Clash of high rise and low politics

Councils should stop being the problem and start becoming the solution to housing crisis

THE cost of renting a home has rocketed past levels last seen at the height of the boom. It now costs 5% more to rent in Dublin than it did in 2008. Incredibly, a two-bed apartment on the city’s southside will set you back €1,732 a month – if you’re lucky enough to find one – according to the latest update from property website Daft.ie.

It’s not just Dublin either. Nationwide rents were up 4% in the second quarter of the year to about €1,037 – the biggest jump since 2007.

The annual influx of students seeking city accommodation has seen some forced to resort to four-in-a-room bunk beds.

One two-bed house advertised this week offered one of nine bunks for €500 a month, plus bills – with one bathroom and a desk shared between the lot!

Behind this problem is a lack of new homes, particularly apartments, an extraordinary phenomenon seven years into a recovery that has generated huge demand for housing – and numerous government action plans to boost supply.

Look up ‘new apartments’ on Daft.ie. New ones were on sale in just 10 counties, usually in blocks of four or five units.

This is hardly surprising. Ronan Lyons, economist for Daft, reckons new apartments cost €280k to build before site costs are added in – and are therefore unviable in most places outside of Dublin.

When uncompleted developments are finished, the supply is likely to dry up altogether.

IN DUBLIN, apartments are being built but only in small schemes and almost entirely in areas where they fetch the high prices that justify the build cost. On Daft, there were none in Dublin 1, while just 15 units advertised in Dublin 2 were under construction. A few small schemes were in the priciest parts of the city – Dublin 3, 4, 6 and 18.

This confirms a report earlier this year from the Department of Environment – now the Housing Department – that identified a ‘virtual collapse’ in apartment building in Dublin, ‘with ongoing commencement figures indicating further declines rather than a badly needed increase’.

‘Notwithstanding the effects of the economic crash on the property sector, additional restrictions imposed by local authority apartment standards meant that new apartment development would remain economically unviable,’ the report said.

Councils had already greatly increased the minimum size of apartments and made them much more expensive to build, with a raft of new regulations.

In the latest twist, our most prominent council intends to reduce the proposed maximum height of apartment blocks.

Earlier this year, Dublin City Council CEO, Owen Keegan, proposed allowing city centre apartments up to 28 metres tall – half the height of Liberty Hall – with 16m the limit in suburbs.

These are hardly skyscrapers. Paris and London, both relatively low-rise cities, have more than 120 buildings between them towering over 100m. The proposal was welcomed by Ireland’s biggest housing association, Clúid, who said there was no reason that apartment blocks should be lower than offices.

Housing Agency chairman Conor Skehan agreed: ‘Around the world, a general height of eight to 10 floors seems to produce the best housing outcomes in terms of density and connectivity.’

However, Dublin City Councillors soon cut these new plans down to size. Councillors of all political hues sought to restrict the height of residential developments throughout the city.

Several motions referred to heights being retained at the level of ‘Georgian terraces’.

In the end, in a decision due to be ratified next month, they agreed to lop a floor off maximum heights in the city and suburbs, bringing them down to 24m and 13m respectively.

This is controversial at a time when we desperately need to build new homes – and apartments offer the most effective solution. What lies behind it? Perhaps the councillors represent the views of existing residents who voted them in and don’t want their semi-d overlooked by a bunch of ‘flat-dwellers’ down the road.

In debates, raging on social media, the ‘B’ word also pops up with comments like: ‘We don’t want another Ballymun. Didn’t we have to knock down those blocks?’

Ballymun was a social experiment that went wrong because local authorities are too monolithic to manage residential buildings in the same way as specialist housing associations have done across Europe.

People who live in a building a couple of storeys high are not necessarily going to be swamped by social problems.

MANHATTAN has higher buildings in much greater concentrations than Ballymun ever did and is one of the best places to live in the world. Paris, hailed as a low-rise city by those who want to keep Dublin dwarfish, has actually four times as many people in its city centre than Dublin.

Concentrating people in a city should be a good thing. It not only means shorter commutes and cheaper homes but a richer, more dynamic and more culturally diverse environment.

Yet Dublin City Councillors’ policies have seen the citycentre population of under-35s rise by less than the national average, while that of outlying suburb Fingal shot up by 50%.

Are they saying to young home-hunters: ‘You can work in the city centre but not live there. Go and buy a house in the suburbs (that will soon stretch to Mullingar) and commute into the city from there.’

Ronan Lyons wants a more flexible solution. Rather than strict height limits, councils should consider taller buildings depending on their location and architectural merit.

A Dublin Chamber of Commerce submission also calls for planners and architects to be allowed use their creativity to determine what is appropriate for individual sites. Meanwhile, Housing Minister Simon Coveney has repeatedly begged councillors to reconsider.

‘I am proposing that in urban centres in the city, where higher heights… are more suitable to create modern, highquality urban living, then we should be looking to do that,’ Mr Coveney said.

‘Otherwise all the new housing units are going to be built on green belts on the outskirts of cities. We need more people living in the heart of cities in high quality, and in some cases, higher buildings.’

Maybe soaring rents and the lack of new apartments will change councillors’ minds.

These pressures are only going to get worse.

Last March, Mr Lyons reckoned the ‘viable and reasonable’ cost of renting out a costly twobed apartment was €1,800.

This week’s latest rent survey showed he was almost bang on. And that was the second quarter, so they are probably past €1,800 already. In 2017, last year’s rule that restricts rent reviews to once every two years will come home to roost.

‘There will be a series of rent reviews next year where potentially you could see double-digit rent increases on the cards. All the measures did was kick the can down the road,’ said Ray Crowley of Davy stockbrokers.

If the proposed heights of apartment blocks don’t come down, rents are likely to keep going up even faster.

A 10% increase would see an €1,800 monthly rent jump to €2,000 a month.

Is that something Dublin City Councillors want to have on their consciences?