House-builders will be licking their lips at the prospect land-banks which have been assembled in the Dublin area. However, it is to be hoped that the planners will give equal attention to the need for a greater mix of housing units on all big sites. Many people feel that in return for higher densities, the developers should be obliged to provide a greater variety of homes in any one development than they are at present - say from affordable semis to large four-bedroom and five-bedroom detached homes, instead of the two-bedroom and three-bedroom semis or terraces that have now become common.
At Tuesday's press conference to announce new housing densities, it was rather odd that the Department of the Environment should have conceded that its guidelines on apartment design, published in 1995, represented the "absolute minimum standards" for future developments in Dublin and other centres.
The guidelines laid down minimum standards for the size and layout of apartments at a time when there was a rash of shoe-box developments in the city centre. In its new document, the Department is now insisting that the 1995 standards should be applied as an absolute minimum . . . "in the absence of detailed contemporary standards for apartment design". In other words, builders will be expected to start thinking along the lines of larger and better apartments.
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