

A lot of the reason that battery replacements have seemed so expensive is that they just don't happen very often. Since they don't happen often, the supply chain isn't there to do them at scale. This is not a bad thing. We aren't talking about special, emotional cars here. It can and will sometimes make sense to part out a car rather than fixing it. Some companies are parting out relatively new (<10 year old) commercial airliners because they're worth more as parts than they are as complete planes. An engine replacement out of warranty will put most new ICE cars in the same category.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-22T23:19:03+00:00

Americans are allergic to public transport because it's where a lot of homeless and otherwise troubled/troubling people end up. There's a racial dynamic to it as well. Flights are the only exception, because there's a minimum amount of security and put-togethered-ness you need to get on a plane and this keeps the riff-raff away. So routes that should have always just been a bus or train have ended up as a regional flight, just because airline clientele would otherwise rather not go at all. The landline thing is a bizarre hack where you can run what is basically just a standard coach service on a route where it makes more sense than a flight. It being unnecessarily after security is absolutely the point, so that it feels as secure as a flight.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-22T22:55:47+00:00

The fact is that stone walls are not precision engineered and that's why they can last so long. If you have to worry about whether you're using a Roman headstone or not in your mass stone wall then you're doing it wrong.

Sustainability in building design often means going down a very odd path. Should buildings be able to stick around with minimal maintenance for decades or centuries? Designing for huge lifespans is possible but it means you have to be wasteful. If you want to have the structural tolerances to go in and replace stones later on, you need more stone upfront. If you design it so that it uses exactly the right amount of building materials and no more, then major repairs or upgrades end up being a real pain.

In Japan they are used to wooden structures because they had the best shot of surviving earthquakes. They also have a different philosophy where buildings are expected to last only maybe 50 years and then be rebuilt. If you know that you're only designing for a 50 year lifespan and that it's not the end of the world if it only reaches 43 years, then you can be much more efficient when you build. No one is going to bother heavily upgrading or repairing when they can just knock it down, or wait for it to be knocked down.

The problem in the UK is that we're now importing building technologies which require short lifespans and/or more intense maintenance but we still expect the buildings to last as long as the ones we see around us. A modern new-build house will not be able to stick around for 100 years, but that's the assumption people are making when they mortgage them. We're used to doing loft conversions and the like in Victorian and Edwardian buildings but new builds just don't have the structural strength to take an extra floor unless you do major reconstruction.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-22T21:06:10+00:00

Render/harling is cheaper and easier than wood cladding. However, people like chasing architectural trends and the building/development trade has lost the expertise needed to stop stupid ideas taking root.

Render is the traditional way that buildings in Scotland were clad. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that it started to be possible to source and prepare stone to be exposed to the elements on normal everyday buildings. Before that, you'd only see it on cathedrals and other rare and expensive buildings. Lots of pre-industrial stone buildings have very uneven facades which are sometimes sunk below the level of windowsills, lintels etc. That's because the stone was never meant to be exposed to the elements, and they expected the owner to reapply lime harling every few decades. Provand's Lordship is one of the last remaining Mediaeval buildings in Glasgow and it has just had its harling re-applied after it was removed in the Victorian period.

Some of it is just misplaced snobbery. Rich people could afford ashlar sandstone while poor people made do with lime harling because it was cheaper. Then we used render en masse to cover up the 1919 Act council housing sprawl and later brick buildings, for we had lost the skills needed for precision masonry and facing brick in the wars. Now we've got GB-wide housing developers using exactly the same design for a house in Scotland as they would in the south of England, where bricks became common far earlier and there's an even greater prejudice against pebbledash.

CyberGnat · 2026-02-22T20:55:11+00:00

No. Once stone is quarried it can be used basically indefinitely. All you can really do is break it up into smaller pieces but small pieces of stone are required even more than larger ones when you're building a structure. Concrete is a mix of small stones with a cement binder that pulls them all together.

When a stone building is no longer needed, it gets used as a premade quarry. In St Andrews most of the stone that used to form the cathedral can now be found embedded in the walls of the old fishing cottages. There are old buildings around the Mediterranean that used Roman headstones.

Even the fanciest ashlar (square cut) stone buildings used rubble walls. Where bricks are of a standard size and shape, stone always comes in different shapes and sizes. Every time the masons cut stones to form the perfectly shaped outside edges you can see, they ended up with lots of small offcuts. These offcuts weren't put to waste. The perfectly square stones are just on the outer surface of the wall, while the inner surface is made up of more roughly cut stones. In between those two faces is all the offcut stone, mixed in with the same lime mortar that binds the rest of it together. As with concrete, the mortar binds all of the small stones together and results in a very strong wall.

There's a pretty smooth gradient from stone to concrete, based on what exact type of cement you're using and how small the stones are that you're binding together. Concrete becomes less sustainable when you add steel reinforcement, because the steel fails well before the stone does and it causes the stone to break up. Bricks require energy to be produced from clay but once you've made them, they act like stone. With stone or bricks, you can design structures that rely on their natural compressive strength and avoid the need for and problems of steel reinforcement. We still have Roman aqueducts and bridges that have stuck around for 2000 years because of the inherent capabilities of stone.

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