What 23 house moves taught me about housing

We’re having the wrong conversation about housing.

Every week, the debate circles the same ground: not enough units, costs too high, designs too bland, energy ratings not good enough. Understandable concerns. But they miss something fundamental.

I’ve moved home 23 times. Rented, owned, shared, solo. 13 different countries - city centres, suburbs, small towns. After all those moves, I can tell you with certainty: the thing that made the biggest difference to my quality of life wasn’t the home itself.

It wasn’t the layout. It wasn’t the natural light. It wasn’t how much it cost to heat. It definitely wasn’t the carbon footprint.

It was everything outside the front door.

The most important factor in any home is how it connects you. To local amenities: shops, cafés, places to meet people, routes for walking and cycling. To work opportunities. To friends and family.

Get that right, and a modest apartment becomes a wonderful place to live. Get it wrong, and even the best-designed house becomes a trap.

Two homes, two realities

Let me give you two examples from my own experience. Both were good quality in their own right. The buildings themselves were fine. But the experience of living in them couldn’t have been more different.

The worst: a house in a residential estate in a regional town in Ireland. I had wonderful neighbours. Plentiful green space and mature trees. But I had to get in the car for every trip to a café, a supermarket, a public service. Need some groceries? Drive. Want to head to the gym? Drive. Fancy a walk somewhere interesting? Drive somewhere first.

The car was the essential link between me and day-to-day necessities. And cars cost money - more than we realise. The house was fine, but location made daily life harder than it needed to be.

The best: a city centre apartment. Shops, cafés, parks, libraries, metro stations, all within 15 to 30 minutes’ walking distance. Neighbours also great. But everything was easier. Pop out for a coffee, bump into someone you know, walk to the park, bike to work. Life had more flow.

Same quality of building. Completely different quality of life.

The isolated building mentality

Here’s the problem. When we design, finance and build housing, we treat each building as a self-contained project. Developers optimise the cost per unit. Architects focus on the layout. Investors assess the return. Everyone’s looking at the building in isolation.

But a home doesn’t exist in isolation. A home is a node in a network. Its value depends on how it connects us: to transport and job opportunties, to services, to community and daily life.

When we ignore this, we end up with developments that look great on the brochure but don’t function as places to live. 500 units next to a motorway junction with no shops, no public transport, no local services. Award-winning architecture that turns its back on the street. Apartments with a wow factor but leave residents stranded.

These aren’t bad buildings. They’re in the wrong places, that don’t factor in how we live.

The connection test

So here’s a simple reframe. Before evaluating any home, or any development, ask: what does this connect me to?

Can I walk to a café? A shop? A park? Can I get to work without depending on a car? Can I see friends and family without it becoming a logistical challenge?

If a home fails the connection test, no amount of good design, clever layout, or impressive energy rating will make up for it. You can’t design your way out of a disconnected location.

This doesn’t mean every home needs to be in a city centre. But it does mean we need to stop treating connectivity as an afterthought and start treating it as the foundation.

What does connected living mean to you?

This is the first edition of the breen.build newsletter and I wanted to start with the idea that matters most to me: that housing quality isn’t just about buildings. It’s about how those buildings plug into the fabric of daily life.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring this further. I’ll also look at how we finance housing and mixed-use developments. And how we build housing that actually works for the people who live in it.

But I’d love to hear from you first.

What does well-integrated housing mean to you? What’s the best-connected place you’ve ever lived, and what made it work?

Hit reply and let me know. I read every response.

Ciarán