Sir, – In response to your correspondent David McWilliams (“What is really going on in the Irish housing market? The numbers don’t add up”, Opinion, October 3rd), I agree that we need urgently to build more affordable homes.
However, in his concluding remarks he states that “obviously, the more floors in a building, the cheaper the apartment ultimately built will be”.
It is not at all obvious.
Taller buildings attract additional structural and fire safety requirements with significant associated costs as they go up.
RM Block
Taller apartment building types typically require 20 per cent of their floor area given over to circulation corridors, stairs and lift lobbies.
In simple rounded terms, a €10 million apartment building construction cost (say, 28 apartments) must divide €2 million across the construction cost of each dwelling. They also require greater maintenance and servicing costs associated with shared circulation.
The State’s Land Development Agency is promoting such an assumed cost-driven model of taller apartment development in which 12 apartments per floor share a central corridor and residents’ front doors open directly into their livingrooms, all of which are accessed by a single lift and stair.
Build costs are intended to be further reduced by mandating smaller minimum size apartments and single aspect apartments. Apartments would be permitted that only face north and never receive sunlight or that face only south and overheat.
Balconies are to be the projecting variety that provide no sheltered outdoor private space. Blocks sit in isolating landscapes without enclosure or passive surveillance.
A cost assumption relating to this model that warrants economic appraisal from McWilliams is at what cost to society such a model of housing will impose in the long term?
Who do we envisage living well or thriving in such apartments? Do State officials or politicians envisage themselves and their families living thus?
Is the shorter-term return on capital more important than longer-term formation of neighbourhoods and communities?
There is strong converse professional evidence that low-rise high-density own-door housing of stacked duplex homes and town houses, together with taller terraced housing, enclosing shared neighbourhoods of pedestrian streets and squares, can deliver similar densities of homes without the capital cost or the annual management and maintenance costs of shared internal circulation areas of taller apartment blocks.
Instead of expensive and low-quality internal circulation, the landscape setting of convivial streets and squares offers more positive outdoor spaces of sociable public realm for future neighbours, and one that can integrate into existing street patterns.
The success of various street-based low-rise medium- to high-density design approaches is evident in the work of the UK’s Peter Barber Architects, or at London’s landmark Alexandra Road Housing, Cambridge’s Sterling Prize-winning Accordia Housing, with recent exemplars in Ireland including Sandford Lodge Residences, affordable homes at north Dublin’s Wilkinsons Brook and, indeed, similar recent work recognised by commendations in the RIAI’s silver medal for housing.
Low-rise high-density housing offers developers (be they private speculative or public bodies) a cheaper outlay on less-complex forms of construction and offers purchasers a corresponding more-affordable and preferable purchase opportunity for a place to become home.
It also has the added benefit of increasing housing supply with street-based front doors in more human-scaled neighbourhoods that may foster a greater long-term sense of community and belonging than taller blocks.
The longer-term vision offered by low-rise high-density street-based own-door homes, promoted as part of the solution to the housing crisis, offers an affordable and greater sense of future community for Irish society.
The current trend among State agencies, politicians and developers to favour taller apartment blocks and associated lower-quality homes must be re-evaluated. Assumptions that taller is obviously cheaper must be questioned. – Yours, etc,
DERMOT MCCABE, MRIAI,
Westport,
Co Mayo.
Sir. – In his, as usual, instructive article, David McWilliams explains that the cure for high prices is high prices and ends with the hope that long may that last. It is a mild celebration of one of the self-correcting mechanisms inherent in market economics.
While supply and demand determine price, it is also true that, when it suits, there has always been room for intervention.
Our politicians need to be braver and legislate that until the crisis ends it should not be possible for someone who is not going to live in a house to be able to buy (or rent) one.
This would remove those who are buying as an investment and source of income from the demand side of the market and prices would fall. Drastic times call for drastic solutions. – Yours, etc,
LEE HEALY,
Ballincollig,
Cork.
