Apartment Choice

Major apartment schemes set for green light" />CGI of the YPG scheme approved in December 2016 (left) and the new-look plans (right) Proposals to create more than 400 apartments across two major schemes at opposite ends of Liverpool city centre look set to secure the green light. Liverpool City Council 's planning committee will discuss separate residential -led applications by YPG Devon House and Eloquent Global as part of its next meeting on Tuesday, 29 August 2017. YPG Devon House is seeking full planning permission to demolish existing warehouse buildings on an L-shaped site at 33 Devon Street near the Royal Liverpool University Hospital to the north of the city centre to pave the way for a new development. The Smith Young- designed scheme involves creating 218 student studios and two ground- floor commercial units across a new eight- to ten-storey building. The site has been the subject of several student- focused planning applications in recent years, inc...

A decade after the crash, Shannon Valley housing estate , on the outskirts of Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon, remains unfinished and partly in ruins. Although the number of “ unfinished housing developments ” has fallen sharply since 2010, Shannon Valley is one of hundreds that still dot the country. The Guls: ‘Every day I put rats in the bin’ Fatima Gul says her little brother, Yousaf, doesn’t like the rats. He jumps up on the sofa or the table in the living room when they come into the house. Their parents don’t allow Fatimar, who is 10, or her nine-year-old sister, Maryam, or Yousaf and his twin, Zohra, who are five, to play near the houses on the other side of their green. It’s too close to the rats and the rubble. Shannon Valley “ ghost estate ” outside Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon. Photograph: Simon Carswell" height="349" src="https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3181475!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg" width="620...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...