A REGRESSIVE MOVE 

New apartment design standards introduced to ease blockages in apartment construction have been criticised by industry experts

New guidelines around apartment construction and design have been issued by the Department of Housing, which will see changes to minimum sizes and allow for the reduced provision of private open spaces. The guidelines will also preclude local authorities from requiring community, communal and cultural facilities for individual apartment schemes.

“Taking decisive action” is how Housing Minister James Browne has described the new guidelines, “without compromising on any essential regulations, to ensure apartments are viable to build. We are acting in response to a housing crisis,” he said. The Minister added that the changes “compare favourably with European norms” and “will likely result in some cases in an average of €50k and up to €100k cost reduction per unit.” Those cost savings have been disputed by some industry experts, including Orla Hegarty, Architect and Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD. “The new guidelines will cause confusion and delays, not to mention additional costs, when it comes to existing plans that have already been approved. These new guidelines all happened very suddenly and without any warning – for people who have land with planning permission, it will force them back to a reviewing process. In some cases, they may have to reevaluate the site and change direction.”

When it comes to cost savings, the numbers provided by the Department of Housing just don’t stack up. “When you look at the numbers in more detail, the savings come to very little and would actually be wiped out when you take delay costs into consideration. Even if you were saving something like €5,000, for example, across the lifetime of the building, that’s very little.”
Under the new guidelines, the minimum size for a studio apartment will be reduced from 37 sq m to 32 sq m. “Building lots of small units is very inefficient in terms of our construction industry and our resources. You end up building a bathroom and a kitchen for every single person, along with a fire door and everything else that’s required under regulations. This approach of providing more units and getting delivery numbers up actually houses fewer people. If you’re housing fewer people in a block more people are unhoused for longer, which isn’t solving the housing crisis at all. It’s regressive and feels very rushed. In my opinion, it hasn’t been thought through.”

There are those, says Orla, who will benefit from the new standards. “Landholders are the winners – people who are waiting for affordable housing and people that are going to live in these units are unfortunately not going to see any benefits.” The smaller the unit says Orla, the bigger the profit. “If you look at property yield, you’ll see it consistently around the world. Smaller units have higher yield. So of course, developers are going to want to build small units but what you end up with are too many small units and people who are desperate for accommodation living in them with their children.
It’s very inflexible infrastructure and not the best use of resources on every level.”

 

The guidelines were introduced without any consultation or prior warning. Is that a normal occurrence? “No, it’s not. When the previous round of changes around apartments took place in 2018, there was a public consultation process. The proposals were put out and submissions were invited before any changes were made. That served the Minister and his department at the time – even with the best of intentions, there are always unintended consequences and perhaps issues that haven’t been thought through. That has been lacking this time around.”

Clearly, says Orla, the new standards have been lobbied for. “Perhaps the Minister didn’t realise the new standards will have such an impact on so many. While there are some winners, the standards have also generated a host of problems for many others.”

A lack of sustainability has also been noted in the new guidelines. “If you create urban communities like this and you can see it in parts of Dublin where there’s a lot of student housing, people are only there for a short amount of time before they move on. Tourists come in and out for a short amount of time and move on. That doesn’t generate a community and it’s intrusive to the permanent community there. If the units are all small and your neighbours are moving all the time, you get buildings that have a certain demographic and they’re increasingly in counties like Meath, Kildare, Laois, Louth and Carlow. That creates issues around commuting. We need more compact communities for families – nearly 50% of Irish households have children. They’re not anywhere in the housing strategy. They’re completely invisible.”

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Michael McDonnell Managing Editor of Irish Construction Industry Magazine & Plan Magazine

Email: michael@irishconstruction.com      WWW.MCDMEDIA.IE